[2/3/2012] Preview: En route to more of our musical storms, we encounter perhaps the most eerily wonderful music I know (continued)

WAGNER: Siegfried: Act I Prelude

Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded May and Oct. 1962


EVEN MORE THAN PARSIFAL, SIEGFRIED SEEMS TO ME
THE WAGNER OPERA FOR THE ENTHRALLED WAGNERIAN

Yes, what we've just heard is the very opening of the first-ever commercial recording of Siegfried, the third of the four operas that make up Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung. (Well, technically it's the "Second Day" of three, following the Prologue in the form of The Rhinegold.)

I've said before that Siegfried, the third of the four operas that make up The Ring of the Nibelung, contains a bewilderingly wonderful assortment of staggeringly different, and frequently extremely eccentric, musics. The Act I Prelude is clearly setting the stage for the return of the Nibelung Mime, who isn't the Nibelung of the title, who would be Alberich, but his brother. And Mime has a whopper of a problem, the problem to end all problems as far as he's concerned.

For audiences that have paid big-time opera-house prices, this isn't exactly what many of them thought they were buying into. And yet for a conductor of any sensitivity and imagination, this is astoundingly gorgeous music to allow to take shape, and what an amazing feeling it must be to coax it out of your players.

I think Daniel Barenboim got wonderfully responsive playing from the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra by the time he made his audio and video recordings of The Ring, and I think his take on the opening is interestingly different from Solti's. And then we're going to hear Reginald Goodall's from the memorable Ring cycle in English he performed and recorded (live) with what began with Siegfried as Sadler's Wells Opera but by the later operas recorded had burgeoned into the English National Opera. The playing isn't as polished as in our other performances, and what Goodall is asking from them is significantly more demanding, but in Goodall's Ring we hear a level of dramatic and musical imagination pretty much in a class of its own.

WAGNER: Siegfried:
Act I Prelude

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim, cond. Teldec, recorded live, June-July 1992

Sadler's Wells Opera Orchestra, Reginald Goodall, cond. EMI/Chandos, recorded live, August 1973

Siegfried: Act II Prelude

The action of Act I of Siegfried is confined to the cave in which Mime has raised the orphaned young hero Siegfried, and is confined to three characters: Mime, Siegfried, and the god Wotan, now disguised as a Wanderer. In Act II we're still in this remote, forbidding forest, and in front of yet another cave, but now we're in the great outdoors -- and what a collection of characters (including the three from Act I) we're going to encounter!

Right away Wagner sets a tone of musical by featuring the strange and disturbing interval of the tritone (you can hear it most vividly pounded out by the timpani), a transformation of the motif associated with the giants Fasolt and Fafner in Das Rheingold, but in this creepy form associated with Fafner now that he has transformed himself into a dragon since murdering his brother Fasolt near the end of Rheingold. (Yes, we have another pair of brothers who don't exactly get along great. Family values are extremely important in The Ring. They just happen to be pretty lousy, and therefore utterly believable, family values.)

Again, this seems to me act-introducing music of astonishing originality and promise -- promise of who-only-knows-what. Let's listen to our same trio of conductors. Here Barenboim, who in this Ring seemed genuinely imbued with some old-school Wagner values, out-adventures even Goodall.

WAGNER: Siegfried:
Act II Prelude

Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded May and Oct. 1962

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim, cond. Teldec, recorded live, June-July 1992

Sadler's Wells Opera Orchestra, Reginald Goodall, cond. EMI/Chandos, recorded live, August 1973


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST


IN THIS WEEK'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST. . .

We're going to hear the monumental storm raging at the start of Act III of Siegfried, of course, and two other, very different act-opening storms.

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