Wagner on Welte: Tristan und Isolde around 1905 (original) (raw)

The beginning of the 20 th century was marked by a complex cohabitation of the hypertrophic heritage of the ›romantic‹ era and harbingers of modernity. This period between 1900 and the outbreak of the First World War, when musical traditions of the 19 th century were still widespread, 2 also saw the dawn of commercial music recording. The musical artwork now entered the phase of its technical reproduction, at a time when many of Wagner's close collaborators were still active musicians. A golden age for gathering performance practice information, one might think. But recordings are by no means straightforward sources. The very early acoustic recordings of Wagner's music seem to be emblematic for this often problematic relationship between expectations and content. You could exemplify this phenomenon with a recording of the tenor Otto Briesemeister singing Loge in 1907. 3 This recording is a highly interesting document regarding vocal technique when singing Wagner, but it seems problematic to deduce more musical information from it. Any quest for information about ›interpretation‹-that is, rubato, phrasing, speed, displaying structure, nuances and affects-produces only modest results. It seems hard to over