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WagnerianaSpring–Summer 2014 Volume 11, Numbers 2–3
Ihrem Ende eilen sie zu,
die so stark im Bestehen sich wähnen.
— Das Rheingold
In This Issue
■■ From the President 1
■■ “An Alternative to
Bayreuth”: The Ring
in Budapest 2
■■ Sound as Story in
Wagner’s Ring 4
■■ Brünnhilde and
Parsifal as Seen by
Odilon Redon 6
■■ Play a Bigger Role in
the Boston Wagner
Society! 15
Continued on page 16
From the PresidentWe had a busy and successful 2013–2014 season, starting with a fun celebration
of the Boston Wagner Society’s 10th anniversary in September, with a
presentation by the Metropolitan Opera’s William Berger and an amazing
German chocolate cake partly donated by Konditor Meister! In October we
collaborated with Professor Deborah Burton of Boston University’s College
of Fine Arts to bring you several events on Wagner, including two talks by
Wagner’s great-grandson Gottfried Wagner, a new film by musician and
filmmaker Hilan Warshaw, a concert with excerpts from Tristan und Isolde, a
roundtable discussion, and more.
December brought board member David Collins’s wonderful, in-depth
examination of The Flying Dutchman. In February Boston composer Tony
Schemmer regaled us with a witty, informative, and irreverent take on the Ring
Cycle, which was great fun; March brought the talented director and stage
designer William Fregosi, who gave a wonderful presentation on the staging
of Wagner’s operas; in April the distinguished musician and musicologist Saul
Lilienstein spoke about the music of the two giants of the nineteenth century:
Wagner and Brahms. This was a terrific talk with visual illustrations and music.
In May, Wagner’s birthday month, we brought you the soon-to-be-famous
baritone Marcelo Guzzo and the hugely accomplished pianist Rainer Armbrust
in a lovely concert of Wagner and Italian composers. And finally, in June the
great and wonderful chairman of the Wagner Society of Washington DC gave a
most enjoyable talk on Strauss in celebration of the composer’s 150th birthday.
What a variety of events! It truly was an outstanding year.
This double issue brings you a review of the recent Ring Cycle in Budapest
by our regular reviewer Atsuko Imamura. In addition, we have a substantial
article by Donald Rosenthal, a retired curator, the Boston Wagner Society’s
Wagneriana
“An Alternative to Bayreuth”: The Ring in BudapestDer Ring des Nibelungen, June 12–15, 2014, Budapest, Béla Bartók National Concert Hall, Palace of the Arts
Artistic director and conductor: Adam Fischer;
featuring: MR Symphonics; dramaturgy: Christian
Martin Fuchs; costumes and puppets: Corinna Crome;
lighting design: Andreas Gruter; stage designer,
director: Hartmut Schorghofer
Das Rheingold
Wotan: Eglis Silins; Fricka: Judit Nemeth; Alberich:
Hartmut Welker; Freia: Tunde Szaboki; Donner: Oskar
Hillebrandt; Froh: Zoltan Nyari; Loge: Christian
Franz; Mime: Gerhard Siegel; Fafner: Walter Fink;
Fasolt: Geza Gabor; Erda: Erika Gal; Woglinde: Polina
Pasztircsak; Wellgunde: Gabriella Fodor; Flosshilde:
Zsofia Kalnay
Die Walküre
Siegmund: Christian Franz; Sieglinde: Anje Kampe;
Hunding: Walter Fink; Wotan: Egils Silins; Fricka:
Judit Nemeth; Brünnhilde: Iréne Theorin
Siegfried
Siegfried: Jay Hunter Morris; Mime: Gerhard Siegel;
Wanderer: Eglis Silins; Alberich: Hartmut Welker;
Fafner: Walter Fink; Wood Bird: Gabi Gal; Erda: Erika
Gal; Brünnhilde: Petra Lang
Götterdämmerung
1st Norn: Erika Gal; 2nd Norn: Judit Nemeth;
3rd Norn: Polina Pasztircsak; Siegfried: Christian
Franz; Brünnhilde: Iréne Theorin; Hagen: Kurt
Rydl; Gutrune: Erika Markovics; Gunther: Oskar
Hillebrandt; Alberich: Hartmut Welker; Waltraute:
Marina Prudenskaya
Presented in a semi-staged version, with the orches-
tra in the pit, singers in concert attire, and a mirrored
screen in the back for projections, the Ring Cycle in
Budapest aimed to “pave the way for alternative perfor-
mance styles to Bayreuth,” in conductor Adam Fischer’s
words. In an age of decreasing financial support for
opera houses and classical music in general, semi-staged
or concert-style performances of operas may very well
become the new norm. These “alternative” styles often
have the advantage of focusing both the singers’ and the
audience’s attention on the music and text, with fewer
distractions in the form of sets, costumes, and props.
Zachary Wolfe recently wrote an interesting article in
the New York Times on this very topic, using several
recent performances presented in the U.S. as examples.
The Budapest Ring succeeds admirably on many
levels in attaining the objective of presenting Wagner’s
operas in an accessible, realistic, modern, and exciting
manner (a paraphrase of Maestro Fischer’s comments in
the program), with excellent playing by the orchestra led
by an energetic and involved conductor, and with gener-
ally a high level of international soloists. Although sets,
costumes, and props (a sword lay on the stage, and there
were chairs for the singers to sit on) were lacking for
the most part, some of the projections were sometimes
distracting and did not enhance the musical experience;
when the Rhinemaidens, for example, sang in Das Rhein-
gold and in Götterdämmerung, three large blond, animat-
ed women were swimming in a background projection,
all of whom resembled Marilyn Monroe. A great deal of
blood splattered on the screen when Fafner killed Fasolt
Bass-Baritone Egils Silins, an
expressive Wotan at the Budapest
Ring
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A Publication of the Boston Wagner Society
and Hagen slayed Siegfried. There were also dancers
portraying the principal characters (during the love duet
in the third act of Siegfried, for example) and during the
ride of the Valkyries. A dancer in a red suit, represent-
ing Loge, seemed omnipresent whenever the fire music
played, as were two men dressed as ravens observing
various events. I would have preferred fewer projections
and dancers, but then these performances might have
turned into mere concerts, and not semi-staged operas.
