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Host 2 (Tom Holland)
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- [02:36]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Hi everybody.
- [02:36]
Host 1 (Dominic Sambrook)
Welcome to the Rest Is History and Happy New Year. And welcome back to the recording of the live show that Tom and I did at the Royal Albert hall in London on the 4th of May, 2025. Now, on Monday, you should have heard the first half of that show, which was the episode on the Russian composer Tchaikovsky. And in today's episode, we'll be broadcasting the second half of that show. And this is in one of the most influential, incendiary and controversial composers, indeed artists of any kind in world history. And the name of that man is Richard Wagner.
- [04:49]
Chorus or Performer
Ham, Sam. This is for heaven. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to.
- [08:08]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
The stage the hosts of the Rest.
- [08:10]
Chorus or Performer
Is History, Tom Holland and Dominic Sambrook.
- [08:23]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Thank you. Thank you very much. Welcome back, everybody. Tom. Amazing to see that some people are still here.
- [08:28]
Chorus or Performer
Few.
- [08:30]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
So that was, as many of you will know, the Ride of the Valkyries from the opera Di Valkyre, the Valkyrie, the divine shield maiden. And our divine shield maidens tonight were Christine Buras, Mari Wynn Williams, Ella De Jong, Rebecca Afonwee Jones, Katie Stevenson and Marta Fontenelles Simmons. And weren't they spectacular?
- [09:03]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
And Dominic. We ended part one with a banger, and we've begun part two with another absolute banger. One of the most interesting, instantly recognizable pieces of music ever written.
- [09:17]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Exactly. So if any of you are planning to strafe a Vietnamese village from a helicopter, this is the ideal accompaniment. As you'll know if you've seen the film Apocalypse now, it is of course, emblematic of the man who wrote it, the composer who is the subject of our second half, and that is Richard Wagner. And Tom, in the first half we talked about how Tchaikovsky was described by his governess as being as brittle as porcelain. And that is not a description that anyone has ever applied to Richard Wagner.
- [09:50]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
No, no, not at all, because Wagner, in all honesty, was a bit of a bruiser. This is a man who essentially bent the whole of the 19th century to his own purposes. And in fact, I would go so far as to say that he is the single most controversial composer in the entire history of music. Would you agree with that?
- [10:12]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
I would absolutely agree. I mean, remember that this is a man who wrote savagely anti Semitic essays, who was Adolf Hitler's favorite composer, and whose operas to this day have never been staged in the state of Israel.
- [10:24]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Yeah. And so it's not really surprising that there's a slight whiff of sulfur about Wagner's public reputation.
- [10:32]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
I think the word we use, Tom, is pungent.
- [10:34]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Yes, as you said, pungent. And so I think the question is, does his antisemitism, which is absolutely gross and palpable, it is absolutely out there. Does it taint his music? Are his operas in some sense a pre figuring of Nazism? And this is an argument that has been raging among Wagner scholars since really the late 60s. And it's obviously a very important, a very heated debate, and we will be coming to it in due course. But it's absolutely not the only reason why Wagner matters and why he is a completely worthy theme for a history podcast, let alone a music podcast. And I think the reason why Wagner casts such a kind of outsized shadow over the 20s 20th century is because he's such a massive, massive influence on the 19th century. And in fact, I think it's hard to think of any composer, perhaps any creative artist whose influence on the 19th century, the cultural influence, was more titanic than Wagner's.
- [11:46]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Right, I agree. So some of you may have come a year ago when we did Mozart and Beethoven. Now Beethoven was one of was Wagner's favorite composer, wasn't it? He's a great hero. And Beethoven had started a process that Wagner carried to its extreme, which is to take music out of the court, out of the palace, and to take it to the public, to take it into the heart of public life, where.
- [12:07]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
It still is to this day. So here we are in the Royal Albert hall. But this is, you know, this is not a palace, this is a kind of public theater. And Wagner is really the midwife of kind of institutions like this, partly because he was such a genius, partly because his music was so influential, but also, and I think just as significantly because Wagner never for a moment doubts that he is a genius. Dominic, I mean, we have experience of colossal egotism, don't we?
