Wagner: Siegfried (Edition Bayreuther Festspiele) [Box-Set]

Wagner, in the middle of the 19th century, while Italy was fully invested in Bel Canto and France was engaged in operatic imitation of Italian operas with more melodramatic content or/and in operatic pale imitation of something more Germanic without being really German, just plain more martial on more Germanic themes like Faust or/and in the invention of the operetta that will become the American or maybe Anglo-Saxon musical, Wagner, said I, invented the modern opera. If it is considered as German, this is slightly erroneous. It is German because it was really started in Germany by the German composer Wagner. But it is truly universal because it was to become the modern opera of the 20th century with Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and all the next generations from André Previn to Pizzetti or Duruflé and so many others like Janacek. What was this revolution all about? First it is a musical revolution. The music is there to emphasize the plot and the atmosphere not to entertain the audience or give the singers some virtuoso moments. The singing has nothing to do with bel canto. It is truly dramatic and is supposed to express the feelings of the characters, the changing moods and feelings of the characters. The singing can reach some moments of more regular structure at some very dramatic moments with long solos or duets. It is rare and very expressive of what is happening on the stage. It has to be highly emotional and not pleasant or agreeable or even nice and beautiful, though it is utterly beautiful in this new dimension. Wagner also moves to a higher level in his subjects. Of course he speaks of love and war and violence and honor and courage and all these very operatic values but he forgets about the Bible, classical mythology or even exotic Islamic or just plain oriental niceties. He goes back to the stock of mythological and folkloric beliefs and tales that are the roots of the Germanic soul, of the Germanic and Nordic traditions. He finds in these themes a callous and rough humanity that enhances all human feelings with an extreme emphasis set on courage, faithfulness and love as the building and saving values of humanity not the decorations of some mundane life. This not human nor humane but humanistic inspiration is new on the operatic stage though Goethe and Schiller, or Victor Hugo had used these new lines of inspiration on the dramatic stage. Siegfried is the first opera of a quadrilogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and it is the archetype of a Wagnerian opera. Wagner changes the old myth in quite a few details to make it more potent. For instance he links the killing of the dragon to the awakening of Brünnhilde who becomes Siegfried's paramour, he makes Siegfried an orphan who does not even know his parents, he makes Mime a dwarf that has nothing to do with Fafner instead of being his brother, and so on. Siegfried becomes the rebellious teenager he could be and Mime the envious and possessive but also lonely smith he could be, though both could have been quite different and were in the tradition, and then the rivalry between the two has a very human and modern ring. Wagner widely uses Wotan, the Wanderer, the one-eyed god who delivered the runes to the humans and was tortured for it. He also uses Erda, the goddess of the earth, or the earth mother herself. That gives to the divinity the very old traditional bisexual nature and dimension, though the two sexes are separated, quite a difference with older traditions behind the Nordic and Germanic mythologies in which the central god figure is both male dominant and female dominated, a character we find in Boewulf for example (his name with the feminine Beo and the masculine Wulf). These changes transform the story into a myth of teenage initiation to craft and work, to courage and heroism, to love and of course sex. I insist on this ternary figure because Wagner is keen on using it at every single level of his text, singing or music. It is a fundamental Indo-European figure or pattern, some would say motif, which is in total opposition to the binary nature of the Semitic old testament's god or the absolutely unitary nature of god in the other Semitic tradition, Islam. In fact we can easily demonstrate that the trinity of the Christian is a return of a pagan tradition, a non-Semitic tradition coming from Persia, that is to say the melting pot from which the Indo-Europeans and their mythologies have come. It is not Christian in Wagner. It is deeply pagan, thanks god it is. And musically of course it is in perfect agreement with the triumph of the archetypical ternary tempo that had just been invented, a tempo that is so Germanic in many ways, the waltz.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Mit dieser Aufnahme ist Pierre Boulez ein wahres Meisterwerk gelungen. Er interpretiert und inszeniert auf hervorragende Weise Richard Wagner und dessen Musik. Es handelt sich bei dieser Aufnahme um eine digitale Aufnahme. Man kann im beiliegenden Textbuch den Operntext leicht nachverfolgen, aber dies muss man dann ohne Regieanweisungen tun, so dass oft die nötigen Hintergrunginformationen fehlen. Eine sehr gute Abhilfe schaftt dabei der Operntext von Reclam, womit man den Text sehr gut nachvollziehen kann. Das Beiheft ist außerdem schnell kaputt, wenn man die Oper öfters mitliest, was für Musikkenner unvermeidlich mindestens 10 Mal gemacht werden sollte.