Wagner Roses: Parsifal and Tristan/Isolde

On my way to Bayreuth (pre-Covid) to hear Wagner's operas Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal I stayed with friends in Hamburg. Sitting on their veranda surrounded by climbing roses and honeysuckle, I read the librettos for the operas, painted the roses and dreamt of the feast to come. Both images below are available to download and print on canvas or paper at artsmitten.com

 

 

Parsifal: Ich schreite kaum ...

 

Tristan und Isolde: Nie erwachen

Flying Dutchman in New Zealand

St James Theatre, Wellington

Producing The Flying Dutchman is quite an undertaking for a recently formed opera company but Wagner's 200^th birthday has inspired the New Zealand Opera to do just that. On Wednesday when I saw the show the St James Theatre in Wellington was packed. Orla Boylan (Senta) and Peter Auty (Erik) delivered their demanding roles with aplomb and Shaun Dixon, originally from tiny Tokoroa,was a charming bright voiced Steersman. During the first half, produced in a minimalist but clever setting which augmented the voices, the evening looked as if it would be a winner.

But then came the chorus scenes and suddenly we were no longer with a group of Norwegian sailors but at a 1950s drunken Antipodean student party with students vomiting and fighting and more beer and chips thrown around the stage than you'd find at the most drunken brawl. The Director was Matthew Lutton from Australia. His credits list a couple of directing roles in Germany and perhaps he took his regie-theatre ideas from there. How pleased I shall be when an opera director is required to know and understand the music and it's cultural setting. Singers and conductors are required to have this knowledge … why not directors?

The Dutchman Flies in Sydney

Huge sails soared to the ceiling of the Sydney Opera House concert hall on Saturday night. A sailing ship ... oh  yes ...  The Flying Dutchman no less.

Sails in the Sydney Opera House concert hall.

The Sydney Symphony together with a cast of fantastic singers presented a wonderful concert performance of Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. The orchestra, the soloists and the very large choir on both sides of the auditorium were exceptionally good. They got a wildly appreciative reception from the audience and a well deserved excellent review.  A video was projected onto the huge sails during the performance, which was successful in augmenting the music rather than distracting from it.

Sydney Opera house last Saturday night

Last year Sydney Symphony put on a fantastic concert version of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades and now, after this performance of The Flying Dutchman (there is another performance this evening), my bet is that the Sydney Symphony will be winning a lot of new subscribers, refugees from Opera Australia which is concentrating on balancing its books by putting on musicals.

Go Sydney Symphony!

Letters: Wagner to the Wesendonks

I have just started reading Richard Wagner's letters to his muse Mathilda Wesendonk and her husband Otto, 1853-1856. There seems to be a general consensus that Wagner was not a very nice man, but although I have only read the first few letters, I think I am going to like him a lot.

Here is a note from Wagner to Otto Wesendonk on 16 March 1854:

Homer crept out of my library. 

I asked: where are you going? 

He said: to congratulate Otto Wesendonk on his birthday.

I answered: congratulate from me as well!

Richard W.

Happy Birthday Richard Wagner

Happy 200th Birthday Richard Wagner!  On this 22 May there are Wagner-comments all over the blogosphere, ranging from the less than enthusiastic book by his grandson Gottlieb (whom others say has been dining off the family name for years) to ecstatic congratulations of music lovers. 

Wagner: etching (2008)

We have all heard stories about his antisemitism but one of his most virulent accusers, Joachim Kohler, has had a change of heart. In 1997 he portrayed Hitler as Wagner's creation (Wagner's Hitler -- The Prophet and His Disciple)  but in his 2004 book Richard Wagner:The Last Of The Titans his  "reading of the letters, diaries, and other documents of the main protagonists... results in some breathtaking but convincing reappraisals".

Regardless, Wagner certainly changed the face of western music.

Wagner was the first conductor to face the orchestra so he had eye contact with the musicians; was the first to write music that reflected the emotional journeys of the characters in his operas; the first to build an opera house with wonderful acoustics but with the orchestra hidden from view so as not to distract from the performance taking place on stage; the first (and only?) composer who instructed the orchestra not to drown out the singers as the audience had to understand the story; one of the very few (are there others?) who wrote his own librettos (or musical poems as he called them), then set them to music.

When you read his autobiography My Life you marvel at how, with so little formal education, he could produce these works of wonder.  And when his music gets under your skin, you are forever changed.

