SO THAT’S WHERE HE GOT THE IDEA

Tonight, eager to take a night off from the sound of huge German Romantic music with big voices singing in German, I went over to Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall for...Beethoven’s 9th! (My friends who are going to the Kirov Ring in Orange County next week are going to hear Boris on the off night between Walküre and Siegfried. Now that’s just plain crazy.) It’s part of the newly invigorated Toronto Symphony’s fall presentation of all the Beethoven symphonies, and I was especially eager to go when I found out that Brett Polegato was the bass soloist. Brett made his Seattle Opera debut last fall as Henry Miles in Jake Heggie’s End of the Affair, and I think he’s an amazing performer. That particular role, played by Peter Cushing in the old film of Graham Greene’s novel and Stephen Rea in the more recent film, was never so sympathetic and melancholy as when Brett embodied it. He wowed Seattle with a beautiful lyric baritone, at the time; but I wondered how he would cope with the bass range of the Beethoven 9th. Turns out he has the bottom notes, too, although the important thing about the bass in the B9 is the surprise beginning must be glorious, with the “O Freunde! Nicht diese Töne” recit--Brett’s was--and, amid shouts of “Freude!” from the vast chorus, you have to do a nice job singing everybody’s favorite tune, the Ode to Joy, the first time we hear a full vocal statement of it. Brett’s a brilliant singer, due back in Seattle before long, and led the charge of four fine Canadian soloists in a wonderful performance of this symphony.

It turned out to be a good thing to hear midway through Wagner’s Ring, because of my oft-repeated assertion: Wagner picks up where Beethoven left off. Beethoven’s 9th is halfway between a ‘normal’ symphony, like his 5th, and Wagnerian music drama. And Wagner’s musical language, in the Ring, has more in common with Beethoven’s 9th than it does with any opera of the day. Everybody likes to say that tomorrow’s opera, Siegfried, is the 3rd movement scherzo of a 4-movement symphony, as though the Ring were really a big Beethoven symphony. Maybe it is; but if so, it’s the 9th, writ even larger. (I think in terms of time the 9th is shorter than any one act of the Ring!) The Ring shares with the 9th a wild profusion of different formal references, its chaotic, organic structure, its self-conscious pushing the extremes, trying for heights and depths of emotion and experience--not to mention specifically musical things like the dense motivic work, the tendency to enjoy weird and unexpected harmonies, and the expansion of the orchestra and the extreme difficulty of the writing. I’m sure the Bellini-esque ‘endless melody’ of Beethoven’s third movement was a great influence on Wagner in daring to write those long musical paragraphs which we Wagner fans so enjoy.

Wagner himself was a huge champion of Beethoven’s 9th, which was written in 1824 but really just baffled audiences until Wagner started conducting it twenty years later. Here’s a teaser from my famous screenplay, Monster God: part of the sequence where Wagner, assisted by his close friend Theodor Uhlig (a violinist in his orchestra), presents the 9th as Kapellmeister in Dresden in 1846. Minna and Wagner were infertile, and they knew it. Bakunin really said what I have him say.

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INT: LEIPZIG, SAXONY: MUSIC LIBRARY: AFTERNOON: SEPTEMBER, 1832:

YOUTH WAGNER, 19 years old, is copying music out of an enormous score onto loose sheets of staff paper.

WAGNER (VOICE-OVER, YEARS LATER, TO UHLIG):
I heard it at a Gewandhaus concert in Leipzig, when I was a student. Reissiger was right, it emptied the hall. But I couldn’t believe what I heard. I spent a week copying out the score, not sleeping...I wanted to understand how it all fit together. I thought I was Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods.

Beethoven’s 9th MONTAGE. WE HEAR the opening of the first movement, and see:

A. YOUTH WAGNER copying out the score. CLOSE-UP on the pen, scratching ink across the paper. CLOSE-UP on his eyes. The open 5ths of the opening.
B. BOY WAGNER watching the strings tuning up in the park, gaping in awe. But we’re hearing Beethoven’s Ninth.
C. WAGNER enacting Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”: he climbs the top of a snowy mountain peak and gazes out on frozen infinity.

