Category: German language

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Harry Kupfer’s 1979 production of Richard Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer at Bayreuth.

Last night I tried to get my blood pressure down (doctor’s orders) with a recording of Richard Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer, produced at Bayreuth in 1978 and taped in 1985. As it happened, it was one of those productions that, like Patrice Chereau’s Bayreuth Ring cycle conducted by Pierre Boulez at around the same time, attracted both praise and condemnation from the Festspielhaus’s devotees. John Gilks laid out the reason for this in 2011:

The concept is that the Dutchman exists only in Senta’s imagination. She is fixated on the Dutchman as her route out of the repressed bourgeois environment [in which] she is trapped. It’s a tormented, even hysterical, version of Senta. …

Onstage throughout the opera, Lisbeth Balslev is excellent and haunting as Senta; Simon Estes as the Dutchman is revelatory. Last night I caught the first half; tonight I conclude.

I’ve been more attracted than usual to vocal music and opera over the past few years, especially that of Austria and Germany; it follows a lifelong interest in what I suppose we can call the German Enlightenment, a 150-year period that stretches from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) to Freud and Wittgenstein in the years before the First World War — over just slightly more than a century and slightly less than a single lifetime, German-speaking lands produced Goethe and Beethoven, Schopenhauer and Wagner, Thomas Mann and Mozart. In these dark times (as Karl Kraus called them), I could use a little more light, so I’m again reaching up to those higher shelves where I’ve been keeping The World as Will and Representation and Buddenbrooks.

And of course my vinyl collection awaits me — the Solti Ring and the Furtwängler Ninth. But first, down to my German homework — I’ve got a lesson on Monday.

If you’re playing along at home, I recommend Bryan Magee’s Aspects of Wagner, the best short introduction to the composer, and Barry Millington’s lengthier but more comprehensive look at the Sorcerer of Bayreuth. (Magee also is quite good on the relationship between Schopenhauer and Wagner in another book.) Kupfer’s Fliegende Holländer production and several other Bayreuth productions are streamable through Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage+ — a streamer I highly recommend as well.

Is it 1933 yet?

Rudolf Schlichter (1890–1955), Woman with Tie, ca. 1923. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

As we await history’s verdict on the events of the past week or so, we look forward to the next exhibition at New York’s Neue Galerie, Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity, which opens at the Fifth Avenue museum on February 20. Running through May, the show, curated by Dr. Olaf Peters, who also curated the Neue Galerie’s fine Otto Dix and Degenerate Art exhibitions, throws a spotlight on one of my favorite artistic periods and celebrates the 100th anniversary of the groundbreaking 1925 exhibition curated by Gustav F. Hartlaub at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. (I note also that many of these artists were cited as “favorites” by R. Crumb, who shares not a few affinities with them.)

“Characterized by its critical realism, social commentary, and detailed depiction of contemporary life, and marking a significant departure from Expressionism’s emotional intensity … [the] Neue Sachlichkeit movement was divided by two philosophies — the unflinching and socially critical Verists, and the Classicists, who focused on harmony and beauty,” says the Neue Galerie:

The show will offer a wide-ranging perspective, exploring the tension between the Verists and the Classicists, which will be illustrated through a multidisciplinary installation, featuring paintings, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, works on paper, and film. … The presentation interprets these two camps as a coherent chapter in art history, focusing on the ways that the New Objectivity proponents mirrored the Weimar Republic’s cultural, political, and social complexities.

There may be no better time to reacquaint yourselves with this remarkable body of work; central to the art was the idea of the integrity of the individual, especially in an era of fluid gender presentation and representation (as evidenced by Schlichter’s Woman with Tie at the top of this item). Needless to add, the movement was crushed by Hitler’s seizure of authoritarian power in 1933; I tend to side with Peter Gay who saw this as a “Revenge of the Father,” as he put it in his 1968 book Weimar Culture, also worth a rereading. Indeed, why not read that, then enjoy the exhibition? It opens on February 20; tickets (which will be hard to come by, no doubt) are now available here.

A toast to …

Nibelungenlied Manuscript C, Folio 1r, about 1220-1250. Owned by Landesbank Baden-Württemberg and Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Permanent loan to the Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe (Codex Donaueschingen 63).

Reflecting the increasingly Austria-centric concentration of this journal, I posted items this week about the late Professor Marjorie Perloff and the holiday offerings of radio klassik Stephansdom.

In addition, I raise my glass today to the Nibelungenlied; as part of my continuing education and immersion in all things German and Central European, I’m reading the Penguin Classics translation by A.T. Hatto, a rather interesting fellow himself. A page of the manuscript, from a 13th century codex, is above. I’m just past the midpoint now, as Kriemhild  stopped at Melk and then proceeded to Vienna for her marriage to Hungary’s King Etzel. As it happens my family and I were in both Melk and Vienna just a few months ago; no sign of Kriemhild, but that was some time ago.

Compared to the much older epics of the Mediterranean Sea — the Iliad and the Odyssey for starters — the Nibelungenlied is far sparer and relatively god- and goddess-free, with more of an emphasis on the internal lives of its characters; apart from Siegfried’s cloak of invisibility, there’s very little supernatural about it. I suppose you could say that, like the climate from which it emerged, it’s much colder than Homer’s poems, but I rather like that; although of course there’s considerably more Christian and chivalrous material, there’s also an awareness that paganism was still an element in social, cultural, and religious life (indeed, a Christian Kriemhild marries a pagan Etzel, a point made by the anonymous Nibelungenlied poet). In addition, both Brunhilde and Kriemhild possess much more agency and are far more energetic than Homer’s female characters — the Nibelungenlied is much sexier and erotic, for want of better words, than the earlier epics. Wagner’s Ring operas have a rather scant resemblance to this poem, relying more on the Volsung Saga, but the Nibelungenlied itself is still quite a wonderful read.

Reading the rest of it is how I’ll be spending much of this weekend.