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The Arthurian Cycle and the British Wagner

M

Makemakean

Mr Makemean
Pronouns
Logical, unlike those in German
So, here's an idea of mine that I was discussing with @Alex Richards the other week that ties into the greater worldbuilding of the Swedish Strangerverse. I kind of figured, wouldn't it be neat if instead of Wagner, in the 19th century, you have a British Wagner instead of Gilbert and Sullivan, and so instead of having a German Wagner write a series of operas based on the (fundamentally Norse) story of the Ring of the Nibelungs, you have the British Wagner write a series of five or so operas about the Arthurian cycle?

When I pitched this idea, the aforementioned Mr Richards right off the bat had a number of clever ideas of what the different installments in the cycle of operas would be, what would be their titles, the main characters and the plots, but alas, I was dumb enough not to take note, and at present my memory fails me. I cannot recall if Mr Richards figured that the central theme should be Excalibur, or if the central theme should be the Holy Grail. I cannot recall if he felt there should be an entire opera dedicated to Lancelot, or if there should be an entire opera dedicated to Percival.

So I'm starting this thread to discuss the matter in some greater detail, to ask people to give their inputs and thoughts.

So, here's the thread dedicated to the Arthurian Opera Cycle!

Coming soon to the Aberystwyth Festival, sponsored by Alfred Edward, Prince of Wales, himself!
 
I'm a tad hazy on exactly what I said previously, but I believe the central theme was effectively Excalibur/Camelot itself rather than anything else- certainly Percival and the Grail would have been a separate work entirely from the main cycle, albeit potentially more interlinked- in the same way that you could easily have a Tristan regardless. Or indeed an operatic adaptation of the Tale of Culhwch and Olwen, probably focusing on the hunting of Twrch Trwyth.

Of course a lot depends on how much this is based purely on the French Chivalric vision of Camelot, and how much on the earlier Welsh antecedents- on the one hand the Lancelot-Guinevere story is entirely a creation of the former, on the other given the period it's entirely plausible that the translation of the Mabinogion is itself part of the drive for the creation of this cycle.

In any case, it's fairly easy to see how some of the elements of the mythos would be adapted- Excalibur is clearly going to end up as both the Sword in the Stone and the Sword of the Lady of the Lake, you'd end with the Battle of Camlan and Arthur being taken to Avalon, you'd want an opera on the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere (assuming you adapted that version of things).

So you'd have something along the lines of:

Merlin- A possibility perhaps, but I could see this as a sort of prologue covering a bit of a grab bag of related ideas- Merlin's ability at prophecy, the tale of Vortigern and the dragons, perhaps the bard Taliesin, Morgan le Fey's apprenticeship to Merlin, and the placing of Excalibur in the stone bashed together into a coherent narrative- perhaps Ninianne/Nimue, the Lady of the Lake forged Excalibur on Avalon in the first place on instruction from Merlin by dint of the prophesised events of the future and there's potentially an opportunity for a bit of a rivalry with both Ninianne and Morgan as apprentices to Merlin.
Arthur or The Young Arthur - telling of Arthur's youth, the pulling of the Sword in the Stone and the founding of Camelot. Throw in the romance with Morgause here and then the reveal that she's actually his half-sister here - you could consider this the 'Spring' of Camelot.
Lancelot- The romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, Lancelot's flight and the murder of the siblings of Galahad and Mordred and finishing with the reconciliation of Arthur and Guinevere- the 'Autumn' of Camelot.
Camlann - The pursuit of Lancelot, the betrayal of Mordred and the titular battle, ending with Arthur returning the sword to the Lady of the Lake as he is taken by boat to Avalon by Morgan. This is clearly the 'Winter' of Camelot. If you've got Merlin and Ninianne in the prologue this could also be where he's trapped by her actions.

I think Camelot's Summer wouldn't necessarily have an opera in the main cycle, but take the form of whatever collection of tales of the Knights of the Round Table get adapted- so you could have a 'Percival' here (Galahad getting nixed in his role as the Grail Knight), maybe a Tristan, or a Gawain, or a Culwich.

I mean you'd probably get a lot of criticism about the composer here as being really misogynistic based on how basically all of the last two operas would come down to 'female betrayals bring down Camelot', but then we are talking about the late 19th Century.
 
First of all, I love everything you've written, Mr Richards.