WE HEAR music from the second movement. MONTAGE continues:

D. WAGNER rehearsing the orchestra. He is inspiring, likeable, easy to follow. He tells a joke and the orchestra laughs; even KARL LIPINSKY, the concertmaster, cracks a smile.
E. KIDS running around Dresden putting up posters on the sides of buildings: “PALM SUNDAY GALA CONCERT, SYMPHONY No. 9 BY LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN”

WE HEAR music from the third movement. MONTAGE continues:

F. WAGNER and UHLIG, working late at night in WAGNER’S study. UHLIG is playing the theme at the piano, WAGNER is conducting. Lots of passion in the room. They are falling, platonically, in love.
G. WAGNER and MINNA, having dinner at UHLIG’S house with the violinist and HIS WIFE. Toasting, clinking glasses. A NURSE brings in UHLIG’S 3 year-old SON and baby DAUGHTER for good-night kisses. Love flows freely in this family. WAGNER notices. He takes MINNA’S hand beneath the table. Deep sorrow between them.

WE HEAR the chorus singing the main tune of the Ode to Joy. MONTAGE continues:

H. WAGNER at podium, in Dresden’s Frauenkirche, leading huge forces in the Palm Sunday Gala performance. Huge orchestra, chorus of at least 200. Audience is packed. WAGNER is leaping about like Leonard Bernstein.

INT: DRESDEN, SAXONY: FRAUENKIRCHE: AFTERNOON: APRIL, 1846:

End of Beethoven’s Ninth. The crowd goes wild--leaps to their feet, screaming, waving, blowing kisses, throwing shredded programs down from the top of the church.

WAGNER is exhausted. He turns around to face them, accepts applause, shares it with the performers. Tears in his eyes.

INT: DRESDEN, SAXONY: FRAUENKIRCHE: AFTERNOON (LATER): APRIL, 1846:

WAGNER is standing in front of the first pew, receiving accolades. Most of the crowd is still swarming around them. UHLIG approaches with another man.

UHLIG:
Wagner, I have someone I’d like you to meet...Hans von Bülow. He’s a pianist.

HANS VON BÜLOW, 20 years old, another dour-looking young man, is beaming on WAGNER. He doesn’t usually beam on anyone...but he can’t help himself.

VON BULOW:
Maestro...what a performance! What an honor, to be here!

WAGNER
Thank you, young man!

But the conversation cannot begin. WAGNER is grabbed, spun around, and vigorously embraced by a giant bear of a man: MIKHAIL BAKUNIN, the hairy Russian anarchist.

BAKUNIN:
Glorious!
(kisses Wagner's cheek)
Magnificent!
(kisses the other)
Almost makes one believe in God! I tell you, if all the music ever written were to burn up, in a great apocalyptic fire that would soon consume the earth, this symphony must survive! Even if they have to die for it! Beethoven’s Ninth will live forever!

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Anyways, I heard it all, tonight, in a very nice performance. Roy Thompson Hall (or maybe it was just where I was sitting) doesn’t support the dynamic range of the new opera house; I did want the pianos to be more pianissimo, and the really loud stuff (about a minute into the first movement, for example) to hurt. (It didn’t.) But I can’t fault any of the playing, and Peter Oundjian certainly did a wonderful job at the podium--a few tempi I’d never heard, in the last movement, but they all worked.

Tonight’s was a Gala Performance; I wasn’t the only Ring patron there, and there were plenty of money people who’ve just put down the company’s deficit and apparently a few politicos as well. The evening began with a rousing rendition of “O Canada”, which always reminds me of Ralph Wiggum at Model U.N. in The Simpsons. I was kidding Brett about this, at the reception later on, when another Canuck joined him in teasing me about the ever-decreasing strength of the American dollar. Bizarrely enough, this fellow turned out to be Fraser, the famous boy soprano who saved Seattle Opera’s 1993 Turn of the Screw, now a strapping 20-something countertenor who had just been singing in Lord of the Rings: The Musical! here in Toronto, and the three of us had a little Seattle Opera reunion. In case a photo turns up in some Seattle Opera publication in the near future, remember, you read about it here first.