Wagner IlluminatedAspects of Wagner: New Light on the Most Controversial Composer of All Time by BryanMageeReview by: Robert DoningtonThe Musical Times, Vol. 114, No. 1568 (Oct., 1973), p. 1012Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/955379 .

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professional. Their weakness is that they may be less than ideally orderly in the study of their subject, acquiring therefore an inconsistent command or a lopsided view of it, and often exhibiting serious lacunae and imperfect perceptions even in areas quite closely related to their main enthusiasms.

This is the impression that is afforded by this book. It starts with a very brief but quite useful discussion of Russian folksong, and then passes to a far fuller account of Russian liturgical chant. Swan's passionate commitment to this music and its background make for an absorbing narrative; its weakness is that it does not tell us much that is precise about the music itself. For example Swan writes: 'It is not necessary here to quote related melodic patterns from folksong and chant' (p.38). Yet surely this is just the sort of thing that the Western reader, perhaps completely ignorant of both types of music, would find most informative, certainly of far more use than Swan's genealogy of the 'classic masters of Russian church singing'?

The trouble is that, however lively and sensitive was Swan's response to the music, his ability to analyse and discriminate were not strong. The lack of musical examples in the chapter on 18th-century Russian music matters less than in the chapter on chant, for Russian composition of this period was an impoverished imitation of Western models, mainly Italian. It is when he comes to the 19th century that Swan's weaknesses are most apparent. He always remains readable, is sometimes stimulating, and occasionally shows real insight. Yet a history of music must be founded upon a scrupulous respect for factual accuracy, and a careful, clear-headed insight into the music. Enthusiasm and powerful personal response are not enough. Glinka's biography is correct enough in outline, but misleading or even wrong in all sorts of details. There are some strange pronouncements, too: 'As Elgar in England shook hands over the centuries with Purcell ... so Glinka stretched over to the Moscow masters of the thresh- old of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries'. Every interpretation I can make of this is at best unhelpful, at worst nonsensical. As for more detailed comments upon the music, these are at times incomprehensible, occasionally demonstrably in- accurate (it is simply not true, for instance, that Glinka became 'a mature master of practically all forms of composition' during his four years abroad in the early 1830s). Nor are the succeeding chapters on the Five, Tchaikovsky and others any more secure, though Swan's individual, often idiosyncratic views and viewpoints do make for lively, if some- times dangerous reading (can one, for instance, really accept that 'Tchaikovsky's greatest strength lies in his uncanny faculty for symphonic con- struction and development' ?).

Nevertheless, the last part of the book has a unique value, for Swan is able to write from personal experience of music and events. We may still not be able to agree with all his critical judgments, and the narrative becomes scrappier as he finds it increasingly difficult to comprehend musical developments; yet we must be grateful for the testimony and opinions of a man who can recall such things as the premiere in 1907 of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Invisible City of Kitezh, the spell of Skryabin's piano recitals, who knew Prokofiev, Rakhmaninov and Medtner, and who can recall so vividly musical conditions and the personal misfortunes of Russian musicians during and after the First World War. It is also valuable to have the traditional wedding rite of the village of Gorodishche printed in one of the appendices.

DAVID BROWN

Wagner illuminated Aspects of Wagner: new light on the most contro-

versial composer of all time by Bryan Magee (rev. edn.). Panther Books, 35p

Certainly a controversial sub-title, but if the most controversial western composer was not Monte- verdi, it was assuredly Wagner; and so I think too. The essays in this welcome reissue are themselves sufficiently controversial to be interesting, yet sufficiently sound to be fruitful; and I recommend them on their reappearance as cordially as I did (MT Nov 1968, p.1022) on their first appearance. I have made a careful page-by-page comparison, and they do not seem to have been very appreciably revised, but are none the worse for that, since they always were good, with only such imperfections as are probably intrinsic; for we are none of us Perfect Wagnerites nowadays, and perhaps we should not want to be. Wagner is himself the better for the demise of Wagnerolatry, and Bryan Magee has helped that along very usefully in this intelligent little volume, among a number of positive percep- tions in true praise of Wagner, of which we cannot have too much for my liking. Especially topical are Bryan Magee's good comments on getting back to Wagner's stage-directions.

ROBERT DONINGTON

Haymarket Opera House The King's Theatre 1704-1867: London's first Italian

opera house by Daniel Nalbach. The Society for Theatre Research, ?3

The theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden have a romance, a sense of theatrical tradition, but who now gives a second thought to the history of Her Majesty's, dwarfed by New Zealand House and looking ripe for redevelopment? Yet its operatic past is at least as glamorous as Covent Garden's and only Drury Lane has a longer continuous theatrical history. Vanbrugh's theatre opened as the Queen's in 1705 (the foundation stone was laid in April 1704) and became the King's on Queen Anne's death in 1714. On Victoria's accession it had to become Her Majesty's rather than the Queen's because, as Grove's Dictionary puts it, another theatre then 'bore that appellation'. Built as a playhouse, it was given over to opera by 1710 because its acoustics, like those of the present Sadler's Wells theatre, favoured the singing rather than the speak- ing voice. It remained the home of Italian opera until the mid-19th century. A musical and social history of this theatre, or rather series of theatres, for there were disastrous fires in 1789 and 1867 and demolition and rebuilding by Tree in the 1890s, is then long overdue.

Daniel Nalbach considers in detail only the first two theatres and is strongest on their changes in architecture and management. The history is a complex and interesting one. Vanbrugh's 'vast triumphal Piece of Architecture' was modified within five years and later designers included Adam, Gainsborough, Novosielski, Nash and Repton. The management is an almost continuous story of intrigue and disaster, with four managers who absconded and one, Taylor, who ran the theatre for years while under nominal imprisonment for debt. Unfortunately the plan of the book makes it very difficult to relate these aspects to each other

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