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I always had a strange thing with Wagner – I appreciate and deeply respect his music but I never liked it. It is not that do “not like it” but rather I just do not feel that Wagner’s things are the part of my sonic realization of world. As I wrote before I never was able to grasp the "Whole Rhetoric" of the Wagner’s metaphors. I read two books about Wagner, many articles, watch the operas on tape. I never attended a live production of Wagner. I did appreciate what I see in Wagner but if did not “attach” to me at personal level… I own many Wagner recordings, I was getting them because I knew that they were good (cast, conductor, event. Etc…) but I always enjoyed my Wagner records as the “fragment” – the separate arias of the artists whom a loved. The entire development of Wagner’s drama never made my awareness, even though I was trying (unsuccessfully) to invest a few times into staging the Wagner’s librettos.
Something was changed a few days ago. I have a local friend stopped by and we were listing my FM recording of MET 2008’s broad of Die Walküre. The friend of mine is hypo-enthusiastic about Wagner, he knows Wagner well, he studied the score, he played it, each summer he spends in Bayreuth – so he know his music, even though he is not German. So, he listening the Die Walküre got “inspired” and in his very typical charismatic way of a French Artist he began to comment the opera with alone with the singer and orchestra. I have to note that when he does it sometimes it becomes as self-contained form or art. I never saw anybody even dose it like him and I even proposed that his “live commentary” shell be preserved for prosperity and commercialized. He does it very fast and very hypo-emotional, he uses a few languages (he speaks with a very flowery French ascent) and he uses countless amounts of linguistic metaphors and symbols. What however, make him unique that he holds his “live commentary” in marvelously synchronized with the flow of the opera, with the singing, with the flow of music and with the development of drama. Knowing that I love Bruckner but do not love Wagner he presented to me the Die Walküre’s events from a perspective of the Bruckner’s drama. It was superbly interning and very educational…
Later on before falling asleep at midnight I was thinking about the Wagner’s language and suddenly it hit me. I suddenly was able to see the Wagner’s expressionism not as a language that is just a brilliantly composed and orchestrated attractiveness but rather as powerful metaphysical force that has own dynamic of building itself up and own way to approach and interact with reality. I never saw Wagner like this before…
I woke up, tune up the system and was listening Wagner up to 3.30AM. It was interesting – it was very different this time. Even though I did not know line-by-line words of the libretto but it had this time a different meaning, put in this way - some kind of meaning that Wagner music did not have before…
Well, think that new Wagner time might be coming… The Cat
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