- [12:41]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
We do from our producers.
- [12:45]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
But Varga, Wagner's egotism is off the scale. But the thing is that not only, I mean, unlike us, not only is Wagner's egotism justified, but it enables him to bulldoze his way through obstructions that would absolutely have halted a less self confident and less assertive composer. So that by the end of his life, it's not Wagner who is paying court to royalty, but the other way around, it is kings and emperors who are paying court to Wagner.
- [13:18]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Yeah. And Tom, I think there's also another reason why Wagner is such an extraordinary subject for an event like this. If you compare him with Tchaikovsky or indeed with Mozart and Beethoven or with Johann Sebastian Bach or most composers that you choose to mention, there are all sorts of flamboyant biographical details in Wagner's life that have no equivalent in the lives of other composers and often kind of unexpected details.
- [13:41]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
So to look at one of them, Wagner, compared to every other composer who is kind of his equal, is an unbelievably late developer. So he is, he's born in Leipzig in Saxony in 1813.
- [13:56]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
So what's that about 25, 30 years before Tchaikovsky?
- [13:59]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Yep. And it's just a few months after Napoleon has begun his retreat from Moscow. So the Napoleonic wars are raging all around Wagner when he's born and baby Richard, which is very hard to think of Wagner as baby Richard, but he was at one point. He is the last of nine children fathered by a man who then promptly dies in a very Wagnerian fashion. And his Mother then marries again. And Wagner, later in life, seems to have wondered whether his stepfather had actually been his father. And as we will see, this theme of people with kind of uncertain paternity is a theme that runs throughout Wagner's operas.
- [14:38]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
And something really important about this stepfather, though, Tom. So his stepfather was not a musical man, but he was a man of the theatre, and that was to really shape Richard Wagner's life.
- [14:46]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Yes, and lots of Wagner's elder brothers were also very involved in the theatre. And I think because of this kind of familial influence Wagner grows up in as a boy and then a young man who is at least as obsessed by the theater as he is by music. I mean, he's very proficient at music, he's very interested in it, but he's not an absolute maestro in the way that Mozart is from the kind of, well, the age of three months or whatever. And so you may wonder, this being so, why does Wagner aspire to become a composer? Composer? And I think the answer essentially is because he wants to set plays to music.
- [15:27]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Right. And that's why Wagner is drawn to opera above all, isn't it? Because when we think of Wagner, we don't think of any other musical form really, but his operas.
- [15:35]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Yeah, I mean, that's essentially pretty much exclusively what he writes. And his interest in opera is not just as a composer. He wants to write the librettos, he wants to design the theatre, he essentially wants to. To control every last detail of the production.
- [15:50]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
But I guess the problem for somebody like that is gargantuan ambitions. But does he have gargantuan means and opportunities?
- [15:56]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Well, in his teens, in his 20s, and then going into his 30s. No, he absolutely doesn't, because he's from a very humble background, relatively speaking. And all the powers of patronage in Germany at this point still lie overwhelmingly with courts. And Germany is a kind of patchwork of kingdoms and princedoms and archbishoprics and so on. And these are the people who are really effectively the only employers that a musician can look to. And so this is the course, the slightly humiliating course from Wagner's own perspective, that he has to follow as a young man. And so if we look at him in, let's take a year at random, 1848, when Wagner is 35, he's kind of done okay by the standards of most musicians. He's head of music at the Royal Court of Saxony in Dresden. But Wagner is pretty miserable. And he's miserable because he feels that his status as court musician is a humiliating one on Special musical occasions. He has to wear a blue coat with a kind of harp on the collar. And to Wagner this is like the livery of a servant. He despises the local theatre, he thinks it's absolutely hopeless. He wants to pull it down and build a new one. And he hates the musical tastes of his employer and of the locals because they are essentially interested in operettas. And this is not where Wagner is at all. Because what Wagner wants to do is write titanic operas about mythology, about men of destiny, about revolution.
