davidwall.ca

2008: A Fig Odyssey

David — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:04:08 +0000

Hello everyone!
Here I am finally updating my poor, neglected website.
2008 was a terribly intense and memorable year, what with elections and parliamentary prorogues and bizarre band-reunions. I was involved in a multitude of projects, big and small, weird and wonderful. One truly significant event was the reunion of The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir (remember them?). The gig, at Guelph’s magnificent Hillside fest last summer, was fabulous, as well as existentially wrought. It’s a pretty bitter sweet feeling to be standing in front of thousands, singing songs I haven’t touched in almost 20 years, wondering whether my 4-year -old in the front row needs to go to the bathroom…
For anyone interested, the lovely Darrin Cappe filmed the whole affair. Here’s a link…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6C7Yz01Tos&feature=related

The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band (another one of my multi-syllabic collaborations) finally finished recording our new CD. It was produced, for the most part, by our zany friend Dave Neufeld at his huge church/studio in Trenton, Ontario (the mix isn’t completed yet). We also recently filmed a video (!) for one of the songs, with Canadian directorial sensation, Bruce MacDonald.
For anyone interested, here’s a preview of the record. Note the wild sounds and English words! (With thanks to the great Kurt Walther) This is a little ditty called “Folk Song”

In the land of TV and film, I had another grand year of steady-to-panic-inducing work. Here’s some highlights:
-I continued my fruitful relationship with YAP films with a score for their much-watched CBC doc about the pet food scandal, “Dog’s Breakfast”, and for the second season of “Finding The Fallen” (Discovery Europe), an emotionally engaging and very original World War I history series.
-I worked with Kenton Vaughan on a great doc about the expansion of Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, (and got to flex my Vaughan Williams chops)
-Jamie Shields, Adam White and I continued our ever-expanding professional association by working together on a feature length pilot for a thrilling new CTV/CBS police drama, “The Bridge”. We also scored Two Sands Productions’ “Extreme Clergy”. The series title doesn’t do it justice; it profiles religious figures who risk their lives to help people in war zones and urban squallour. Quite inspirational.
-Kevin Lacroix and I provided music for a new “spinoff” of The Nature of Things, “The Suzuki Diaries”, in which David and his youngest daughter travel across Europe in search of successful green energy solutions.
-there were a miriad of other projects as well, including a short film by Dan Berman featuring South Asian reworkings of Richard Wagner (more on him later!)

John Greyson, Jared Rabb and I finally finished the film version of our nearly decade-long collaboration, “Fig Trees”. Part of me can’t believe it’s over! Anyway, it was immediately shipped off to the Berlin film festival, where it won a “Teddy” award for best documentary/essay. It is being shown in festivals across the world, including the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and Hot Docs here in Toronto, on May 1st. For anyone interested, here’s an excerpt (for a larger image, click on the title)…

Barcelona Aria (from John Greyson’s Fig Trees) from Jared Raab on Vimeo.

And another…

4 Throats (from John Greyson’s Fig Trees) from Jared Raab on Vimeo.

So far 2009 is looking big and fabulous. Jamie, Adam and I will be working on 2 series (the second season of “Stuck” for 52 Media productions, and “Tosca” for Upfront Entertainment). I’ll also be scoring an interesting doc for Associated Producers about the mind, called “The Science of the Soul” (History U.S.). I’m just finishing up the music for a powerful film about ex-cons by director Alan Zweig, called “Hard Name” (It’ll be premiering at Hot Docs on May 3rd). Meanwhile John Greyson and I are working up about a hundred new projects…

Enough already! How much of my awe-inspiring genius can you stand?

And now, for anyone interested, here’s part 3 of my ongoing discussion of Wagner’s operas!

BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE SWANS: LOHENGRIN AND ITS PREQUELS

OK. So, Lohengrin is Wagner’s worst “post-Rienzi” opera. I know this might ruffle a few swan feathers, but it’s the truth. Don’t get me wrong; there are fantastic highlights strewn throughout its’ ponderous 3-hours, even some of W’s best, but I think it ultimately fails as a mid-19th century musical/dramatic work (consider that Rigoletto premiered one year after Lohengrin). There are many reasons for this failure, but ultimately Lohengrin suffers from “In Betweeny Disease”. If Tannhauser is NYC and Das Rheingold is Philadelphia, Lohengrin is a greasy-spoon truckstop somewhere on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (if such joints still exist). Wagner has tried to leave behind the grandiose, over-emphasized trappings of French grand opera which permeate The Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser by admirably scaling back the fortissimos and glossing over the separations between vocal “numbers” (arias, duets, choruses, etc.), but he hasn’t found the wonders of his late orchestral/motif style to replace these absences. To quote Gertrude Stein upon visiting L.A., “There’s not much ‘there’ there”.

