CAPÍTULO TERCERO. PROCEDIMIENTOS DE ACUERDO ABREVIADO Y

For reasons of approachability (amongst others) there is a great tradition of ‘potted’ or reduced Ring cycles in recordings, and increasingly for audiences of live events, as I will go on to outline. But for the amateur musician, seeking practical involvement, the availability of arranged Ring repertoire is sparser. Wagner features heavily in the array of nineteenth-century reductions for organ, but music from The Ring is not prominent. Similarly, choral arrangements from The Ring are not readily available (Wagner makes use of a traditional opera chorus only in the final work of the cycle, Götterdämmerung) although other Wagner choruses can be found in sheet music form.578 Social historian Dave Russell describes the adoption of Wagner into the amateur choral repertoire as a part of the developing movement of choral societies, and the secularisation of the repertoire. He describes the problem, during the nineteenth century, of a lingering English Protestant aesthetic that was ‘stern’ and that associated opera negatively with

577 _{Listings for the 2012 ROH full Ring cycle ranged from £44 (distant, restricted view and standing) to} £1000. Intermezzo, ‘Royal Opera House prices Hit New High for Ring Cycle’, Intermezzo, 16 September 2011, <http://intermezzo.typepad.com/intermezzo/2011/09/roh-ring-cycle-prices-revealed.html>. In response to the demands of current economic climate, for 2012 ROH lowered or froze prices for many productions, but in order to facilitate this, ticket prices for some productions were higher than usual and audiences were warned that ‘there will be an increase in seat prices for a few productions we know there will be a huge demand for tickets for such as The Ring’. Chris Shipman, ‘Ticket Pricing for the 2012-13 Season’, ROH: News, 21 March 2012, <http://www.roh.org.uk/news/ticket-pricing-for-the-201213- season>. Also within the English-speaking world, and the amongst the highest profile houses, the Metropolitan Opera, New York charged $300 to $2,650 for 2013 full Ring cycle tickets. Metropolitan Opera, ‘Met Opera Ring Cycles’, Metropolitan Opera (2012)

<http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/subscriptions/new/reserve.aspx?PackageID=9988>. ‘Ring leaders’ can pay up to $16,000 for special company access, dinners and programme billing. Metropolitan Opera, ‘Become a Ring leader’, Metropolitan Opera (2012)

<http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/season/ringleaders.aspx> [all pages accessed 11 October 2012].

578 _{Arrangements of the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Tannhäuser, the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin, the} Sailors’ Chorus and the Spinning Chorus from Der Fliegender Holländer, ‘Choral de Sachs’ from Die Meistersinger, ‘Roman War Song’ from Rienzi are listed at ‘Wagner Choral’, musicroom.com [n.d.] <http://www.musicroom.com/search/find.aspx?searchtext=wagner+choral&lx_pagenumber=1> [accessed 5 July 2012].

‘Catholicism, the theatre and the passions’. But despite this, ‘by 1900, pieces of Lohengrin [and] Tannhäuser […] had been attempted and been well-received’.579

The brass band was a similarly accessible form of music-making of that time in industrial England. According to Russell, ‘by the 1890s Wagner selections based almost exclusively on the early operas Rienzi, Flying Dutchman, and Tannhäuser were extremely common in the concert repertory’.580

It is unsurprising that Wagner’s music, with its heavily orchestrated brass sections, is often transcribed for brass ensemble. Today there are such arrangements available of excerpts from The Ring that also match broadly the repertoire available for organ: most prominent are ‘Siegfried’s Funeral March’ (Götterdämmerung), ‘The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla’ (Das Rheingold), and the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ (Die

Walküre).581

For the pianist, Liszt’s admiration for Wagner led him to ‘transcribe’ various selections from Wagner’s operatic works. The first to be so arranged was the Tannhäuser Overture, in 1849.582 The only part of The Ring that Liszt treated, he labelled a ‘transcription’ of the

‘Valhalla’ music from the final scene of Das Rheingold, although as Charles Suttoni highlights, this is not a transcription of any one passage, and is rather ‘a kind of paraphrase or evocation that draws freely on the scene’s musical motives’.583

Liszt’s aesthetic, then, contrasts sharply with claims made on behalf of certain orchestral Ring arrangements (to be discussed) that they might be as faithful to the original material as possible, and that their musical content is ‘all Wagner’s’.584

A few select examples have been mentioned here. On specialist websites, many and various arrangements for bands and choirs afford the amateur musician the opportunity to perform Wagner’s music. The extraction of orchestral overtures encourages concert-hall performances, and virtuosic piano transcriptions and organ reductions facilitate the reception of Wagner’s work as chamber music. Historically, selections, such as those from Parsifal, have

579 _{Dave Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840-1914: A social history (Manchester: Manchester} University Press, 1987), p.216.

580

Ibid., p.187.

581 _{Published examples include: Richard Wagner, Funeral March from ‘Götterdammerung’ (Paris:} Alphonse Leduc Ensemble-Brass [n.d.]); Wagner, arr. Howard Snell, Entry of the Gods into Valhalla (UK: Rakeway Music Catalogue [n.d.]); Wagner, arr. Adrian Drover, Ride of the Valkyries (Scotland: Adios [n.d.]). Detailed discussion of how Wagner reception has manifested itself in published

arrangements over the years is beyond the scope of this study, but for a historical perspective on Wagner arrangements, the reader can access exemplars held in UK research library collections via

<www.copac.ac.uk>.

582 _{Charles Suttoni, ‘Introduction to the Dover Edition’, in Franz Liszt, Complete Piano Transcriptions} from Wagner’s Operas (NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1981), pp.vii-x (pp.viii-vix).

583 _{Ibid., pp.ix-x.} 584

‘Wagner- Ring Without Words: Product description’, Amazon [n.d.] <http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wagner-Ring-Without-Words-Blu-

even entered the music hall.585 Yet apart from those few examples mentioned, excerpts from The Ring do not feature heavily in these repertoire sets. One might conclude that, with the Ring cycle, Wagner was so successful in his pursuit of organic ‘unending melody’ (described by Deathridge and Dahlhaus as ‘avoiding bridges, caesuras and cadences’) that extractions without abrupt musical severance are difficult, and thus seldom attempted.586