What do you think?
Rate this book
Verdi and/or Wagner: Two Men, Two Worlds, Two Centuries by Conrad, Peter (2014) Paperback
Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, the two greatest operatic composers of their time, had everything and nothing in common. Their achievements were comparable, but their personalities, their approaches to music and drama, and their complex legacies made them incompatible. Verdi thought of art as a comfort to mankind; it pleased Wagner to believe that the nervous intensity of his operas might drive listeners mad. Is it impossible as Peter Conrad asks in this book, the first to investigate their affinities and explain their mutual mistrust to love them both? These equally matched Titans offer us a choice between two kinds of art, two ways of life, two opposed philosophies of existence. During their lifetimes Verdi and Wagner helped to define the identity of their emerging nations; their music still dramatizes the light and dark sides of every human beings character and consciousness.
Paperback
First published November 7, 2011
10 people are currently reading
249 people want to read
About the author
Peter Conrad
126 books27 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 19, 2019
About halfway through, I found Peter Conrad seriously testing my resolve to finish this book. His general approach is achronological, jumping around to different points in the two composers’ lives to find points of comparison and contrast. He never stays with one very long, at most a paragraph or two, before using some similarity or difference to bring in the other. I had just gotten through lengthy sections comparing his subjects’ second wives, houses (this part was really tedious), and, finally, dogs and didn’t know if I could take any more. Then he caught my attention by talking about, of all things, inactivity and tedium.
After speaking of Verdi’s need for his librettists to supply him with the “parola scenic”, words that would inspire his music, words which Conrad sees as also provoking action on the part of the characters, Conrad contrasts this with Wagner’s purely orchestral, offstage action: Tannhäuser’s pilgrimage, Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, Parsifal’s wanderings. Verdi was concerned about scenes where characters are immobile on stage, where Wagner “cultivated the immobility that Verdi dreaded”. He cites Arthur Symons in 1897, who “marveled at seeing people for the first time utterly still onstage” during Parsifal , and quote him as saying, “Wagner realized the supreme importance of monotony.” (This set me off on a train of thought that gave me some new insights into my own lifelong interest in Wagner and, perhaps, a revelation about an aspect of Wagner's own development; but these thoughts go well beyond Conrad's own observations - I will add them at the end of the review.)
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Conrad's treatment of Wagner is a kind of "dog that didn't bark": he never mentions the composer's personal antisemitism. While this is perhaps on the whole fairer to Wagner than building an entire understanding of his work around his antisemitism as do Marc A. Weiner and Paul Lawrence Rose, in a book of this length it is inexplicable. As it is, Wagner's personal egotism and sybaritic indulgences put him in a negative light when contrasted with Verdi's modesty and relative asceticism, so perhaps Conrad didn't want to totally stack the deck against the German; his point at the end of the book is that both men provided contrasting but necessary complementary images of "the artist" and that the art of both has a legitimate place at the summit of musical achievement.
The last third of the book is by far the most interesting: in it Conrad deals with the posthumous reputations of both composers, including the reactions to Wagner's death by Verdi and his circle. In addition to mentioning a number of stage productions and adaptations, Conrad gives a lengthy but far from exhaustive discussion of novels and films about the composers or employing their music; he also talks about their public images within their own countries and internationally, and the different ways in which each figure came to stand for "high" culture in contrast to popular culture, such as the use of Il Trovatore in A Night at the Opera.
He also gives a fair amount of attention to Wagner's official popularity in the Third Reich and with the composer's chief fan in that regime, Adolf Hitler. But Conrad is unwilling to make Wagner bear any personal responsibility for this affinity, adopting the attitude he attributes to Toscanini, "he saw no reason to assume that Hitler had retroactively incriminated Wagner." He does not address the unofficial ban of Wagner's music in Israel, which would have seemed to be an irresistible topic in any survey of the postwar fortunes of the composer's music.
Would this book ever have been written if one man had been born a year sooner or later? Though the two composers represent the summit of their respective countries' musical theater in the 19th century, such an extended comparison seems uncalled for: the differences in ambition, effect, and legacy are too obvious and unlike for comparisons to make much sense.
***
So, my Wagnerian insights:
I realized that it’s this immobility of Wagnerian characters that makes the operas come across so well on recordings, especially to those who have developed a taste for listening to music in this format. There’s little stage action to imagine; the drama is in what the characters say or what the orchestra says about them. And when the characters do move, their actions are often of the kind that can be, at best, only approximated in a stage production: swimming, flying, or transforming from or into animals to name only three of the many un-representable actions that occur in the course of the operas. Whereas most operas, such as Verdi’s, are plays set to music or adapted to facilitate musical setting, Wagner’s seem more like symphonies with obbligato vocal parts.
