«Wagner». Interview with Maria Zalesskaya

La musicòloga Maria Zalesskaya, nascuda a Moscou, s’ha especialitzat en l’entorn històric i musical de Richard Wagner. Ha publicat diversos llibres: «Wagner» (2011), «Lluís II» (2012), «Richard Wagner. El compositor prohibit» (2013), «Ferenc Liszt» (2016).
De tracte afable i acostumada a escoltar, Zalesskaya ha heretat el secular capteniment rus: utilitzar el silenci com a una norma de seguretat.
Una vegada més, fem gala de la nostra voluntat de donar acolliment a les diferents cultures amb un rigorós respecte per les diferències.
Pensem que és molt interessant oferir al lector de Sonograma Magazine l’entrevista que Maria Zalesskaya ens va concedir amablement. Ens parla sobre la música que gira a l’entorn dels poderosos i transcendentals moviments musicals germànics abans de la desfeta de l’Imperi austrohongarès, tan important per la història europea. Una Europa, l’actual, en un notable declivi.

Carme Miró: In your biography «Richard Wagner. The Prohibited Composer» and in other articles, you say that Wagner was exceptional in everything. But let’s take one thing at a time.

At what time and how does Wagner materialise the radical change in opera’s musical aesthetics, between Goethe’s Die Laune des Verliebten and Parsifal?

Maria Zalesskaya: When Wagner began to write the pastoral Laune der Verliebten in 1829, he based his work on the score of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Three of his following early operas — Die Hochzeit (1832), Die Feen (1833), Das Liebesverbot oder Die Novize aus Palermo (1836) — were also far from original. Even Rienzi (1840) is actually a large French opera, although here Wagner follows the Berliozian form of descriptive music and acts more as a symphonist than an operatic composer of the Meyerbeer school. But Der Fliegende Holländer is already a fundamentally new phenomenon in the opera of that time.

According to Wagner himself, «no artist has ever imagined life like this — the only one of its kind — an example of a complete transformation that took place in such a short period of time». Wagner completed Der Fliegende Holländer in just seven weeks in the autumn of 1841, a little less than a year after Rienzi. However, what was especially important was the Der Fliegende Holländer, in which Wagner first applied the system of leitmotivs as the figures’main musical characteristic, and finally went the way of bringing universal mythological plots into his works. What’s more, the music of the opera itself is full of new and not-so-familiar harmonies, chromaticisms and modulations. In fact, despite the newness of the musical language of Der Fliegende Holländer, Wagner has not yet entirely departed from the traditional «opera of numbers». But we see the numbers become large scenes, with one passing into another directly as a germ of an «endless melody». The aria becomes a freely constructed monologue, and the duo takes on the nature of a dialogue. It was in Der Fliegende Holländer (in autumn 1841) when Wagner finally freed himself of others influences and was born as an original composer, different from anyone else. In his subsequent works, Wagner improved and extended the innovative tendencies of his first real musical drama. Parsifal was the culmination of his work, in which he perfectly realised all the elements of his operatic reformation, which were outlined in Der Fliegende Holländer.