Here’s what I mean: First comes the admittedly magnificent prelude, but then act I is Wagner’s dullest, most prosaic offering ever (again, not counting Rienzi and before). It is full of simplistic, military fanfares and empty royal pomp with very little to be remembered or celebrated. There are sweet moments, of course, like Elsa’s pitiful utterances and her evocation of the envisioned hero. But it isn’t really until Lohengrin himself hits the stage that the music really takes off. Here is Wagner at his best; silken, shimmering strings and a beautiful, restrained vocal line. The argument has been made that this contrast is intentional; boring, derivative music for the earthbound Brabantians, versus splendid, magnificent music for our heaven-sent hero. But do we have to sit through all of it? The finale, like all 3 in this opera, is pretty amazing. Incredible counterpoint and harmonic invention. But aren’t exciting, full chorused but static act-enders a leftover from Meyerbeer, Rossini and all of the composers Wagner loathed?

Act 2 begins with a rehearsal for the prelude to Siegfried. There are no high instruments (violins etc.) for a very long time, because R.W. is telling us that evil is afoot. Sure enough, Ortrud and Telremund, Wagner’s first-ever genuine villains enter and spray their deep, delicious darkness all over the place. Telremund has to be one of the thickest, most easily manipulated figures in operatic history. After Ortrud has ruined his life and caused his complete rejection from society, all it takes is a little bit of sexual teasing to get him back in line. Idiot. There follows an incredble, Iago-like monologue for her (more on this in a moment) and then one of two excellent, distinctly un-Wagnerian, act 2 duets. This is when Elsa comes in and the plot thickens. Another great duet and then a lot of dullness, in which we hear the “forbidden question” motif about 2 dozen times. One cool moment happens when Elsa and chorus seem to be winding the act to a big finish as she triumphantly moves towards the palace in a massive wedding procession, only to be suddenly interrupted by Ortrud. The musical “volte face” is almost Mahlerian in it’s emotional shock. The finale that follows is, of course, exciting.

Act 3 is immediately impossible for me to enjoy because of two musical blemishes: It’s terribly ubiquitous, dramatically innapropriate prelude (it never sounded like joyful wedding music to me, only like teutonic military bombast. Admittedly it might also have been ruined by my long-entrenched childhood association; it was included on the soundtrack album to the Beatles’ “Help”). And, of course, the horrible “Wedding March”, surely the blandest of all Wagner’s famous melodies. There follows a bizarrely chaste wedding-night duet, which quickly transforms into Lohengrin trying to claw his way out of the doghouse. he keeps making it worse for himself, with stunningly self-absorbed lines like “I want to live in you” and his terribly ill-conceived description of all the great stuff he’s given up to live out the rest of his days in boring old Brabant. This reveals one of the work’s biggest flaws: Elsa is right! This pompous, nameless braggart has no business concealing his identity from his own wife! I would have told him to make up something (Like, for example, “Taylor”, the name of Charleton Heston’s character in The Planet of the Apes. But more on this in a moment). So she’s dropped the big question just in time for Telremund to run in and get instantly dispatched by our dejected hero who tells everyone to meet him in front of the boring king, where he’ll let it all out. When he finally tells the gathered Brabanters the news (the audience, of course, already knows the scoop because it says his name on front of the theatre program), Ortrud makes a major gaff and spills her own beans as well. Thing is, if she’d managed to wait until Lohengrin actually left, she would have been fine. Instead she lets him overhear that she used her terrible pagan magic on Elsa’s brother. What’s a goody-two-shoes knight of the grail gonna do? Bring back the brother! Ortrud literally dies of embarrassement. When L finally makes his exit, Elsa dies of sorrow. Wagner loves killing the ladies like this. No blood; no mess.

I guess it’s no big surprise that Lohengrin is a boring and silly opera with only odd highlights to keep the listener going. Maybe it’s a tall order to expect something miraculous from a work composed in the 1840’s. But R.W. had already managed such miracles, I feel, with his Dutchman and Tannhauser offerings. For Grand Opera thrills and chills, Dutchman easily trumps the Swan-rider. For sheer strangeness and musical adventuring. Tannhauser is the clear winner. Also, both of these earlier operas have better tunes and more memorable set pieces. And both are full of dramatic and musical events in a way that Lohengrin is significantly not.

