Promiscuous Art

I went to the symphony last night to check out our new music director. I knew the main event was La Mer (no, not that one) but did not otherwise look at the program when buying my ticket. Upon arrival I learned that there would also be Wagner. Specifically the prelude and Liebestod from Tristan. This gives me opportunity to deploy one my (many) favorite Huysmans quotes from Against Nature, translated by Robert Baldick.

Then again, secular music is a promiscuous art in that you cannot enjoy it at home, by yourself, as you can a book; to savour it he would have had to join the mob of inveterate theatre-goers that fills the Cirque d’Hiver, where under a broiling sun and in a stifling atmosphere you can see a hulking brute of a man waving his arms about and massacring disconnected snatches of Wagner to the huge delight of an ignorant crowd.

He had never had the courage to plunge into this mob-bath to listen to Berlioz, even though he admired some fragments of his work for their passionate ardour and fiery spirit; and he was well aware that there was not a single scene, not even a single phrase, in any of the mighty Wagner’s operas that could be divorced from its context with impunity.

Slices cut off and served up at a concert lost all sense and meaning, for like chapters in a book that are complementary to one another and combine to reach the same goal, the same conclusion, Wagner’s melodies were used to define the characters of his dramatis personae, to represent their thoughts, to express their visible or secret motives, and their ingenious and persistent repetitions could only be understood by an audience that followed the subject from the start and watched the characters gradually taking shape and developing in a setting from which they could not be removed without dying like branches cut from a tree.

Des Esseintes was therefore convinced that of the mob of melomaniacs who went into ecstasies every Sunday on the benches of the Cirque d’Hiver, barely twenty could tell what the orchestra was murdering, even when the attendants were kind enough to stop chattering and give it a chance of being heard.

Considering also that the intelligent patriotism of the French made it impossible for any theatre in the country to put on a Wagner opera, there was nothing left for the keen amateur who was ignorant of the arcana of music and could not or would not travel to Bayreuth but to stay at home, and this was the reasonable course Des Esseintes had adopted.

The whole book is like this. Des Esseintes is such an asshole. I love it.

Anyway, I agree with his sentiment vis-a-vis disconnected snatches of Wagner, at least when it comes to Tristan. The whole point of the chord is that you have to sit through four and a half hours of tension before it is finally resolved. Playing the prelude and Liebestod back-to-back, as a single piece, defeats the purpose. It loses the emotional weight, and degrades to just being a nice piece of music. There’s no höchste lust there.

Despite all that they played everything well, it was a great concert, and I think I like this Elim Chan.