Boulez's Wagner

 Whatever one thinks of Boulez otherwise, and I loathe him... he was as good a Wagnerian as ever existed, because he had absolutely no patience with the veneration of Wagner as a sacred monolith. Most Wagner is much too slow, and if you are a Wagner skeptic like me, sitting through Knappertsbusch and Goodall is just a deeply unpleasant experience...

Perhaps it takes a megalomaniac to understand another megalomaniac, but what Boulez actualized in sound is that Wagner did not mean the scores as ends in themselves. Wagner may have been the greatest genius in the history of the arts, but Wagner, like Boulez, was activist first, intellectual second, musician third. They both intended to form the world in their images, and both were brilliant enough that it's astonishing how close they came - brilliant in the practical know-how to achieve their vision, brilliant enough as people to manipulate them to serve their ends, and brilliant enough to elucidate a total world-vision of music and its uses in society. They're both geniuses enough that you can't ignore them, even if you hate them. Their monomaniacal visions of human nature are a part of the human story, and in order to make that darkness palatable to unsuspecting masses, you need to find the light amid it.

Dave Hurwitz said that Wagner is a French composer in disguise, and it's absolutely true. His vision of music was based on Meyerbeer and Berlioz. Boulez's Wagner is like Historically Informed Performance that strips off the varnish and shows Wagner's kinship with his contemporaries: Berlioz, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schumann, only Wagner was even more inventive than those geniuses, and through Boulez as perhaps no other conductor, we hear Wagner's full bag of tricks.

The Furtwängler/Barenboim axis is equally good in its way, an ecstatic, revelatory experience that finds long-range harmonic relationships in the score of which I'm not even sure Wagner wanted us to hear, but I think Boulez's more straight-forward way is what Wagner intended, seducing us into thinking that the power of this music is entirely normal and not the Milgram experiment set to music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVEsiPVlQKY