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God I love Wagner. Why do people hate Wagner? Because of the Nazi thing? I mean okay fine, but I mean have these people listened to Wagner? It's like when in that Motte podcast and @KulakRevolt kept hating on The Great Gatsby. I mean I feel like at some point people aren't paying attention to the things they should be paying attention to.
Exhibit A: This is Siegfried's Funeral March. Yeah, from a film, but hey, I have never had the good fortune to watch the 17 hours which is Der Ring des Nibelungs though I would do it in a heartbeat.
Many years ago I watched a pretty uneven film called Aria and was introduced to Wagner apart from the usual Apocalypse Now sequence. The film had only one Wagner piece, a haunting section from the longer opera Tristan Und Isolde called Liebestod. You can find this in both instrumental and vocal versions. My favorite is the one done by Leontyne Price, and was the one used in in the film. You can watch that here.
So why the Wagner hate? Too rhapsodic? Too emotional? Neither of these critiques holds water with me. I mean listening to Wagner 24/7 is probably not advisable, but sometimes a little Wagner is just what the musical doctor ordered.
Fight me!
I dislike a lot of Wagner's oeuvre, and would pin this on two factors:
Despite lots of exposure as a frequent concert-goer, classical piano training and everything, I still can't appreciate operatic singing. The excessive vibrato means that the voice always spends more time sitting at pitches that are gratingly dissonant with the rest of the orchestration than in consonance.
A lot of it strikes me as melodically and harmonically monotonous, and the chord progressions, when they don't get washed out by being slow-walked, still fall flat emotionally. This may be a problem that I have with the German folk musical tradition in general, to which Wagner owes a lot. (For the same reason, I have a good track record of shocking connoisseurs by declaring a dislike of Schubert's songs.) This song, which we had to sing at school, seems close to a central example of everything I dislike about it. (So, curiously, a near-opposite of "too emotional"? Maybe someone is having an intense emotion there, but I don't empathise with it.)
That being said, there are a handful of Wagner pieces I actually do like, like for example the Vorspiel from Parsifal.
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