These are minor quibbles, as the overall experience
was exciting and at times moving. The biggest acco-
lade must go to the orchestra, whose playing was both
dynamic and sensitive, enhanced by the superb acoustics
of the Palace of Arts. I was fortunate to witness Maestro
Fischer with the Vienna Philharmonic the following
week in Vienna’s Ring Cycle, and if my experience in
Vienna is any guide, it was obvious that Fischer main-
tains close contact with the orchestra and the singers,
often mouthing the words in the libretti and truly enjoy-
ing the musical experience. In Budapest the orchestra
pit is deep, and it was difficult to observe the musicians
closely, but I suspect a similar communication was
occurring there as well throughout the performances.
Fischer’s conducting was brisk but not hurried, and he
emphasized the yin and yang of Wagner’s music. A case
in point was the stupendous immolation scene, sung
exquisitely by Iréne Theorin. At times the orchestra per-
formed so quietly that she whispered the words and was
still audible, a truly moving moment.
Notable among the soloists were Egils Silins, a light-
voiced but expressive Wotan; 73-year-old Hartmut
Welker, who nearly stole the show as Alberich; Gerhard
Siegel as one of the best Mimes today; Anje Kampe as
a moving Sieglinde; Bayreuth veteran Judit Nemeth as
Fricka and the 2nd Norn; Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried
(in Siegfried only); Walter Fink as Fafner and Hunding;
and Marina Prudenskaja as Waltraute.
The highest vocal honor goes to Iréne Theorin, who
sang Brünnhilde in Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung.
Her high notes have a tendency to turn shrill, but on this
occasion she had excellent control throughout her vocal
range and was in excellent voice. Despite having to use
a cane due to a recently broken limb, which limited her
stage movements, she was an authoritative Brünnhilde,
both vocally and stylistically. Today Sweden can boast
about its two best Brünnhildes, Nina Stemme and Iréne
Theorin, both worthy successors of Birgit Nilsson.
Unfortunately, Christian Franz as Loge, Siegmund,
and Siegfried in Götterdämmerung was a weak link in an
otherwise excellent ensemble of singers. He fared the
best as Loge, a character role often (but not always) sung
by an older tenor. As Siegmund, and especially as Sieg-
fried, Franz lacked vocal heft and often resorted to near
barking. He also tended to duck the high notes.
The audience, a mix of young and old, Hungarian
and foreign, applauded the singers, chorus, conductor,
and orchestra enthusiastically. Many people said they
would return to the Budapest Ring next year.
— Atsuko Imamura
Atsuko (Ako) Imamura, a member of the Boston Wagner Society, is a native of Tokyo and has lived in the United States for over 35 years. She frequently travels around the world to attend operatic performances.
Dramatic soprano Iréne Theorin
sang Brünnhilde in the Budapest
Ring
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Wagneriana
Sound as Story in Wagner’s RingThis essay is an excerpt from Saul Lilienstein’s Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: An Interpretive Journey, a book awaiting publication. Another excerpt from the book, on Götterdämmerung, will appear in the next issue. –Ed.
Das RheingoldAn article in the New York Times in September 2003
stated, “Astronomers say they have heard the sound of
a black hole singing. And what it is singing and per-
haps has been singing for more than two billion years is
the tone B flat—57 octaves below middle C. The black
hole is playing the lowest note in the universe,” said the
scientists at the Institute for Astronomy at Cambridge
University in England.
That’s what they discovered in 2003. One hundred
fifty years before that, almost to the day, Richard Wag-
ner set down the tone E flat, symbolically five scale tones
deeper still than anything science has come up with.
Wagner wrote to his friend Franz Liszt, “The prelude to
[Das Rheingold] represents the beginning of the world.”
Scene One: At the bottom of the Rhine
The first sound, like an undifferentiated element of
nature not yet separated into its parts, will gradually
reveal itself through a series of tones in which eight
French horns, overlapping, create the theme through
which the first stirrings are heard.
It is the overtone series, the so-called chord of nature,
built here on a low E flat that keeps sounding and
resounding. For the initial moment of variation, bas-
soons and cellos take this almost formless undulation
and give it the quality of measured time. Other wind
instruments subtly enter. Higher strings will momen-
tarily continue the cello’s rhythm, like a wave that rises
and subsides. Flutes take up the theme, reaching upward
even as the deep tones hold on. Then a new variation:
the tempo remains but the inner pulse quickens. Four
clarinets sing out the song of the river. Oboes join them.
The upper strings come back, like an undeniable tide.
A final variation on that one tone, one continuing the E
flat major triad: it’s the full orchestra—and everything is
bristling into life, bubbling up, coming to the surface.
Then the harmonies change, and the song of human
voices is heard. These are the daughters of the Rhine,
and the sounds with which they begin, “Weia, Waga,
Woge, Welle, walle zur Wiege, Wagalaweia! Wallala weiala
weia!” are like the sounds that appear before coherent
human speech, as a mother would sing to a child, “Lulla
lulla, lullay.” The priest and humanist Father Owen
Lee spoke of this music as “coming out of the cradle of
waves. The song of the Rhinemaidens is a lullaby to the
newborn world. There is something in us that longs for
lost innocence in a union with nature.”
The composer believed the ultimate goal of nature
was to evolve into human consciousness—and here are
five beautiful minutes of descriptive music that demon-
strate how a philosophical thought can be transformed
into a work of art.
Scene Four: On a Mountaintop, Near the Rhine
Even Wotan is distracted by the gorgeous display in
the sky—and the sound of Wagner’s music. But he
knows that this moment came with a heavy price, and
as he salutes his fortress, he recognizes it as a necessary
refuge, that place where by mastering fear he can live
safe from terror and dread. The warm and noble theme
by which we first knew him peals out again and again
in the orchestra. Wagner is going to tell us that Wotan
is suddenly inspired with a grand idea. We don’t know
what this is, but we’re stunned by a new theme that,
as Father Owen Lee described it, “leaps through the
rainbow music, a shining idea just emerging from the
unconsciousness of the Father God.” Announced by a
solo trumpet, high C drops down an octave to middle C,
then leaps upward through the tones of a C major triad.
Clear, piercing, precise.
No moment in Das Rheingold will eventually be more
revealing than this one—of Wagner’s newfound power
to tell us things through sound alone. We will have to
wait for the first act of Die Walküre to truly recognize
its import. Here, in Das Rheingold, it must function as
a purely musical device—a theme introduced just for
the coda, as Beethoven frequently did. But what a risk;
Wagner hopes we will all show up for the next opera,
hopes that he will have a chance to write it, knowing that
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A Publication of the Boston Wagner Society
if all goes well, that theme will allow us a glimpse into
the mind of the god.
