Alex Ross for Wagner During NYC's Unofficial Wagner Month

(Above: photo from Robert Lepage's new Wagner Das Rheingold, opening tomorrow night at The Met. Photo credit Metropolitan Opera and Ken Howard) 

One of our personal heroes (who happens to be the music critic for The New Yorker), Alex Ross, makes his New York Times op-ed debut with an argument for Wagner, timely for tomorrow's Metropolitan Opera opening night with Wagner's Das Rheingold. 

Comments

[laddie]

David Byrne will is considered a "deal, old guy" by many. All his ideas were done long before he did them, in OPERA!

[Dakota]

Yawn. What's so great about Wagner anyway? He was the Howard Shore of his era.

[Zurriuss]

Just stared at decorations. Amazing!

[Constantine A. Papas]

To me, Wagner's Ring is not opera but heavy metal classical symphonic music for orchestra with some extra instuments: human voices! On the other hand, Wagner's concept replicates the classical Greek theater: the plays were subsidized and free to the public not only for entertainment but also for education.

[vale]

They've got to try to drum up some interest somewhere to get the people in...
Orders are orders and some people blindly obey.
Need I say more?

[GCComposer]

To the extent Alex Ross is right about the Ring crowd, I think we're dealing with the exception that makes the rule. I'd say that many more people know of, and thus are interested in, the Ring Cycle because it is a spectacle. The thing is that the fact that it is such a spectacle helps the people translate something so abstract as Wagner's music into something they can understand. And since more people can relate to it, more people like it, and people who normally wouldn't attend do. This whole topic is actually quite apropos, as I've just started a discussion on how we relate to abstract art on my own blog.

In any case, I don't mean to disparage Wager or the Ring Cycle. Rather I mean to question Ross' point that classical music is not elitist. I don't think a motley crowd for one of the world's best know (and known as a spectacle) works, should really lead us to conclude that classical music's wider audience is all that diverse.

However, the fact that people can relate to it should give us hope that we can help them relate to other classical music, thus broadening the audience more generally.

Grant Charles Chaput
KillingClassicalMusic.com

[furst]

Its been sold out except for the obscenely overpriced premiere. Seems the advertising, in various forms - posted all over NYC, might be superfluous for this purpose.