Tannhäuser Overture

Everyone's interest in classical music had to begin somewhere, and at some time.  While I remember checking out scratchy 78 rpm records in high school from my town's public library -- the William Tell Overture comes to mind -- my interest didn't really gel until college. 

I can't honestly recall the first piece that really caught my fancy, but during my junior year I had a roommate with an excellent "hi-fi," and a fairly extensive collection of LPs.  I remember specifically an album of Wagner's orchestral music entitled "Magic Fire Music."  I played it, repeatedly, and the piece I liked the best was the overture to Tannhäuser.  It's eminently hummable, right?  You play it early in the day, and it goes through your mind until nightfall.

As a bit of a gift to those of us who still consider Stravinsky's Rite of Spring to be pretty avant-garde stuff, the Seattle Symphony this week, as part of its regular season, presented a program that I attended last night of three pieces from the Romantic era.  The first, not surprisingly, was the  Tannhäuser Overture.  (The other two, equally well-loved or hackneyed, depending on your disposition, were Dvořák's Cello Concerto in B minor, and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.)

I doubt that I was the first lad to cut his musical teeth on the Tannhäuser overture, or on Wagner in general.  Wagner has an appeal to young males that is, while not exactly sexual, at least hormonal.  Somewhat similar to the appeal of race car accidents and hard tackling in football, but combined with the spiritual transcendence you find in certain Church of England hymns.  Wagner appealed to the Nazis; his music is also used at weddings. . 

When I was twenty, the recordings of Wagner's music that I played repeatedly, performed as scored by a full orchestra, might as well have been performed on a pipe organ.  The sound was a single wave that washed over me and receded, over and over.  The appeal was all loudness and emotion and confrontation with overwhelming force.

Listening to Tannhäuser's overture last night -- and especially watching it played by the orchestra -- was my first experience with its live performance, other than as played by a darkened orchestra in the pit before the full opera.  It was enjoyable watching how various themes worked together, and how various instruments contributed, each in its own way, to the overall effect.  A classmate back in college pointed out to me how, in Wagner, the strings build up tension and the horns resolve that tension, but that was pretty much the extent of my musical analysis.

I've never played an instrument in an orchestra.  For me it's often difficult to perceive how various instruments are working together, and off each other, when listening to a recording.  Which suggests one good reason to attend a live performance -- you can watch the sections of the orchestra at work.  You can see how the various pulleys and gears of the orchestral machine act together to produce the overall effect -- an effect that would still be enjoyable, but different, were the piece to be transcribed for organ, or any other solo instrument.

And yes.  The major theme of the Tannhäuser Overture still rings in my head today.  I quietly hum it to myself.