maybe i could just use that as the title of my paper.
it was kind of like when i went to see die fliegender hollander (sp?--it's just so much more fun of a title than the flying dutchman, but i guess i'll go with that), and was underwhelmed. not by the singing, much of which was very good (though the baritone, a., wasn't, and b., had developed his own version of the park and bark, which was the stalk and talk [he didn't need no stinking sustained line, OR to use his knees when he walked! he did what he wanted!]), but by the piece itself. the whole time i was like, "this is supposed to be wagner? this is to real wagner what strauss's operas are to strauss's songs. seriously. this is the musical theater version of wagner." not that i don't like musical theater. but for the most part i don't like strauss operas (rosenkavelier? come on. it's so self-conscious it's ridiculous, and you can't even call it ridiculous because it knows it's ridiculous so you just have to call it freaking ridiculously self-conscious. and salome, which i do kind of like, still seems to have been written in an apologetic attempt to live up to beardsley's illustrations), and i really don't like dutchman.
and while i can see that meistersinger is better, or at least less rough, than dutchman, it's still got that dutchman-y, musical theater-y, song and dance-y feel to it. it's the emma to dutchman's northanger abbey, except that i like both northanger abbey and emma. oh, don't pretend you don't know what i'm talking about. it's got a certain degree of self-forgiveness that i just can't get into. even if i wanted to, which i don't. in meistersinger, wagner knows what he's doing. in tristan, he either doesn't know or doesn't care what he's doing. and that uncertainty, the uncertainty expressed in tristan, for me, right now, makes art art--uncertainty, or lack of control, makes for art that i respond to. because i'm someone who's living in uncertainty, i'm therefore living as uncertainty, for uncertainty, and nothing so completely self-credulous as meistersinger can touch me.
i'm even tempted to do the full marxist, and take an adorno-ish stance by condemning meistersinger as a really IRRITATING example of bourgeois what-have-you-ness. blah blah national art blah blah c major blah blah fairy godfather and shoe cobbler hans sachs, go ahead and reject the blonde kid! GOD KNOWS you wouldn't want to be anything like king marke! king marke had something to die for; you don't appear even to have that.
of course, if i could do this assignment thoroughly, i might feel better about it...or i might just get really really frustrated with how much i don't like meistersinger, as opposed to the merely very large amount of frustration toward it that i currently carry.
ah, how sweet it is to whine about something vaguely amusing. i like this adorno, though not as much as his thing on mahler. adorno is determined to tear wagner up from the floor up, at least in the first half of this in search of wagner thing. what i like best about adorno is that he's not frightened of getting personal; though i think that his attack falters somewhat by being placed on shifting ground in this particular book (in the mahler one, it was different, as far as i remember), i feel like he also makes it clear that he's talking about his particular viewpoint--it's a need-based argument; he needs to be very stringent with wagner, especially because this work was published first in '52. and within that parameter, that of his need to condemn, he functions brilliantly. the brilliance of personal need is never an issue with me. i like things more when their authors' preoccupations show up in them. at the sfmoma, they have a few matisses, and though i like the green lady in the hat, my real favorites are the color sketches he did of indeterminate, bright-rendered landscape. i like them because they share the personal; they aren't guarded. this preference probably shows up in my own stuff; you could never accuse anything i write of being, you know, polished. if i were to have a sense of something like an aesthetic, it would certainly include unfinished-ness in its parameters.
maybe at some point this will change--maybe at some point i'll understand how a person can stand to listen to meistersinger with any degree of complacency, for example. any degree of complacency that he or she can still occupy, considering the fullness of wagner's own complacency in the work. maybe if i hadn't been reading the adorno, i wouldn't be seeing so much to object to in the opera. but i don't know. i watched the ring on t.v. when i was five or three or something. it's pretty much my earliest memory. my mom was falling asleep on the outside of the tv, and siegfried was dressed vaguely as mary martin in peter pan on the inside of the tv, and erda came out the trap door, and it was all verrry exciting. meistersinger is not like the ring. it is nauseatingly self-assured, and does not push itself in any direction that touches me. i really can't handle sachs musing on sacral german art. and i can't handle this nonsense about spontaneous crowning of master-poets and jokey riots. BAH.
i mean, if wagner wanted, like the harvest moon shines, to muse on, in utter fatuity, about aesthetics, he should have come to the future, followed my example, and gotten himself a blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment