From: conrad@brahms.udel.edu (Jon Conrad)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: Length of Wagner's operas (was librettos ....)
Date: 9 Nov 92 19:01:33 GMT
Article-I.D.: news.BxGq6L.LMI
Organization: University of Delaware

In article <1992Nov03.100242.21313@lloyd.Camex.COM> chrisi@lloyd.Camex.COM (Chris Ischay) writes:

>Wagner's operas are so widely respected and admired that I've got to
>believe there's more to enjoy in them than I've found so far.  As an opera
>lover of recent vintage, I have found Italian operas by and large
>immediately appealing -- La Boheme got me hooked the first time.  

Me too.  That was the first opera I learned to love, and I still love
it.

>I cried
>at "Viene la sera" in Butterfly because the music is so gorgeous.  Aida
>gives me goosebumps about 50% of the time.  The examples go on and on.
>Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Montemezzi, Giordano, Bellini, Rossini -- they
>*stir* me.

You're doing better than me.  I've kept an open mind for 25 years years
(I was determined not to be "one of those Germanophile snobs"), but I've
finally had to come to the conclusion that I am not on a wavelength with
Rossini and Bellini and Donizetti.  Except for the couple of obvious hit
tunes in each one, they are unspeakably boring to me.  Nobody need
respond to this point; I'm going to change, alas.  My loss, I'm sure,
that I find the music so dull.

>Wagner has his moments, lots of them in fact.  But the basic problem I
>confront is that his works are extraordinarily long, on top of which
>there's not always a lot going on in terms of stage business.  

Ok, since you brought it up.  What is this obsession of yours with stage
business, Chris?  Is something going on only if people are running
around the stage?

Try this:  You go to a play with a lot of talk about ideas, one agreed
to be a good play.  Shaw's "Man and Superman," let's say.  Do you
complain because there's not a lot of "action" moment to moment?  I hope
not.  You understand that the "action" is in people characters and
ideas, and how they change in reaction to each other and to outside
circumstances.  You follow the arguments intently, enjoying the play of
ideas and the affect they have on everybody onstage, and what this tells
you about life.

Why will you not accord the same courtesy to Wagner?

>His music is
>gorgeous, and very expressive of internal states, 

Bingo.  You're getting real warm here.

>but internal states alone
>can make for slow stage action.  

Only if you insist on being bored by internal action.  Why not treat the
internal states as the real action?  Such an acceptance is the key to
finding Wagner's mature works not only continuously absorbing, but
actually concise.  Do you demand that people run around the stage, or
are you willing to pay attention to what they're thinking and saying?

>I'd like to say, "Wagner is just plain too long."  But I don't want to
>leave it at that.  I *know* there are plenty of readers here who
>passionately love Wagner's operas.  How do *you* deal with six-hour operas
>and characters who move only every so often?

Again with the moving around.  Wagner writes 6-hour operas about people
who repress their passions and then find they can't control them; about
people who are confused about the difference between chastity and
goodness, and only gradually discover the difference; about people who
realize that they are mortal, and have a limited time to make amends for
their misdeeds; about goddesses who adjust to being mortal women; and so
on and so on.  These are vital and complex psychological histories, with
much to say to each of us; and Wagner miraculously takes them through
these life-upheaving changes, that take us years in real life, in only a
few hours, making each stage along the way real and involving through
his musico-dramatic mastery.  If that's not "action," I don't know what
is.  What the hell difference does it make if they step across the stage
while experiencing all this????

How do I deal with it?  I know the libretto cold.   (Hearing the
recording in English, at least once, helps enormously with this.)  I try
to listen to each strand of the music while getting involved in the
characters' journey.  Far from being eventless, it's *too* eventful to
ever take all of it in at one time, though I keep trying.

Your breakthrough, should you ever have it, will come when you let go of
a too-limiting idea of what "action" is.

Jon Alan Conrad