Richard Wagner wrote thirteen operas, of which there are no recordings I’ve seen of the first three, Rienzi is regarded as an apprentice-piece, and The Flying Dutchman as the first where Wagner comes into his own. The Dutchman stands with any nineteenth-century opera by any of the other big names, and the remaining eight are as far beyond the rest of the operatic repertory as Shakespeare is beyond the rest of theatre. Those nine are:
Tannhauser (210 mins)
Loengrin (235 mins)
Rheingold (160 mins)
The Valkerie (235 mins)
Siegfried (250 mins)
Gotterdammerung (275 mins)
Tristan and Isolde (235 mins)
The Mastersingers of Nuremburg (275 mins)
Parsifal (245 mins)
I have seen all nine, all at the English National Opera. I got started on Wagner with Solti’s recording of Parsifal on Decca, and I borrowed that from Richmond Library because I was reading Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, and Popper hated Wagner, so I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I was sucked in from the opening bars. Parsifal is a lot of twentieth-century music that slipped into the mid-nineteenth century.
I do not own one of his operas, and I have a boxed set of Ligeti and all of Berio’s Sequenzas. Recently I thought of buying a couple. I haven’t got round to it.
For one thing, Wagner operas cost upwards of £35 each, though there’s a recent Ring cycle for £45. For another, it really matters who is performing, especially for those of us who started with Solti. I’m not buying a live recording, because it’s just not possible to get the depth and precision of sound a studio can provide. If I’m paying that money, I want to put the headphones on and hear the details. There are not many interpretations available, since recording Wagner costs a lot more than even recording Mahler.
It’s the sheer time needed to listen to Wagner. It’s not background music to focus in and out while writing blog posts. It’s sit-down-and-listen-and-don’t-do-anything-else. So is a lot of that 19th-century orchestral stuff, and that doesn’t always suit me. Those running times, and those are without fifteen-minute breaks between acts, and in some cases, an hour for an evening meal. The Mikado clocks in around 130 minutes, and Carmen at 155 minutes. I’m pretty sure the mid-week performance of Mastersingers I went to started at 4:00PM, and a Tristan at 5:00 PM.
My life at the moment is more suited to the pleasant complexities of the Baroque. When, if, I ever stop working, I will buy Wagner’s operas and spend the whole day listening to one, as it should be.
And remember, if you're married, and there was music when she walked down the aisle to you, it was written by Wagner:
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