Intellectual Property Law

Only the good parts

By Susan Crawford

Maybe you’ve avoided Wagner operas - and, in particular, the Ring cycle - because the plots seem silly and the singers plant themselves in the middle of the stage and sing steadily without moving much for extraordinarily long periods of time.

What if someone put together all the exciting and moving bits in one piece? It would be like kicking the record player so the the needle jumped to the good parts.

That’s what I saw tonight at Carnegie Hall, with the NY Philharmonic’s performance of Lorin Maazel’s The Ring Without Words. Maazel conducted without a score. He seemed agile, distinguished, and magisterial - a fine combination for a conductor, and an even better combination for a conductor leading his own work. He had a tremendous brass section, several harps, and a fabulous percussion team in front of him. (I was drawn tonight to the cymbal player, who managed to convey several different levels of cymbal fervor with confident accuracy and beautiful sound.) And strings - the front desk players were all shining tonight.

“It was fun” doesn’t really convey how this evening went, but it *was* fun. Here is Maazel’s description:

I was intrigued by the challenge: could a symphonic synthesis of the Ring reveal the essentials of its code? I bolted the following list of criteria to my drawing board:
ONE: The synthesis must be free-flowing (no stops) and chronological, beginning with the first note of Rheingold and finishing with the last chord of Götterdämmerung.
TWO: The transitions must be harmonically and periodically justifiable, the pacing contrasts commensurate with the length of the work.
THREE: Most all of the music originally written for orchestra without voice must be used, adding those sections with a vocal line essential to a synthesis and only where the line is either doubled by an orchestral instrument, ?imaginable? or, in the rare instance, when it can be reproduced by an instrument.
FOUR: Every note must be Wagner?s own.

Say you’re bored by baseball. Wouldn’t it be great if you could see just the highlights, seamlessly flowing from one to the next? You would like this piece.

The warm applause seemed to be in thanks for Maazel’s entire career as well as for this particular piece. My companions were very impressed that a 78-year-old had carried off the performance without a score. Ah, that’s nothing for him - he had his debut at nine, with the Interlochen orchestra at the 1939 World’s Fair. I’ve seen a picture of him at that age that I wish I could show you, but I can’t find it online. Just imagine a very intense and mature boy; now imagine a tan, fit, confident conductor. He is having a good life, it seems, and he’s given us all the good parts.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on June 11, 2008 (boomark / email).