The Wagner Tradition

...One can find a splendid Viennese error there: two completely different timings for the Rheingold set...

...London's Ring was solid gold...

...Culshaw's first-rate narrative skill is left free to achieve some amazing feats, weaving themes together in the best Wag-nerian manner...

...Neither in the conversations Gol-lancz records nor in the space gen-erously granted him in the After-word did Wieland Wagner answer such cogent questions as: Why do you leave unbroken the sword that is to be shattered in Act II of Walkiire...

...What did outrage some listeners, however, was the electronic gimmickry the singing was often filtered through...

...Hotter...

...And it was fun...

...How traditional this is: Anything that will work for Wag-ner will work for anyone else??-excess and all...

...In the chapter on Siegfried, a low-comedy impasse with some bone-headed Heldentenor they hired and fired (Culshaw scrupulously removes all clues to his identity) alternates harmoniously with the many let-ters from that great lady, Kirsten Flagstad, who was dying of cancer yet apologizing all the while to her "boys at London" for being unable to record with them...

...the public demands, and once it learns what desperate little destructive feat he is attempting, it switches its in-terest and relegates the wretch to the dark and solitary confines his tech-nique has earned for him...

...Culshaw's weapons are formidable on his home ground (the recording booth) so he rules the stage off-limits from here on out...

...Culshaw keeps his book factual yet flavorful by blending the personal with the technical in this delightful manner...

...There really seems to be no substitute for creative genius...

...Because they are working with something worth hearing, the re-creators??the performers and con-ductors, the stage and recording directors??get the spotlight...

...for most of his life, Gollancz refused to own a phonograph...

...Nothing succeeds like excess" could have been his motto during the long gestation period of what he modestly called The Art-Work of the Future, his very own Der Ring des Nibe-lungen, in which myth and music escalated into four separate, evening-long works...

...I fear there's more here than the usual "McLuhancy" (a phrase from Benjamin DeMott I have appropri-ated to my own use...

...Reviewed by HARRIS GREEN Editor, Prentice-Hall RICHARD WAGNER continues to ignite controversy, revolution, and outrage 85 years after his death...

...To this day I have failed to discover what goes on at the anvil school, or what career you adopt once you have graduated there, but we were grateful for its existence...

...Accord-ing to Culshaw, these echo cham-bers and the like enhanced the dra-matic illusion??as if the music itself were not vivid enough...

...The really dry facts get shoved into the Appendix...

...It is dull to serve, though...

...By the time Culshaw reaches the grand finale, he is smear-ing a series of dismal thuds over the glorious tone of the Vienna Phil-harmonic to re-create the "collapse" of the flaming castle in the Immola-tion Scene...

...for Act One, alone...

...If a contemporary composer is spotlight-ed, the situation is usually akin to that of a convict caught breaking out: "What are you up to now...

...He had to have a real live bear in Act I in the scene where our woodsy Helden-tenor romps on with one of the beasts...

...The books deal with the two most famous Wagner re-creations of our time: London Records' epoch-making complete re-cording of the Ring, a seven-year project which recording director John Culshaw describes most charm-ingly in Ring Resounding...

...And everyone sings into an echo chamber...

...There is too much fine work in Ring Resounding for it to be marred by that Epilogue??it should be cut...

...London's complete recording did far and away the most good for Wagner...

...Today there is too much mere in-genuity in opera, though it is all in the productions, not the composi-tions...

...My dealings with the under-25 masses??and I must confess that last year I began to look at 35 from the wrong direction??lead me to be-lieve that many of them would side with Victor Gollancz...

...It therefore comes as no surprise to the reader to learn that, by Gbtter-ddmmerung, the list of "technical re-quirements" which took up only four lines for Rheingold (my favorite set) has swollen to "four closely typed foolscap pages...

...Cul-shaw's, on the other hand, could make use of another Wagnerian tra-dition to save it from his excesses...

...No Wagnerite, Gollancz nevertheless seethed with rage after seeing how the late Wieland Wagner staged Grandfather's works at the 1965 Bayreuth Festival, which Goll-ancz covered for the London Obser-ver...

...Who can forget the elec-trifying clarity of that passage in Rheingold that Wagner had written to be banged out on 18 anvils...

...For that matter, "criminal" is a term that could well be applied to many of today's re-creators...

...None of this was offensive since a really swinging live performance would have raised similar hell...

...Ludwig, Windgas-sen, Frick, Fischer-Dieskau, Neid-linger, London, Svanholm...

...Culshaw also indulges in this modish demagoguery: "We made our Ring for the young gen-eration...

...But on closer examination, the Ring turned out to be "opera" after all, and despite its excesses, a cre-ation that flashed and rumbled with genius...