Filled with new confidence and in a beautiful example
of alliterative poetry, Wotan sings, “Folge mir, Frau: in
Walhall wohne mit mir!” (Follow me, my wife, and live
with me in Walhalla!).
There’s only one among them who is not taken in by
the splendiferous show, and that’s Loge, of course. No
master is a hero to his valet. Loge knows that Wotan
and the others are moving toward their own inevitable
destruction. So he will return to a state of fire and, as an
elusive flame, be free of them, perhaps even to consume
them all in the burning fire that he creates in the end.
The summing up continues. The gods’ rainbow jour-
ney takes them over the river, and the Rhinemaidens
are heard, lamenting the loss of their shining treasure.
“What are these sounds?” Wotan wants to know. Loge
tells him: “It’s the children of Rhine crying out for their
gold. The treasure that was stolen from them.” Wotan
has no time for this. Loge obeys his master’s orders one
more time and tells the maidens to bask instead in this
new shining light—the radiance of the gods. The last
words of this opera belong to them: “Now only in the
depths of the river is there tenderness and truth. False
and fainthearted are those who celebrate above us.”
The Architecture of the Ring
Richard Wagner thinks in vast architectural spans. For
instance, we know that the prelude to this opera was the
prologue for the three scenes that followed it, the prelude
in E flat major. From Wotan’s entrance to this conclu-
sion, everything is framed within the key of D flat. This
shaping foreshadows the entire Ring of the Nibelungen.
Das Rheingold is a prelude to the three operas that fol-
low it. It all begins in E flat; it all ends in D flat. Does it
matter? It’s almost impossible for anyone to retain these
sounds in memory. Does it matter that we can’t hear
all of the notes in many Renaissance motets? Does it
matter that it is impossible to see all of the statues in the
cathedral of Milan? Is it just possible that the B flat, 57
octaves below middle C, that resounds from the black
hole—that no one can hear—that if it stopped, the world
would come to an end?
— Saul Lilienstein
Saul Lilienstein, a musician, musicologist, and former stu-dent of Leonard Bernstein, gave a presentation to the Boston Wagner Society in April 2014. Lilienstein served as Artistic Director and Conductor of Maryland’s Har ford Opera The-atre and then of Operetta Renaissance in Baltimore, con-ducting and producing over fifty operas. A highly regarded Professor of Music, his is a familiar voice at the Smithson-ian Institution, Johns Hopkins University in Rockville, the Kennedy Center, Washington National Opera, and at music symposiums in New York, California, and Ohio. He has completed over seventy-five highly acclaimed CDs for the Washington National Opera. His articles on music have appeared in newspapers and periodicals throughout the coun-try. In 2005 the Wagner Society of Washington DC bestowed the Society’s Award for “uncommon contributions.”
Design for the first Ring Cycle performance in Bayreuth,
1876, by Josef Hoffmann
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Wagneriana
Brünnhilde and Parsifal as Seen by Odilon RedonIn the decades following Richard Wagner’s death in
1883, one of the leading European visual artists most
interested in Wagnerian subjects was the French painter
and lithographer Odilon Redon (1840–1916). Though
he was an exact contemporary of such Impressionist
painters as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Redon’s career began to develop only around 1880,
much later than theirs. Redon is often classed with the
Symbolist painters of the 1880s, the most famous of
whom is Paul Gauguin, an acquaintance of Redon. Sym-
bolism was in many ways a kind of neo-Romanticism
that looked back for inspiration to the artists of the first
half of the nineteenth century.
This is perhaps the connection
between Wagner’s operas and
Redon: Though we often empha-
size Wagner’s uniqueness, he
belonged to the Romantic move-
ment as much as older artists like
the composers Carl Maria von
Weber and Hector Berlioz or the
painter Eugène Delacroix. Like
them, Wagner set his works in
an idealized or mythical past.
It is difficult to imagine him composing an opera on a
contemporary subject: Wagner has no Traviata. Redon’s
choice of subjects was to be much the same.
If Wagner’s operas continued to inspire major French
(and British) visual artists, the leading modernist artists
of late nineteenth-century Germany—Max Klinger,
Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann—largely avoided Wag-
nerian subjects, perhaps because they were overwhelmed
by the composer’s reputation. The “musical” Klinger,
for example, had contributed to a memorial album for
Wagner in 1884. Thereafter, though he collaborated
with Johannes Brahms on a large Brahms-Phantasie
album of etchings and sheet music, and produced a
colossal sculptural monument to a Jupiter-like Beethoven
(Leipzig, Museum der Bildenden Künste; the reduced
version is in Boston, Museum of Fine Arts), Klinger did
not create any Wagnerian works.
Odilon Redon originally came to prominence through
his sets of black and white lithographs, noted in particu-
lar for the strangeness of their subjects, such as a giant
floating eyeball or a smiling spider. These lithographs
often were inspired by, though only loosely related to,
such celebrated works of the Romantic period as Fran-
cisco Goya’s grotesque etchings (the Caprichos and
Disparates) and Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of horror. The
images sometimes had no obvious interpretations, and
Redon declined to provide any. Active early in his career
as an art critic as well as an artist, Redon in a newspaper
review in his native Bordeaux of the Paris Salon of 18681
voiced his disapproval of naturalistic art styles such as
Realism (Gustave Courbet) and Impressionism (Edu-
ard Manet and Monet). Redon
felt that these artists, in their
focus on accurate depictions of
everyday reality, were turning
away from the true source of art:
the imagination, which the poet
Charles Baudelaire had called
“the queen of the faculties.” In
the review Redon demonstrates a
tendency to generalize about art,
rather than concentrating on one
specific work after another like
most other Salon reviewers.
Though the subjects of Redon’s later works became
less opaque and highly charged, they remained unusual
choices for an avant-garde painter in the era of Impres-
sionism: themes from Classical mythology, such as the
chariot of Apollo and the winged horse Pegasus, or tra-
ditional religious subjects such as the Madonna, treated
in an untraditional manner. It is not surprising that
Redon, especially in the later phase of his career, was
attracted to Wagner’s world of remote Northern mythol-
ogy, which, like most of Redon’s subjects, had little to do
with the realities of nineteenth-century urban life. The
dreamlike quality of Redon’s early work continues in
his Wagnerian subjects, particularly in his depictions of
Parsifal.
Redon was a competent amateur violinist and, as
he wrote in his journal, To Myself, “a faithful listener
to concerts” who considered himself a “symphonist
painter.”2 On the other hand, he had little opportunity
The dreamlike quality of Redon’s early work continues in his Wagnerian subjects, particularly in his depictions of Parsifal.
