Many thanks for the invitation to voice some of my ideas and questions re/
Die Meister; hopefully not too many of you will regret the offer. I have a LOT of ideas and questions and as I began to write about them for this post I had more and more difficulties trying to write about them.
1.To begin, one thing that I have learned from reading some of the Wagner's music posts is that there seems to be an (almost) endless number of meanings and depths of meaning in his music. So much so that a listener will never fully see or understand them all, at least on a cognitive level, and conversations on his or other great music are also potentially endless. It seems that great art is always MORE.
I get this sense of many depths of meaning in the "aria"
Wahn, Wahn.... From reading Owen Lee, I am working with the understanding that the "
Wahn" is irrationality and passion. Yes, I vaguely understand that Schopenhauer's
Wille is lurking behind this but I strongly suspect Wagner had a much more positive outlook on life.
Wagner's use of this understanding of
Wahn (and I do think Hans Sachs IS Wagner in his mind) as the fundamental cause of suffering and conflict in the world (The Problem of Evil) flows from an extremely life-affirming, wonderfully positive view of life!
Humanity/the collection of individuals working in their own unique ways can channel a fundamental force in nature and use it to produce the greatest works of art-at a national level (Germany in this case at one level of meaning) but also at the level of the individual person's own personal life (and probably multiple other levels that I have not identified yet).
2. The
Wahn in terms of the "glowworm." There is something about the excerpt about the glowworm that jumps out at me in an "annoying" way. I cannot figure out why it annoys/challenges me so much. We are listening to this gorgeous, lush, "burgundy/evergreen" orchestration and profound ideas and all of sudden he is singing about a "glowworm" and the music becomes like the "irritating" child-like view of fireflies "dancing" around in a Disney movie--I think it's the interruption of this music that I prefer that is what jumps-out at me and probably the firefly music isn't as child-like as I think it is, whatever the case I KNOW that I am not-hearing this music correctly or Wagner has some understanding that is challenging me.
As I'm writing this I wonder if it also has something to do with this theme in Wagner's music of the world-weary vs. the child-like wonder of beauty; this "dichotomy" mentioned in a Parsifal thread. It involves the concept of the noble idiot or fool-I really do not understand this and I'm not sure if the fault is all mine-it sounds like hubris for me to even suggest this, but could Wagner have been unsure what exactly he understood by this dichotomy in person/world or could he have over-done the idea?--yes, off topic, but I can barely tolerate the character of Kundry.
3. I think this is also why I found the character of Eva challenging-or at least as she has been portrayed in the DG video of the 1984 Bayreuth production or by Annette Daschle in one of the met performances (and I DO enjoy Daschle's voice and performances with the Berlin Philharmonic).
In the opening scene Eva is as superficial as a puddle-unless I am missing or incorrectly interpreting something, regardless I am going to skip to Act III. There you have this incredibly wise, heroic, strong, compassionate man, with a voice to die for (the man of every woman's dreams!) who is faced with the epic, terrible struggle of whether to surrender something we wants so badly. This "something" is personified by/incarnated in a superficial twit. A "woman" that is creating this devastating dilemma for this man that she supposedly has loved in many wonderful and evolving different ways since childhood, but she acts as if this was some mundane conversation-not even to the depth of a "conversation". Her expression and actions utterly boggle my mind in this scene and I can't believe this is limited to one performance.
(I have just begun to wonder if I dislike Eva in part because I am jealous of her!
What a terrible thought.)
Putting the jealousy thing back in the closet, it's not just Eva that boggles my mind in this scene, while she is singing, Sachs is also just hammering at the shoes as if nothing important is being said and going on inside of him! Sachs's goodness and depth IS being conveyed in what he is singing, but what was Wagner trying to say with these stage directions?!? Wagner would not have made such a drastic mistake, so I know my reaction is incorrect. Instead of moving on to a different performance that didn't involve the actions and costumes, etc.., yes, the one at the British Proms
, I just put the entire thing on a shelf until now and I've listend to Wahn, Wahn, frequently.
4. The last thing I will bring up here is Beckmesser as portrayed by Hermann Prey. Another member of TC had told me of her admiration of Prey, not with any explicit reference to a particular piece of music, but that positive opinion might have biased me a bit towards his character; as might have Owen Lee's positive interpretation of the character. I still CAN honestly say that in MY own opinion, I genuinely found him to be a very loveable character/person.
As of this moment, the idea that Wagner chose to create one of the main "villians" as a primarily good man, again, says to me that Wagner's view of the world/reality is positive and life-affirming. Individuals, humanity as a whole, and the world as a whole, are not fundamentally depraved or irredeemably broken. That belief is not at all new to me; what I find so EXCITING about it here is the idea that this belief can be pre-cognitively strengthened and integrated more fully in those of us who listen to this music because the music also works at a "subconscious" level. Listening to this work is character development even when you are not actively listening and yes, it is just a wonderful experience to listen to this music.
I am a LITTLE concerned that I projected TOO many of the beliefs I already hold onto this work, but maybe I haven't.
Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.