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At the Sainsbury Centre

Anne Wagner: Elisabeth Frink, 21 February 2019

... grâce. It’s a gesture, Frink said, that she owed to the final moments of Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, where Richard is viciously stabbed by a swarm of Lancastrian soldiers. He falls, then writhes and jerks in painful spasms, each marked in William Walton’s score by a dissonant chord. Then he collapses, his sword ...

In Cardiff

Anne Wagner: David Nash, 15 August 2019

... approach. Jackson Pollock’s drips are process, as are Lynda Benglis’s polyurethane pours. Richard Long’s walks are process, and Richard Serra’s lead props. Process, in other words, emphasises the how of making as the work’s content, rather than the why. Nash stands out for his sheer commitment to process as an ...

Intelligence in a Cymbal

Ian Pace: Hugo Wolf’s Songs, 16 February 2023

The Complete Songs of Hugo Wolf: Life, Letters, Lieder 
by Richard Stokes.
Faber, 602 pp., £30, September 2021, 978 0 571 36069 7
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... place in concert programmes. Of later Lieder composers, Mahler is admired for his symphonies and Richard Strauss for his symphonic poems and operas.Wolf composed around three hundred Lieder, together with mostly minor orchestral works, the most significant being the Italienische Serenade (1892), several worthy choral works, and the opera Der Corregidor ...

What Wotan Wants

Jerry Fodor, 5 August 2004

Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s ‘Ring’ 
by Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht.
Oxford, 241 pp., £14.99, April 2004, 0 19 517359 7
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... Wagner’s operas in general, and the Ring cycle in particular, have been goading the criticising classes into print for a century and a half, with still no end in sight, but the sacrifice of all those trees has produced very little in the way of a critical consensus; not even on such basic matters as what the Ring is about ...

Theirs and No One Else’s

Nicholas Spice: Conductors’ Music, 16 March 2023

Tár 
directed by Todd Field.
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Richard Wagner’s Essays on Conducting: A New Translation with Critical Commentary 
by Chris Walton.
Rochester, 306 pp., £26.99, February 2021, 978 1 64825 012 5
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In Good Hands: The Making of a Modern Conductor 
by Alice Farnham.
Faber, 298 pp., £16.99, January, 978 0 571 37050 4
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... Adorno​ said of Wagner that he wrote ‘conductors’ music’. He meant this as a put-down, but most good orchestral music written between 1800 and 1920 was conductors’ music, grand in conception, intensely expressive, declamatory, scored for a large orchestra to be performed in imposing concert halls for a mass audience – music which, to be fully effective and to have maximum impact, required a co-ordinating mastermind to run the show ...

At Tate Britain

Anne Wagner: Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964-79, 14 July 2016

... more than others. It offers a rich array of choice, including such poetic and elusive pieces as Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking (1967); Victor Burgin’s subtly sensory All Criteria, first published in 1970 in a Camden Art Centre exhibition catalogue for a show called Idea Structures; and Stephen Willats’s astonishingly dynamic graphite anti-grid ...

Tomorrow is here again

Anne Wagner: The First Pop Age, 11 October 2012

The First Pop Age 
by Hal Foster.
Princeton, 338 pp., £20.95, October 2011, 978 0 691 15138 0
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... the names that stand out in Pop painting – among them not only Lichtenstein and Warhol, but also Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha, each the subject of one of Foster’s five chapters – were collectors, even connoisseurs, of the omnipresent image: they assembled examples of its endlessly mundane oddity in files and scrapbooks; they deployed ...

The Faster the Better

Paul Driver: Anatomising Mendelssohn, 3 February 2005

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music 
by Larry Todd.
Oxford, 683 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 19 511043 9
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... fluid’. Mendelssohn had to hear something only once to be able to play it on the piano, as Wagner found when he played the Venusberg theme from his opera-in-progress, Tannhäuser. When Mendelssohn asked what it was, Wagner peevishly replied: ‘Do you think I am going to reveal it to you?’ So Mendelssohn simply ...

Is Michael Neve paranoid?