- [17:36]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
When you mention revolution, Tom, and you claimed you'd chosen a year at random, and I think that was a lie, you are correct. So 1848, as some of you will know, is the year of revolution in Europe. And by May 1849, Tom, incredible scenes. The storm clouds of revolution are gathering above Dresden and Saxony and putting Wagner in their shadow.
- [18:01]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
They absolutely are, Dominic. And Wagner couldn't be happier about this. And it may surprise people who think of Wagner as being, well, you know, let's face it, right wing because actually that's unfair. He has certain right wing opinions, can't deny that. But in his essentials, he's a bit of an anarchist. In fact, I would go so far as to say a bit of a hippie. And we'll hopefully be justifying this in due course. And certainly when the threat of revolution comes to the court, he's very, very excited about it. And that may, as the revolutionary fervor spreads across Saxony, it absolutely catches Wagner up. And so he starts publishing inflammatory pamphlets to which he puts his own name, he starts distributing flyers around the barricades and at one point he shins his way up the tallest spire in Dresden to serve as a lookout, looking for the forces of reaction who are trying to snuff out the brave revolutionaries.
- [19:04]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Right? And this is a problem if you're working for the person who's running Saxony, right? Because as everybody knows, the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 get crushed. So Wagner has effectively been backing a losing horse.
- [19:17]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
He's been backing a losing horse and the winning horse is his ex employer, who he's been insulting in pamphlets and flyers. So he's clearly guilty of treason and the penalty for treason in Saxony is death. So Wagner is in terrible peril. He has to flee for his life and he only just gets away from Saxony. And adding to to the kind of the disastrous state that he finds himself in is the fact that he can't. There's no obvious place of sanctuary in the rest of Germany because everywhere in Germany has experienced these revolutions and now that they've been crushed, nobody wants to have anything to do with this failed revolutionary that Wagner has now become. So, essentially, across Germany, he has made himself Persona non grata.
- [20:06]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
So he ends up in Switzerland, which, for some absolutely unfathomable reason, he finds really boring. And I guess, you know, beggars can't be choosers. What can you say?
- [20:17]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Well, Dominic, I mean, you say beggars, and that is literally what Wagner is. Because it's not just that he's skint, he's massively in debt. He's a man who all his life loves the loves, splashing the cash. So he has no money, he has no patron, he has no theatre where he can put his operas on. And the next five years, he writes almost no music at all. And again, this is something that is unusual about Wagner. When you think of the great composers, it's hard to think of another composer of Wagner's stature who, for five years, in the middle of his life, just stops writing music. And you might think he. He's doing this because he's a bit depressed, he's a bit down, he's lost his self confidence. Not a bit of it. Wagner has lost nothing of his self confidence. And the five years following his escape from Dresden are absolutely not wasted. Even though he isn't writing music, because what he's doing instead, he is reading, he is writing, he is dreaming. And the fruit of these dreams will be the single most astonishing cultural achievement of the whole of the 19th century. And it will tell the story of a ring, of gods, of Valkyries, of heroes. And I think it's time now for some music. And so let's hear one of these heroes. He is called Siegfried. He has been raised by Mime, a dwarf, as the dwarf's own son. So there's the kind of the theme of confused patrimony. But in truth, Siegfried is the son of a dead hero whose sword, Notung, had been shattered to pieces by Wotan, the king of the gods. And Siegfried, he comes into Mimer's forge and he finds the fragments of Notung and he picks them up and he marvels at them. And do you know what he says? He says, no tongue.
- [22:22]
Chorus or Performer
No tongue. Nickers shirt.
- [22:29]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
That is what he says.
- [22:36]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Tom.
- [22:37]
Host 1 (Dominic Sambrook)
That is.
- [22:37]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Don't.
- [22:39]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
It's applause. Born out of pity and embarrassment, I.