But Lohengrin is still, perhaps, one of Wagner’s most interesting works, from a theoretical point of view. In fact, I would argue that it is a kind of key for unlocking most of Wagner’s subsequent music dramas. Ultimately, it is the epitome of musical art that is “better than it sounds”, because it rewards study in so many ways, even if it doesn’t fully deliver as theatre or music.
Wagner’s entire post-Rienzi output was drawn from 2 literary sources. On the one hand, you have his libretti based on medieval european texts. These formed the basis for everything from Tannhauser on, with the exception of the Ring Cycle. The Ring itself was derived from Norse mythology, his other source. But it’s in the incredible text of Lohengrin that these two worlds intersect and we’re handed a Wagnerian Rosetta stone, as it were.

Towards the beginning of act 2 we are given our first moment alone with Ortrud. Telremund has run away in a kind of sexually aroused tizzy, soon to be sublimated into a frenzy of evil violence, and our slithering villainess utters an amazing, revealing monologue. In it’s inexplicable, impenetrable evil, it brings to mind Iago’s chilling “credo”. Ortrud, we learn, is deeply, profoundly disturbed, beyond the usual pragmatic lust for power, or even earthly revenge. Like Iago, her internal driving force is profoundly anti-Christian. But whereas Iago denies the existence of heaven and therefore the hegemony of any kind of discernible moral code, Ortrud is fully loyal to a different deified force. In an incredible, confessional moment, she cries out to “Wotan” and “Fricka” to help her exact her revenge. For what? for the destruction of the pagan Norse gods themselves! Christianity has eclipsed the old order and driven out the denizens of Valhalla and now it’s time for payback! In this light, we can look to the Ring Cycle as the ultimate “prequel”, more than a century before “The Godfather II” or “The Phantom Menace”. Lohengrin is post-Gotterdammerung, post-twilight of the Gods. And in this light, the Ring takes on a new meaning; Wotan and Albericht and Everyone else in the Ring cycle ultimately fail because they are pre-Christian and therefore bereft of compassionate love, anti-materialism and all the other supposedly Christ-bound innovations Wagner, Schoepenhauer and so many others went on about in the 19th century (in Wagner’s world, is the worship of Norse Gods a stand in for stubborn, supposedly loveless Jewishness? Or more aptly, were these “Jewish” characteristics intrinsic to any pre-Christian era?). But Ortrud is pre-Christian in yet another important respect. In her (understandable) nudging of Elsa to ask for our hero’s name and origin, she is the embodiment of Lilith, the garden serpent who compelled Eve to take that fateful bite.

And then we have Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal, one of the most perplexing literary/musical works in western history. Again, for more obvious reasons, it is a prequel to Lohengrin; Parsifal is Lohengrin’s dad. I would look at the Ring cycle as Wagner’s “Conquest For the Planet of the Apes” and Parsifal as his “Battle for the planet of the Apes”. This would make Lohengrin, of course, the equivalent of the first, classic Ape movie, in which Charleton Heston comes from some mysterious other world on a silver, fiery swan, rescues the (mute) girl from the terrible pagan monkeys and is ultimately unable to integrate into his new, earthly surroundings. “God damn you all to hell!” he cries, and falls on his knees in his shock and horror at having seen the potential of human beings to destroy. Or is he actually Ortrud, bemoaning the death of the gods? Certainly a full academic analysis is needed…

And now for recommended recordings and DVDs. Maybe because many of the wonders of this opera have always alluded me, i seem to have more performances of it than any others in the Wagner canon, as if I’ve been hoping to be converted or something.
For sheer vocal slendour I’d go for the classic Rudolf Kempe EMI stereo recording from ‘64. It has to have one of the best ever assembled Wagnerian casts. Jess Thomas, with his sweet, light-yet-heroic touch sounds suitably angelic. Elisabeth Grummer is among the greatest German language singers in history, and you can’t do better for the villains than Christa Ludwig and Dietrich Fischer Dieskau. Dietrich manages to convey the fact that Telramund starts the opera as a great, respected hero and, though he grows steadily crazier, should retain a modicum of dignity.
But the CD performance I always return to is Sawallisch from a ‘62 Bayreuth live recording. It also stars Jess Thomas, but the villians are the unparalleled power house coupling of Astrid Varnay (a Brunhilde in her own right) and Ramon Vinay (one of the greatest helden-tenors ever, singing in a booming baritone). This performance is a little rough, with ample stage and audience noise, but it’s on fire!

