The new season of ADDA concerts, titled Naturaleza, vida y amor, began last night with an unusual program. Single work programs are often symphonies or oratorios, or theatre pieces scores played primarily as musical experience. But The Ring Without Words is an arrangement, which is unusual.
The work is not a reconstruction. Neither is it an invented fantasy. Commissioned by Telarc from Lorin Maazel, The Ring Without Words is pure Wagner, his own music as selected by the conductor who must have led performances of the Ring several times. He made no revisions, added no notes and stuck to the running order of the story. What Lorin Maazel did might be characterized as a musician’s technical skill, but this would miss a point. What Maazel accomplished with this work is almost incredibly creative.
Lorin Maazel effectively condensed fifteen hours or so of music drama into a seventy-minute orchestral suite which kept Wagner’s music and story in the correct order. What he created was an orchestral showpiece of the most wonderful kind. It is, of course, full of familiar music, some of which is as well-known as any pop song, even more than a century and a half after it was written.
But what is also amazing about the work is that it comes together to tell the story. Almost absent from Lorin Maazel’s construction is Valhalla, the Giants, the fire music at the end of Die Walkűre and importantly Siegried’s forging of Nothung. Fafner is there as a dragon in just a few chords before he is similarly dispatched. But what remains is coherent and convincing.
The Ring Without Words preserves Wagner’s orchestration, which means that the sound of a hundred musicians on stage is filled out with Wagner tubas, whose penetrating tones underpin an already vast score. What is so amazing to an audience member listening to this music is the realization of how utterly original it was in its style. Almost incredibly, we are talking about the middle of the nineteenth century. All right, there was Berlioz and there was Meyerbeer and there was Liszt. But Wagner surpassed all of these in the way that he integrated his choice of material into the orchestral texture to create a musical language that was truly communicative. Thus the experience of The Ring Without Words is not primarily loud or brash. There is a genuine and successful attempt to stick to the story, so we have Wotan telling Brünnhilde why he has to surround her in fire – this will hurt me more than it hurts you - but then there is only a hint of his call to Loge to set the fire.
Lorin Maazzel was not the only person to create a purely orchestral score from the Ring. The Ring – An Orchestral Adventure by Henk de Vlieger is another attempt and also lasts about seventy minutes in concert. But whoever the arranger, it is Richard Wagner that survives via his utterly original music.
Last but not least, I have to mention the impeccable
playing we heard from the ADDA orchestra. The quality of their playing means
that the concert series will be a success.