Alex Richards said:
Of course a lot depends on how much this is based purely on the French Chivalric vision of Camelot, and how much on the earlier Welsh antecedents- on the one hand the Lancelot-Guinevere story is entirely a creation of the former, on the other given the period it's entirely plausible that the translation of the Mabinogion is itself part of the drive for the creation of this cycle.
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Well, as I mentioned, this is a British Wagner.

Tolkien might have had his deep-seated concerns about French influences on what was considered British mythology and famously said that 1066 was the worst year in English history and all that and essentially all of the Arda mythos is about creating an English mythos void of French influence, but seeing OTL Wagner was perfectly happy to borrow from the Norse like crazy, I don't think this British Wagner would have any qualms abut borrowing from Chrétien de Troyes if he felt it made the story all the more majestic and powerful.

So that should clear some misgivings up. Basically, what I'm asking is, what would be the best operatic treatment of the Arthurian cycle that you can think of in a Wagnerian style.

Alex Richards said:
Merlin- A possibility perhaps, but I could see this as a sort of prologue covering a bit of a grab bag of related ideas- Merlin's ability at prophecy, the tale of Vortigern and the dragons, perhaps the bard Taliesin, Morgan le Fey's apprenticeship to Merlin, and the placing of Excalibur in the stone bashed together into a coherent narrative- perhaps Ninianne/Nimue, the Lady of the Lake forged Excalibur on Avalon in the first place on instruction from Merlin by dint of the prophesised events of the future and there's potentially an opportunity for a bit of a rivalry with both Ninianne and Morgan as apprentices to Merlin.
Arthur or The Young Arthur - telling of Arthur's youth, the pulling of the Sword in the Stone and the founding of Camelot. Throw in the romance with Morgause here and then the reveal that she's actually his half-sister here - you could consider this the 'Spring' of Camelot.
Click to expand...

Okay, so here's where my stylistic concerns start coming in.

Of those theatrical performances I have seen (both in real life and on film, which are preciously few), two things stand out to me here that I really want to draw on. One was a Japanese opera/play whose name I cannot remember, and whose title I cannot come across despite diligent googling. My parents took me and my sister to see it in Tokyo back in 2002, and it was the first part of a duology about some artist or another. The play ended with the artist about to commit suicide or something of the sort (it was difficult to tell, I don't speak Japanese) and the artist decided to do some final painting, or some final piece of calligraphy, or something, on a rock. Just when the artist is about to commit suicide, the paint has somehow or another bled through the stone to the other side, his wife notices this, tells her husband, and he does not commit suicide, because this is proof of his ability, which apparently was at the heart of the whole play.

Or something.

Again, I don't speak Japanese, but apparently, this was a very beautiful performance, because the lady who was sitting next to me started sobbing towards the end because of just how moved she was by the whole thing. And I remember sitting there, being like, 'geez, I wish I knew what was happening here, because it must be quite something!' But it was a striking scene nonetheless, even when you didn't understand anything, seeing that paint bleed through the fake stone.

I'm also reminded of towards the end of Das Rheingold when Valhalla appears across the Bifrost and Wotan leads the Aesir thither while the Rhine maidens cry out for their lost gold and Loge expresses his contempt for the hypocrisy of the Aesir and all that.

I want to have one of the operas end either with Excalibur being placed in the stone, or Excalibur being pulled from the stone.

Which one makes the most sense?
 
Makemakean said:
I want to have one of the operas end either with Excalibur being placed in the stone, or Excalibur being pulled from the stone.

Which one makes the most sense?
Click to expand...

I mean there's scope you could go for both- you'd need to have the Arthur-Morgause romance and such before he actually becomes king, and drop the 'pulls the sword, is not believed, the sword is put back and he pulls it again' bit of course.

But otherwise, the plot of that Merlin is essentially leading to the placing of Excalibur into the stone, probably with Merlin making the whole 'Whomsoever pulleth this sword' speech.
 
