Tristan und Isolde
Posted on 09/18/2005 5:55:05 PM PDT by sitetest
Robert Spano is zooming along in his life as a conductor, the lights all turning green.
Tonight in Symphony Hall, he conducts Mahler's monumental "Resurrection" Symphony and begins his fourth season as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra — a partnership that increasingly draws national praise.
Robert Spano (photo courtesy of the Atlanta Symphony) Spano comes off a summer at the Seattle Opera, where he led Wagner's four-opera, 16-hour Ring cycle. After more than two months of rehearsal, he led the cycle three times over three weeks — and calls it a life-changing experience. A sign of success: He's already been invited back to Seattle to conduct the Ring in 2009.
We recently caught up with the 44-year-old conductor in a Midtown coffee shop.
Q: You received mostly glowing reviews for your first Ring. How did you feel about it?
A: It felt like a huge marker in my life. Not just as a conductor but as a human being. I feel like a different person. I'm altered and I'm grateful.
Q: What was so transformative?
A: For one thing the physicality, the athleticism of the Ring. In rehearsal, the first time we did Rheingold [Part 1 of the Ring saga] was the first time in my life I've had to conduct for 2½ hours without stopping. I made a point of not getting tired. I quit smoking, which I'd started at 17. I was going to the gym, doing Pilates. I went on a six-meal-a-day eating regimen, smaller meals. I took it very seriously. During the performances, I didn't get tired at all, didn't even think about it. But at intermission, and this was unusual, I'd be completely exhausted, physically and mentally. Sometimes I'd walk into my dressing room and have to lie on the floor to regroup, just so I'd have the energy to continue.
The other thing I hadn't expected, in the two years I spent in serious study [of the Ring score], was that everything took me twice as long to learn as usual. That terrified me. I'm usually a pretty quick study. Here I had to learn a whole new musical language — Wagner's language — which I'd been avoiding most of my life. No matter how hard I studied, I always had a thousand pages to go.
There is something bottomless about the Ring; it's such a vast and strange world. Fifty years before Freud and psychoanalysis, Wagner had it in the Ring. It goes very deep. Everyone who really knows the Ring will tell you that. But until you're inside it yourself, you can't quite imagine how such a thing could be true.
Conducting the Ring also, and this was really fascinating to me, warped my sense of time and space. Act 1 of Götterdämmerung [the fourth Ring opera] is two hours, which is as long as all of [Puccini's] Madama Butterfly, but I thought about it like 'an act of opera,' not in time but as units.
For long stretches I felt like I wasn't in my own body. I felt like I was growing with each performance, more than I'd grown in my entire life of conducting. It was amazing. And ridiculous, in a wonderful way.
Q: Did you take a nice break after Seattle?
A: No, I came right back to Atlanta to start preparing for the new season. I'll admit my first few days back I wasn't too functional. I'm not taking any vacation this year, but next fall [2006] I'm taking a chunk of time off, to compose. I have several pieces I need to finish, and this summer made me all the more aware that composing is a part of my life that I have to pursue. As a kid, when I was 12, I thought of myself as a composer, but later sort of fell into conducting. It's clear to me that returning to composition is something I have to do.
Q: You open the ASO season with Mahler's Second Symphony. It's only about 80 minutes long. Does that now feel short to you?
A: He's the opposite of Wagner; it's so concentrated and focused. Mahler, no fool, gave us a clue to music and meaning, the eternal question. Mahler quotes from Act 2, Scene 2 of Walküre [the second Ring opera]. It's a loveless scene where convention and society choke-hold creativity and the loving possibilities of the individual. I was blown away when I realized that connection. I love that I better understand Wagner through the eyes of his descendants, like Mahler.
Q: Will Atlanta ever share in your Wagner revelations?
A: I'd love to do Tristan und Isolde [with the ASO], maybe done in separate acts, maybe just a single act. That's an opera I have always loved. It's a long way away, but we might be able to pull it off.
Now, young man, get your mind out of the gutter or I'll wash your mouth out with soap.
Dear Cyclopean Squid,
"Disagree. The only thing better than Mahler 2 is Mahler 3."
LOL. What a fun thread.
As for me, I don't really care for either Wagner or Mahler. Neither does my older son. But my younger son, while not finding Mahler especially worthwhile, does enjoy Wagner.
It's fun and interesting seeing how each person has his own tastes in the broad range of music to which we loosely apply the term "classical." There is certainly something for everyone.
sitetest
The problem with any Mahler symphony is that, as an audience member, one tends to listen to them in comfortable seats in a dark, warm hall. It takes intense concentration to listen to one in full: if you let your attention wander for a moment, you'll be asleep and drooling in no time.