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A Publication of the Boston Wagner Society
during his early career to familiarize himself with
Wagner’s operas. Redon missed Wagner’s lavish 1861
Paris production of Tannhaüser, which failed, probably
because it became entangled in French domestic parti-
san politics.3 Nor did he attend an 1869 production of
Rienzi that, as Wagner predicted, was a popular success.
After the disastrous Franco-Prussian War and siege of
Paris in 1870–71, nationalistic hostility in effect banned
German opera, even in translation, from Parisian stages
for two decades. As late as 1887, a production of Lohen-
grin at the Eden-Théâtre had to be canceled after one
performance. The principal mode of gaining familiarity
with Wagner’s operas in France (and indeed in much
of the rest of Europe) was through piano transcriptions
played at home, with which Redon was familiar (he was
friendly with the Wagnerian-influenced composer Ernest
Chausson and the Catalan piano virtuoso Ricardo
Viñes) or through occasional concert performances of
orchestral excerpts. We know that Redon attended the
Concerts Lamoureux in Paris, where he heard music by
Wagner.4 A reluctant traveler, Redon in correspondence
later mused about a visit to the Bayreuth Festival:
Before leaving Paris I heard Tannhaüser with great
emotion. That gives me the desire to go to Bayreuth
one day; that would suggest crowds of ideas to me.
What a new art, for the eyes as well!
Yes, Wagner, with his cycles and the whole world
that he evokes, the ink that has spilled about him,
was really somebody. We must not yet really judge all
that. His writings make me think.5
In the end, however, Redon never made the pilgrim-
age to Bayreuth. Rather than regarding Wagner’s works
as the culmination of modern art, Redon preferred to
use them as a source of reflection and inspiration for his
own work.
Since Redon did not date his works, little was known
about their evolution until the recent publication of
his livre de raison, or listing of authentic works.6 A few
earlier painters had kept such books or lists, though
true to his less organized persona as a writer, Redon’s
livre consists of several lists of works, payment records,
and so on, arranged according to a variety of criteria.
Three notebooks record sales of works; “noirs” or draw-
ings, as well as pastels and oil paintings; and prints
with a general chronology (Paris, Bibliothèque Jacques
Doucet). From the lists we learn that he began to treat
some Wagnerian subjects in 1884, the year following
Wagner’s death, and continued to do so until at least
1905, when he began to stop recording the production
and sale of his works.
Redon’s opinions about specific composers, as
on other subjects, can be difficult to pin down. His
musical tastes seem to have been wide-ranging; his
friends claimed he was interested in the music of Bach,
Beethoven, and César Franck, among others. In his
journal, however, with its discussions of many painters,
Redon devotes sections to only two composers: Robert
Schumann and Hector Berlioz, exemplars of “pure”
instrumental composition, since their operas were little
known. (He also executed a Symbolist Homage to Robert
Schumann in pastel.) Redon acknowledges the greatness
of the two composers without trying to define it. He is
more interested in his view of their contrasting person-
alities: Schumann as generous and accepting, Berlioz
(Redon’s primary subject) as ambitious, angry, and
disappointed.7
Redon’s only mention of Wagner in To Myself was writ-
ten in 1882, the year the composer presented Parsifal. It
comes in a discussion of the lithographs of Henri Fantin-
Latour, probably the best-known contemporary inter-
preter of Wagnerian themes. After critiquing the older
painter’s emphasis on “worldly” external detail and his
handling of color and composition, Redon continues:
Laborious and careful research led this artist to
attempt the interpretation of music through paint-
ing, forgetting that no color can render the musical
world which is uniquely and deeply internal and
without any support from real nature. Not having
succeeded, he doubtless takes revenge in discharg-
ing his sorrows through lithography in pale, soft
sketches on the poems of the musician, Wagner. But
whether he draws out of the “libretti” of Brahms,
Schumann, or Berlioz, it is always the expression of
a vague German sentimentality that is not new for us
and that needs to be given with less emphasis.8
In discussing Fantin’s art, Redon inverts a criticism
of Wagner that was common in France in the 1850s and
1860s: that Wagner was trying (perhaps through his
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Wagneriana
early use of the Leitmotif) to imitate the effects of realist
painting in his works (“the Courbet of music”). Redon’s
attitude toward Fantin must have been ambivalent, since
the older painter appears to have taught him the tech-
nique of transfer lithography, which was the basis of
Redon’s early success. In his writings, Redon repeatedly
speaks with approval of the suggestive, indeterminate, or
ambiguous nature of music as a model for visual artists.
His belief in the esthetic superiority of the art of music,
due to its abstract or intuitive nature, was widespread
among visual artists and theorists of the time. As the
English art critic Walter Pater wrote, “All art aspires to
the condition of music.”9 In most of his own Wagnerian
works, Redon avoids the dramatic scenes often favored
by Fantin-Latour, preferring static images (with the
important exception of Brünnhilde’s immolation) that
capture the spiritual quality or essence of the character
he is depicting.
Many commentators on Redon’s work have noted
his use of Wagnerian subjects. In recent years a num-
ber of art-historical studies have been devoted to the
Wagnerian images, mainly the lithographs, and in the
broader context of artists’ interest in Wagner in the late
nineteenth century.10 There is no study discussing all of
Redon’s Wagnerian pictures, which include four litho-
graphs, a charcoal drawing, and two pastel paintings.
Additional works by Redon on Wagnerian themes once
existed but are now lost. The Wagnerian subjects make
up only a small part of Redon’s oeuvre and cannot be
considered in isolation from his work as a whole. Nev-
ertheless, the surviving Wagnerian works are consistent
in subject matter—only Brünnhilde and Parsifal are
depicted—over a period of more than twenty years.
These subjects are drawn from Wagner’s most recently
produced works: the Ring operas, premiered in their
complete form at Bayreuth in 1876, and Parsifal of 1882.
Redon’s career followed an unusual pattern: initially
he was better known in literary than artistic circles.11
Among his critical champions were leading members
of the literary avant-garde, including the novelist Joris-
Karl Huysmans and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. In
Huysmans’s influential, anti-naturalistic novel A rebours
(Against the Grain, 1884), dealing with an eccentric
art collector and aesthete, Redon and the painter Gus-
tave Moreau are the only living artists given favorable
mention. With Mallarmé, the unofficial arbiter of the
literary avant-garde, Redon planned to produce a lavish
artist’s book of the poet’s works, though Mallarmé’s
death prevented its completion.
