Post by darkehmen on Mar 8, 2008 2:51:45 GMT 1
I was happy to learn, from K620, that DG will shortly be releasing the Sawallisch film of Der fliegende Holländer. It will easily be the best Holländer on the market right now (not that it has any real competition), but I still deeply rue the fact that Karajan's 1982 production was never filmed. It's as significant a missed opportunity as is his incomplete Ring film cycle.
My sense of loss was further compounded when I came across the following passage in Richard Osborne's biography of Karajan, describing said production:
"During rehearsals, [Karajan] reminisced...about productions he had seen in the past. Several had dispensed with the sea entirely, despite the fact that it is one of the work's central images. (In the opening sea, Wagner directs that the sea should occupy most of the stage.) Another production was played on so small a stage...that when the Steersman raised his telescope to spy on the Dutchman, he only narrowly missed hitting the Dutchman in the eye.
In Karajan's production the sea was there all right. It was there in the Overture -- terrifying and cold, Wagner's orchestra, as Karajan imagined it, exposing the Salzburg audience to a form of musical hypothermia. And it was there, as Wagner demands, on stage, rocking and billowing in its sheltered cove. Daland's boat and the menacing hull of the Dutchman's ship were grandly, broodingly realised by Karajan and Schneider-Siemssen: the docking, the dousing of the sails, the paying out of the anchor all judged to a nicety after hours of patient rehearsal. Nor were the rehearsals arranged simply because Karajan, the professional sailor, wanted things right. It went deeper than that. Wagner, Karajan averred, knew precisely what he wanted: the flux of the sea, which carries with it ideas of death and dissolution, pitted against the reassuring solidity of the land (the anchor's fall, in Karajan's production, conjuring a startling sonority in its own right) and the domestic "certainties" that lie beyond.
Ach! Now that's the Holländer I've been waiting my entire life to see. How extraordinary that Karajan, my favourite conductor anyway, would have been the one to realize it so perfectly -- just as I've always imagined it.
I can't understand how any musical director could consider their own half-baked modernist ideas superior to the grand conception described above. It shows, once again, that the greatness of Karajan's productions was due to one overarching factor -- his respect, his humility, before the wishes of the composer.
Incidentally, although it's considered the definitive English-language biography, I have very mixed feelings about Richard Osborne's book about Karajan. The research is impeccable, but the tone is so very, very...downbeat. It's actually a rather depressing book to read. I feel about it much the same way that I feel about the various Karajan biography-films that have been made to date -- unsatisfied.
I think the reason why there has not as yet been a great Beethoven film is the same reason why there has not yet been a great Karajan film -- these are by nature heroic subjects, and we live in a vehemently, reflexively anti-heroic age. Only a heroic approach (which does not mean a hagiography) will ever do these two musicians justice.
My sense of loss was further compounded when I came across the following passage in Richard Osborne's biography of Karajan, describing said production:
"During rehearsals, [Karajan] reminisced...about productions he had seen in the past. Several had dispensed with the sea entirely, despite the fact that it is one of the work's central images. (In the opening sea, Wagner directs that the sea should occupy most of the stage.) Another production was played on so small a stage...that when the Steersman raised his telescope to spy on the Dutchman, he only narrowly missed hitting the Dutchman in the eye.
In Karajan's production the sea was there all right. It was there in the Overture -- terrifying and cold, Wagner's orchestra, as Karajan imagined it, exposing the Salzburg audience to a form of musical hypothermia. And it was there, as Wagner demands, on stage, rocking and billowing in its sheltered cove. Daland's boat and the menacing hull of the Dutchman's ship were grandly, broodingly realised by Karajan and Schneider-Siemssen: the docking, the dousing of the sails, the paying out of the anchor all judged to a nicety after hours of patient rehearsal. Nor were the rehearsals arranged simply because Karajan, the professional sailor, wanted things right. It went deeper than that. Wagner, Karajan averred, knew precisely what he wanted: the flux of the sea, which carries with it ideas of death and dissolution, pitted against the reassuring solidity of the land (the anchor's fall, in Karajan's production, conjuring a startling sonority in its own right) and the domestic "certainties" that lie beyond.
Ach! Now that's the Holländer I've been waiting my entire life to see. How extraordinary that Karajan, my favourite conductor anyway, would have been the one to realize it so perfectly -- just as I've always imagined it.
I can't understand how any musical director could consider their own half-baked modernist ideas superior to the grand conception described above. It shows, once again, that the greatness of Karajan's productions was due to one overarching factor -- his respect, his humility, before the wishes of the composer.
Incidentally, although it's considered the definitive English-language biography, I have very mixed feelings about Richard Osborne's book about Karajan. The research is impeccable, but the tone is so very, very...downbeat. It's actually a rather depressing book to read. I feel about it much the same way that I feel about the various Karajan biography-films that have been made to date -- unsatisfied.
I think the reason why there has not as yet been a great Beethoven film is the same reason why there has not yet been a great Karajan film -- these are by nature heroic subjects, and we live in a vehemently, reflexively anti-heroic age. Only a heroic approach (which does not mean a hagiography) will ever do these two musicians justice.