- [22:43]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Don'T think, because that is exactly what Siegfried says. He then cranks up the bellows, he then he gets in some Viking laughter. And as the bellows are rearing, as he sets to forging Notung Mima is watching on all kind of scheming and tricksy and out comes the hammer and a sword that was broken and had long seemed beyond repair starts to be repaired.
- [23:11]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Right, well, to banish the memory of what just happened, let us hear the exultant singing of Siegfried in which we hear, I think, the resolve and the implacability and if you're a big Wagnerian, I suppose, the heroism of Richard Wagner himself. So please welcome Toby Spence and John Findon as Mime and Siegfried for the forging of Notum. Siegfried's forging zone.
- [24:07]
Chorus or Performer
Einstein f blau tine ros.
- [24:30]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
When heart.
- [25:46]
Chorus or Performer
This road fun can be fried meat it's titan pin and its honor has craft listing large looming kind stance to a criminal. Tom Mag licks me it's hard. Jehovah. Might be stupid let's have test. Lost in a Hal. I.
- [29:34]
Sponsor Announcer 2
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Host 1 (Dominic Sambrook)
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Host 1 (Dominic Sambrook)
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- [30:48]
Sponsor Announcer 2
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- [31:23]
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- [31:55]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
So absolutely bravura stuff there from Toby Spence and John Findon. And that is from the opera Siegfried, the third in a cycle of four operas that are, of course, known as the Ring cycle. And, Tom, you know, I'm a massive fan of J.R.R. tolkien.
- [32:12]
Chorus or Performer
I do.
- [32:12]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
So a sword that was broken, being reforged, a magic ring. All of this does sound very familiar. And I guess the question for me and for a lot of people is how much was Tolkien would say the Lord of the Rings, how much was he influenced by Wagner? Because Tolkien always denied it, didn't he? Said, oh, I have nothing to do with Wagner. But it does seem a coincidence, say the least.
- [32:33]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Well, well, to look at the possible relationship of Tolkien and Wagner, I think the best thing is to look at how it is that Wagner comes to write the Ring cycle. And the thing is that, like Tolkien, he is obsessed by the mythology and the literature of the ancient North. So early medieval German poems, but also Viking mythology, the sagas of Iceland, all of that. And essentially, in those five years when he's not writing music and he's in Switzerland following his exile from Saxony, this is what he's doing. He's sitting there immersing himself in Nordic myth. And it's happening a whole century before Tolkien writes the Lord of the Rings. And absolutely, Wagner is the first creative artist to recognize the incredible potency of this kind of Norse medieval material. And specifically, what he recognizes is the huge potential that it has for someone who wants to create his own mythological world. And so this is what Wagner does. And first of all, he writes it up as poetry. So again, this is what he's doing in his five years. He's reading, but he's also writing his own kind of mythic account. And you get. In this mythic account, you get Ryan maidens, you get Valkyries, of course, you get Valhalla, you get Wotan, the King of the gods, you get dragons, you get the magic swords that we've just seen being forged. And all of this Wagner is putting into poetry. And he's a very, very good poet. And then having done that he composes the music for it. And then having done that, he wants to put it on. And so he devotes himself to the exhausting task of trying to raise the money that will enable him to stage the four operas of the Ring cycle in the kind of scale and style that he has in his mind's eye. And essentially what Wagner wants for the Ring cycle is for it to be. And Dominic, I'm afraid there's only the one word for what he wants it to be. He wants it to be a sacral experience.
- [34:46]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Right, Tom Holland. Bingo there. But the amazing thing is that he succeeds, doesn't he? Because if we Fast forward to 1876, by which time he's actually in his 60s, all his dreams are about to be fulfilled. He now has his own theater in a small town in northern Bavaria called Bayreuth. He has effectively single handedly introduced, invented the look, the sort of the appearance of Norse myths. So the classic thing, of course, the horned helmet that we associate with the Vikings and the people who travel to Bayreuth for the premiere for them, it is like a cross between going to a theater in ancient Greece and a kind of religious pilgrimage, isn't it?
