There was a time when foreign operas were performed in Russian. In the movie “The Cranes are Flying,” Volodka played the duke’s song from Verdi’s Rigoletto on the harmonica, and the moviegoers immediately realized that it sounded like a mockery of Boris’ love. Because they knew the text: “The heart of beauties is prone to betrayal and change, like the wind of May.” The masterpieces of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky were preferred from Russian operas. In the film “Rogue One” starring Tom Hanks, a Russian courier, delivering a parcel, sings Gremin’s aria: “Onegin, I won’t hide: I love Tatiana madly.”
But no one in Russia sang vocal hits from Wagner operas. Are there any?
In 1876, 36-year-old Pyotr Tchaikovsky went to the Bavarian city of Bayreuth (Bayreuth) to the premiere of the tetralogy “Ring of the Nibelung” as a correspondent for the newspaper “Russian Vedomosti”. The composer wrote and sent to the editor the articles that made up the cycle “Bayreuth musical Celebration”. Pyotr Ilyich described in detail the history of the creation of the tetralogy, the content of its operas.
“Each character is provided with a special short motif that belongs to him alone, which appears every time he is shown on stage or when they talk about him,– Tchaikovsky noted. – The incessant return of these motifs forces Wagner, in order to avoid monotony, to present it in a new form each time, and he discovers an amazing wealth of harmonic and polyphonic technique. This wealth is too abundant; by constantly straining your attention, it finally tires it, and at the end of the opera, especially in “The Death of the Gods,” this fatigue reaches the point that music ceases to be a harmonious combination of sounds for you – it becomes a kind of tiring hum. Is that what art should achieve? If I, a musician by profession, felt a feeling of spiritual and physical fatigue close to complete exhaustion, then what should be the fatigue of an amateur listener?”
But most importantly, Tchaikovsky characterized the musical method of the creator of The Ring of the Nibelung: “Since opera (according to Wagner) is nothing more than a drama accompanied by music, since the actors in the drama must speak, not sing, Wagner irrevocably banishes all rounded musical forms from the opera, then He banishes arias, ensembles, and even choirs, which he uses sporadically and very sparingly only in the last part of the tetralogy.… Since people in the dormitory do not sing songs in moments of moral passion, there can be no arias; since two people do not talk to each other at once, but listen to each other, there can be no duet; since the crowd also does not pronounce the same words at once, there can be no chorus, etc. Wagner, perhaps forgetting too much that the truth of life and the truth of art are two completely different truths, pursues, in a word, rationality. In order to reconcile these demands for truth with musical demands, Wagner adopted exclusively the form of recitative. All his music, and the music is deeply thought out, always interesting, sometimes excellent and fascinating, sometimes dry and incomprehensible, from the technical side amazingly rich and equipped with unprecedented beautiful instrumentation, is entrusted to the orchestra.”
Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky condemned for “pretending to realism”, for the fact that he sought to convey in his works the very “vital truth”. And this desire led in the operas of the 20th century to the fact that beauty was banished from there. Screams and screeching suppressed the bel canto.
Wagner’s masterpieces are primarily overtures to operas: “The Prohibition of Love”, “The Flying Dutchman”, “Tannhauser”, “Lohengrin”, “The Nuremberg Meistersingers”. However, Wagner has practically no vocal masterpieces. The exception is the wedding choir from Lohengrin. In Wolfram’s romance from Tannhauser, only the final orchestral part is beautiful, but not the main singing part. Similarly, in “The Death of Isolde” from the opera “Tristan and Isolde”: an amazing orchestra and expressionless vocals.
What’s the matter? Pyotr Ilyich himself gives the answer in a letter to Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck dated September 8, 1884, evaluating Wagner’s opera “Parsifal”: “It always seemed to me that Wagnerists from non-specialists pretend to delight themselves, which they do not feel deep down. Wagner, in my opinion, killed his enormous creative power with theory. Any preconceived theory cools the immediate creative feeling. If the singers in the opera do not sing, but speak to the deafening thunder of the orchestra, somehow adjusted, colorless sequences of notes against the background of a magnificent, but incoherent and formless symphony, then what kind of opera is this?”
There is no doubt that Richard Wagner is a great symphonist. The music of the famous “Flight of the Valkyries”, almost the only masterpiece in the entire 15-hour tetralogy, makes a strong impression. However, Tchaikovsky’s “Francesca da Rimini” is no worse. Pyotr Ilyich began composing this symphonic fantasy in 1876, while in Bayreuth and being impressed by the premiere of Wagner’s opera Valkyrie, which is part of the tetralogy. The plot of Tchaikovsky’s musical fantasy was the 5th song from “Hell” in Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. Francesca and her lover Paolo are doomed to spin in a hellish vortex forever after their tragic death because their love was not conjugal.
Of course, everything is clear to us, including the gloomy German genius. But Wagner is being insistently introduced into the national consciousness today. So the Mariinsky Theatre not only presented an updated version of The Ring of the Nibelung in St. Petersburg, but also brought it to Moscow. The most honorable audience, who heroically endured the performance, is in indescribable delight. Although few of those present at the tetralogy will be able to sing any of its vocal fragments, especially in German.
In The Ring of the Nibelung, Wagner sang the German spirit, he created the German musical Iliad. Nevertheless, it is more appropriate for Russian music lovers to appreciate Tchaikovsky’s works than Wagner’s. Nadezhda von Meck, nee Fralovskaya, famously said this in a letter to Pyotr Ilyich from Moscow dated March 18, 1877: “My God! how great is the person who gives others such moments, and how I would like to get into your soul at a time when you yourself are listening, for example, to your “Francesca” or something else. And what a delight this “Francesca” is! Can anyone better depict the horror of hell, and the charm of love, and everything that is above the ordinary level of feelings! Where can Wagner compare with you with his realism: he is a profane artist, unfortunately talented; God be with him… It’s a good thing we’re not Germans, otherwise we would have to be admired; now we can safely say: thank God we don’t have Wagner, but we have Pyotr Ilyich.”
