Weird wired Wagner Wednesday
Been reading up on the upcoming trip, doing a little light reading to get ready.
“Here was not the customary procedure of a non-musical playwright putting together a libretto and then handing it over to a composer to be ‘set to music,’ the product of their joint labour being afterwards turned over to actors, producers, machinists, designers and all the rest of them to add their several contributions, but the operation of a complex faculty of which the world had no experience until then, the operatic creator being at once dramatist, musician, mime, producer, conductor and everything else. It was not even that Wagner, during the creation of an opera, was dramatist, and composer and stage practitioner in successive layers, as it were, the one faculty taking the up the job where others had laid it down.” (Newman, Ernest. The Wagner Operas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.)
The impact of opera as a form of popular culture has probably waxed and waned in the intervening years. A curious note, and I could only wish that I had better notes from my university study, but as I understand it, until Wagner’s Parsifal, the Holy Grail was the cup that caught Christ’s blood. But after that opera, the myth was changed so the grail was the cup used at the last supper. In any event, cursory research indicates the theories have holes.