...it matched the crackling conducting of Georg Solti and the incandescent playing of the Vienna Philharmonic with the best Wagner singers of our time: Nilsson, Flagstad...

...In-defensible, however, is Wieland's remark that Gollancz cannot appre-ciate his staging because of the gen-eration gap...

...Her wondrously human letters are as simple and noble as her singing...

...His recordings have shown the way to "opera in terms of expanding communication" (a term I'm coming to loathe...

...When he and his team devoted their sonic wizardry to Wagner's musical demands...

...and the "Bayreuth Style," credited to Wag-ner's grandson, Wieland, which the late Victor Gollancz attacked with infectuous moral fervor in The Ring at Bayreuth...

...It was by common consent the goddamned-est thing ever recorded...

...Contemporary composers, another breed of technocrat, do the same when they pronounce the tonal sys-tem "to be in ruins"??as if it actually were a solid object...

...In the end, the Gollancz book is a traditional Wagnerian publication, similar to those tracts the composer himself ground out to set everyone straight about everything??although, of course, Gollancz made no self-serving special pleading...

...Of the two...

...Eight handsome photo-graphs are included in the book to show exactly what Wieland did do, and they can be divided about equally between evidence for the defense and for the prosecution...

...Their job is properly done only when it does not distract from the performance: "The producer, in other words, must always serve...

...Culshaw does not hammer home the point, but it was obvious that the old Wagnerian order was passing with Flagstad, a tonal sculptor whose phrasing was like a Henry Moore without holes...

...Wagner is sup-posed to have cracked it with the Prelude to Tristan...

...Heeven predicts an Art-Work of the Future: something like a cross be-tween a home movie and a recording that will bring Brunnhildc right smack into my living room...

...John Culshaw had to have it growl...

...Culshaw explains in a passage that captures the fabled wackiness of that city: "Adolf Krypl announced that he had discovered something called an anvil school from which we could obtain any number of anvils in all sorts of shapes and sizes...

...Unfortunately, there is a strain of ominous black humor, quite un-intentional, in this Siegfried chapter, and it gets blacker and less humorous as the book and the Ring project progress...

...Like so many re-creators and technocrats today, Culshaw wants the glory that be-longs only to a creator like Wagner, or a re-creator like Flagstad who never added needless touches to her performances...

...In his Epilogue to Ring Resound-ing, Culshaw abandons the role of urbane historian for the guise of shrill prophet...

...He insisted each was a "music-drama," since he person-ally had discovered "opera" was passe...

...A welcome contrast to Culshaw's misplaced ingenuity is the pure fer-vor Victor Gollancz pumped into his rather testy but ultimately quite affecting little book, The Ring at Bayreuth...

...His book is a monument to his humanitarianism and needs no embellishment...

...They would only bark when Culshaw was around...

...I never really wanted to see her there??but no matter...

...No bears cooperated...

...No one could complain about that...

...So stage and recording directors move into the act, exploiting those dubious operatic reforms Wieland and Cul-shaw pioneered...

...He and his team prowled about zoos with their tape recorders...

...The live performance is passe, he insists...

...No one told him about it at the time, though, so he went ahead and wrote Meistersinge' in the old manner...

...Requirement" is not quite the word I would use for such inventive vandalism...

...He states his case against egregious re-creators like Wieland and Culshaw in moral terms...

...After denounc-ing the ruthless stylization and bla-tant flaunting of the text that are at the heart of "the Bayreuth Style," Gollancz swings out from Bavaria to indict the other glamorous re-cre-ators (Zeffirelli, Peter Hall, Karajan) who do just as badly for other composers...

...One of the many virtues of Ring Resounding is the answer it gives to the inevitable question about this jolly passage: How ever did London come up with 18 tuned anvils in Vienna, where all the recording was done...

...But Culshaw's pet project for Sieg-fried was inexcusable...

...How he and Culshaw would hit it off can be easily imagined...

...These two books, both of British origin, would be considered sound evidence should there ever be established a much-needed Court of Esthetic Jus-tice, where perpetrators of every-thing from simple misdemeanor to coldly premeditated murder are brought to trial...

...Culshaw's insistence upon re-creating the dramatic illusion had Rheingold throbbing with sound ef-fects: heaven-rivening thunderclaps, cracking whips, clinking "gold" bars (actually aluminum??not even a Vi-ennese bank would let them throw real gold about in the scene where the Nibelungen treasure is piled up...

...One wishes he had at least cut most of those "technical requirements...

...Wagner thought so little of this bear that he hustled it offstage immedi-ately, without assigning it a leitmotif...