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God I love Wagner. Why do people hate Wagner? Because of the Nazi thing? I mean okay fine, but I mean have these people listened to Wagner? It's like when in that Motte podcast and @KulakRevolt kept hating on The Great Gatsby. I mean I feel like at some point people aren't paying attention to the things they should be paying attention to.
Exhibit A: This is Siegfried's Funeral March. Yeah, from a film, but hey, I have never had the good fortune to watch the 17 hours which is Der Ring des Nibelungs though I would do it in a heartbeat.
Many years ago I watched a pretty uneven film called Aria and was introduced to Wagner apart from the usual Apocalypse Now sequence. The film had only one Wagner piece, a haunting section from the longer opera Tristan Und Isolde called Liebestod. You can find this in both instrumental and vocal versions. My favorite is the one done by Leontyne Price, and was the one used in in the film. You can watch that here.
So why the Wagner hate? Too rhapsodic? Too emotional? Neither of these critiques holds water with me. I mean listening to Wagner 24/7 is probably not advisable, but sometimes a little Wagner is just what the musical doctor ordered.
Fight me!
I dislike a lot of Wagner's oeuvre, and would pin this on two factors:
Despite lots of exposure as a frequent concert-goer, classical piano training and everything, I still can't appreciate operatic singing. The excessive vibrato means that the voice always spends more time sitting at pitches that are gratingly dissonant with the rest of the orchestration than in consonance.
A lot of it strikes me as melodically and harmonically monotonous, and the chord progressions, when they don't get washed out by being slow-walked, still fall flat emotionally. This may be a problem that I have with the German folk musical tradition in general, to which Wagner owes a lot. (For the same reason, I have a good track record of shocking connoisseurs by declaring a dislike of Schubert's songs.) This song, which we had to sing at school, seems close to a central example of everything I dislike about it. (So, curiously, a near-opposite of "too emotional"? Maybe someone is having an intense emotion there, but I don't empathise with it.)
That being said, there are a handful of Wagner pieces I actually do like, like for example the Vorspiel from Parsifal.
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I'm with Rossini on this: Wagner has beautiful moments but terrible quarter-hours.
There are beautiful lyrical moments, but that's mostly the music. Singing in German is a tough row to hoe (can you tell the sound of it is not one of my favourite languages?) and it's only at times that he makes it work.
The politics, unfortunately, is entangled with the work, but trying to leave that aside - I think Wagner's view of Love (as in the Tristan and Isolde sense) has been a terrible one. Love cannot last on earth and leads inexorably to Death. You can't live like that. Grand tragic passion that wrecks the lives of all around you as the only true love? Go away.
EDIT: I note you mention the Wagner pieces as, in essence, having heard "His Greatest Hits". You haven't sat through the seventeen hours, you've had the best bits plucked out for you 😁 The Liebestod is beautiful, and the Love Duet which precedes it has been used to great effect in BBC Radio 4 versions of the Holmes story The Adventure of the Devil's Foot but the underlying philosophy is essentially nihilistic; this is a barren emotion that can only be realised by the death of the lovers and sinking into some kind of cosmic, impersonal, energy. From Act II Love Duet when they realise and consummate their love:
Tristan's idea is that only in the endless night of death can they truly have their love. Even the night of physical love they are sharing is not sufficient. And in the end of the opera, in the end of the Liebestod (Love-Death, literally translated) Isolde agrees: to melt back into the energy of Nature, to be engulfed by the World-Spirit, is their only culmination:
But if they are reduced to non-consciousness, submerged once again in the Universal, will they even know each other? can they even experience this love, this bliss, if they are no longer the unique personalities of Tristan and Isolde, if they don't know themselves or each other? They don't even have the fruits of this tragic love-in-death after all!
That's the emotions-over-reason spirit of the romantic movement though isn't it. It's not supposed to make sense, making sense is for squares. Think about it logically - the less sense it makes the more potent and authentic the emotions must be!
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Well Tristan and Isolde obviously weren't imagined by Wagner, though of course he may have chosen that story to illustrate some grander theory of his own about love. I don't particularly feel the kind of doom-filled approach to love that you describe as Wagnerian, but then again I don't analyze it, I just listen. I don't understand German, nor do I read through translations as I listen. I just listen. And I've, as I say, never had the opportunity to watch. Or, never made the opportunity or taken it.
The pieces I linked aren't the only Wagner I've ever listened to, though you're probably correct that I have been exposed to a lot of his greatest hits, as you say. I don't think this is a particularly bad thing. My first exposure to Rachmaninoff was in this same way but I've since listened to quite a few of his full concertos and symphonies. As well as of course his Vocalise which, I'm sure you're happy to know, isn't in German but consists of just one vowel.
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Completely agree. He revolutionized his and all other - by way of gesamtkunstwerk - art forms. He was as much a renaissance man as there’s ever been, and the power of his vision (and his ability to execute that vision) is rivaled by a sparing handful of aspirational entrepreneurs: Ford, Disney, Jobs/Gates, Musk. His pamphlet on Jewish Music is an overblown non-scandal due to its later admirers; his views were absolutely standard for his day - more charitable even, in parts.
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There are critics of every great musician in every genre, especially as they come in and out of fashion. But Wagner, broadly speaking, has a good reputation as a composer. He is generally considered one of the greatest operatic composers ever. His works appear on almost every list of “the greatest operas of all time”. His politics (and Hitler’s love of him, and upholding of him as central to German nationalist art) mean that an association with the radical right is probably always inevitable, but his operas are staged regularly and his pieces are performed even more regularly in the US and Western Europe and draw a large audience. I looked on the website of the New York philharmonic and they’re playing pieces from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in early January next year, they had several Wagner-focused concerts late last year (and probably some more earlier this year).
So I’d say he has probably broadly the appreciation he should. People who don’t like opera or classical music may have their prejudices, but they wouldn’t listen to him anyway.
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