Stefan Mickisch, a man with a gift
for explaining Wagner's music
( 2009)

Festspielhaus - the Opera House that Wagner built in Bayreuth
(painted in 2009)

Frederich II

"I was particularly captivated by the personality of that gifted Emperor Frederich II., … it delighted me to find in the German mind the capacity of appreciating beyond the narrow bounds of nationality all purely human qualities, in however strange a garb they might be presented. For in this I recognised how nearly akin it is to the mind of Greece. In Frederick II I saw this quality in full flower. A fair haired German of ancient Swabian stock, heir to the Norman realm of Sicily and Naples, who gave the Italian language its first development and laid a basis for the evolution of knowledge and art where hitherto ecclesiastical fanaticism and feudal brutality had alone contended for power, a monarch who gathered at his court the poets and sages of eastern lands and surrounded himself with the living products of Arabian and Persian grace and spirit – this man I beheld betrayed by the Roman clergy to the infidel foe, yet ending his crusade, to their bitter disappointment, by a pact of peace with the Sultan from whom he obtained a grant of privileges to Christians in Palestine which as the bloodiest victory could scarcely have secured."

This was what Wagner wrote about the personality of Frederick II whom he discovered in reading Raumer's History of the Hohenstaufen.  

Reading passages like this in Wagner's autobiography My Life makes me wonder if Wagner,  like Nietzsche, has been a victim of media campaigns against him, passed down the generations, because of his anti-cleric attitudes. I think it is highly likely, as even assuming Wagner presented himself in the best light in his autobiography (although actually he is very self critical), he would hardly write something like this if he didn't mean it.

Wagner autobiography ... much more interesting than I imagined

I am reading a fascinating book, the autobiography of Richard Wagner called My Life. It is such an interesting insight into how life was lived in 1850. I am up to the part where he and his wife are on a boat,  traveling  to Paris from Konigsberg (now Poland). They are traveling without passports and to get out of Konigsberg without a passport they had to flee across a border at night behind the backs of Cossack guards. Wagner seems to have regarded small things like laws as irrelevant to him.

So now they are on a boat being blown up the coast in a violent storm, the noise and fury of which he later wrote into his opera The Flying Dutchman.

I found my copy in English on Amazon for free, contributed by a team of volunteers. When I tried to find this again I found other copies on Amazon as well ... but not free.

Under the duck's wing

Today I sorted through the boxes of materials I had accumulated while writing Blue Tulips. As I worked a tiny (about 3cm wide) circle of paper dropped out of one of the files. It was a small drawing from mid 2005 that had eluded my search when I looked for it to include in the book as an illustration. I had not remembered it was so small ... had probably looked for a larger drawing. It says a lot about my state of mind at the time when I drew it.

Under the duck's wing

I kept the cards, the letters, the original emails (not sure why these) but discarded the draft versions of the book. I had a lot of disc versions as I knew it would be some years before I could work on it again and I was afraid of loosing the material in the interim. I didn't guess there would be a seven year gap between finishing the story and publishing it.

Today as I sorted I thought of Richard Wagner who had a seventeen year gap between the third (well, half way through the third) and fourth operas of the Ring Cycle. Like me, Wagner moved a good deal and I suppose he also had boxes of materials he had to take with him. My sympathies Mr Wagner.

Wagner weekend

This weekend I am going to a weekend workshop called Forging Meaning out of Music Heritage, Complexity and Vision of the Ring with Dr Antony Ernst as presenter.

Anthony Ernst addressing NSW Wagner Society members in 2002

I made this sketch of Anthony Ernst when he addressed the NSW Wagner Society in 2002 and it was  later used on the cover of a book he published with the support of the Wagner Society.

Since then Anthony Ernst has been in Germany working with several European orchestras. It will be very interesting hearing if and how his views have changed.

Richard Wagner Greeting Card

Next year is Richard Wagner's 200th birthday and I have been working on some Wagner-related art for a 2013 exhibition. I also made some Wagner related greeting cards from etchings I made in Dunedin.

Richard Wagner Profile Art Card by elizabethgw

Collages for the Wagner Bicentenary

Richard Wagner was born in May 1813 and in honour of the bicentenary of his birth, many opera houses  including Opera Australia are preparing productions of his work.

Wagner: Collaged etching

I am celebrating as well and have just made series of Wagner collages using etchings. You can see the series here

Art and Music

This is a painting by Rupprecht Geiger called 402/64. Geiger was one of Germany's foremost abstract artists and painted mainly in red. (His obituary in 1996 was titled 'A life for the colour red.')