- [35:29]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Right. And it's hard to get your head around just how massive achievement this is. But you asked about Tolkien before. So imagine that Tolkien, he writes the Lord of the Rings, but they're not content with that. He raises the money for the films of Lord of the Rings and then having done that, he personally comes up with all the special effects for the films and he designs the costumes and of course he composes the music. And this is not something that Tolkien up would end in a million years have thought to do, but Wagner does. And he can do it because he is not only a great musical genius, but he is also at the absolute cutting edge of culture and technology in the 19th century. So the Ring cycler has its Valkyries and magic swords and all that kind of thing, but it is also, when it goes on at Bayreuth, the most futuristic musical spectacle ever staged in the 19th century. And it is the kind of ultimate fusion of ancient and modern. And this fusion touches almost every aspect of the production. So there is a dragon in the Ring cycle and Wagner commissions a dragon to be forged in a foundry in Birmingham. And all the bits get sent to Bayreuth, except for the neck, which by accident goes to Beirut in Lebanon. And so this dragon comes on and it has no neck. You have celebrity guests, so you have the Kaiser, not the Kaiser that we do impersonations of on the rest of history. But his dad, Tchaikovsky, turns up a host of other kinds of composers and very much friend of the show. Dom Pedro II of Brazil.
- [37:23]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Lovely to have him back.
- [37:24]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Great to have him back, isn't it? And he arrives and he's put up in a hotel and he's given the ledger and it asks him for his name. So he writes it down and then it asks him for his occupation. And so he puts down Emperor.
- [37:36]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
He's not wrong. Yeah, exactly.
- [37:40]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
And all kinds of things about musical production begin with Wagner and with Bayreuth. So part of the way in which Wagner himself had raised money for it was to go on tour as a conductor, conducting his own work. And he becomes the first celebrity conductor. So Ollie's pedigree begins with Wagner on the stage. The curtains part in the middle, rather than being raised again, something new with Wagner. And on the first night, the reviews don't just go around Germany, don't just go around Europe. They're cabled across the Atlantic to New York.
- [38:20]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
So that sort of sense of being at the cutting edge, that fusion of ancient and modern, of old myths and the latest technology, you can see that there is a parallel there with Wagner's most famous subsequent admirer, who is, of course, Hitler, because Hitler is obsessed, as Wagner is, with Nordic myths. Like Wagner, he has a kind of diabolical genius for using the latest technology, the latest kind of media innovations. And so that takes us back to the question that's hung over this since we started, the question we began with, which is, how much do you think the Ring cycle, as some critics do, is laced with the poison of Nazism from the very beginning?
- [39:02]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Well, absolutely. As you say, there are critics who argue that the Ring cycle is absolutely putrid with kind of incipient fascism, that it's virulently nationalist, and more specifically, that the operas are rife with anti Semitic stereotypes. So it is often claimed, for instance, that Mima, who we saw in the scene that was just performed, is intended as an incredibly negative portrait of a Jewish drawing on all the anti Semitic stereotypes going, so he's dwarvish and malevolent and cringing. And this is counterpointed to the blond, heroic Siegfried. But for what it's worth, personally, I think that this is completely wrong. I think that had Wagner intended the Ring cycle to be anti Semitic, he would have made it very, very anti Semitic and he would have left no one in any doubt about it, because Wagner, throughout his life, was never a man to hide his opinions. And that after all is how we can be certain that he was an anti Semite, because he absolutely trumpeted it.
- [40:11]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Right? And isn't it interesting that the Nazis themselves, when obviously the Nazis adore Wagner and they love the Ring, but actually they don't make a big deal of the Ring being anti Semitic.
