Exemplar of Tucker's Law of Musical Performance #1: The Keilberth Ring - 79 years

(note: this is a game-like speculation, not in any way to be construed as hard-and-fast truth).

Truly great works require a full lifetime to understand - technically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, historically, and philosophically. The greatest performances of the greatest music are generally somewhere between 60-90 years after the premiere. After a lifetime of performance in which performers try everything from extreme excess to the severest self-effacement, there arrives a golden mean somewhere between 39 and 61% intervention which brings out the work's best qualities. But then, the works become overfamiliar and performances verge into decadent concepts as interpretations are imposed that have little to do with the music.

The Keilberth Ring is the finale in the first generation flowering of Neue Bayreuth, when Germany finally glimpsed the full destructive power of Wagner's works in sets that looked designed by Albert Speer and vocal actors rather than merely great singers, which could not help but remind Germany of their past - both its cover of glory and the inner psyche who led them to such horrific ignominy. After '55, there was a gradual replacement as Knappertsbusch and Böhm oversaw the new complacency in excessively slow and fast tempi that stayed extraordinarily metric in Wagner's constantly shifting harmonic motion, Hotter lost his voice, Nilsson gradually became a trumpet (Kedem Frühling Horowitz Berger is right, it's true...), Windgassen yo-yo'd between greatness and boredom, and Wieland Wagner passed away all too early to be replaced by his unimaginative musical politician of a brother.

Oh to have heard the front-line Germans at Bayreuth, but those who were there: the K's - Karajan, Keilberth, Krauss (sorry Kedem but it's true), perhaps Kempe, and I guess occasionally that other one... brought out what was truly great in the music in an orchestra who played with a Wagnerian idiomaticity which no orchestra has equalled before or since. There are other ways to play Wagner greatly, but when I'm being honest with myself, there's no more meaningful Wagner than this.

Three years after Keilberth comes decadence - Solti's sonic spectacular. It's not bad, especially compared to the moo-like singing that comes later (we won't mention any names), but it's nowhere near what people say it is, and it chooses shallow visceral effects over meaning.

So much later Wagner no longer Wagner, it is either something added on top of Wagner, or boringly unadulterated. There are later high moments: much as I dislike them both generally, Boulez and Barenboim have the intellectual heft to 'get' the Ring, and Adam Fischer is just such a magnificent and underrated musician. All three add something particularly worthwhile, and the singing isn't all that bad - at least for the two B's... But then....

...So here it is, the Ring we probably have to listen to if we truly want to understand the Ring. I'm not a Wagner fan, and yet I listen to him constantly. If you want to understand how the 20th century happened as it did, you have to listen to Wagner as much as you have to read Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx.