Long before Tristan und Isolde...

If Domenico Scarlatti's contemporaries heard the B-theme of his sonata K.208 (L.238) as less than outrageously unstable with respect to its key, it is hard to see why the key instability of Wagner's Tristan (composed about a century later) should have been greeted with much more than 'big fucking deal'.
   
Here is Scarlatti's proto-Wagnerian harmonic pretzel in a performance by the Korean pianist Soo-Yeon Ham recorded live at the 2009 Cleveland International Piano Competition.

Querying the dead

Listening to a Webern score without being able to read it must be rather like studying a great  architectural mastepiece without having access to a ground plan.  ...  The new [music], when it eschews any links with the past, can be absorbed only by those who are able to hear the music and read the score (the aural equivalent of the architect's blueprint).

ERICH LEINSDORF [1]

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Why should listening to a piece of art music be like studying a piece of architecture (or anything else)? Why shouldn’t it be instead like taking a tour of a palace (castle, cathedral)? 

     Does one have to study the shooting script and the production designer’s storyboard in order to “absorb” a film of Eisenstein, Godard, or Tarkovsky?  Or read the source code of computer programs used to produce some of the art works at MOMA in order to “absorb” such works?  

What exactly does the ability to read a score amount to? 

     When in 1854 the conductor Hans von Bülow sent Richard Wagner some scores to review, Wagner responded with a letter in which he admitted his borderline incompetence (if not impotence) as a score reader:

     ...[H]ow am I to get any clear idea of these [scores]? You know how abominably I play the piano, and that I cannot master anything by that means unless I can get a clear conception [of the music] beforehand.  What I get from a simple reading [of the score] is not enough ... to arrive at an idea of a composition.[2]

     Did Wagner have the ability to read a score?

Blue Balls Lohengrin

In the middle of one his stand-up acts, the American comedian Steven Wright - whose onstage persona is by turns morose, dejected, or depressed - suddenly took a deep breath and said very slowly, very darkly, and with a deep sigh: I am soooo excited...  That was funny and the joke took all of two seconds.

Recently I was reminded of Steven Wright by what I thought (for a moment) was a similar joke, except that it went on for more than twenty minutes and wasn't in the least funny.  The joke in question was the Bridal Chamber Duet from Lohengrin conducted by Joseph Keilberth at the 1953 Bayreuth Festival (with Wolfgang Windgassen in the lead role).[1]  To say that Keiberth's tempo was sluggish would be a severe understatement.  It was comatose.  Had this been a piece of instrumental music, one could conceivably justify such a tempo as an exercise of 'artistic license', akin to Glenn Gould's catatonic recording of Siegfried's Idyll or Sviatoslav Richter's glacial performances of Schubert's piano sonatas. Alas, with opera musical decisions cannot be completely unmoored from the text [2]; and it is because of the text that Keilberth tempo struck me as being simply freakish.
     To explain:

When smart people say stupid things III

Our admiration for the great singers of the past is based on gramophone records. But what do we know about the precise circumstances in which they were made?  Undoubtedly performances by tenors like Max Lorenz and Lauritz Melchior were stellar events ... although I am inclined to doubt whether both these singers had such tremendous voices as is claimed for them today.
Christian Thielemann [1]
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Perhaps only a German mind can so effortlessly misrepresent obvious facts and then raise doubts as to whether there are any such facts at all. (This, after all, is the principal characteristic of German philosophy from Kant to Heidegger.)  Coming from a highly experienced and internationally acclaimed opera conductor, Thielemann's doubt is worse than frivolous. It is delusional.  There is no gentler way to describe his state of denial in the face of readily available and utterly compelling evidence that Lauritz Melchior's legendary status as a Wagnerian Heldentenor is fully justified by the unmatched glories of his singing.

So lets take a quick look at the evidence.