It is no longer common to find, among the announcements and reviews of recent CD releases, notice of a recording by frontline forces of a conceded 19th Century operatic masterwork, particularly any of the large, late ones of Giuseppe Verdi or Richard Wagner. So when I saw that a recording of the Salzburg Easter Festival’s 2019 presentation of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger had been released, and that among its attractions were a conductor I’ve admired (Christian Thielemann) and, as Hans Sachs, one of the very few contemporary singers who’s piqued my interest in a big-role, big-opera context (Georg Zeppenfeld), I sat up and paid attention. If we have a Weltklasse conductor and Sachs, I reasoned, then given bare adequacy from the rest, we are well along the way to a satisfying experience. At the same time, I saw an opportunity to give attention to a much older recording I’ve owned for a number of years, but not yet heard: the 1967 Bavarian State Opera radio performance, with a promising-looking cast under another conductor I like, Rafael Kubelik. It was sent to me by a thoughtful reader, and has been shooting guilt-inducing glances at me ever since.
I concluded my last post with the thought that it may be time to give us all a rest from Wagnerism—not so much its cultish fandom, which I hold harmless, but its endless academic examination of everything in the acid-rain atmosphere out around the works themselves, which I do not—and try to focus on what’s really in the operas. That might also enable us to recognize the grievous damage inflicted on the operas (and on us) by the intrusion of such examination, nearly always broadly political in motivation, into the realm of production and performance, a taking-on of adversarial critique by the very persons charged with advocating for the works. I have a hunch that Thielemann may agree with me about this. “I am convinced that a conductor does not need a ‘concept’ for the work,” he says in one of several program-booklet essays. “You just have to lay yourself open confidently to its humor, its wit, and the tricks it plays.” He’s speaking of his own métier, of course, but I wonder if he is not also suggesting an attitude toward that of the stage.
True, in the case of Meistersinger, a comic opera of unprecedented length, breadth, and depth that also serves as a national monument, it is hard to avoid the intertextual connections among Wagner’s works. Except that I don’t think of them as “intertextual,” since although text may indeed confirm some things and suggest others, for me such connections have not arisen primarily from texts, but from performance, from hearing the music played and sung and watching the story play out in real time. And while audio recordings, videos, and films are documents, and can thus be considered “text,” live performance cannot be fixed through inscription. It can only be experienced and re-experienced, never quite the same, its meanings, connections, and insights gradually surfacing and cohering in individual minds and in the collective one, if we grant the existence of such a beast. That’s the most wonderful thing about live performance—it throws off the shackles of text and lifts off into free flight, taking us along for the ride. With any recording of a live performance, we hope that the fixed document thus created retains some of the feel of that flight.