I suspect that I'm not alone in loving the orchestral music of Wagner (and some other operas too, but especially Wagner) while having no interest at all in actual opera. It's been traditional for many decades to offer up selections, overtures, extracts, etc. of his greatest operas as orchestral only works with no vocals; the Tannhäuser "Festmarch" and Overture, the Ride of the Valkyries from the Ring, etc. Heck, I've had some of those since I was a teenager, and many of them were CD pressings of recordings that were done decades earlier. My first Ring selections was recorded by the conductor George Szell of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1968; near the end of his decades long stewardship of that particular group. Leopold Stokowski (the conductor you'll see if you watch Disney's Fantasia) did about a full album's worth of selections, although not aggregated in any way. Now, I always felt like I was missing something to have merely a selection of about five minutes or so of an operatic work that has a performance run time of something like fifteen hours. Granted, I doubted that I really needed to hear fifteen hours of the Ring, even without the vocals (which wouldn't have impressed me much, because I don't care for operatic singing), but certainly there was more than a few minutes, right? A typical Romantic era symphony by someone like Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, etc. would run 20-30 minutes or so on average if you played all four movements back to back.
Luckily, in the late 80s, the first so-called "potted Ring" arrangements started popping up. These were attempts to rearrange selections from the full work in such a way that you felt like you were listening to a Cliff's Notes of the actual Ring, in correct order, and telling somewhat of the story of the full four opera cycle—but just orchestral. Der Ring Ohne Worte (The Ring Without Words) arranged by Maazel was the first, and by many still considered one of the best; the German label Telarc was state of the art sound, and Maazel himself conducted the Berlin Philharmoniker. But there are now four arrangements all offering something different, and they come in a variety of recordings by a variety of orchestras and composers. The most readily accessible and easy to get is the so-called The Ring—An Orchestral Adventure by Dutch composer Henk de Vlieger (performed with "his" orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, at least in it's first recording). It's about an hour long; about 10 minutes shorter than Maazel's arrangement (depending on the performance). Both can fit on a single CD. De Vlieger's has been recorded by many orchestras and composers, giving you somewhat of some choice.
The last two are a bit harder to acquire, although you can hear them on YouTube or Spotify, and you can get Amazon digital versions of most without too much trouble or expense. Dressler and Tarkmann are the two arrangers in question here.
Anyway, although I rarely talk about, and in fact, I haven't listened to much of it over the last year or two, I'm a huge fan of Classical music (and by Classical, I really mean the Romantic era. Most people consider that music classical, but if you want to be nitpicky, the Romantic era was the ~100 years or so that followed the Classical era, starting with Beethoven and going into the early years of the 1900s. Most people consider early modern orchestral music to be classical too, so don't listen to most people, I guess.) Wagner's talent and influence in this arena is prodigious. If you haven't ever listened to any Wagner, you should. And if you don't like opera, I can sympathize, because I don't either, but the good news is that for quite some time now, you can get an awful lot of great Wagner without any opera in a format that more closely resembles a longer symphony of sorts; the format that I wish he'd put it in in the first place, if I could have my way.
As an aside, I do sometimes regret that the German/Austrian school of Romance era music was only really challenged by the Russian school, and a some French and Italian composers, but there wasn't much going on in British or American music; my actual people. That said, the Germans are not really so different than us, having a common North Sea post-Roman origin, a common Hajnal Line crucible, etc. And for that matter, Wagner's topics (although not in the Ring itself) were quite often related to the Matter of Britain, including his Tristan und Isolde, his Parsifal, his Lohengrin, etc. I'm OK with patronizing their work, as although most of the composers were sponsored by patrons from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they often came from all over, and not all of them were Germans or Austrians themselves. And their works spread throughout the entirety of Western Civilization during this era, and were well-known across the entire civilizational horizon.
As an aside, Maazel also did an arrangement for a "potted Tannhäuser" and de Vlieger did arrangements for a "potted Parsifal" and a "potted Tristan und Isolde." I'm not aware of a "potted Lohengrin", so the only extract that remains overly familiar from that one is the bridal chorus.
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