My Life with Wagner by Christian Thielemann

Author:Christian Thielemann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus

The characters

Wagner’s characters sometimes remind me of the late-eighteenth-century sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s ‘character heads’. All the types are represented: stupid people, brooding people, the wise, the damaged, the tolerant, the intolerant, those greedy for power, those tired of power, beings of the underworld, beings of the world above, the brilliant and the simple, gods, men and dwarfs – the entire range. The audience can easily see themselves in relation to this company. They are reflected in it, recognize themselves and assemble their own personalities from the most diverse of its facets. But so far as the voices of Wagner’s characters are concerned, they strike me as less stereotyped and conventional than those of Italian (or Russian or French) opera, which tend to come down to triangular situations with naïve sopranos notoriously caught between radiant tenors and sinister baritones. Wagner’s conflicts are more widely conceived, more global and mythic, which of course is because of the subjects of the operas. And where they do not arise from the subject, as in The Mastersingers, Wagner plays with operatic convention in a very intelligent and enjoyable way.

A brief summary of the Wagnerian bestiary follows below, in chronological order:

RIENZI is not only the last of the tribunes (of the Roman people), as the subtitle of the opera tells us, but also a tenor and Wagner’s first solitary hero. He dies in the flames of the Capitol (we need not dismiss parallels with Twilight of the Gods), and with him died any ambitions of Wagner’s to write grand opera.

THE FLYING DUTCHMAN has no name, and is the embodiment of the restless, unredeemed soul. His story also reflects Wagner’s experiences in flight from Riga to London over the storm-tossed ocean. The register of his voice is baritone, and what he seeks is the steadfast love and constancy of a woman. Only she can release him from his eternal wandering over the high seas. He thinks he has found this woman in SENTA (soprano), and indeed she falls in love with his picture before he ever sets foot on land. But the young huntsman ERIK (tenor) also shows a strong interest in Senta, and now we find ourselves in the familiar love-triangle – see above. That is not so serious because the opera still follows the conventional form, and counts to some extent as one of Wagner’s number operas: aria follows aria, ensemble follows ensemble. In contrast, Wagner’s later music dramas are through-composed as a single ‘never-ending melody’.

TANNHÄUSER is Wagner’s second eponymous hero to be a tenor, and he vacillates – like Wagner himself? Like every man? – between the Apollonian and the Dionysian principle, between Eros and Agape, sensual lust and pure love. He is offered the latter by the devout ELISABETH, he enjoys the former with VENUS in the Venusberg (located as the real-life Hörselberg in the Thuringian forest). Elisabeth sings soprano, Venus is in the mezzo register, but the two women are not musically differentiated very much, so that Wagner can easily lose sight of them in the third act.

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