Photo of pages 221-222 of John Culshaw’s Ring Resounding by There Stands the Glass.
John Culshaw writes about the incidental noise issued by conductor Hans Knappertsbusch in Ring Resounding. Sure enough, Knappertsbusch’s “grunts and snorts” are clearly audible at the opening of a 1951 recording of Parsifal.
Studying the book is part of an ongoing investigation of Wagner corresponding with my burgeoning interest in classical music. Culshaw’s detailed account of the first complete recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen is filled with delectable gossip and substantive musings.
Discovering that the disruptive ambient noise accompanying many of the classical concerts I’ve attended isn’t an aberration came as a shock. Ill-timed coughs and the creaking of seats are also part and parcel of live recordings. The non-musical sounds created by artists further altered my connection with the so-called fine art.
For instance, a pivotal moment of Deutsche Grammophon’s otherwise wonderful new recording of Krystian Zimerman’s Beethoven: Complete Piano Concertos is marred when members of the London Symphony Orchestra clamorously adjust their sheet music. And the breathing of pianist Behzod Abduraimov is clearly audible on one of my favorite albums of 2021.
When I put on headphones and queue up Beethoven, Debussy or Wagner, I’m no longer surprised when the ostensibly pristine and often ethereal sounds are accompanied by grunts, snorts, murmurs and heavy breathing. The humanizing revelation is one more indication classical music and opera aren’t nearly as arrogantly inhospitable and formidably precious as they initially appear.
The art of opera has nothing to do with obscene galas. Culshaw hoped his landmark recordings would make the form more equitable: “The sickness of opera has been, and is, that it is a very expensive and exclusive closed shop… Richard Wagner abhorred this attitude a hundred years ago, and we are only now beginning to make the slightest progress towards a change.”