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The Radio 3 Boards > The Music Boards > Music Through The Ages > Early Music > The (real) Mastersingers
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Author Topic: The (real) Mastersingers  (Read 509 times)
teleplasm
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« on: 14:58:36, 10-03-2007 »
It soon became clear in today's show that the Mastersingers produced little or no original music. They were really poets who wrote verses to fit a repertoire of old melodies. But the Minnesingers, the early-mediaeval German counterparts of the Troubadours, some of whose music was also played, are a different matter. It's a pity that Radio 3 couldn't have done a show about them rather than the musically rather arid subject of the Mastersingers, which was obviously motivated by the fact that Wagner's opera is being broadcast tonight from the Met.
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Kittybriton
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« Reply #1 on: 16:05:56, 10-03-2007 »
Alas! I missed most of the programme, but intend to catch it ASAP on LA.
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DracoM
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« Reply #2 on: 19:34:22, 10-03-2007 »
Well, for the first ten minutes, I thought I was listening to an extended trail for the Met Opera relay. And totally agree, not much was added! And given the number of trails we've had for the Met Opera broadcast, another 10 minutes of it just sickened.

OK, I love Wagner, but this was overkill.
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reiner_torheit
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« Reply #3 on: 21:54:19, 10-03-2007 »
I shall definitely tune into this EMS on Listen Again!   I agree, the Minnesingers were the people doing the more interesting work.  They were greatly influenced by the trouveres.  I believe I remember reading (about 20 years ago when studying this stuff) that quite a few of the troubadours (the Occitanian branch of this genre) had fled to Germany when the Languedoc was pillaged by de Montfort ("Kill them all! God will find his own!") and his crew.  This might have been how the tradition was transplanted to Germany.  There were also German & Austrian singers who were outside this tradition but related to it... like the Monarch-Bard Oswald Von Wolkenstein (King of the Tyrol).
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roslynmuse
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« Reply #4 on: 23:41:32, 10-03-2007 »
BBC logic - broadcast Meistersinger on R3 AND Siegfried on BBC2 on the same evening, overlapping.

Couldn't do better if it had been planned...
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teleplasm
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« Reply #5 on: 12:39:12, 11-03-2007 »
This is the second time recently that the Early Music Show has been conspicuously abused. Last weekend, two (!) shows were given over to composers of the French Revolution. The presenter introduced the first by admitting that "Early Music is being stretched almost to its limit". I'll be charitable, and regard this remark as tongue-in-cheek. Considering that some of the featured composers were contemporaries of Beethoven, it was being stretched well beyond its limit.

What was Radio 3 up to? The natural treatment of this subject was on Composer of the Week. Maybe the programme planners thought that after five hours of music by such stunning mediocrities as Gossec and Méhul, even the most devoted Radio 3 listeners would be losing their will to live or switching over to Classic FM, so they compromised by dumping it onto the Early Music Show for a couple of hours. If this is a clue to how much respect they have for the Show, I can't see it surviving in its present form.
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roslynmuse
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« Reply #6 on: 13:10:03, 11-03-2007 »
In the past there would be no need to apologise for simply doing a one-off programme about Gossec and Mehul et al - in fact I seem to remember Basil Deane presenting one such about 15 years ago...

Why everything needs to be pigeonholed I don't know; presumably so that it can be targetted by the appropriate messageboard (or not...)  Undecided
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Kittybriton
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« Reply #7 on: 15:37:00, 11-03-2007 »
Listening to the programme ATM I am tempted to agree with Draco - this seems to be at least as much about Wagner as it is about the original Minnesingers. While I can see that Wagner's opera might be a way of luring the unsuspecting into earlier centuries it would be nice to have a programme that concentrates more on the subject itself rather than mixing it with a nineteenth century review that wasn't primarily concerned with historically informed performance.
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trained-pianist
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« Reply #8 on: 17:20:09, 11-03-2007 »
I agree with you all. The only positive for me is that I am becoming some kind of an expert at Wagner Mastersingers (a specially the scene where whatever his name is singing under the balcony, very comic scene it is). They keep broadcasting this episod in many different programmes.
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