As for DVDs, I own a few, but I’d recommend the Abbado/Domingo/Studer 1990 performance from the Vienna Stadtoper. Once you get past Placido’s ridiculous blonde hair (can’t Lohengrin be tall dark and handsome?), and the ever so slightly murky sound, the singing and conducting takes over. Domingo is perfect for this part; an expert at flowing, delicate, Italianate (or perhaps french sounding) legato. Cheryl Studer delivers nicely.

I am a fan of alternative, whacked out Wagner productions, so I’ve ordered a DVD of a famous Peter Konwitschny production in which all the action takes place in a high school classroom between hormonal teenagers. Perfect!

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2007: Year of the Albino Squirrel

David — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 01:59:50 +0000

Hello and happy new year. The problem, of course, with these darn websites is the whole having-to-update-em thingy. I’m just not good at this, but a whole year of neglect is verging on pathological, so…

2007 was absolutely off the scale for me in terms of number of projects and eclectic pursuits. The part of me that was sadly neglected was my career as a singer, but that was more than made up for by all the other insanity. My family and i moved into a fabulous new home complete with a fully equipped recording facility on the first floor (seems like no one else wanted it!) I can’t overstate the sweetness of being able to work at home in comfort, though the potential for endless procrastination has exponentially increased.

In the world of film and television I got to provide music for a wide range of inspiring stuff. here’s a few hilites; Andrew Munger’s fascinating doc about Walmart, “Walmart Nation”; Jamie Kastner’s provocative and funny piece about jewish identity, “Kike Like Me”; an exciting interactive drama produced by the Canadian Film Centre, “Late Fragments”; Matt Gallagher’s hilarious and poignant character study/ode to Windsor, “The Rise and Fall of the Grumpy Burger”; YAP films’ revealing miniseries about great canadian battles, “Bloodlines”…

Oh yes, then there’s the squirrels. John Greyson and I finally got down to filming the feature version of our experimental opera project, Fig Trees. All I’m going to say about it is that it’s currently being edited and that the narrator is played by a 12-year-old genius in an albino squirrel suit. There’s also a scene where I’m singing a duet while being teased and stroked by three naked men. All in all another typical piece of mainstream canadian cinema. John and I also got to tour the video installation version a bit this year. We hauled our monstrosity to such far flung destinations as the Yukon and the Vancouver New Music Festival.

The future looks bright and scary as we slip into 2008. In the near future I’ll be working with Kenton Vaughan and the folks at 90th Parallel on an intriguing 2-part doc about Daniel Liebeskind’s expansion of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. I’m also busy scoring a sweet series about women trying to change their lives, called “Stuck”, produced by David York for The Women’s Network and a fascinating, politically charged 13-parter called “Extreme Clergy” for Creative Anarchy and Vision TV. In the summer I’ll be scoring another season of “Finding The Fallen”, YAP’s compelling World War I/forensic archeology series. I’m getting back into some singing as well, thank goodness. The Flying Bulgars are celebrating our 20th (!) anniversary this year which will include shows in Toronto, Vancouver and elsewhere. We’re also busy recording an album of (mostly) English songs with Dave Neufeld (Broken Social Scene, Super Furry Animals) at the helm as producer. Pretty weird, if you ask me! In March I’ll be traveling to New York and San Francisco with Frank London of the Klezmatics (etc.) to perform songs from a musical he composed, “A Night in the Old Marketplace”. His librettist, Glen Berger, is actually in the middle of writing the book for a big broadway musical called “Spiderman”, starring Bono! (I’m not joking this time!)

That’s enough blabbering on about me and how clever and sexy I am. Please flip through some of the pages of my sadly neglected site and make it feel wanted. I feel like a deadbeat dad.

