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What are you currently listening to?

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Author Topic: What are you currently listening to?  (Read 97162 times)
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dyn
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« Reply #90 on: October 05, 2013, 11:43:11 am »

Re Wagner. Perhaps you have not heard the "right Wagner, as his orchestral music drew me to classical music in my youth. I cannot bear his "Fat lady Operas", but slap on his orchestral music like Orchestral Prelude to Good Friday Spell from Parsifal, Tannhauser and Venusberg Music, Magic Fire Music..or Tristan und Isolde..and try to get beyond the Flying Dutchman..unless it is just a "German" thing. BTW:I too, have little use for Schoenberg.

It's possible... I'm not sure, i used to object strongly to music with singing in it, but there's now an increasing amount of vocal music I enjoy and a reasonably large number of singers I can tolerate, so it's not the fact that most of Wagner's music is opera (although, admittedly, the vocal style required is not really to my taste, either). Sadly it's a lot of the same elements that seem to attract people to the music—a high-minded seriousness i find holier-than-thou, orchestral grandiosity that for me tips over into bombastic tub-thumping, endless chromatic lines full of longing and desire and etc that quickly become tiresome, this whole overriding sense of the man's massive ego and "mission from god" to deliver music to the world. (I suppose one has to have a pretty big ego to succeed as a composer, to be able to put pieces of yourself out in the world and not turn suicidal when critics call them derivative, repetitive and boring, explains why a lot of composers are not people you'd want to have coffee with) There's also some of that in Beethoven and Brahms, but at least they also have humour and poetry and other things that compensante somewhat. All the Wagner I've heard has been very, very serious, usually with its high point being a beautiful melody that then gets repeated and "developed" at such length that i never want to hear it again. I managed to slog through Tristan, which was a chore; have never completed any of the Ring operas and have given up trying. Bruckner, Mahler and Shostakovich i do occasionally revisit, though without much luck so far (there are a few Shostakovich works i like, but many more i've never warmed to)

I suppose in complete fairness i should also mention that i have played through Wagner's Album-Sonata in A-flat major which was actually quite charming and showed off some of his strengths (melodies, development & orchestration, if it can be called orchestration when there's only one instrument concerned) to good advantage. Everything else that i've heard i'm happy to pass my listening duties off to others.

(incidentally my objections to Wagner are pretty similar to my objections to Schoenberg and Boulez, two other self-proclaimed "God's Gift to Music"s—perhaps it's as much an ideological as an aesthetic thing)
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