A note on the potential location for staging these operas - the early C20th composter Rutland Boughton, who had an interest in Arthurian-era archaeology and bought into the notion that Arthur and Guinevere were buried at Glastonbury Abbey, did actually establish a local version of Bayreuth at Glastonbury in the 1920s as a forerunner of the Glastonbury Festival . The inspiration for this came from Bayreuth and it was intended by RB to be a British riposte to the Wager mythological version of German culture, with Arthur as its 'much more authentic than the Rhinemaiden myths' centre; but RB was a quirky Socialist and a Lenin fan, who wrote and staged an Arthurian opera with 'good' workers and 'outdated and decadent' aristocrats, ending with a 'Red Dawn' of a workers' revolt. He also changed the Arthurian Holy Grail connections to the 'Grail Dynasty' in favour of a Socialist interpretation with Jesus Christ as bringing a new classless society led by the workers to replace the old order, in presumed homage to Soviet Russia, and made him a miner's child - which put off sponsors and led to a boycott. The plans he made for a Bayreuth-style cultural centre at G collapsed as a result; but if you have a CF more cautious and non-political version of Boughton, the 1920s as an era of post-WW 1 cultural yearning for a stable 'New Order' could focus on Arthur as trying to bring an end to wars and chaos.

Could a leading nostalgic 'cultural revivalist' composer like Vaughan Williams or a longer-living Holst get involved and be lured into writing the music for Arthurian entertainments, and a Tolkien who had fallen more for early 'Celtic' myths (Taliesin's C6th poetry?) and less for 'Beowulf' at school/ college take it up in his writing? JRRT did apparently know the Pre-Raphaelite paintings by the Morris 'group' in Birmingham art-galleries as a boy pre-1914, so that could start him off on Arthurian themes and an Arthurian expert mentor as his tutor when he was at Oxford c. 1912 get him into Welsh and Irish rather than Anglo-Saxon poetry , by focussing on actual Welsh and Irish languages rather than on creating his own 'Elvish' tongues. As it is, there are elements of Arthuriana in JRRT - Aragorn as Arthur, 'failed quester' Boromir as Sir Gawain, Gandalf as Merlin, and Galadriel as the mysterious Otherworldly patroness Lady of the Lake. And Frodo as a sort of Galahad, albeit a flawed one, as he cannot stay in the 'real' world after achieving the Quest.
 
heraclius said:
A note on the potential location for staging these operas - the early C20th composter Rutland Boughton, who had an interest in Arthurian-era archaeology and bought into the notion that Arthur and Guinevere were buried at Glastonbury Abbey, did actually establish a local version of Bayreuth at Glastonbury in the 1920s as a forerunner of the Glastonbury Festival . The inspiration for this came from Bayreuth and it was intended by RB to be a British riposte to the Wager mythological version of German culture, with Arthur as its 'much more authentic than the Rhinemaiden myths' centre; but RB was a quirky Socialist and a Lenin fan, who wrote and staged an Arthurian opera with 'good' workers and 'outdated and decadent' aristocrats, ending with a 'Red Dawn' of a workers' revolt. He also changed the Arthurian Holy Grail connections to the 'Grail Dynasty' in favour of a Socialist interpretation with Jesus Christ as bringing a new classless society led by the workers to replace the old order, in presumed homage to Soviet Russia, and made him a miner's child - which put off sponsors and led to a boycott. The plans he made for a Bayreuth-style cultural centre at G collapsed as a result; but if you have a CF more cautious and non-political version of Boughton, the 1920s as an era of post-WW 1 cultural yearning for a stable 'New Order' could focus on Arthur as trying to bring an end to wars and chaos.

Could a leading nostalgic 'cultural revivalist' composer like Vaughan Williams or a longer-living Holst get involved and be lured into writing the music for Arthurian entertainments, and a Tolkien who had fallen more for early 'Celtic' myths (Taliesin's C6th poetry?) and less for 'Beowulf' at school/ college take it up in his writing? JRRT did apparently know the Pre-Raphaelite paintings by the Morris 'group' in Birmingham art-galleries as a boy pre-1914, so that could start him off on Arthurian themes and an Arthurian expert mentor as his tutor when he was at Oxford c. 1912 get him into Welsh and Irish rather than Anglo-Saxon poetry , by focussing on actual Welsh and Irish languages rather than on creating his own 'Elvish' tongues. As it is, there are elements of Arthuriana in JRRT - Aragorn as Arthur, 'failed quester' Boromir as Sir Gawain, Gandalf as Merlin, and Galadriel as the mysterious Otherworldly patroness Lady of the Lake. And Frodo as a sort of Galahad, albeit a flawed one, as he cannot stay in the 'real' world after achieving the Quest.
Click to expand...

