Wagner

It’s four years since I gave up opera criticism. The pandemic had struck, I had hit a significant birthday, and notched up three decades at the coal face – a quarter of a century at the Telegraph, and an earlier stint at this address. There were other things I wanted to do and after reviewing something like 2,500 performances, I had said everything I wanted to say, several times over, and knew that it was time for other voices to be heard. Truth be told, I was becoming a little jaded. My blind spots – opera seria, the final eight mediocrities of Richard Strauss, Rossini’s irritating comedies – were turning

Tanner, the critic RICHARD BRATBY Michael Tanner (1935-2024), who died earlier this month, had such a vital mind and stood so far above the common run of music critics that it’s hard to believe he’s gone. For a philosopher to concern themself with the inner game of opera is not unknown (think of Friedrich Nietzsche and Roger Scruton). To do it as perceptively and as readably as Tanner is rarer. For two decades, starting in  1996, his weekly Spectator opera column offered as thorough and as stimulating an education in musical aesthetics as one could hope to receive; intellectual red meat served with forensic clarity and a mischievous, subversive smile.

It’s sometimes said that if Wagner were alive today he’d be making movies, but come on – really? A generation of Wagnerites has grown up for whom the first and definitive encounter with Der Ring des Nibelungen was on the small screen – in my case, the BBC’s early-eighties serialisation of the Bayreuth centenary production. What lingered was not the spectacle, but the intimacy: Donald McIntyre and Gwyneth Jones enveloped in darkness, reaching into each other’s souls. If you grew up with Wagner on TV and came of age, culturally speaking, around the time The Sopranos first aired, it seems obvious that the Ring isn’t some effects-laden Marvel blockbuster before

Fun fact: Engelbert Humperdinck composed part of Wagner’s Parsifal. Shortly before the première, it was discovered that Wagner’s score didn’t allow time for a crucial scene change. The 27-year-old Humperdinck, then working as Wagner’s assistant, composed a few temporary bars to cover the gap and, rather to his own surprise, found that they met with the Master’s full approval: ‘Why not? It should work!’ It’s worth knowing partly because of the light it throws on the practical, collegial working methods of music’s favourite cartoon supervillain, and partly because it reaffirms the originality of Humperdinck’s own best-known opera, Hansel and Gretel. How many artists could have flown that close to Wagner’s

There are a lot of corpses on stage at the end of Charles Edwards’s production of Tristan & Isolde for Grange Park Opera. At this stage in the drama, directors tend to fade out the bloodbath, the better to focus on Isolde’s final dissolution into bliss. But as Michael Tanner argues, Tristan, like the Ring, offers no bearable solution to its central problem, however much the music – that great deceiver – might try to persuade us otherwise. You want art to tell you the truth? Wagner knew that you can’t handle the truth. He declared that in Tristan ‘from the first to the last, love shall for once find

It’s the final scene of The Valkyrie and Wotan is wearing cords. They’re a sensible choice for a hard-working deity: practical but with a certain retro flair. Slumbering under a red puffer jacket lies his daughter Brünnhilde, and as Wagner’s music yearns and flickers, the Lord of Ravens shuffles slowly around on all fours, methodically attaching the carabiners for the climactic flying effect. First one, then another. Then another. Four more to go! Possibly we’re not meant to be seeing this. Possibly it was meant to be obscured by the ‘large final fire effect’ that a slip in the programme tells us has been cut (‘despite extensive planning’) at the

Glyndebourne is nothing if not honest. ‘In response to the ongoing Covid-19 restrictions our 2021 performances of Tristan und Isolde will be presented as a concert staging, after the 2003 production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff’, says the programme, and what we get is not a full production but a compromise imposed by the peculiar circumstances of August 2021. The London Philharmonic Orchestra huddles on stage. Behind them the back wall glows and fades in washes of blue and pink; in front, a stepped apron extends over the redundant orchestra pit. The singers slip on and off from the wings or, in a basic but effective trick of lighting design, appear to