Although Eduard Hanslick wasn’t present at the Munich premiere of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre on June 26, 1870, the influential Viennese music critic did attend the first Bayreuth Festival in August 1876, and his oft-quoted impressions of that opera’s second act make for very enjoyable reading (especially if you find yourself agreeing with him).
“[It is] an abyss of boredom. Wotan appears, holds a long conversation with his wife, and then, turning to Brünnhilde, gives an autobiographical lecture covering eight full pages of text. This utterly tuneless, plodding narrative, in slow tempo, engulfs us like an inconsolable broad sea from which only the meager crumbs of a few leitmotives come floating towards us out of the orchestra. Scenes like this recall the medieval torture of waking a sleeping prisoner by stabbing him with needles at every nod. We have heard even Wagnerites characterize this second Act as a disaster. It is entirely unneccesary, since with two cuts both episodes could be done away with, painlessly. Die Walküre has, indeed, a very loose relationship with the action of the whole; it tells nothing of the fateful ring which we have not already learned in Rheingold, and only Brünnhilde’s punishment is important for the purpose of the drama.”
Hanslick met Wagner in 1845, and the composer invited him to a performance of Tannhäuser in Dresden the following year, which he reviewed favorably. By the mid-1850s, Hanslick’s tastes had shifted significantly, and he came to place a much higher value on the music of those he felt followed in the tradition of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann, most notably Johannes Brahms. Despite his general antipathy towards Wagner’s operas, Hanslick’s account of his time at Bayreuth is actually quite fair and is certainly worth seeking out.