I’ll take Venus, you can have the Halle

And now, part two of my continuing discussion of Wagner’s operas…

Tannhäuser (und der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg)

Just about every composer has his or her favorite, misunderstood little masterpiece that no one seems to appreciate or love enough. The artist swears that if people would only give it a proper chance, they’d see just how wonderful and special this misshapen opus really is. Refusing to let go, he or she keeps massaging and refining it forever, often till it’s virtually unrecognizable. For some reason, the 19th century had a lot of these unappreciated gems, perhaps because of the grandiose ambition placed on art by Romanticism. Beethoven had his Fidelio, Berlioz his Les Troyens, Verdi his Simon Boccanegra, Brahms his first symphony in all it’s incarnations. The classic 20th century example is Prokofiev’s amazing, histrionic opera, The Fiery Angel, a work he tinkered away at for decades. But certainly the ultimate example of this is Wagner’s strangest work, Tannhäuser, which he returned to again and again over a forty year span without ever achieving the kind of artistic satisfaction he was used to.

By the time Tannhäuser reached the Paris Opera in 1861 it had already been in circulation for 16 years. During that time, it had undergone a plethora of changes, including an awkward translation into French. Wagner had also inserted a completely incongruous ballet into the first act, composed in his Tristan-chromatic-modern style. This transition, from his 1840’s, Meyerbeer-inspired palette to the wild and wacky psychadelia of Wagner’s late work, creates a sensation similar to discovering an extra in the background of some Hollywood Roman epic wearing a wristwatch. Complete temporal nausea sets in, as if the time machine is out of whack. The performance that night in Paris was one of the biggest fiascos in operatic history. There had been 164 rehearsals.

What is it about Wagner’s fifth opera that makes it so weird and problematic? Tannhäuser truly is his strangest work. More than any other of his mature operas, it straddles the line between old and new; big catchy set-pieces are sandwiched between long passages of peculiar, even vague, anti-melodic declamation. It’s especially telling that the big contest in act two, the centerpiece of the whole show, is made up of settings of meandering prose rather than beautiful strophic songs (the latter would be wonderfully realized in Wagner’s great comedic Tannhäuser “remake”, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg). In an almost Brechtian way, the composer felt an aversion to simple beauty, fearing it might lull his audience into a sensual stupor and distract from the deep and serious conceptual world of the opera.

But what does it all mean? In many ways, Tannhäuser is a re-telling of Wagner’s own Flying Dutchman. A morally compromised, brooding outsider is “saved” by a naïve, chaste beauty through an act of mystical/suicidal sacrifice. In the earlier opera this archetypical story is told in the context of nautical folklore. In Tannhäuser it is inserted into a rich stew of medieval/teutonic fables. The central conflict becomes the protagonist’s struggle to negate his leanings toward a pagan sensuality and embrace Christianity, especially its anti-sensual, ascetic aspects. In the end he is unable to vanquish his lustful self and is able to find religious grace only in a typical Wagnerian moment of inexplicable, spiritually entwined death.

Tannhäuser has classically been perceived as a failed pro-Christian work. The major failing has usually been characterized as Wagner’s inability to tip the musical balance in favor of his Christian characters. In fact, Venus, our knight’s pagan love goddess, comes off as much more attractive, well-rounded and memorable than her well-meaning but ponderous counterpart, the sweet and chaste Elizabeth. If Wagner meant to write off pre-Christian free love as immoral, he sure did a bad job. He would have been doing so as a raging hypocrite, of course, because his sexual adventuring and penchant for expensive luxuries of all kinds was legend. I would argue that he meant to express something very different. He wanted to show the virtues of sensuality and it’s compatibility with an ethic of holistic rather than religiously framed “goodness”.

It is significant that there are no villains in the opera. Tannhäuser is seen as a deeply conflicted, hyper-sensitive artist with a super-charged libido (hmmm, sounds like our composer). He also seems to be genuinely in love with Elizabeth, not in a philandering sense, but as a fully engaged husband-to-be. It is this apparent contradiction in his character that forms the core of the drama. Venus is portrayed as amoral rather than immoral, her unquenchable lust seen as an essential aspect of Womanhood, much like Elizabeth’s self-sacrificing, pure nature. Maybe Wagner envisioned the ultimate Woman as an amalgamation of these two opposites. Tannhäuser can be read, perhaps, as a philosophical testing ground for that greatest of all explorations into moral polarity; the Ring cycle. It can also be seen as a maniacally ambitious rationalization for some very questionable treatment of the women in our featured artist’s life. Is Tannhäuser just a fancy portrayal of the whore/angel cliche in Wagner’s twisted sexual fantasy world?