I am writing an essay about 'meaningful and compelling' relationships between art and music. The painting I have chosen is 402/64. The music is Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and my essay is turning out to be much more interesting than expected .... as essays should be of course.

Wagner Event in Aldeburgh

My exhibition in Aldeburgh was held at the same time as a 3 day event organised by the London Wagner Society which I also attended. We saw film excerpts of Wagner opera, interviews with people associated with performances of Wagner's operas, a Masterclass and a concert, between which I dashed back to the gallery to make sure it was open in all the intervals.

While I was sitting and listening though, I painted. Below is Maestro Antonio Pappano, music director at the Royal Opera House, painted during the Masterclass. I have just put this and other paintings up on my website.

'Wagner Inspired' Exhibition in Aldeburgh

I have just spent a week in the UK, a flying visit to put on an exhibition in Aldeburgh in conjunction with a 3 day event that was being held by the London Wagner Society. Aldeburgh (pronounced Awl-bro and not, as I had assumed, All-de-berg) is a picturesque town on the Suffolk coast about 2 hours north east of London.

I arrived late on Thursday to drop my pictures at the gallery. The town lights were on and Aldeburgh looked very pretty.
The Met Bureau had forecast heavy rain and 12C for the weekend but in the morning the sun was shining.
I had spent a lot of time preparing the exhibition before arriving and my work paid off as the hanging was trouble free and relatively quick.
An opening was scheduled for 3pm so there was no time to waste but we were ready in plenty of time and the etchings/paintings looked great - a good size for the room really.


But ... where were the guests?

I found out later that the bus bringing participants from London had broken on the motorway. So instead of coming to an art exhibition guests were treated to a 3 hour display of engineering ingenuity as the mechanic built a replacement rod for the bus's gear box. Non-bus participants received their tickets (and the invitation to the exhibition) only when they arrived in town, too late for the opening.

So we packed away the glasses and just hoped that people would find time between the many activities during the event (movies/interviews/masterclasses/singing) to drop in. The movies were held in the Aldeburgh Cinema which was housed in the same quaint half timbered building as the Cinema Art Gallery so people did drop in. However, if I undertook such an exhibition again I would make sure the organisers of the event planned some exhibition-viewing time.

It was great showing the work to people with a similar Wagner addiction to my own. Wagner Society members didn't need the symbolism in my work explained to them, they understood it immediately and recognised the pieces of Wagner's librettos woven into the images. I was fascinated to see them inch their way around the room, examining each image and nodding their heads. Only two of the works sold over the weekend, but in the current financial climate that is probably a good result. I was told I should exhibit the work to a wider audience so I will think about that for the future. Perhaps there may be an opportunity in Hamburg as Wagner's Ring Cycle is being prepared in Hamburg by Australian born conductor Simone Young.

On Monday I woke at six and went for a walk along the beach. It is a windswept place and barren looking. Aldeburgh was Benjamin Britten's birthplace and all his music has a local flavour, including his opera Peter Grimes which is about a fisherman who is 'different' and who is hounded to his eventual death by the town gossips.
I had the great good fortune of seeing the opera Peter Grimes on Monday evening.

Walking along along the Aldeburgh beach on Monday morning, then hearing Peter Grimes at the Coliseum in London in the evening was the highlight of the weekend for me.
The Coliseum is a stark contrast to the beach in Aldeburgh and to Peter Grimes.
The young Australian singer Stuart Skelton sang the role of Peter Grimes and he was fantastic. I had seen him singing in Sydney at an informal Wagner Society function, as the NSW Wagner Society sponsored German lessons (I think) for him during his studies. He got rave reviews for his portrayal of Peter Grimes and they were well deserved.

On the Wednesday late flight back from Stanstedt I flew over English countryside yellow with Rapeseed flowers to what the ElCheapo airline RyanAir calls Hamburg-Luebeck but which is actually Luebeck. The connecting bus to Hamburg takes an hour, then onto the the almost-last train home. My wheelie bag sounded very loud as I tramped home through dark and silent streets.

Aldeburgh in May

On 15-17th May I am having an exhibition in Aldeburgh in Suffolk, UK. I will be showing my 'Wagner Inspired' etchings as part of the 3 day event organised by the London Wagner Society.

I have never been to Aldeburgh, birthplace of Benjamin Britten, but judging by online photos it is a very picturesque place.

Exciting or what?

Ring Cycle Jewellery

I finished the jewellery workshop yesterday. I worked in copper with gold leaf and based my work on Wagner's music.

Raum/Zeit (Musical notes in Copper)

Hojotoho!