'It Is Only The Machinery They Are All Interested In'
Posted: Tuesday 28 September 2010 - 1 comment(s) [ Comment ] - 0 trackback(s) [ Trackback ]
Category: General
E flat major. Thoughts, anyone? Three flats, yes, and that's about it.  But it is the key of two titanic works composed by two Titans - Beethoven's Symphony no 3, the 'Eroica', and the Vorspiel of Wagner's Das Rheingold , which opens the Ring cycle.
 
How differently the composers treat their choice; Beethoven opens with two crashing tonic chords, demanding our attention and thereafter wrenching the path of nineteenth century symphonic writing out of its comfort zone and into a new dimension.
 
Wagner starts his opera in darkness, with a single quiet, sustained low note. One by one, notes of the tonic triad ascend above it in the brass, and, as other instruments enter, the notes are folded back upon themselves in ever multiplying layers. Strings next, adding passing notes in between the structural pillar notes of the chord. Range and dynamics grow, the wind section is in by now, note values shorten, scales rush up again and again from the lowest depths to the higher peaks until - well, that's enough from me, the music says it better than I can.
 
It's obvious where I'm going with this - to the new production of the Ring at the Met, with its spectacular new staging. But first, some diary entries:
 
 
'R says it is only the machinery they are all interested in... R is ill with grief about Das Rheingold... HR announces his decision not to conduct... L asks whether his conductor can take over...P is demanding it...the staging of the work is so abominable that the machinist is demanding three months to put it right...News -  the singer B has left so as not to have to sing Wotan in such circumstances...the theatre director gives the bass singer's role to a tenor., some musician or other will conduct, and so everything is all right... the singer who rehearsed Loge will sing Mime, the orchestra has been reduced, the theatre director is bribing newspapers and now everyone is happily spreading lies. The members of the orchestra are much put out by all this and by the fact that they have to be directed by the most incapable of all conductors... '
 
It sounds so contemporary, doesn't it? Yet these are comments extracted from the diary of Cosima Von Bülow, who became Wagner's wife in 1870. She is writing about the first production of Das Rheingold in Munich on 22 September, 1869. On September 24  Cosima wrote, 'The A.A.Z reports a succès d'estime for Das Rheingold; the work is quite happily sacrificed, but the honour of the machinists, costume designer, director, etc, is saved - on paper, at any rate.' It's good to know that the 'machinists' got an accolade, as indeed has Robert Lepage for the extraordinary machine forming the set in the current production.
 
 
 
 Machinery caused interest even in the 1869 performance, and judging from this year's publicity, 'R' - Richard Wagner - may well again have thought in 2010, 'It is only the machinery they are all interested in' . Not so, but reading the accounts of the production in various reviews, it seems that the use of this extraordinary structure enhances the music in a spectacular way.
 
Not got a ticket? No problem; the Met's Das Rheingold is coming to cinemas on October 9 - and it will be available online. I, for one, will be watching.
 
 
 
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