There are, of course, musical “highlights” galore in the opera. The over-played but magnificent prelude, surely one of the most grandiose and essentially teutonic works of German Romanticism; Tannhäuser’s equivocal ode to Venus at the opera’s beginning; Elizabeth’s big aria, “Dich Teure Halle”, probably opera’s most famous love song to a piece of architecture; The big march in act 2 as the competition begins; Wolfram’s beautiful “O Du, Mein Holder Abendstern”, a brilliant portrayal of a medieval Catholic’s inability to express actual romantic love (it has to be done through an astronomical metaphor); Tannhäuser’s big 3rd act Rome monologue, a precursor to Wagner’s monumental Ring cycle soliloquies; finally, the big ending. It’s massive and strange in the best ways.

I love all the recordings I have of Tannhäuser. On CD the best all round document is Solti’s early seventies rendering of the final incarnation (Wagner re-Germanized the Paris version at the end of his life). Rene Kollo, surprisingly, does a fantastic job as the knight, without a hint of that obnoxious nasal tone. Christa Ludwig is the perfect Venus. The only problem is all the Paris amendments, which I find disconcerting, but it’s a matter of taste. On DVD I quite enjoy the Zurich Opera production with Peter Seiffert, a world-class Tannhäuser. Franz Welser-Most, one of the 21st century’s great conducting hopefuls, does a good job bringing out as much lyricism as possible from this often stingy score. The Dresden, 1860 version is used.

To better understand Wagner and opera in general, please go to the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEhHroh2r4w&feature=related

Penguins, Pools and Ring Cycles

David — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 07:03:49 +0000

Hello to everyone and happy holidays etc. I’ve had quite a year of eclectic endeavours and I don’t even know where to begin…

My record, “The Spell I Was Under” was rhapsodically received in many quarters, including some lovely print reviews (check ‘em out on this site, of course). I got to talk to various and sundry on the radio (Jian Gomeshi and Matt Galloway were both highly memorable) and spread the word by performing to fabulous audiences all over the place. One of my favourite shows of the year was at the Hillside festival in Guelph, Ontario, with Ken Whiteley. Love was in the air. Another highlite (of my entire life, actually) was singing with the unbelievably tremendous Campbell Brothers at Hugh’s Room last spring.

John Greyson and I got up to new mischief, including two connected video-installation projects involving the famous gay penguins of the Central Park Zoo. The first piece depicted their wedding and was presented in a wading pool. The second, much more ambitious, took over the entire Harrison Baths swimming pool in downtown Toronto as part of the fabulous “Les Nuits Blanches” city-wide arts event in September. This piece dramatized their subsequent divorce to the strains of the “Libestod” from Wagner’s Tristan Und Isolde and other pop hits. In November J and I flew to the Yukon to install a mini version of “Fig Trees” at the wonderful Yukon Arts Centre.

I had my busiest year ever in the world of film/TV soundtracks. here’s a few of the most interesting moments: I worked extensively with Elliot Halpern and the gang at YAP films, scoring two features and a documentary series and have just embarked on a new, war-history oriented series with them called “Once A Warrior”. Daniel Greaves and I continued to collaborate on a multitude of projects, and we’ve started on a feature doc about Henry Morgentaler and a drama feature about hard living in Detroit. I was especially proud and excited to be involved in four powerful short films for the Stephen Lewis Foundation, directed by the wonderfully talented Liz Marshall. Another high point of my year was scoring a fantastic, daring and super-personal doc for Simcha Jacobovici about the history of Romania…

I’m sure there’s a whole other bunch of endlessly interesting stuff for me to brag about but I can’t remember just now.
Look for me in the new year performing a whole lot more with the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band as we start gearing up for the band’s 20th (!) anniversary.

Have a splendiferous 2007!
xxooDW

Wagner, Mel Gibson and Me

Those who know me at all are probably aware that I have a love of opera that verges on the unhealthy. I’m going to start posting some of my amateurish musings on the subject here, kind of as a therapeutic outlet.

This year was Toronto’s year of Wagner and it tickled me to no end. I didn’t get to see the new Ring productions the COC used to christen their fab new house, though I saw the prototypes over the last 2 years and was suitably impressed (I saw them all except for Das Rheingold, which was frustrating).

Wagner has always been a huge fascination for me, ever since I was 8 years old and my dad played me his “highlites from the Ring” lp and I couldn’t believe it; a massive, sword-and-sorcery fantasy game that even snobby grown ups could love. 20 hours of it. Now, of course, after having consumed hundreds (thousands?) of pages on Wagner’s music and (gasp) philosophy, my fascination has changed significantly. Yes, the music is sublime and the sheer audacity of his vision and hugeness of his influence boggles the mind, but I think of RW as a glorious, violent traffic accident; I can’t tear my eyes/ears away from the carnage.