At this time Richard Wagner’s influence in France
was exerted less through his music than his writings,
especially his popularization of the idea of the Gesa-
mtkunstwerk, the synthesis or union of the arts in one
work.12 Both Huysmans and Mallarmé contributed arti-
cles on Wagner to the important literary journal Revue
wagnérienne, founded in 1885. Redon first recorded a
Wagnerian subject in his livre de raison in 1884: A War-
rior: For Wagner. This drawing, probably in charcoal,
was undoubtedly a response to the composer’s death in
the preceding year. The work is lost.
Figure 1. Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde on Horseback,
charcoal, c. 1885, sale, Bern, Kornfeld und Klipstein,
10–12 June 1971, no. 1088
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A Publication of the Boston Wagner Society
The first surviving Wagnerian subject picture listed
in the livre de raison is a Brünnhilde, a charcoal drawing
made in 1885 that was sold at auction in 1971 (Figure
1).13 The background of literary interest in Wagner may
have provided an impetus for Redon’s turn to Wagnerian
subjects: in 1885 he contributed to the Revue wagnéri-
enne, probably by invitation, a second treatment of
Brünnhilde, this time in lithography (Figure 2). Redon’s
first two Brünnhilde images, though nearly contempo-
rary, are handled quite differently. The charcoal drawing
is relatively large for a work on paper, more than twenty
inches in height. Brünnhilde, her face in nearly full pro-
file facing right, crouches atop her rearing horse, Grane.
She wears a light shift that covers most of her torso while
leaving the breasts exposed. She raises her right forearm,
and in her hand is a small object she prepares to throw.
This surely depicts Brünnhilde at the conclusion of Göt-
terdämmerung, throwing the ring into the Rhine, which
is shown as a small and rather placid stream at the right.
Such a gesture would be clearer to the viewer than show-
ing the heroine wearing the ring as she rides into the fire.
The mountainous landscape behind the figure at the left
is undefined.
Most unusually, the image shows a second, more
sketchy Brünnhilde seated behind the first. She carries
a large, ornate circular shield behind her on the left, but
otherwise her face and costume are not detailed. Her
right arm is raised and her forearm and hand thrown far
back, as if to hurl something forcefully. Grane also has a
curious feature in possessing vestigial wings, suggesting
that the artist might originally have thought of depicting
the winged horse Pegasus, a subject he treated elsewhere.
In contrast to these unresolved elements, the horse’s head
and mane, and the grasses in the foreground, are treated
in detail. One might describe the sketchy Brünnhilde
figure as a pentimento, drawn before an artist’s second
thought or revision. While pentimenti are usually cov-
ered over, however, Redon has intentionally left the entire
figure visible. He apparently regarded the drawing as
finished, and it is probably the work on this subject that he
exhibited at the forward-looking Salon des XX in Brussels
in 1890. The indeterminate aspect of the composition, if
anything, enhances a “modern” quality that has appealed
to artists: the distinguished British sculptor Henry Moore
(1898–1986) at one time owned the Brünnhilde.
The critic Teodor de Wyzewa wrote about Redon
in the Revue wagnérienne in June 1885, a few months
before the artist’s contribution to the journal. Wyzewa
included Redon among the few practitioners of “Wagne-
rian painting,” an imprecise term referring to artists who
worked by suggestion rather than description.14 Around
the same time Léo Rouanet defended Redon’s art against
the accusation that it was too “literary,” citing Wagner’s
advocacy of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and Charles Morice
and other literary critics linked the names of Wagner
and Redon in their often diffuse theories of Symbolism,
sometimes to the painter’s dismay.15
Redon’s lithographic Brünnhilde of 1885 is a small
work, proportioned to fit the dimensions of the Wagne-
rian journal. The subject’s face is in full profile, this time
to the left, though her body, as in the earlier work, large-
ly faces toward the viewer. Encased somewhat awkwardly
in heavy armor with a helmet and large shield, she stands
before a sketchy mountainous landscape, as in the char-
coal drawing. She is shown here as she appears in Die
Walküre, still fully active as Wotan’s warrior daughter.
Figure 2. Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde, lithograph,
Revue wagnérienne, 1885 , TS 40.40, Harvard Theater
Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University
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Wagneriana
Redon did not see the opera until the 1890s: perhaps
in Paris in 1893, and certainly in London in October
1895.16 Nevertheless, he was already familiar with it to
some extent, if only through the libretto. Brünnhilde’s
youthful, small, sensitive features and down-turned
mouth seem to contrast with her formidable armor, sug-
gesting a certain vulnerability.
Redon’s earliest surviving depictions of Parsifal date
from 1891. He had not seen Wagner’s opera, which at
this time was performed only in Bayreuth; neverthe-
less Redon must have had some familiarity with Wag-
ner’s version of the Parsifal legend. The piano and full
scores of the opera had been published, and the plot and
interpretation of Wagner’s work had been discussed in a
detailed article by the critic Edouard Schuré in the Revue
wagnérienne in 1885,17 as well as in later articles. The
subject interested other artists of the period: the young
Belgian Symbolist Jean Delville, for example, produced
at least two works related to the last act of Parsifal: a
charcoal drawing of Parsifal as an androgynous, disem-
bodied face in a state of ecstatic vision (1890; private col-
lection); and a strange painting in which the hero peers
from behind a curtain at the distant Monsalvat (1894;
Brussels, Musées Royaux). By this time Redon was nev-
ertheless the best-known artist working on Wagnerian
subjects. Redon was thinking about the meaning of the
Parsifal story by the summer of 1891, albeit in somewhat
negative terms. Writing to a friend, Redon stated that,
despite what moralists may say, older men (Redon was
fifty-one) regret the unfulfilled desires of their youth.
Referring no doubt to the hero’s encounter with the
Flower Maidens and Kundry, Redon affirmed: “Renun-
ciation, Parsifal to the contrary, leaves a malaise.”18
Redon began a lithograph showing Parsifal frontally
at bust length, which we may call Parsifal I. A line from a
crack in the lithographic stone at the level of the fig-
ure’s forehead caused Redon to reject the print after a
few proofs were printed; only three are known today.19
Not wishing to waste the stone, Redon inverted it and
depicted an aged druidess; the crack was hidden in the
druidess’ costume. While not a Wagnerian subject, the
Druidess suggests Redon’s casual attitude toward the
interchangeability of male and female figures, which can
sometimes be difficult to tell apart in his work.
