Saul Lilienstein, professor, former student of Leonard Bernstein,
conductor, scholar, and producer of opera, was scheduled to present a
lecture entitled "Uncommon Resonance:  Discovering Wagner's long reach
into unexpected places and amongst musicians and writers far from German
lands" last February 22 in Funger Hall at George Washington University
in Washington, DC.  I cursed my luck at having to miss it due to a prior
commitment on the sunny beaches of Kauai, but the gods were with me.  On
the scheduled day, they blanketed Washington w/ a snowstorm.  Professor
Lilienstein and Wagner Society Chairman Jim Holman debated whether or not
to cancel the lecture, Holman apparently arguing that the weather wasn't
going to clear up and Lilienstein arguing that, especially where Wagner
was concerned, you had to be patient.  Holman won out and the lecture was
rescheduled for last night, making it possible for me to attend, and glad
I was at the chance.

The day before had been the occasion of a gala evening fund raiser
at a historic Georgetown mansion w/ Thomas Stewart and Evelyn Lear in
attendance, where a trophy cup that had been presented to Steward (I
believe in Bayreuth) was put up for silent auction.  Jim Holman told us how
he had hoped to become the winner of the silent auction and in fact he did
win the auction, for which he thanked some of his friends who he believed
had deliberately held back somewhat w/ their own bids out of consideration
for him.  Upon receiving the trophy cup, Holman did what he had planned to
do if he should win it:  he presented it back to Thomas Stewart, who firmly
refused the tender, thanking him w/ his arms on Jim, "Hans Sachs" style.
It was all very touching.  And then Holman presented Professor Lilienstein
to us.

I remembered him from an earlier Washington Opera insights lecture
on *Magic Flute* and was prepared on that basis to be enlightened and
entertained.  I wasn't disappointed.  He started out by reminding out that
he was going to explore Wagner's influence upon artists outside the German
cultural world, specifically among Italian, English and French artists.
He also warned us that his presentation would not follow a structured
sequence, a warning that seemed borne out by the disorganized, unstacked
pile of notes he held clutched in this hand, from which he kept reading
until close to the end of his presentation when they fell from his hand
and scattered all over the platform.

 From the appearance of *Tannhaeuser* to that of Strauss' *Salome* in 1905,
Wagner, according to Lilienstein, was the cutting edge in Europe's musical
world.  When *Parsifal* premiered in New York, it made bigger newspaper
headlines than the sinking of the *Titanic* a few years later.

After these preliminary observations, Lilienstein demonstrated the first
example of what he considered a Wagnerian influence upon a work of art,
Oscar Wilde's story "The Nightingale and the Rose".  For those who might
not recall the tale, it's about a young student who believes he can get the
pretty girl to go to the dance with him if he can find her a red rose even
though it's the middle of winter.  The nightingale, pitying the student,
creates a red rose from a rose tree literally w/ her heart's blood,
impaling herself on a thorn until it penetrates her heart producing the red
rose and being left lifeless.

   "....All night long she sang, with her breast against the thorn, and
   the cold crystal Moon leaned down and listened.  All night long she
   sang, and the thorn went deeper and deeper into her breast, and her
   life-blood ebbed away from her.

   "She sang first of the birth of love in the heart of a boy and a
   girl.  And on the topmost spray of the Rose-tree there blossomed a
   marvellous rose, petal following petal, as song followed song.  Pale
   was it, at first, as the mist that hangs over the river--pale as the
   feet of the morning, and silver as the wings of the dawn.  As the
   shadow of a rose in a mirror of silver, as the shadow of a rose in
   a water-pool, so was the rose that blossomed on the topmost spray of
   the Tree.

   "But the Tree cried to the Nightingale to press closer against the
   thorn.  Press closer, little Nightingale," cried the Tree, 'or the
   Day will come before the rose is finished.'

   "So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and louder and
   louder grew her song, for she sang of the birth of passion in the
   soul of a man and a maid.

   "And a delicate flush of pink came into the leaves of the rose, like
   the flush in the face of the bridegroom when he kisses the lips of
   the bride.  But the thorn had not yet reached her heart, so the rose's
   heart remained white, for only a Nightingale's heart's-blood can
   crimson the heart of a rose.

   "And the Tree cried to the Nightingale to press closer against the
   thorn.  'Press closer, little Nightingale,' cried the Tree, 'or the
   day will come before the rose is finished.'

   "So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and the thorn
   touched her heart, and a fierce pang of pain shot through her.
   Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song,
   for she sang of the Love that is perfected by death, of the Love that
   dies not in the tomb.

                            *****

   "Then she gave one last burst of music.  The white Moon heard it,
   and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky.  The red rose
   heard it and trembled all over with ecstasy, and opened its petals
   to the cold morning air.  Echo bore it to her purple cavern in the
   hills, and woke the sleeping shepherds from their dreams.  It floated
   through the reeds of the river, and they carried its message to the
   sea.

   "'Look, look!' cried the Tree, 'the rose is finished now;' but the
   Nightingale made no answer, for she was lying dead in the long grass,
   with the thorn in her heart."

