Wagner: The Complete Experience and its Meaning to Us
by Paul Dawson-Bowling
2nd edition, published 2021
Three volumes (hardback), 1166 pp
ISBN: 978-1-8383269-0-6
De la Porte Publishing
The first edition of Paul Dawson-Bowling’s The Wagner Experience and Its Meaning to Us was published in two volumes by Old Street Publishing in Wagner’s bicentenary year 2013. Apparently as comprehensive as anyone needed, it covered all the canonic operas. There were detailed summaries and commentary, and substantial chapters on the composer’s life, character, musical style and the fascination his work has held for so many, beginning in his lifetime. The author amended and expanded the book for the 2021 edition. It now runs to three volumes and over a thousand pages. The substantial new material justifies the adjective “complete” in the title. The book now covers all of Wagner’s completed operas, not just those from The Flying Dutchman onwards.
Three new chapters are devoted to rarely examined early operas: Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi. This is important. Few other guides cover them. If they do, it is cursory and sometimes merely dismissive. Even Ernest Newman in Wagner Nights excludes them: “the reader is hardly ever likely to see a performance”. But Der Fliegende Holländer did not come from nowhere, and its composition was virtually simultaneous with that of Rienzi. The path to Holländer began with Die Feen, and the journey is perhaps as significant and impressive as that from Holländer to Parsifal. Wagner himself is to blame for the early works’ neglect. He often said that his real career began with Der Fliegende Holländer. So, many writers just accept the “Wagner canon” as the seven works (counting The Ring as one) which Bayreuth has enshrined. That is to the detriment of a full appreciation of Wagner’s career and achievement – or “The Complete Experience”, to acknowledge this book’s title.
Volumes 2 and 3 now cover Wagner’s operas. In volume 1, Dawson-Bowling discusses the composer’s biography, character and music. It is in practice a separate book or, in a strained analogy to Das Rheingold, a Preliminary Evening. There are psychological insights into the females in Wagner’s life, especially his first wife Minna and her changing relationship with her husband over time. The chapter “The Miracle of the Music” deals with the status, and accuracy, of the business of motive-labelling, the relation between words and music, and the role of form. The author acknowledges various authorities, in which he is well-versed, but he usually finds an individual angle. He even takes Stravinsky, a figure we usually see as Wagner’s antipode, and shows us Wagnerian musical form through a Stravinskian lens. There are straightforward musical examples, yet the author even explains verbally what a canon is. So, those who cannot read music will usually still get the point.
Volume 1 ends with the chapter “Puzzles, Obstructions and Objections”, which explores obstacles to appreciating Wagner’s work. They include prejudiced biographers and the composer’s own serious faults, including his extreme antisemitism. Dawson-Bowling clearly sees that as indefensible, but dismisses Joachim Köhler’s stated view that “without Wagner there could have been no Hitler” as “beyond reason”. ‘Director’s opera’ is also seen as an obstacle. There are a few recent examples of how Wagner’s intention can be well-served but also perverted. The author even tackles “today’s climate of instant gratification”, and defends the rewards that follow from effort. Very often he clearly attempts to be even-handed in these matters.
Chapters in volume 2 present the first six operas, Die Feen to Lohengrin. Chapters in volume 3 discuss The Ring cycle,Die Meistersinger, Tristan and Parsifal. The core of each chapter is a detailed plot summary, and each has a clear exposition of the libretto’s characters, events and trajectory, as well as the meaning of these things. There is also the literary and philosophical background and the often varied source materials. The creation of a Wagner opera began long before he first put some ideas onto music paper. The text matters, not least because, as he once told Cosima: “It is the conjunction of the poet and musician in me that is important. As a pure musician I would not have been important.” The chapters all offer fine expositions of Wagner’s works, as good as Newman’s or any others I know. There are many illuminating asides and insights, especially concerning the main characters.
I only wish that Wagner’s exact title prefaced each chapter. Die Feen is a “grand romantic opera”, Das Liebesverbot a “grand comic opera”, Rienzi a “grand tragic opera”. Der Fliegende Holländer is a “romantic opera”, Tannhäuser a “grand romantic opera”, Lohengrin another “romantic opera”. Tristan is a “dramatic action” (Handlung), Die Meistersinger a “comic opera”, The Ring a “stage festival play” (Buhnenfestspiel) and Parsifal a “stage consecration festival play” (Buhnenweihfestspiel). Not one work is called a music drama, and Wagner corrected people who used that term for his operas. Lydia Goehr cites Wagner’s essay “On the Name Music Drama” in her article on this whole matter (“From Opera to Music Drama: Nominal Loss, Titular Gain” in Richard Wagner and His World, ed. Thomas S. Grey, Princeton University Press, 2009, pp.65-86).
MusicWeb visitors might be particularly interested in recommended recordings, appended to each opera’s chapter. Naturally, a comprehensive list would have required a fourth volume! So, even Tannhäuser gets only one suggestion, Sawallisch’s Dresden version from Bayreuth in 1962, but none of the Paris version. The solitary Flying Dutchman recommendation is on film, not CD, but you might rush to order it once you read what the author has to say. Lohengrin gets several versions to consider, while The Ring has one recommendation for the whole tetralogy, and further individual ones for each opera. I know most of these recommendations, and can vouch for their soundness. The author’s views are positive, and they celebrate the greatness of the performances without modish affectations. He has no truck, for instance, with the anti-Solti or anti-Karajan brigades, following the evidence only of his ears – and eyes for a couple of DVD recommendations. Dawson-Bowling is, by the way, a serious supporter of concentrating on a sound recording, with Wagner’s libretto and stage directions, as a valid way to encounter the “complete Wagner experience” – especially as an alternative to a perverse stage production (vol.1, p.338).
There is an inaccuracy in one of the recommendations. Recording suggestions for Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi look to the BBC versions, with uncut scores and strong casts conducted by that fine Wagnerian Edward Downes. The author notes that these each had subsequent CD issues and that they all eventually appeared in Deutsche Grammophon’s bicentenary “Wagner Complete Operas” box in 2013. In fact, my copy of that box has the Rienzi from a 1976 EMI issue, conducted by Heinrich Hollreiser. That is good musically and with a coherent text, but not as full a text as Downes put together; Hollreiser’s Act Two ballet music is fourteen minutes, not forty. Downes’s BBC recording of Rienzi on YouTube (here) is sonically not a substitute for a properly remastered transfer from a BBC-engineered broadcast, which would be a boon to collectors.
So this is a valuable, nay invaluable, guide to its subject. The volumes, with a good index and bibliography, are handsomely produced. There are no fewer than 136 colour illustrations, many unfamiliar and from the author’s own collection. But it is the text that matters, and the three chapters on the first three operas, in as much detail as the later works, are a unique feature as far as I am aware. Paul Dawson-Bowling begin his Introduction thus: “This is a book of enthusiasm.” He may mean enthusiasm in its etymological sense “divine inspiration”, with reference to Wagner’s godlike status for so many. Or maybe not. Suffice to say, Wagner: The Complete Experience and Its Meaning to Us can be commended with enthusiasm to novice or initiate.
Roy Westbrook
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