Redon’s final version, Parsifal II, mentioned in the
livre de raison as completed by October 1891, has the
same composition as the rejected plate, yet the two
images differ considerably (Figure 3). Judging from
reproductions, the left side of the face in Parsifal I is in
deep shadow. The dark eyes, which seem to glance to
the viewer’s right, and the slightly asymmetrical mouth
give the figure an alert, active look. In the final version,
Parsifal’s broad face is smooth and more evenly lighted,
producing a decidedly youthful appearance. His large
eyes look forward yet are not focused, giving the figure
a detached, dreamy quality that heightens the impres-
sion of his innocence. The decoration of his helmet and
costume, as well as the detail of the architectural set-
ting behind him, have been much reduced, placing all
emphasis on the face. Although he already holds the
sacred spear that he wrested from Klingsor, Parsifal
hardly conveys the impression of a man of action. As
Figure 3. Odilon Redon, Parsifal II, lithograph, 1891;
photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Bequest of W. G. Russell Allen, 60.698
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A Publication of the Boston Wagner Society
in Jean Delville’s contemporaneous drawing, the figure
has an androgynous quality, and it makes an interest-
ing contrast to the similarly costumed but more force-
ful-looking Brünnhilde in Redon’s earlier lithograph.
Symbolist authors posited Parsifal’s androgyny as an
aspect of his sexual purity and spirituality. While Redon
maintained a certain distance from the Symbolist and
spiritualist currents of the time, he certainly was aware
of this interpretation of the hero’s personality, which has
some support in statements made by Wagner himself.20
Redon attempts to convey Parsifal’s spiritual essence,
rather than the events of the story; in this he is faithful
to Wagner’s opera, which relies more on the presentation
of the characters’ thoughts and emotions than on scenes
of action.
Redon’s last Wagnerian lithograph, Brünnhilde
(Götterdämmerung), appeared in 1894, at a time when
Redon was particularly interested in Wagner and his
operas (Figure 4). In his livre de raison Redon listed an
oil painting of Tannhäuser for 1894, around the time he
saw this opera for the first time, but the painting is lost.
Though the pose in the Brünnhilde is similar to that in
the earlier lithographic image, the draftsmanship is com-
pletely different. In contrast to the broad treatment of
the earlier Brünnhilde and Parsifal II, Redon here uses a
delicate linear style, particularly in the outline of the face
and the long, flowing hair. While the caplike treatment
of the head and the topknot somewhat recall the earlier
Brünnhilde’s helmet, the figure otherwise wears a loose-
fitting dress instead of armor. Standing before faintly
sketched tree trunks, Brünnhilde has only a flowering
branch at left as her attribute. Her face, with its down-
turned mouth, nevertheless shows the same determina-
tion as in the earlier figure: perhaps she is plotting her
revenge for Siegfried’s supposed betrayal.
Redon dated his emergence as an artist to the mid-
1870s, when he gave up trying to achieve “perfect”
drawing in an academic style; nevertheless, as this litho-
graph shows, he could draw very subtly when he wished
to do so. Some critics have seen the influence of English
Pre-Raphaelite art here or, in particular, the drawing
style of the brilliant English illustrator Aubrey Beard-
sley (1872–1898). Beardsley, unlike Redon, was a true
“Wagner fanatic” who saw every Wagnerian operatic
performance he could attend in London or Paris. Many of
Beardsley’s designs on Wagnerian themes were published
in British journals; Redon also could have seen them in
exhibitions during his trips to visit collectors in London.21
Beardsley’s drawings, though, have an erotic and satirical
emphasis that is foreign to Redon’s seriousness.
After 1900 Redon virtually ceased making litho-
graphs or charcoal drawings, concentrating instead
on brilliantly colorful works in pastels or oil. He even
attempted large decorative paintings: these were com-
missioned for specific locations and had to be executed
on site, since all of Redon’s earlier works had been
completed in his Paris apartment. Estimates of the dates
of Redon’s late works vary widely, since around 1905 he
stopped recording the completion and sale of his works
in the livre de raison.
Even the recorded works are difficult to identify, due
to repetitions of titles and/or subjects. Redon’s move to
color opened many new formal possibilities, and some of
the late works are in a loose technique that approaches
Figure 4. Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde (Götterdämmerung),
lithograph, 1894, www.metmuseum.org
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Wagneriana
abstraction. He continued, however, to produce works on
the same subjects as before.
As already noted, Redon was relatively casual about
the subject matter of his works, an attitude often regard-
ed today as “modern.” There is some evidence that
Redon himself was unsure of the subjects of some of
his works. In a list of 321 drawings in the livre de raison,
Redon describes the next to the last item as follows:
320 Drawing. Is this a Parsifal, a bard, a barbarous
and mystic knight?
Head covered and viewed from the front.
Since Redon is usually specific about the medium,
this does not seem to be a work that is known at the pres-
ent time. The discussion of the work near the end of the
list may mean not that it is recent, but merely that the
artist postponed discussing this ambiguous subject until
the end.
A large pastel and charcoal titled Parsifal retains
some of the strangeness of Redon’s earliest lithographs
(Figure 5). The work was long owned by members of
Redon’s family, who provided the identification of the
subject. The work currently occupies a central place
in the Redon room of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. It is
relatively restrained in color, in keeping with the somber
tone of Wagner’s opera: the figure wears a black robe
and cowl, over which a gold-colored cloak is fastened by
a strap across the chest. His face is young and bearded,
with large eyes, a dreamy expression, and tonsure-like
hair. He stands before a landscape of high mountains
and a gold and pink sky. Redon does not include a Parsi-
fal in the chronological list of his later works, though
there are various references to “Ohannès,” that is, Saint
John the Baptist in the desert. A listing for “Saint John”
might indicate another traditional subject, Saint John the
Evangelist on the island of Patmos writing his Gospel.
However, the usual iconographic attributes of these
saints (an animal-skin cloak or an open book) are not
present here. On the other hand, the figure does not hold
a spear as in the earlier Parsifal lithographs.
The monk- or pilgrimlike attire of the young figure
in the pastel fits with the general meaning of the Parsi-
fal story. In Wagner’s scenario an older Parsifal returns
to Monsalvat dressed in armor, which he removes, but
this detail is often omitted in productions. A hard-to-
read outcropping at the upper right in the image may
represent the knights’ castle. The loose handling of the
pigments suggests that this is a late work, and special-
ists have proposed various dates from 1890 onward, an
unusual disparity for a picture by a well-known mod-
ern artist. The museum dates the Parsifal on stylistic
grounds to 1912, a very late stage of Redon’s career. The
work could have been done in two phases: an early draw-
ing in charcoal (the black robe), whether of Parsifal or
some other subject, later reworked in pastel colors, a pro-
cedure Redon is known to have followed in other cases.
