Tea at Trianon: Wagner in Venice

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Wagner in Venice

R. J. Stove tells of the influence Venice had on Wagner, saying:

Venice's own beauty and mystery jolted Wagner into genuine reportage, so different from the turbid philosophising that elsewhere dominated his prose. Late in life he casually admitted to Saint-Saëns - first a devotee, afterwards a passionate opponent - that when he re-read his early theoretical writings: "I find I no longer understand them."

At first Wagner's Venetian residence had severely practical reasons. Harassed by Saxony's government, after the abortive Dresden uprising into which he had thrown himself with characteristically rampageous enthusiasm, he needed a bolt-hole beyond the writ of the policeman, the debt collector, or the jealous husband (this last category having made life awkward in Zürich).

Yet La Serenissima grew on him, as it grows eventually on everyone. While he only stayed there a year before returning to Paris in 1859 - there to superintend Tannhäuser's French premiere - he retained fond memories of existence among the canals. So when, in 1882 after Parsifal's completion, angina pectoris forced the 69-year-old Wagner to a comparatively tranquil refuge, there could only be one choice: Venice it was.

"Riccardo Wagner" (for thus journalists Italianized his name) became something of a local mascot, in a city all too conscious that creative musical prestige had largely abandoned it since Vivaldi and Albinoni had disappeared from the scene more than a century earlier.