- [40:23]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
It's never mentioned. And you would think that if there was an obvious anti Semitic subtext of the Ring cycle, the one person who would notice it would be Hitler. So if it's subliminal, it's very, very subliminal indeed. And that's why I think it's not subliminal, because I just don't think it's there. And it's not just because of the reception of the Ring cycle. It's because of the, the drama that is within the Ring cycle. So I said that Wagner is actually a bit of a hippie. The Ring cycle is not a celebration of power and domination, but the absolute opposite. So the Ring does promise power to those who take it and who want to use it, but Wagner shows the Ring enslaving all of those who look to master it.
- [41:15]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Right? And that's something that obviously be very familiar to readers of the Lord of the Rings, but this is something that Wagner himself coined, right? Because this is not something that you find in Norse or Germanic myths. There are magic rings, but there are no kind of addictive rings of power.
- [41:31]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Right? And I think that this is because the idea of a ring of power is actually a very, very 19th century one, because again, it's, it's, it's, it's about this issue of technology. Wagner is writing his operas at a time where it is becoming evident that the power of technology to cause destruction is becoming greater and greater. And of course, in the decades that follow, it will become, you know, it will result in the destruction of the First World War. But Wagner is being prophetic here. And so that's why I think that you asked is to Tolkien influenced by this idea of the Ring as something that is malevolent. I think he is, because I think that, as you say, it's not a notion that is there before Wagner.
- [42:20]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Right. And actually the interesting thing again is that what Wagner pits against the power of the Ring, the counterweight to it, is actually something that the Nazis did not rate at all, which is love, the power of love.
- [42:33]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Is she absolute hippie? So what Wagner shows us at the end of the Ring cycle, Siegfried is treacherously killed and he has the ring on his finger at the time. And to Siegfried, the ring is nothing it's just a trinket. He's perfectly able to resist it, because for Siegfried, the great thing is love. And when he dies, it's with the name of his beloved on his lips. And that beloved is Brunhilde, who is a Valkyrie who has become immortal. And she, in her grief that her beloved has died, that Siegfried is dead, removes the ring from his finger and she renounces all of its power in the name of love. And then, having done that, she lights Siegfried's pyre and. And she climbs onto his horse and she gallops into the flames of the pyre, and the flames rise and rise and they consume Valhalla, the halls of the gods. And so the Ring cycle ends. And what you are witnessing is Gutta Dhammerung, the doom of the gods. And the message that the Ring cycle ultimately ends up teaching is not a fascist one, but the opposite. That set against the ruin of worlds, ultimately there is only love.
- [45:31]
Chorus or Performer
Sa. Sat sa.
- [52:02]
Host 1 (Dominic Sambrook)
Wow.
- [52:03]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
So that was Siegfried's funeral march from the third act of Gutterdammerung. And it's a lamentation over Siegfried's death, his Tod in German. But it was also a celebration of his life and his love, his Liebe and tom, those two German words, the pairing of them, liebe, love and tod, death. It's associated with another opera, in particular another Wagner opera, and it's not an opera that's in the Ring cycle.
- [52:33]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Yes. So this is Tristan and Isolde.
- [52:35]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
So let's get into Tristan and Isolde. Obviously, if you've heard the music, if you've seen it, you'll know that it's 12 hours long. It's a love story. More obviously a love story than the Ring cycle. What I'm now going to do is try and tell you what happens in about 30 seconds. So it comes from Arthurian myth. You have Tristan. He's a famous knight. He's the adopted son of King Mark of Cornwall. So King Mark is pledged to marry Isolde, and Isolde is an Irish princess. Now, inevitably, it's an opera, there's a love potion. So Mark and Isolde are meant to drink this potion, but again, it's an opera, so Tristan ends up drinking it instead. Tristan and Isolde drink it, everything goes wrong. Inevitably, there are various operatic shenanigans that we don't need to go into. Tristan dies in Isolde's arms. Isolde then consummates their love by dying as well. But not before she has sung the single most beautiful and most devastating piece of music in the whole History of opera. And that is her Liebestod.