The strong emotions expressed in the opera are notably
absent in this representation, as in Redon’s lithographs
of this subject. Redon again seeks to capture the charac-
ter’s spirituality, now not as androgyny but through the
weary inwardness of Parsifal’s lowered gaze.
The latest, and perhaps the most unusual, of Redon’s
Wagnerian subjects is a pastel Brünnhilde, now in a
Figure 5. Odilon Redon, Parsifal, pastel and charcoal.
Photo: Hervé Lewandowski, Musée d’Orsay, Paris © RMN
– Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY
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A Publication of the Boston Wagner Society
private collection in New York (Figure 6). At twenty-
nine inches in width, it is the largest of Redon’s surviv-
ing Wagnerian pictures. The heroine, as in the charcoal
drawing of 1885, is again shown on her rearing horse,
in near profile to the right. Her right arm is held far
back to hurl the ring into the Rhine. If the composi-
tion is similar, the handling is radically different, with
large blocks of brilliant, undefined color, extremely loose
drawing, and flat, “conceptual” modeling, especially in
the body of the horse, which is mostly blue in color. A
large central core of orange indicates Siegfried’s burning
pyre, while the green and blue area at the right is associ-
ated with the Rhine. Grane’s rearing pose is explained
by a water snake that crawls beneath his hooves; Redon
has signed the work in this area.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the work is the
depiction of Brünnhilde in the nude. The idea of a nude
Brünnhilde is certainly unusual, if not unique. It prob-
ably does not derive from any of the medieval epics Wag-
ner consulted during his preparations for the Ring. Nor
was Redon particularly known as an artist who depicted
the nude; although painting from the nude model was
long the core of the academic art curriculum, Redon
had relatively little formal training. In 1904 Redon, then
aged sixty-four, hired his first nude model. In the follow-
ing years he became more interested in painting subjects
Figure 6. Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde on Horseback,
pastel, Collection of Dian Woodner, New York
calling for the female nude, and the Brünnhilde probably
dates from this period.
As in the earlier charcoal drawing, a detailed pen-
timento, above and to the left of Brünnhilde, is clearly
visible under strong lighting. Yellow flames burst from
the roof of a square castle tower representing Valhalla.
Before it, sketched in an orange-red similar to Brünnhil-
de’s hair, stands at least one armored figure with the
right arm raised, echoing Brünnhilde’s gesture. This is
perhaps the Valkyrie Waltraute, who had unsuccessfully
urged Brünnhilde to give up the ring.
Did Redon treat any Wagnerian subjects other than
Brünnhilde and Parsifal? A lost painting of Tannhäuser
has already been mentioned. At least one critic reports
an undocumented drawing of Isolde, though it is not
possible to locate this work at present.22 The large retro-
spective exhibition of Redon’s work at the Grand Palais,
Paris, in 2011 included a little-known oil painting from
a private collection depicting two figures in a boat at sea.
Beginning in the late 1890s, Redon recorded more than a
dozen works with the word “Barque” in the titles. Redon
seems to have recorded the Paris picture in May 1907:
“858 Boat (gray sail) four figures. Good small painting”.
The boats in such pictures carry one or two passengers,
usually women; this scene is atypical in that it depicts two
males. A large figure in a brilliant red cloak and hood sits
upright at the tiller, while a young figure in shirtsleeves
leans wearily against his shoulder. In the front of the ves-
sel, near the sail, are two ghostly forms, probably sailors.
The curator of the Paris exhibition suggests that the
picture depicts a scene from Tristan und Isolde.23 The
action is not shown on the stage but is described in a
monologue by Kurwenal. When the wounded Tristan on
awakening asks how he came from Cornwall to Brittany,
the loyal Kurwenal replies:No horse hither you rode:
a vessel bore you across.
But on my shoulders
down to the ship
you had to ride: they are broad,
they carried you to the shore.
Now you are at home once more;
your own the land,
your native land.
— Tristan und Isolde, III, i
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Wagneriana
In the painting the ship sails under a brilliant sky
before high cliffs that might be found in a number of
places along the coast of Britain or of Brittany, an area
where Redon regularly vacationed. The choice of a scene
not actually shown on the stage suggests that, if this is
indeed the subject, Redon was working from Wagner’s
printed libretto.
Although Redon claimed to have lost his early interest
in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, he continued to pro-
duce pictures based on Richard Wagner’s operas in the
late period of his career. Redon’s principal Wagnerian
subjects, Parsifal and Brünnhilde, exemplify different
aspects of psychological and moral life. For Redon Parsi-
fal, though a warrior, represents interiority and contem-
plation; as we know, Parsifal survives and eventually is
recognized as king at Monsalvat. Brünnhilde’s engage-
ment, in contrast, is exteriorized and uncompromising,
resulting in her death. Redon’s pictures of these subjects
demonstrate the strong interest Wagner’s operas contin-
ued to arouse in some of the leading visual artists of the
late nineteenth century.
NOTES1. Odilon Redon, review of Paris Salon of 1868, in [Bor-
deaux], La Gironde, 19 May, 9 June, 1 July, and 2 August 1868. See Odilon Redon, Critiques d’art, ed. Robert Cous-tet (Bordeaux: W. Blake, 1987), 43–66.
2. To Myself, trans. M. Jacob and J. L. Wasserman (New York: George Braziller, 1986), 19. The original French edition, A soi-même (Paris: José Corti, 1923), was published after the artist’s death. Though the title was Redon’s own, he did not finalize the contents and order of the work.
3. For Wagner’s influence on Parisian art in the 1860s, see Wagneriana 8, no. 4 (2011): 4–8, and Therese Dolan, Manet, Wagner, and the Musical Culture of Their Time (Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).
4. Lettres d’Odilon Redon, 1878–1916 (Paris and Brussels: Van Oest, 1923), 23, letter of 1895 to Maurice Fabre.
5. Ibid., 25 and 27, letters of 7 August 1895 to Andries Bonger and 4 August 1896 to Maurice Fabre.
6. Paris, Grand Palais, Odilon Redon: Prince de rêve, 1840–1916, ed. Rodolphe Rapetti, 2011. The catalogue of this major exhibition includes a transcription, “Le ‘Livre de raison’ d’Odilon Redon,” in CD-ROM format. A mas-sive catalogue raisonné of Redon’s paintings and draw-ings, published before the livre de raison became available, is arranged not in the usual chronological order but by subject matter: Alec Wildenstein et al., Odilon Redon: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint et dessiné (Paris: Wilden-stein Institute, 1992–98), 4 vols. A catalogue of Redon’s
lithographs and etchings had already been published in the artist’s lifetime in André Mellerio’s Odilon Redon (Paris: Secrétariat, 1913).
