As most of the West hunkers down in fear of Chinese lung AIDS, online providers are conjuring up things to keep us all occupied, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York which will be streaming live performances of Richard Wagner operas this week each night at 7:30 PM EST.
5 CommentsTags: live stream, Opera, richard wagner
Has any painter ever depicted so sorrowful a look of love as Wagner does in the final accents of his Prelude? ~ F. Nietzsche
Parsifal is the final opera of Richard Wagner and the manifestation of four years of work. Here we shall attempt to briefly present from a structural perspective the use of contemplative silence and modulation in crafting great songs. The prelude contains all that the opus requires and it all unfolds like a flower from the bud.
2 CommentsTags: bruckner, felix mendelssohn, howard shore, mahler, nietzsche, Parsifal, richard wagner
Richard Wagner’s character is famous all over the world, admired as well as decried as just behind Christ and Napoleon, it is the German composer who has given rise to the most impressive bibliography; in 1962, according to Jean Gallois, nearly forty-two thousand books, articles or documents were written about him and if one considers the tetralogy as his greatest masterpiece, it is “Tristan und Isolde” that will remain the most innovative harmonically. The chromaticism of the prelude pushed to the extreme marks a turning point in the history of music, arriving at a point of no return for tonal music. Is it the end of romanticism or the birth of the processes of modern music? The question has often been debated and the French composer Achille Claude Debussy, very influenced by Wagner and this opera before detaching himself from it and rejecting it, will write about Tristan:
4 CommentsTags: johann sebastian bach, richard wagner, romantic music, tristan chord, Tristan und Isolde
Most Death metal bands don’t age gracefully and tend to either become parodies of themselves or end up playing pop music. Atrocity after having conquered Death metal decided to experiment with various genres but each of those experiments has been abysmal failure. This band therefore destroyed its reputation in both underground and mainstream circles to the extent of being forgotten by all. But from 1985 to 1992, Atrocity were on the war path until the release of their Magnum Opus Todessehnsucht (Longing for Death). Five musicians with an obvious passion for classical music combined with Floridian Death metal and the Teutonic trio. More precisely their main influences seem to be Death, Destruction, Kreator, Morbid Angel and Richard Wagner.
5 CommentsTags: 1992, Atrocity, death, death metal, richard wagner, Todessensucht
On his previous album of classical piano interpretations of the music of Richard Wagner, Alexander Jacob converted a contemplative opera into an ambient soundtrack in which melodies emerged evanescent and drifted toward the surface. With Richard Wagner: Der Ring Des Nibelungen, Jacob takes the more robust thematic material of that opera and makes from it an album of stormy but passionate classical piano pieces as we might find from Chopin or Brahms.
The piano attacks these pieces with a stormy bluster followed by periods of long contemplative expansion on the melodies, compressing lengthy operas into a classical piece that can easily fit into the listening of a normal classical listener, with more of a Romantic style on piano than the hybrid Romantic-Modernist style of the Wagner operas. In this, Jacob and the transcribers Richard Kleinmichel and Karl Klindworth translate Wagner into an entirely different style while distilling his lengthy compositions to the internal dialogue of complex but approachable pieces.
Where the last album occurred as waves of ambient melody as fit Parsifal, for the more sturm und drang material of the Ring cycle Richard Wagner: Der Ring Des Nibelungen takes an appropriately forthright approach in reducing many layers of orchestration and voices to a piano monologue. As an introduction to Wagner, this album may be more approachable than the first, although that may show more of Wagner’s technique in composition as it distinguishes itself from others. For those who want a classical piano experience that delivers intensity without veering into bombast, Richard Wagner: Der Ring Des Nibelungen will be a delight.
7 CommentsTags: alexander jacob, Classical, karl klindworth, piano, richard kleinmichel, richard wagner
Richard Wagner wrote epic operas based around primal mythology as based on Nordic and German folklore. Almost two centuries later, Alexander Jacob sat down with piano scores by Richard Kleinmichel and created an album of spacious, otherworldly music using that interpretation of the original. Numen Media released Richard Wagner: Parisfal on digital and compact disc for an audience wanting to explore Wagner in a sitting and not an afternoon.
The selected scenes from the opera translate into music with strong themes emerging from dense backgrounds, giving it both the textural feel of contemporary electronic music and the depth of heavy instrumental complexity as is found in most classical and progressive rock, but in the single voice of the piano this becomes a comforting shift like transition from city to country to town via train. Themes arise and then recede, like ideas in a dream, and play off related ideas in a shifting scenery which reveals its contours only slowly.
Transitioning to a single instrument from the multi-layered score written by Wagner, which famously required larger orchestras than were normally used, requires sacrificing some detail as many voices become one. The piano, on the other hand, demands lack of outright repetition as it becomes too obvious. Jacob and Kleinmichel navigate those obstacles by isolating different leitmotifs and working them into the piano as complementary voices. The result strikes the listener as more peaceful than Wagner, and relies on subtlety to bring out its power, manifesting out of a background ambiance a striking and sudden clarity like an explosion in darkness, then returning to a piece that almost conceals itself in calm. As a result, Richard Wagner: Parsifal serves as soothing music which inserts its intensity like a revelation in the mind of the listener after the fact, leaving a lingering sense of being transported to a different and more epic era.
4 CommentsTags: alexander jacob, numen media, richard kleinmichel, richard wagner