Michael Neve, 2 June 1983

... dreaming (usually) of being something else. If degenerationist psychiatry had not been given Richard Wagner, Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Friedrich Nietzsche, it would have invented them – would have written and composed Parsifal. This act of recognition is best seen in the compilations of paranoid cases carried out by that terminal figure of one ...

Impatience

J.P. Stern, 30 August 1990

Unmodern Observations 
by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Herbert Golder, Gary Brown and William Arrowsmith.
Yale, 402 pp., £30, February 1990, 0 300 04311 2
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The Importance of Nietzsche 
by Erich Heller.
Chicago, 200 pp., £23.95, February 1989, 0 226 32637 3
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... le style, c’ est l’ homme même Nietzsche is following in the footsteps of Schopenhauer and of Wagner’s polemic against the conductor Paul Devrient (the topic of the essay itself was suggested to Nietzsche by Cosima Wagner). True, Strauss’s book is vulgar and boring, and Professor Herbert Golder says so more than ...

They would have laughed

Ferdinand Mount: The Massacre at Amritsar, 4 April 2019

Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre 
by Kim A. Wagner.
Yale, 325 pp., £20, February 2019, 978 0 300 20035 5
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... has been told many times, but rarely with such narrative vigour and moral passion as by Kim Wagner in this centenary account. He quotes at length from Dyer’s own evidence to the commission of inquiry led by Lord Hunter, who had been solicitor general for Scotland in the Asquith government. Again and again, Dyer convicts himself out of his own ...

Going Against

Frank Kermode: Is There a Late Style?, 5 October 2006

On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain 
by Edward Said.
Bloomsbury, 176 pp., £16.99, April 2006, 9780747583653
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Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work 
edited by Karen Painter and Thomas Crow.
Getty, 235 pp., $40, August 2006, 0 89236 813 6
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... great achievements crowned a lifetime of ‘aesthetic endeavour’ – Rembrandt, Matisse, Bach, Wagner and Verdi, for instance. Said prefers to contemplate instances of lateness that speak less of achievement than of ‘intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction . . . nonharmonious, nonserene tension and, above all, a sort of deliberately ...

Fabian Figaro

Michael Holroyd, 3 December 1981

Shaw’s Music. Vol. I: 1876-1890 
edited by Dan Laurence.
Bodley Head, 957 pp., £15, June 1981, 0 370 30247 8
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Shaw’s Music. Vol. II: 1890-1893 
by Dan Laurence.
Bodley Head, 985 pp., £15, June 1981, 0 370 30249 4
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Shaw’s Music. Vol. III: 1893-1950 
by Dan Laurence.
Bodley Head, 910 pp., £15, June 1981, 0 370 30248 6
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Conducted Tour 
by Bernard Levin.
Cape, 240 pp., £7.50, November 1981, 0 224 01896 5
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... It constantly refreshes the listener with reminiscences of familiar masters.’ A little later, Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser holds the audience seated ‘despite the loss of the express at 5.15 entailed by waiting’. Gradually, over almost a year on the Hornet, these instances of Shavian wit and spirit increase. ‘Some glees were contributed by the ...

Princes, Counts and Racists

David Blackbourn: Weimar, 19 May 2016

Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present 
by Michael Kater.
Yale, 463 pp., £25, August 2014, 978 0 300 17056 6
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... into the Altenburg Palace on the outskirts of town; Thackeray, George Eliot, Smetana, Berlioz and Wagner all visited. Liszt engaged better musicians, improved the repertory, old and new, and included his own compositions. He put Weimar back on the cultural map, but didn’t get the support he hoped for from the court. He tried hard to secure a permanent ...

In Hiding

Nicholas Spice, 30 December 1982

Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of the Early Years 1864-1898 
by Willi Schuh, translated by Mary Whitall.
Cambridge, 555 pp., £35, July 1982, 0 521 24104 9
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... of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to his imaginative powers. He would have cast the composer, not, I think, in his early years, but towards the end of his life: in 1940, perhaps, in late summer. The scene: Strauss’s tastefully furnished study in his ...

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