{"id":12139,"date":"2022-07-09T10:51:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-09T17:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=12139"},"modified":"2022-07-20T10:53:57","modified_gmt":"2022-07-20T17:53:57","slug":"the-original-heavy-metal-madman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2022\/07\/09\/the-original-heavy-metal-madman\/","title":{"rendered":"The Original Heavy Metal Madman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thecritic.co.uk\/a-madmans-guide-to-wagner\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>from The Critic<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A madman\u2019s guide to Wagner<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>You don\u2019t have to be crazy to enjoy Wagner, but it helps<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>by <a href=\"https:\/\/thecritic.co.uk\/author\/philip-hensher\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Philip Hensher<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Best Song Of Richard Wagner ||  Richard Wagne Top Hit Collection\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_D0LZCTGL94?feature=oembed\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The German composer Richard Wagner wrote seven operas in his mature style. I\u2019ve been going to see them in live performances for the last forty years or so \u2013 my very first was\u00a0<em>Die Walk\u00fcre\u00a0<\/em>at English National Opera in 1983, I think. I knew most of them quite well before that. The BBC, rather astonishingly now, had devoted ten weeks to showing the famous 1976 Bayreuth centenary\u00a0<em>Ring\u00a0<\/em>on TV, act by act; the summer before I went to university in 1983, I splashed out on what I still think is the greatest of all opera recordings, Carlos Kleiber\u2019s\u00a0<em>Tristan\u00a0<\/em>and played it into the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Still, there is no substitute for seeing the things live, in the theatre. Since then I\u2019ve seen all of them repeatedly, brilliantly performed and directed, and some really awful evenings, too. Once I saw&nbsp;<em>Siegfried&nbsp;<\/em>twice on two successive evenings, the first in Berlin and then (a friend phoned me while I was at Tegel airport with the offer of a ticket) at Covent Garden. (The Berlin dragon cost hundreds of thousands and reduced the audience to fits of laughter; the London one, in Richard Jones\u2019s inspiration, was a pumpkin on a stick, whose destruction proved unexpectedly horrible).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m quite a hopeless Wagnerian. I\u2019m never very good at remembering the names of singers I\u2019ve seen, for instance. I\u2019ve seen so many ridiculous whims of producers that I\u2019m more or less immune to them, though a previous ENO\u00a0<em>G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung<\/em>\u00a0did rouse me to proper booing. Booing is traditionally part of Wagnerian appreciation \u2013 the museum at Bayreuth fondly displays the whistle a patron brought to express his rage at the 1976\u00a0<em>Ring<\/em>, engraved with the date of us. I very much enjoyed, a few years ago, when in Leipzig the truly ancient Siegfried was evidently so shellshocked by his reception at the end of the first act that he took his second-act bow pushing the charming 20-something singer of the Woodbird in front of him, like a human shield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/thecritic.co.uk\/a-madmans-guide-to-wagner\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">click to continue reading at The Critic<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The Critic A madman\u2019s guide to Wagner You don\u2019t have to be crazy to enjoy Wagner, but it helps by Philip Hensher The German composer Richard Wagner wrote seven operas in his mature style. I\u2019ve been going to see them in live performances for the last forty years or so \u2013 my very first [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}