That's true. Usually I try to avoid using "classical" music, but I've given up on that. I would normally say Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc. But that is not accepted practice and so I gave in.
This is a particularly good thread. Once, long ago, I was not into classical music (there I go) with the human voice. I just wasn't ready. So for that reason I was not into Mahler. I took a "Symphony" class which had a great guide written by Edward Downes. This was a collection of program notes on various works. I read through them and become floored when I read the descriptions of Mahler's works, and the stories behind them. I rushed out and listened to the Titan and was transformed. I instantly purchased his complete works on Amazon. It remains my best purchase.
There is so much feeling in Mahler that everything else seems subdued. That can turn some folks off, but being a hopeless neurotic like the G-man I find it perfection itself. There's a Mahler symphony for whichever mood you're in.
I guess I can't understand when folks don't like Mahler. Maybe like my old self they weren't yet ready. Or maybe they just don't like it, plain and simple. I force people to listen and when they respond coldly I am shocked. But I guess when you love something you want everyone else to love it too. I see myself as something of a missionary spreading the music of Mahler. I played it on my college radio station, and wrote about it in our newsletter (it was a prog rock station, but I am friends with the ExecBoard and the newsletter editor).
I'm going to stop rambling now. Honestly.
Dear Cyclopean Squid,
I understand what you mean regarding the terms that we use. My own way of using the terms is to recognize that properly speaking, "Classical" relates to a pretty specific sort of music during a pretty specific era, but that the term is also broadly used to refer to a very wide range of music.
I think about the range of music played by our local classical music station - all the way from Renaissance music up through stuff done in the 20th century. Or the main classical radio station on XM Satellite Radio (where, by the way, they don't stint on Mahler), where the slogan is, "The greatest music of the last thousand years." * chuckle *
That seems like a fair enough broad working definition for the term.
Mahler - eh. His music just doesn't ring my bells. I get chills down my spine from Bach and Vivaldi. I can be entranced by Beethoven. I thrill to Gershwin. Even with Wagner, I have some emotional response (although not all positive). But not with Mahler.
Oh well.
sitetest
Is that the so-called "Symphony of a Thousand"?
You are thinking of the 8th. That one's got only 2 movements, but one of them is about an hour long! And it's the final scene from Faust II--a great combo, Goethe's words and Mahler's music.
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
Listen to the Mahler 5th. It's a great entry piece. And it has the famous Adigietto.
Wagner wrote 'Here Comes the Bride' ya know.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EA11Aa02.html
"..The rapturous response among popular audiences to the first two installments of the trilogy should alert us that something important is at work. Richard Wagner's 19th-century tetralogy of music dramas, The Ring of the Nibelungs, gave resonance to National Socialism during the inter-war years of the last century. Tolkien does the same for Anglo-Saxon democracy.
"
Agreed! And the only thing better than Mahler 3 is Mahler 9.
It was Mahler that made me decide to pursue a degree in music, and my introduction to Mahler 2 by a friend was the turning point.
Was that a joke or are you confusing Mahler with Mendelssohn?
The tune knows as 'Here Comes the Bride' is from Wagner's Lohengrin. Mendelssohn's Wedding March from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is another piece and is also very famous.
I've often said that my favorite Mahler symphony is the one I'm listening to at the moment. ;)
I have delusions of grandeur, and nothing accenuates that like listening to the G-man. I like to view myself as some great figure in world history, and when I conceive of my passing (leaving humanity in a state of shock, confusion, and utter grief) I imagine that the news would be broken over the strains of the final movement from the 9th. And, of course, the Resurrection would play at the grand state funeral.
Wow, I'm not sure why I actually wrote that--it's weird enough to think it, let alone commit it to the page. But there it is.
It's awesome that you are pursuing a music degree. That's what I'd do if I had any talent for composition. But alas, I was passed over in that department. I can appreciate the music if not create it. Good luck on your degree!
the Mahler 3rd is overhwmelming. The first movement is almost half of that thing. It's a mighty conception.
The scope of the work leaves me in awe--not only its length, but the breadth of its conception. Depicting every level of creation--wow. The final movement is awe-inspiring.
It's hard to find forbearers for it. Perhaps, the Richard Strauss tone poems, which were all the rage at the time but are now very difficult to sit through.
I've often said that my favorite Mahler symphony is the one I'm listening to at the moment.
Heh, I know the feeling. I put on Symphony 1 after reading this thread.
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