Which brings me to my second insight, now completely unrelated to any point made by Conrad:
Describing Wagner’s mature works as symphonies with obbligato vocal parts led me to think of Berlioz’ Roméo et Juliette as a possible precursor. I recalled recently reading in The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner's Life and Music, under “Myths and Legends”, that Wagner described the inspiration for his Faust Overture as a result of hearing a Parisian performance of Beethoven’s Ninth; but the only such performance that Wagner could have attended occurred after the completion of the overture in January 1840; Barry Millington considers Berlioz’ “symphonie dramatique”, which Wagner would have heard in late 1839 “a far more likely inspiration”. Is it possible that the Beethoven work is a (perhaps consciously perpetrated) “screen memory” for that of Berlioz in a wider sense? After all, Wagner put great store on the Ninth as the starting point for his own musical-dramatic art, a kind of passing of the German musical crown. But Berlioz’ work, with its plot development, repeated motives, extensive orchestral narrative of dramatic events, and integrated vocal parts which are as much summaries as dramatic speeches, actually resembles Wagner’s subsequent operas much more than the Ninth symphony, essentially an instrumental work with a choral finale. That no one seems to have made much of this may owe to the fact that neither Wagner’s detractors or supporters have much interest in tracing his art, seen as über-Teutonic , to a Gallic inspiration. Certainly Wagner himself had no interest in acknowledging such an influence, particularly from a still-living and productive rival.
After speaking of Verdi’s need for his librettists to supply him with the “parola scenic”, words that would inspire his music, words which Conrad sees as also provoking action on the part of the characters, Conrad contrasts this with Wagner’s purely orchestral, offstage action: Tannhäuser’s pilgrimage, Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, Parsifal’s wanderings. Verdi was concerned about scenes where characters are immobile on stage, where Wagner “cultivated the immobility that Verdi dreaded”. He cites Arthur Symons in 1897, who “marveled at seeing people for the first time utterly still onstage” during Parsifal , and quote him as saying, “Wagner realized the supreme importance of monotony.” (This set me off on a train of thought that gave me some new insights into my own lifelong interest in Wagner and, perhaps, a revelation about an aspect of Wagner's own development; but these thoughts go well beyond Conrad's own observations - I will add them at the end of the review.)
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Conrad's treatment of Wagner is a kind of "dog that didn't bark": he never mentions the composer's personal antisemitism. While this is perhaps on the whole fairer to Wagner than building an entire understanding of his work around his antisemitism as do Marc A. Weiner and Paul Lawrence Rose, in a book of this length it is inexplicable. As it is, Wagner's personal egotism and sybaritic indulgences put him in a negative light when contrasted with Verdi's modesty and relative asceticism, so perhaps Conrad didn't want to totally stack the deck against the German; his point at the end of the book is that both men provided contrasting but necessary complementary images of "the artist" and that the art of both has a legitimate place at the summit of musical achievement.
The last third of the book is by far the most interesting: in it Conrad deals with the posthumous reputations of both composers, including the reactions to Wagner's death by Verdi and his circle. In addition to mentioning a number of stage productions and adaptations, Conrad gives a lengthy but far from exhaustive discussion of novels and films about the composers or employing their music; he also talks about their public images within their own countries and internationally, and the different ways in which each figure came to stand for "high" culture in contrast to popular culture, such as the use of Il Trovatore in A Night at the Opera.
He also gives a fair amount of attention to Wagner's official popularity in the Third Reich and with the composer's chief fan in that regime, Adolf Hitler. But Conrad is unwilling to make Wagner bear any personal responsibility for this affinity, adopting the attitude he attributes to Toscanini, "he saw no reason to assume that Hitler had retroactively incriminated Wagner." He does not address the unofficial ban of Wagner's music in Israel, which would have seemed to be an irresistible topic in any survey of the postwar fortunes of the composer's music.
Would this book ever have been written if one man had been born a year sooner or later? Though the two composers represent the summit of their respective countries' musical theater in the 19th century, such an extended comparison seems uncalled for: the differences in ambition, effect, and legacy are too obvious and unlike for comparisons to make much sense.
***
So, my Wagnerian insights:
I realized that it’s this immobility of Wagnerian characters that makes the operas come across so well on recordings, especially to those who have developed a taste for listening to music in this format. There’s little stage action to imagine; the drama is in what the characters say or what the orchestra says about them. And when the characters do move, their actions are often of the kind that can be, at best, only approximated in a stage production: swimming, flying, or transforming from or into animals to name only three of the many un-representable actions that occur in the course of the operas. Whereas most operas, such as Verdi’s, are plays set to music or adapted to facilitate musical setting, Wagner’s seem more like symphonies with obbligato vocal parts.