- [53:46]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Yeah, it's swooning, it's overpowering. Yes, folks, it's sacral. And above all, perhaps it's climactic in every sense of the word. It is the climax of the opera. But Tristan an Isolde is, throughout its entire length, unbelievably erotic. There are climaxes everywhere. And Dominic, do you want to know what Friedrich Nietzsche the. Yes, you do. The great philosopher who admired and despised Wagner in equal measure. Do you know what he said about Tristan?
- [54:26]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
I would love to know.
- [54:27]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Okay, you asked for it. So Nietzsche said of Tristan, I have never found a to work as dangerously fascinating with as weird and sweet an infinity.
- [54:38]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Oh. So Nietzsche who generally bonkers, but in this respect, quite right.
- [54:42]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Yeah, yeah. This isn't the talking to a horse Nietzsche. This is the shrewd and analyst of opera. So we've talked about Wagner as a hater. He's obviously a very good hater. We've talked about his anti Semitism. But Dominique, he was. He also hates the French, which I imagine you slightly more favorable towards.
- [55:01]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Yeah, he's not all bad.
- [55:04]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
He also, I'm very sad to report, he hates London. He comes here several times and he always thinks the weather's terrible, it's too foggy, people are too obsessed with business. So that's very sad. But Wagner is not just about hating things. He is also very, very good at being in love. And perhaps before we end this show in the most climactic manner possible by hearing the Liebestod, perhaps we could just give a shout out to two people with whom Wagner had very intense affairs.
- [55:38]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Okay. I think everybody would absolutely love that.
- [55:41]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Well, and the reason I want to give a shout out to these two in particular is because they're very intimately connected to Tristram and Isolde. And the first of these is a woman called Matilda Wessendonck. And Wagner has a tempestuous affair with her while he's in the process of composing Tristan. And both Wagner and Matilda were married at the time and Matilda was actually married to one of Wagner's most generous benefactors. And I think for Wagner, the sense of betraying somebody who had always shown him nothing but kindness and financial generosity seems to have slightly titillated. It seems to have excited him.
- [56:24]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Yeah, Wagner was just a bit of a shit, wasn't he? I think it's fair to say. So that's. That's a sort of echo of the plot of Tristan Isola, isn't it? So Wagner is betraying a Man who has been very generous to him. Just as Tristan is betraying King Mark.
- [56:40]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Well, you say he's a bit of a shit. He's an army where an artist has to be a shit.
- [56:45]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Don't do this.
- [56:47]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Because for Wagner, the. The experience of writing music is always a very intensely sensory and emotional experience. So, for instance, he. He likes to wear beautiful silk clothes, he likes to breathe in the sweetest perfumes.
- [57:03]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Like you when you're podcasting.
- [57:04]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Absolutely. And I suspect that to write Tristan, he needed to feel the thrill of an illicit love. And actually, he writes the whole of the second act while he's on holiday in Venice with Matilda. And they've both, you know, Wagner's left his wife behind, Matilda's left her husband. And you can see that this would get the creative juices flowing.
- [57:28]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Well, yes. Well, I mean, the result is. Listen, the result is one of the great masterpieces of 1970 century culture. But the problem for Wagner, I guess, is he's written Tristan Isolde, but putting it on is a very different matter because basically he doesn't have any money.
- [57:41]
Sponsor Announcer 2
Right?
- [57:41]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Yes. And this is certainly the case for the first five years after he's completed Tristan. But then, brilliantly for Wagner, massive stroke of luck. In 1864, he meets the second of the great loves of his life that I wanted to talk about. And this is not a woman, but a man.
- [57:59]
Sponsor Announcer 1
And.
