The Palau de la Música proposes to carry out an experiment that combines words and music in an unexpected way. It wouldn’t be new if it were about interspersing poetry in a concert, but the intention is nothing less than building a concert around an essay book. That is: interpreting fragments of Wagner’s opera after ad hoc readings taken from Wagnerismo, the latest book -an authentic thesis on the gigantic effect that Wagner has caused in the world- by ??Alex Ross, also author of the famous The eternal noise (The rest is noise, in its original title).
The idea came from the general director of the Palau de la Música Catalana, Joan Oller, who is a fan of the work of the American essayist. He proposed it to the music director of the Liceu, Josep Pons, a great connoisseur of Wagner, and the agreement was immediate. The Orchestra of the Gran Teatre will fill the Palau de la Música on the 13th with a program that includes from the Funeral March of Siegfried, from The Twilight of the Gods, to the Prelude and death of love of Tristán and Isolde, the Cavalcade of the Valkyries or the prelude to Parsifal. (Tickets with a 20% discount for subscribers to La Vanguardia).
Baritone Michael Volle will participate in this meeting interpreting Hans Sachs’s monologue in The Nuremberg Mastersingers and also Wotan’s Farewell. And the actor Pere Arquillué will be in charge of reading the texts as a narrator. A reading that ventures dramatic. A proposal that welcomes the Grec Festival under its city umbrella, since it is about attracting all kinds of audiences, people who are curious about the figure of this unrepeatable composer.
“We try not to make the texts excessively long -explains Oller-. We choose texts that are literal, short, and that make sense with the music that follows them. For example, they talk about the death of Wagner in Venice and the reaction that occurs in the world, when orchestras from all over the planet cancel their programs to offer Wagner monographs, and all his rivals, Brahms, Mahler, Verdi… they all react. And at the moment when it is described how the Venetian gondolas play the Funeral March of Siegfried, the music enters. At no time is the music interrupted to introduce a text”.
“They are dramatized readings, they can move -adds Pons-. When we talk about the Hitlerization of Wagner, how he was used by this totalitarianism, we give a voice to those who attend it, but also to a granddaughter of his who goes with the Manns to the United States United States and denounces that his grandfather is being used by a military power. And he writes a text that is read before every performance of Wagner operas in America”.
The program is made up of seven chapters: the aforementioned death in Venice (with which Ross jokes with Thomas Mann’s novel); the modern Wagner, honoring Nietzsche’s expression (to be modern you must first be a Wagnerian); the Hitlerization of Wagner and the way in which it is appropriated not only by the Nazis but also by other movements; magical fire, that is, his talent as a sorcerer; Wagner in Catalonia, which has undoubtedly been a surprise for American readers to know about Montserrat, Liceu, the Palau, etc…; cinematographic Wagner, since Ross points out that, had he lived longer, he would have been a screenwriter, filmmaker and author of soundtracks in Hollywood in the 20th century, and finally, a chapter dedicated to the multiple Wagners… the environmentalist, the pacifist and anti-capitalist, but also the satanic, the Jewish, the black, the socialist, the Nazi, the anarchist, the feminist, the gay… and the great sorcerer.
“Ross tries to follow all the influence of Wagnerism, but from my point of view he fails, since it is something literally impossible. Beginning with the spell that he caused on the artists of silence: novelists, poets and painters envied the storms of feelings that he was capable of unleash with sounds. And let’s not talk about what it provoked in political and social movements. Not even Shakespeare had as big an impact as the universe of wangerism,” says Oller.
To which Pons adds, for his part, the number of literal quotations -sometimes they were exact copies- made by great composers. Felip Pedrell copied the Tannhäuser overture; Manuel de Falla picked up his horns at the end of En el Generalife, or the fanfares in the incidental music of El gran teatro del mundo, on Calderón’s work… “There are those who copy him directly and there are those who seek an answer to Wagner, because they sense that it will be an aesthetic dictatorship that will last for centuries. Debussy, for example, goes to Bayreuth every year, he doesn’t miss a Parsifal… he looks for an answer”.