Which brings me to my second insight, now completely unrelated to any point made by Conrad:
Describing Wagner’s mature works as symphonies with obbligato vocal parts led me to think of Berlioz’ Roméo et Juliette as a possible precursor. I recalled recently reading in The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner's Life and Music, under “Myths and Legends”, that Wagner described the inspiration for his Faust Overture as a result of hearing a Parisian performance of Beethoven’s Ninth; but the only such performance that Wagner could have attended occurred after the completion of the overture in January 1840; Barry Millington considers Berlioz’ “symphonie dramatique”, which Wagner would have heard in late 1839 “a far more likely inspiration”. Is it possible that the Beethoven work is a (perhaps consciously perpetrated) “screen memory” for that of Berlioz in a wider sense? After all, Wagner put great store on the Ninth as the starting point for his own musical-dramatic art, a kind of passing of the German musical crown. But Berlioz’ work, with its plot development, repeated motives, extensive orchestral narrative of dramatic events, and integrated vocal parts which are as much summaries as dramatic speeches, actually resembles Wagner’s subsequent operas much more than the Ninth symphony, essentially an instrumental work with a choral finale. That no one seems to have made much of this may owe to the fact that neither Wagner’s detractors or supporters have much interest in tracing his art, seen as über-Teutonic , to a Gallic inspiration. Certainly Wagner himself had no interest in acknowledging such an influence, particularly from a still-living and productive rival.
October 14, 2013
I stopped reading about half-way through. What might have been an interesting extended essay is here, in book length, tedious and unenlightening--not what one would expect of a treatise on two of the towering geniuses of the nineteenth century.
February 22, 2013
The author knows these works.. To a fault.
Why - if I enjoy both composers do I find this so very tedious?
Why - if I enjoy both composers do I find this so very tedious?
July 14, 2018
When I start something, I have to finish it. This can be a very positive trait, but when it comes to books (and movies), it can also cause a lot of frustration and wasted time. I had high hopes when I started reading Verdi and/or Wagner, but after spending three weeks struggling to get through it, I am wondering what I gained.
I certainly didn't learn anything about Verdi or Wagner, because any real information contained in the book was buried in a load of fluff. Having been an opera lover for about ten years now I had never taken the time to get to know the men behind the music. I often looked for books on Wagner and Verdi, but the only ones I seemed to find had been out of print for years. So when this was released I thought it was the book I had been waiting for.
I had hoped to learn about these two composers, about their life stories and how it influenced their art. I knew there would be some comparison involved, hence the name of the book, but I did not expect every concept and statement regarding one to be compared to the other. You can't compare every aspect of their lives because they were so very different. Every little detail and statement is overly analyzed, as if everything they did and wrote had some kind of hidden meaning.
I had some basic knowledge of Verdi and Wagner before I started, from Verdi's involvement in politics to Wagner's building of Bayreuth, and that is still all I have after 300+ pages . This book is an endless list of anecdotes and facts flung onto the page at random. Even the chapter names had no relation to their content except for the first paragraphs. Nowhere did I gain any real insight into why they wrote the operas they did.
Maybe this book should have come with a disclaimer: must have basic knowledge of German and Italian in order to make sense of this book. If I didn't have a basic knowledge of German, like I do with Italian actually, this book would have made even less sense. The book is chockfull of references to Verdi and Wagner's operas (as I would have expected and wanted), and often the lyrics of certain arias are included...the translations are not. If you have been listening to opera for thirty or forty years, with a libretto, this will probably make sense to you, but I was only able to deduce the meanings through their context. Yes, I could have looked up the translations, but that would have meant spending even more time on this book.
Verdi and/or Wagner feels elitist, and is just the kind of attitude that has turned the younger generation away from opera. If you are looking to learn about the lives of Wagner and Verdi, this is not the book for you. If you are interested in finding out why a diaper commercial might use the Ride of the Valkyries as background music ("Are infant bowel movements as unstoppable as the wind on which Wagner’s equestrians ride?"), then Peter Conrad wrote this book with you in mind.
I certainly didn't learn anything about Verdi or Wagner, because any real information contained in the book was buried in a load of fluff. Having been an opera lover for about ten years now I had never taken the time to get to know the men behind the music. I often looked for books on Wagner and Verdi, but the only ones I seemed to find had been out of print for years. So when this was released I thought it was the book I had been waiting for.