- [57:59]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
And he's called Ludwig. He's only 18 years old and he has just recently been crowned as King of Bavaria. He's the second Ludwig to be King of Bavaria. So Ludwig ii and he, more than any of the superfans that we talked about in the first half, I mean, he's the ultimate superfan possibly in the entire course of the history of music, because it is Ludwig who funds Wagner Theatre a Bayreuth, and it is Ludwig in 1865 who coughs up the cash that enables Wagner to put on the first production of Tristan. And I think Wagner was not gay, unlike Tchaikovsky, but there is an almost erotic quality to his relationship with Ludwig. So ministers of kings throughout history have always worried about their royal master chucking cash at a royal mistress. And the ministers of Ludwig II are kind of very similarly anxious about the amount of money that Ludwig is shoveling towards Wagner. And there is something. There is a kind of quality of two lovers about their relationship locked in a kind of very intense passion. They're always quarreling, making up, pledging eternal love. And then the kind of. The cycle goes round again and again and again.
- [59:17]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
And you talk about Ludwig as a superfan. I mean, Ludwig is the first of many, isn't he? You know, composers had inspired devotion before, of course, Mozart, Beethoven, whoever. But in Wagner's old age, and then especially after his death, he inspires an adoration of a kind that no composer has ever inspired before. So he really is a composer with fans, with super fans. And I guess that's partly because he's an extraordinary self promoter, but also because, as we've heard, there is just an unbelievable power and intensity to his work.
- [59:58]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
Yeah. And so I think that Europe gets gripped by what you could legitimately call Wagner mania. And Wagner mania among Wagnerians is still very much a going concern. And certainly if Wagner is hated, and there are lots of people who have hated him and who do hate him, then so also is he passionately, passionately adored. And I can't think of any composer actually who has before or since who has been the focus of such extremes of emotion. And when you listen to the Liebestratters we're about to do from the end of Tristan and Isolde, I think you can see why.
- [60:38]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Right. So, ladies and gentlemen, that brings us towards the close of tonight's show and that is what we are going to end with. But first, we have a host of thank yous. So first of all, thank yous to our brilliant goal hanger team, executive producer Tony Pastor, who's with us tonight, a great man. We have backstage, Hannah, Aliyah, Izzy and Julian, who have been shoveling sushi down Tom Holland's throat and fuelling Arthur Sambrook with pizza. We have our dear, dear friends in business class, our producers, Theo Young Smith and Tabby Syrett. The other two members of the Rest Is History Quartet. And of course we have our brilliant conductor, Oliver Zeffman, one of the most talented young conductors out there without whom we would not be here tonight.
- [61:44]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
And our thanks also to the Philharmonia Orchestra. And if there are any people here who are here tonight who have not. So I just wanted to say if there's anybody here who this is their first experience of listening to a live orchestra. I mean, the Philharmonia Orchestra powerfully demonstrates why it's so much better to come and listen to a live orchestra than to hear music on Spotify.
- [62:28]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Absolutely. Not least when you have the brilliant soloists that we've had this evening. Marta Fontenelle Simmons, Christine Buras, Mari Wynn Williams, Ella De Jong, Rebecca Aronwee Jones, Katie Stevenson, Leah Xu, Toby Spence and John Findon. What brilliant, brilliant performers they have.
- [62:57]
Host 2 (Tom Holland)
And finally, our thanks to Ingela Brimberg, who now over the corpse of Tristan, will sing of love and death. So thank you and goodbye.
- [63:08]
Host 3 (Oliver Zeffman)
Good night.
- [64:11]
Chorus or Performer
Sa. Sam. Lord ram. Sa. It. Ra. Holy. Ra. Sa. Sh. Ram.
- [71:26]
Host 1 (Dominic Sambrook)
So thank you so much for listening, everybody. Now, we will be back next week and I'm sorry to say there will be no musical accompaniment because it will be business as usual. And on Monday we'll be resuming our normal service with a mighty series based on medieval history. And it is the life and career, the extraordinary achievements of one of the very worst people in history. That person is, of course, Joan of Arc. So a massive thank you once again to Oliver Zeffman, to the Philharmonia Orchestra, to the Royal Albert hall and to our brilliant soloists, Le Zhu, Ingela Brimberg, Toby Spence and John Findon. Thank you very much and happy New Year, everybody. Bye bye.
- [72:08]
Chorus or Performer
Bye.