I’ve been really obsessed with “Our Friend” this year, and it’s funny/ironic that it’s coincided with an equally deep obsession with Gustav Mahler, the ultimate temporal schizoid - one foot in the 19th, one in the 20th centuries, who was crushed by his anxiety, perfectionism and alienation. Oh yes, and by his being Jewish in Austria in the early 19 hundreds. the problem is that I can love both these composers at the same time, knowing what I know now about how the worst century ever turned out and how Wagner was like a prescient, reasurring mirror for a generation of genocidal music lovers to look back on. But I keep returning to him. He’s my musical canker sore that I can’t stop playing with.

I would like to go through each of his operas gradually, starting with the Flying Dutchman, and briefly describe how they make me feel. I’ll mention my favourite recordings and how, I believe, the operas relate to a), Wagner’s ever-developing catastrophic conceptual landscape. Oh yes, and b), the music…

Die Fliegende Hollander

In many ways, (depending on my mood), this is my favorite work by Wagner. He was young, bold, and coming into his incredible musical/philosophical identity for the first time and you can hear his iconoclasm in every bar. Not to say it’s all perfectly original and ground-breaking; lots of it has the four-square, hustle-bustle of, say, mid-career Verdi or even, ha ha, Meyerbeer (listen, for example, to the duet between the Dutchman and Dalland towards the end of Act one). This is one of the reasons why it’s so great, though; when one tires of the formal experimentation and “endless melodies” of more celebrated, later Wagner, it can be refreshing to dip into the Steersman’s catchy little ditty or the “Spinning Chorus” from Dutchman. But what really slays me about this piece is it’s unremmiting darkness and deep sense of existential dread. The motifs come fast, furious and ham-fisted, but they work like crazy, maintaining an incredibly terrifying, clausterphobic atmosphere. The opening section of the whole work, which ingeniously captures the cursed, stormy whirlwind of the whole drama and then returns in its entirety as Senta’s obsessive “ballad”, is a breathtaking stroke of genius. No wonder the work didn’t catch on.

I also love the Dutchman’s relatively benign subject matter. It’s like all (or most of) the ingredients of Wagner’s twisted image-world are there, but he hasn’t quite figured out how to be a monster yet. For example, in this context, his ever-repeated “Wondering Jew” paradigm is used to fill the lead character with a real pathos; we’re supposed to identify with this Jew. Wagner hadn’t quite made the intellectual leap into deep-seated, all-encompassing, paranoid anti-semitism yet, and thus all Jews were not the same. He was still impressed by people like the poet Heinrich Heine enough to borrow liberally from his works and actually use his ideas to help formulate his own sense of “Germanness”. Most importantly, within the established (post Rienzi) Wagner cannon, this work is not only pre-radical antisemitism, but pre-hate. Like Tannhauser directly after it, but unlike Lohengrin after that and everything else he wrote, this work, amazingly, has no villains in it. There is noone to detest. All the characters are strung along by their own madnesses and/or fates and we can only stand back and feel for them, a little bit like in Verdi’s La forza Del Destino, I suppose.

I own three recordings of Dutchman and they’re all fantastic. I love the George London/Leonie Rysanek recording from 1962. It has a marvelous low-grade stereo sound that only adds to the murky, wet, other-wordliness of the drama. I usually don’t like London too much; his voice lacks warmth and steadiness, which probably aren’t problems in big houses, but on record it’s annoying (for example, his crappy romantic lead part on Solti’s Arabella recording). But his weird voice seems to work here-it’s kind of weary sounding, which is totally appropriate, of course. Rysanek is completely fierce and unhinged, a terrific casting choice in this context.

I’m a big fan of adventurous Wagner re-stagings, and the readily available Bayreuth Dutchman from the eighties starring Simon Estes is one of the best examples on DVD of using fresh, controversial ideas to energize an old operatic war-horse. The concept, which is simple and brilliantly carried off, is that all of the drama is completely in Senta’s mind. That she’s suffering from some kind of delusional mono-mania that eventually pushes her, literally, off the edge. What a fantastic way to circumvent the ridiculous, proto-Romantic, completely implausible story line. And Estes is fabulous.