Tag: Richard Wagner

Opernachmittag

Lise Davidsen in the Metropolitan Opera production of Tristan und Isolde.

I couldn’t let the day go by without noting that tomorrow’s Metropolitan Opera broadcast will feature the new Met production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, featuring Lise Davidsen and Michael Spyres; Yuval Sharon directs and Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts. You can stream this via Philadelphia’s WRTI tomorrow afternoon, March 21, at 12:00 noon Eastern time.

The New York Times‘ Josh Barone was enthusiastic about the new production earlier this month — “the event of the season,” he says (gift link to his review here) — and it will undoubtedly be worth the time. Davidsen is reputed to be nothing less than miraculous (director Sharon has given her a baby in this one; I’m thinking I’ll be glad to listen and not sorry to miss the visuals), and Nézet-Séguin conducted a terrific in-concert version with Nina Stimme last season. I confess I’m somewhat skeptical of director-centric productions by the likes of Sharon; on the other hand, I was spellbound by the Chereau Ring at Bayreuth and recently very much enjoyed Barrie Kosky’s Don Giovanni for the Vienna opera. The little I’ve read of Sharon’s A New Philosophy of Opera is intriguing and tempts me to read further — what do I know? Still, a baby?

Event of the season or not, Tristan is one of the great achievements of the aesthetic imagination, an extraordinarily erotic and meditative work, Schopenhauer as music. Listen, and before a second listening read Bryan Magee’s The Tristan Chord.

Metaphysical stocking stuffers

If you’re still looking for a few gifts for the pessimistic metaphysician on your Christmas list and have around $750.00 lying around, here are a few presents you might consider shoving under the tree.

The Georg Solti Ring cycle recorded for Decca in the 1950s and 1960s and produced by the great John Culshaw was a landmark in stereo technology, still considered one of the best recordings ever made. (I have the original releases and can vouch for that.) It’s never been out of print, but a few years ago Decca remastered the original recordings and issued them on both SACD — whatever that is — and vinyl. Except for Das Rheingold, the new remasters are still in print (and I hope Decca is smart enough to repress Das Rheingold too). You can find them all here for the price of a mid-level audiophile system, appropriately enough. Surely there’s a middle ground between this and streaming it over Apple Music, but what the hell. It’s Christmas. Decca has a pretty compelling argument a little down this page.

Yesterday I wrote about Arthur Schopenhauer, with whom most of us my age became familiar through the classic E.F.J. Payne translation from Dover Publications. More recently, though, Cambridge University Press issued new translations of all of Schopenhauer’s work under the editorship of Christopher Janaway. Sandra Shapshay of Indiana University reviewed the first volume of Cambridge’s The World as Will and Representation shortly after its 2010 publication. It will be hard to give up Payne’s remarkable rendering, but after reading through Professor Shapshay’s evaluation, I admit she must be right: the Cambridge is the keeper. You can get the lot in paperback for $300.00 or so, and unlike the new Solti Ring releases, they all seem to remain in print.

The Golden Ring

The 1964 BBC documentary The Golden Ring gathers together many of my enthusiasms into one 87-minute film: Wagner, Vienna, analog recording, and whatever pleasures all of these entail. Nearly sixty years later, it’s now a historical document of a particular moment in time, art, and technology, a portrait of one of the greatest recordings ever made of one of the great artistic achievements of the nineteenth century and, indeed, all of Western music: The Solti Ring cycle.

The Golden Ring covers the recording of the final Ring opera, Götterdämmerung; Das Rheingold had been released in in 1958 and Siegfried in 1962, with the second opera, Die Walküre, to come in 1965. All of them were recorded in Vienna’s Sofiensaal, originally built in 1826 but which was almost totally destroyed by fire in 2001 (it was finally rebuilt and renovated in 2013 and re-opened as an event space). The documentary is a rare behind-the-scenes look at a classical music recording, most notable perhaps for the ability to eavesdrop on conductor Solti and producer John Culshaw as they negotiate the daily difficulties of the project.

It’s a pleasure to watch, especially if, like me, you have the records on hand, and I must admit I’ve got them all now except, ironically, Götterdämmerung. I’ve purchased used versions of all of them from Discogs, and must say been delighted with their condition. They sound great, even now, sixty years after their release, and I’ve gotten near-mint-condition vinyl at bargain-basement prices, far less than I would have paid when I first listened to the Solti Ring in the early 1980s. I can only assume that this is because (1) they were very well taken care of, and (2) there’s little market for them. Capitalism works for me.