Wagner

Sitting here last evening looking at the blank screen of my computer and wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life - as one does when one gets to my age - I felt rather down in the mouth. I needed something to lift my spirits - I had already read On Line Daily Mail but that hadn't helped much, in fact it had done the opposite - when I suddenly had the bright idea to seek on Youtube a certain Wagnerian "number" with the title "Siegfried's Burial March". Now you wouldn't think that that piece of music from "The Ring" would do anything but make my depression even greater than it was. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong again. Try it for yourself - the Klaus Tennstedt's version with The London Philharmonic Orchestra. It is absolutely thrilling, moving and it lifts the spirits as no other work can do. For me at least.
But what can I say about the work better than Thomas Mann in his essay "The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner".
"The overpowering accents of the music that accompanies Siegfried's funeral cortege no longer tell of the woodland boy who set out to learn the meaning of fear; they speak to our emotions of what is really passing behind the lowering veils of mist: it is the sun-hero himself who lies on the bier, slain by the pallid forces of darkness - and there are hints in the text to support what we feel in the music: "A wild boar's fury", it says, and : "Behold the cursed boar," says Gunther, pointing to Hagen, "who slew this noble flesh." The words take us back at a stroke to the very earliest picture-dreams of mankind. Tammuz and Adonis, slain by the boar, Osiris and Dionysus, torn asunder to come again as the Crucified One, whose flank must be ripped open by a Roman spear in order that that the world might know Him - all things that ever were and ever shall be, the whole world of beauty sacrificed and murdered by the wintry wrath, all is contained within this single glimpse of myth."