There, said Lilienstein, we had Wilde's Liebestod, Wagnerian in its use of
repeated words and repeated images as motives, culminating in death...and
ecstasy.  (Lilienstein did not remind us that the story goes on with the
pretty girl rejecting the rose because it wouldn't go w/ her dress, and
rejecting the student in favor of the chamberlain's nephew, who wears
silver buckles, whereupon the student goes back to his room to study
philosophy and metaphysics.)

Lilienstein then showed us three clips of different productions of the
same scene from Verdi's *Falstaff*.  It's actually somewhat of a confused
scene, with the men on one side singing their carefully laid plot in duple
time, the ladies on the other side singing in triple, and in the middle,
the tenor declaiming his feelings, to which nobody is paying attention.
It's actually a tour de force that few besides Verdi could bring off.
After we saw and heard it for the third time, Lilienstein advised us that
Verdi had just heard the premiere of *Die Meistersinger* when he wrote that
and he now showed us the scene from the first act where Walther, in the
middle, full of untrained, undisciplined enthusiasm, sings his qualifying
song to the horror of the masters, who are faulting it from start to finish
in duple on one side, while the apprentices (sopranos) are having a great
laugh in triple time on the other side.

Wagner's influence was illustrated differently in an Interlude occurring
in Puccini's *Manon Lescaut* which did sound as though it could have come
from *Tristan*.  (It also reminded me of Puccini's "Chrysanthemum" quartet,
portions of which fill the background of another scene in the opera as
somebody on this list once pointed out to me.)

Next we heard an orchestral portion of *Tristan* ending on a chord,
clearly recognizable as from that opera...except that it wasn't.  It
was the beginning of a splice from Debussy's *Afternoon of a Faun* and it
caught most of us off guard.  It illustrated how composers who wanted to be
important or significant had to first find themselves in Wagner.  But then,
the composer would have to free himself from that influence and one of the
best ways to exorcise Wagner was to parody him.  Hence the slightly mocking
allusion to the opening of *Tristan* in "Golliwog's Cakewalk".  Lilienstein
told us that Chabrier wrote a Wagner-like opera called *Gwendolyn* which
was so Wagner-like and unoriginal that there was no point listening to it
w/ the real stuff available.  Chabrier then apparently worked to exorcise
his demon with a work called "Souvenirs de Bayreuth" where familiar Wagner
allusions are recast as salon music, can can, and the like.  With apologies
to those who might view Wagner as a deity and his music as sacred text, he
did a little dance to the opening of Act II to *Tristan* a la Can Can, w/
a few tasteful kicks and ending with his turning away from us, bending
down, and tossing up his coat tails.  Then followed some examples from
Faure wherein the "Rhine Journey" was recalled.

And then we were given scenes from *Parsifal* to watch, while Lilienstein
read to us Verlaine's "Parsifal" in French and English, which I thought
an unnecessary interference w/ enjoyment of the music until later in his
lecture.  This is about Wagner, remember, so we have to be patient.

I think Lilienstein reserved his highest praise and appreciation for a
Wagner-influenced work for Debussy's *Peleas et Melisande*.  While the
music and the vocal lines bear evidence of Wagner's influence, the opera
is clearly Debussy's.  For example, when Peleas and Melisande recognize
their forbidden love for each other, there is no longer the need for an
orchestral build up as after Tristan and Isolde take their love potions.
He simply says, "Je t'aime" and she replies, barely audibly, "Je t'aime."

We next heard of *Rheingold's* premiering in Russia, where all the
musical giants of the land insisted upon attending the rehearsals and
Rimsky-Korsakov wrote *Mlada* another Wagnerian opera that's not heard
anymore.

And now back to poetry and T.S.  Eliot's "Wasteland".  I, like probably
most in the room, recalled Eliot's *Tristan* quotations ("Frisch weht der
Wind/Der Heimat zu;/Mein Irisch Kind,/Wo weilest du? and "Oed' und leer
das Meer, and Weilala leia) but I would not have recognized "Et O ces
voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole" had I not heard it a few minutes
earlier, when Lilienstein read that line from Verlaine's "Parsifal".
(Eliot attributes the source of the line in his notes, w/out further
explanation.)

Delius was described as an Englishman who wished he had been German.  We
were able to hear the final scene from his *Village Romeo and Juliet*, an
opera which, according to Lilienstein, would have been another *Gwendolyn*
but for that last scene.  I had never heard any of the opera before and
can't speak about what I hadn't heard, but the last scene which we heard,
was sublime.  There were hints of familiar Wagner passages, like "War es so
schmaehlich" from the last act of *Die Walkuere*, but the music went beyond
that, and the lovers' duet was heartbreakingly beautiful.  The opera was
first performed in Germany and in German.

We were treated to some further instances of what Lilienstein considered
art bearing Wagner's influence, including a reading of the last few
paragraphs of Molly Bloom's soliloquy ending Joyce's *Ulysses*, but for
me the climax of the evening was the final duet from Delius' opera.

Walter Meyer