I had hoped to learn about these two composers, about their life stories and how it influenced their art. I knew there would be some comparison involved, hence the name of the book, but I did not expect every concept and statement regarding one to be compared to the other. You can't compare every aspect of their lives because they were so very different. Every little detail and statement is overly analyzed, as if everything they did and wrote had some kind of hidden meaning.
I had some basic knowledge of Verdi and Wagner before I started, from Verdi's involvement in politics to Wagner's building of Bayreuth, and that is still all I have after 300+ pages . This book is an endless list of anecdotes and facts flung onto the page at random. Even the chapter names had no relation to their content except for the first paragraphs. Nowhere did I gain any real insight into why they wrote the operas they did.
Maybe this book should have come with a disclaimer: must have basic knowledge of German and Italian in order to make sense of this book. If I didn't have a basic knowledge of German, like I do with Italian actually, this book would have made even less sense. The book is chockfull of references to Verdi and Wagner's operas (as I would have expected and wanted), and often the lyrics of certain arias are included...the translations are not. If you have been listening to opera for thirty or forty years, with a libretto, this will probably make sense to you, but I was only able to deduce the meanings through their context. Yes, I could have looked up the translations, but that would have meant spending even more time on this book.
Verdi and/or Wagner feels elitist, and is just the kind of attitude that has turned the younger generation away from opera. If you are looking to learn about the lives of Wagner and Verdi, this is not the book for you. If you are interested in finding out why a diaper commercial might use the Ride of the Valkyries as background music ("Are infant bowel movements as unstoppable as the wind on which Wagner’s equestrians ride?"), then Peter Conrad wrote this book with you in mind.
June 30, 2023
I'm not an opera person. I did greatly enjoy Peter Conrad's books on Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, so I gave this a try.
Admittedly, I didn't get all that I could out of this book that I would have were I an opera buff, but it did make me think about culture, creativity, the meaning of stories, specifically realistic vs. fantastic, and in general, reading this was an interesting experience. It might send me to listen to some of the operas someday. (I have heard orchestral versions of Wagner's famous pieces. I am much less familiar with Verdi.)
Glad I read this one.
Admittedly, I didn't get all that I could out of this book that I would have were I an opera buff, but it did make me think about culture, creativity, the meaning of stories, specifically realistic vs. fantastic, and in general, reading this was an interesting experience. It might send me to listen to some of the operas someday. (I have heard orchestral versions of Wagner's famous pieces. I am much less familiar with Verdi.)
Glad I read this one.
June 7, 2016
There was a time in my life when I would have rapidly devoured this book. That time is not now. I worked at this book like erosion and my progress was just as slow. The fault is not Conrad's, although I think I would have preferred a more explicit organization. Conrad is thematic, which is good, but based on chapter titles it was hard to tell exactly what the grounds for comparison might be. I am a long time Verdian. I am a reluctant and recent Wagnerian. Conrad's work didn't do much to encourage my fledgling interest in Wagner - he really was as pompous and long-winded as much of his music. Verdi was a common sense artist who worked for commercial rather than intellectual reasons for most of his career. In the penultimate paragraph, Conrad posits, "Verdi appeals to humanists, Wagner to mystics and also to misanthropes. Is it impossible for one person to love them both?" (Conrad 372). My answer, more so now than ever, is yes. It's impossible to LOVE both, but not to appreciate both. I'm afraid my Wagner appreciation will ever remain my reaction to much of this book - drowsy interest. I'm glad I read it, but sorry it took 6 weeks.
October 1, 2014
This is a complex work, much like the two men on which it is based. It explores their personalities, their psyches, their foibles, their legacies…
It liberally quotes from their operatic works. (Not knowing these operas would be quite a hindrance, I believe.) The way these men are perceived even today is quite different. Verdi might have been a tad temperamental, but he would have been infinitely easier to be around than Wagner, whose ego and general distaste for all things alive make him most disagreeable. The book is well-written. The lengthy quotes in German and Italian are almost always translated immediately after their appearance. Knowing that helps to wade through some of the more esoteric passages.
It liberally quotes from their operatic works. (Not knowing these operas would be quite a hindrance, I believe.) The way these men are perceived even today is quite different. Verdi might have been a tad temperamental, but he would have been infinitely easier to be around than Wagner, whose ego and general distaste for all things alive make him most disagreeable. The book is well-written. The lengthy quotes in German and Italian are almost always translated immediately after their appearance. Knowing that helps to wade through some of the more esoteric passages.
July 26, 2013
Thanks to Mr. Conrad, I now understand why I click more with Verdi's operas than Wagner's. Not that I don't enjoy Wagner's music, but by the last act, I always feel that I'm being hectored to death.
April 8, 2024
Read in preparation for a class, I sincerely hope the class will be less tedious than this!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews