Some renderings give you a sense of
solidity and straightforward movement; others of the elaborate and
various life which informs this so solid structure. Here one got the
complete thing, completely rendered.
I could not say the same of the rendering of the overture to "Tristan."
Here the notes, all that was so to speak merely musical in the music,
were given their just expression; but the something more, the vast heave
and throb of the music, was not there. It was "classical" rendering of
what is certainly not "classical" music. Hear that overture as Richter
gives it, and you will realise just where the Meiningen orchestra is
lacking. It has the kind of energy which is required to render
Beethoven's multitudinous energy, or the energy which can be heavy and
cloudy in Brahms, or like overpowering light in Bach, or, in Wagner
himself, an energy which works within known limits, as in the overture
to the "Meistersinger." But that wholly new, and somewhat feverish,
overwhelming quality which we find in the music of "Tristan" meets with
something less than the due response. It is a quality which people used
to say was not musical at all, a quality which does not appeal certainly
to the musical sense alone: for the rendering of that we must go to
Richter.
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