7. To Myself, 117–19.
8. Ibid., 130.
9. Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” Fortnightly Review, October 1877, and subsequent editions.
10. Michael Tymkiw, “Pictorially Transcribing Music: The Wagner Lithographs of Henri Fantin-Latour and Odilon Redon,” in Martha Ward and Ann Leonard, eds., Looking and Listening in 19th Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, 2007), 51–59, and Rachel Sloan, “The Condition of Music: Wagnerism and Printmaking in France and Britain,” Art History 32, no. 3 (June 2009): 545–77. See also Astrid Sebb, Peinture Wag-nérienne: Phasen und Aspekte der Wagner-Rezeption in der französischen bildenden Kunst zwischen 1861 und 1914 (Diss., University of Düsseldorf, 1999).
11. Recently this aspect of Redon’s career has been exhaus-tively analyzed in Dario Gamboni’s The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature (Chicago and London: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 2011).
12. Wagner’s influence on Symbolist literature and art, partic-ularly in France, is discussed in Grange Wooley’s Richard Wagner et le symbolisme français (Paris: Presses Universi-taires de France, 1931) and Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Die Symbolisten und Richard Wagner (1991).
13. Bern, Kornfeld und Klipstein, Moderne Kunst, sale, 10–12 June 1971, no. 1088, ill. Tafel 16.
14. Teodor de Wyzewa, “Peinture wagnérienne: Le Salon de 1885,” Revue wagnérienne 1, no. 5 (8 June 1885): 155, and “Notes sur la peinture wagnérienne et la Salon de 1886,” Revue wagnérienne 2, no. 4 (8 May 1886): 113.
15. Léo Rouanet, “La 8e Exposition des impressionistes,” [Perpignan] Le Passant (5 June 1886): 199–202, and Charles Morice, La Littérature de tout à l’heure (Paris: Per-rin, 1889), 281.
16. Lettres, 26, letter of October 1895 to Maurice Fabre.
17. Edouard Schuré, “Parsifal,” Revue wagnérienne 1, no. 10 (8 November 1885): 270–81. The journal subsequently published other articles about this opera, including one by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, later the husband of Wagner’s daughter Eva, as well as a sonnet by the poet Paul Verlaine.
18. To Myself, 14, letter of 25 August 1891 to Maurice Fabre.
19. See Tymkiw, “Pictorially Transcribing Music,” fig. 49; also Suzanne Folds McCullagh and Inge Christine Swenson, “A new ‘Parsifal’ by Odilon Redon,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 7, no. 4 (September–October 1976): 108.
20. Jean-Jacques Nattier, Wagner androgyne (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1990), 195–96, quoting Cosima Wagner, Tage-bücher (27 June 1880).
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A Publication of the Boston Wagner Society
21. On the possible mutual influences of Beardsley’s and Redon’s Wagnerian subjects, see Sloan, “Condition of Music,” esp. 565–67.
22. Suzy Levy, in Odilon Redon: Lettres inédites (Paris: Corti, 1987), 162, mentions a drawing of this subject in the col-lection of Redon’s patron Andries Bonger in Almen, The Netherlands. The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, which now houses most of this collection, has no record of a work of this kind. (Lucinda Timmermans, personal communi-cation, May 1, 2014.)
23. Paris, Grand Palais, 2011, cat. 116 (text by Rodolphe Rapetti).
— – Donald Rosenthal
Donald Rosenthal is a member of the Advisory Commit-tee of the Boston Wagner Society and associate editor of Wagneriana.
Upcoming Events
A Family Affair: Music of Liszt, von Bülow, and two Wagners
Concert
Maestro Jeffrey Brody uses his highly expressive keyboard skills to provide a sonic feast
Sunday, October 5, 3 p.m. Park Avenue Congregational Church 50 Paul Revere Road (intersection of Park Avenue) Arlington, MA 02476
Advance tickets: $15 for adults, $10 for seniors and students; $20 and $12 at the door
For tickets, call 781-643-8680 and leave a message
Reception to follow the concert
Artists and Wagner in 19th-Century France
Talk and presentation by
Dr. Marian Burleigh-MotleySunday, October 26, 2014, 2 p.m. Hunnemann Hall Public Library of Brookline 361 Washington Street Brookline, MA 02445
Free and open to all
Musical Revolution in the RingTalk and presentation by
Maestro Asher FischWith samples from Seattle’s Ring Cycle
Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 6 p.m.
Hunnemann Hall Public Library of Brookline 361 Washington Street Brookline, MA 02445
Free and open to all
– 15 –
Wagneriana
associate editor, and a member of its advisory board. This essay is about French
painter Odilon Redon’s paintings of Wagner’s operas, with beautiful color
illustrations. Third but not least, we have an entertaining segment from Saul
Lilienstein’s book Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: An Interpretive Journey.
We have a partial list of events planned for the 2014–15 season for you. In
October Dr. Marian Burleigh-Motley, lecturer at the Metropolitan Opera Guild
and until 2009 head of the Office of Academic Programs at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and lecturer in the Concerts and Lecture program, will give a
talk and presentation titled “Artists and Wagner in 19th-Century France: From
Delacroix to Cézanne.” In January, by popular request, Maestro Asher Fisch
returns to the Boston Wagner Society to present “Musical Revolution in the
Ring,” about the historic significance of the musical innovations Wagner made
as he pushed back the boundaries of the art form when he created the Ring. The
program will have samples from Seattle’s much-loved production of the Ring.
More events will be added on an ongoing basis.
— Dalia Geffen
Editor & Publisher: Dalia Geffen
Associate Editor: Donald
Rosenthal
Designer: Susan Robertson
Proofreader: Paul Geffen
Logo design: Sasha Geffen
Wagneriana is a publication
of the Boston Wagner Society,
copyright © The Boston Wagner
Society, Inc.
We welcome contributions to
Wagneriana. Please contact us at
617-323-6088.
Web:
www.bostonwagnersociety.org.
Address: Boston Wagner Society,
P.O. Box 320033, Boston, MA
02132-0001, U.S.A.
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learning the great variety of activities that keep our
society going? Come and discover for yourself all that
we do on a regular basis! The Boston Wagner Society
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In addition, we are looking for a web designer. If
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look forward to hearing from you!
– 16 –
