So I'm Reading This ...

[joggerjayne]

So I'm reading this book ...

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/13/highereducation.news

It's giving me a whole new perspective on Wagner.

Apparently he never read Nietzsche. Reappraisal of Siegfried needed. And, contrary to his popular image, he was a bit of a trendy liberal leftie. He would probably have been a Guardian reader.

Yikes!!!

[jno]

Wagner didn't invent the ring, he just wrote the tunes. There seem to have been a few in Norse sagas. They tend to be bad rings rather than good ones.

[joggerjayne]

jno, that is true. He based it on the Nibelungenlied (is that how you spell it?)

But most operas, like Parsifal, La Cenerentola, Hansel and Gretel ... okay I'm not going to list them all ... are based on existing stories.

[jno]

opera composers have always been lazy when it comes to narratives, but they do have lots of nice notes.

[joggerjayne]

Lazy?

Yeah, but if they made up the stories themselves, they'd probably be a bit crap.

[doctordb]

jno,
Emperor Joseph 2nd once informed Mozart after a performance in Vienna, 'there are too many notes.' He was a bit of an idiot.

[joggerjayne]

Too many notes.

He'd obviously never listened to Schoenberg.

:0(

[jno]

he was right, Mozart did use too many notes. Look what poor John Cage got left with.

[joggerjayne]

That would be the Schoenberg who lived about two hundred years after Mozart.

Which might explain why the Emperor hadn't listened to him.