Wagner, not Robert but much more complicated

Since I am a huge fan of Natalie Wood, you might think that I would write about Robert Wagner, her famous husband who is thought to be involved in the drowning of this incredibly beautiful actress. I was totally, madly in love with Natalie Wood in my teenage years, watching her in WestSide Story. I didn't care whether someone else dubbed her voice for her singing, I was just blindly in love. She was the symbol of perfection, every inch of her. I was in fact quite a fan of Robert Wagner too during his peak of fame, when you couldn't turn on the TV without seeing him in either It Takes a Thief, The Switch or Hart to Hart. But I was, obviously, pretty upset when things turned ugly with his involvement in the death of the fallen angel. ............................................................................................................................................... No, no, it's Richard I wanna talk about. This year (2013) is the 200th anniversary of the birth of this great composer. Great, sure, but also a megalomaniac anti-Semitic, extreme right-wing personality (how could one become a great artist and extremely right-winged at the same time?). Richard W. wrote an anonymous essay, Das Judentum in der Musik, arguing that Jews were ineligible to practise art. He later had the tract reissued under his own name. He abused Jews routinely, according to the diaries of his second wife, Cosima (who was the daughter of Franz Liszt), and based the devious characters of Mime and Beckmesser, in part at least, on caricatures of his least favourite Jews. ............................................................................................................................................... Richard died when his son, Siegfried was only 13. Siegfried Wagner (who was therefore the grandson of Liszt, the most macho of all composers in history who'd slept with hundreds, if not thousands of women) was gay or at least bisexual. He became the lover of the English composer Clement Harris for the rest of their lives. He later married a woman, and continued the Wagner tradition of defending the extreme right wing in Germany. Siegfried invited Hitler to Bayreuth in October 1923 and, after the following month's failed Munich putsch, supplied him in jail with home comforts and, it is said, with the paper on which he wrote Mein Kampf. Bayreuth during the Third Reich became a national shrine. All these, in spite of his declaration : "Art reaches us through the heart, and God gave hearts to all human beings." Following in his father’s footsteps, Siegfried Wagner was also a composer, but his operas, although popular during his lifetime, never entered the standard repertoire. In 1896 Siegfried began conducting at the Bayreuth Festival and from 1906-1930 was the festival’s sole artistic director. In Siegfried’s controversial 1930 staging of his father’s opera Tannhäuser, he boldly embellished several scenes with shirtless male teenagers. ............................................................................................................................................... Writing my Wagner's Restless Nights, commissioned by the Indonesia Opera Society to be premiered next September by the French pianist Frederic D'Oria-Nicolas and the Ananda Sukarlan Orchestra forced me to study his way of composing the motifs of Tannhauser and Ride of the Valkyries. The last time I did it with his music was during my student days in the conservatory in Den Haag, where I became passionately obsessed with his music for Tristan und Isolde. In this new piece of mine I did a rather complex polyphony of marrying both themes from the Ride and Tannhauser prelude. I realized then how he was so ahead of his time especially in his orchestrating methods, combining instruments which no man has done before, such as that heavenly Tannhauser prelude. I always thought that many of Wagner's music is "over-orchestrated", but studying these two works certainly changed my idea about his music. That's the manifestation of Walt Whitman's sayings: Simplicity is the glory of expression. It is simple, but Wagner used harmonies not used before. Ideas can only be developed fully when it is simple. It is the development which can be sophisticated. Sophisticated and simple can be at the same time. Anyway, writing this piece also made me to rethink Wagner's music since I totally made a new orchestration, which include a prominent piano part. The piano has never been Wagner's beloved instrument, so I have to be careful to make a kinda mutation from Wagner's musical seed, not to make a grotesque Frankenstein-ish monster out of it. Things can go terribly wrong!