With all the bad luck that's befallen Peter Gelb's Ring cycle lately--scenery malfunctions in Das Rheingold, personnel malfunctions in Die Walküre--Classicalite figured it was passed time for the great Irish critic George Bernard Shaw to step and save the production from itself.
Below, in this second excerpt from his brilliant 1898 work The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring, Shaw offers a few "preliminary encouragements" on why everyone, everywhere should experience one of the greatest achievements in classical music.
After all, it is the bicentenary of Richard Wagner's birth.
Moreover, as a worried source close to Classicalite tells it, Gelb's re-mounting is only selling around 51 percent of the Met's seats.
You read Classicalite's first installment of Shaw on Wagner this Tuesday. Now, we present both men's second act.
My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may suppose themselves to be disqualified from enjoying The Ring by their technical ignorance of music. They may dismiss all such misgivings speedily and confidently. If the sound of music has any power to move them, they will find that Wagner exacts nothing further. There is not a single bar of "classical music" in The Ring--not a note in it that has any other point than the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama. In classical music there are, as the analytical programs tell us, first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias, recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente, and other ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like. And this is why he is so easy for the natural musician who has had no academic teaching. The professors, when Wagner's music is played to them, exclaim at once "What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no cabaletta to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord not prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has not one note in common with the key he has just left? Listen to those false relations! What does he want with six drums and eight horns when Mozart worked miracles with two of each? The man is no musician." The layman neither knows nor cares about any of these things. If Wagner were to turn aside from his straightforward dramatic purpose to propitiate the professors with correct exercises in sonata form, his music would at once become unintelligible to the unsophisticated spectator, upon whom the familiar and dreaded "classical" sensation would descend like the influenza. Nothing of the kind need be dreaded. The unskilled, untaught musician may approach Wagner boldly; for there is no possibility of a misunderstanding between them: The Ring music is perfectly single and simple. It is the adept musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn: and him I leave, unpitied, to his fate.
Want to read G.B. Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite in its entirety? Well, you're in luck.
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