Honestly, I think you need to have an interpretation in the medium along traditional lines before you can realistically do an interpretation that goes down that sort of route.
 
heraclius said:
A note on the potential location for staging these operas - the early C20th composter Rutland Boughton, who had an interest in Arthurian-era archaeology and bought into the notion that Arthur and Guinevere were buried at Glastonbury Abbey, did actually establish a local version of Bayreuth at Glastonbury in the 1920s as a forerunner of the Glastonbury Festival . The inspiration for this came from Bayreuth and it was intended by RB to be a British riposte to the Wager mythological version of German culture, with Arthur as its 'much more authentic than the Rhinemaiden myths' centre; but RB was a quirky Socialist and a Lenin fan, who wrote and staged an Arthurian opera with 'good' workers and 'outdated and decadent' aristocrats, ending with a 'Red Dawn' of a workers' revolt. He also changed the Arthurian Holy Grail connections to the 'Grail Dynasty' in favour of a Socialist interpretation with Jesus Christ as bringing a new classless society led by the workers to replace the old order, in presumed homage to Soviet Russia, and made him a miner's child - which put off sponsors and led to a boycott. The plans he made for a Bayreuth-style cultural centre at G collapsed as a result; but if you have a CF more cautious and non-political version of Boughton, the 1920s as an era of post-WW 1 cultural yearning for a stable 'New Order' could focus on Arthur as trying to bring an end to wars and chaos.

Could a leading nostalgic 'cultural revivalist' composer like Vaughan Williams or a longer-living Holst get involved and be lured into writing the music for Arthurian entertainments, and a Tolkien who had fallen more for early 'Celtic' myths (Taliesin's C6th poetry?) and less for 'Beowulf' at school/ college take it up in his writing? JRRT did apparently know the Pre-Raphaelite paintings by the Morris 'group' in Birmingham art-galleries as a boy pre-1914, so that could start him off on Arthurian themes and an Arthurian expert mentor as his tutor when he was at Oxford c. 1912 get him into Welsh and Irish rather than Anglo-Saxon poetry , by focussing on actual Welsh and Irish languages rather than on creating his own 'Elvish' tongues. As it is, there are elements of Arthuriana in JRRT - Aragorn as Arthur, 'failed quester' Boromir as Sir Gawain, Gandalf as Merlin, and Galadriel as the mysterious Otherworldly patroness Lady of the Lake. And Frodo as a sort of Galahad, albeit a flawed one, as he cannot stay in the 'real' world after achieving the Quest.
Click to expand...

This is all very, very interesting stuff. It is alas quite removed from what I'm trying to do, I fear.

With a PoD in 1770 and applying Jaredite-Thandean rules of different sperms hitting different eggs post-divergence, I cannot really have J. R. R. Tolkien or Gustav Holst show up in the early 20th century.
 
Makemakean said:
So, here's an idea of mine that I was discussing with @Alex Richards the other week that ties into the greater worldbuilding of the Swedish Strangerverse. I kind of figured, wouldn't it be neat if instead of Wagner, in the 19th century, you have a British Wagner instead of Gilbert and Sullivan, and so instead of having a German Wagner write a series of operas based on the (fundamentally Norse) story of the Ring of the Nibelungs, you have the British Wagner write a series of five or so operas about the Arthurian cycle?

When I pitched this idea, the aforementioned Mr Richards right off the bat had a number of clever ideas of what the different installments in the cycle of operas would be, what would be their titles, the main characters and the plots, but alas, I was dumb enough not to take note, and at present my memory fails me. I cannot recall if Mr Richards figured that the central theme should be Excalibur, or if the central theme should be the Holy Grail. I cannot recall if he felt there should be an entire opera dedicated to Lancelot, or if there should be an entire opera dedicated to Percival.

So I'm starting this thread to discuss the matter in some greater detail, to ask people to give their inputs and thoughts.

So, here's the thread dedicated to the Arthurian Opera Cycle!

Coming soon to the Aberystwyth Festival, sponsored by Alfred Edward, Prince of Wales, himself!
Click to expand...

It's an idea, but I think as others have mentioned, there might be an issue of origin. Yes Wagner took a fundamentally Norse thing and made it apart of 'German' culture, but in context it could have been Germanic enough to count. With Arthurian Legend, your talking about Welsh legends adapted by the French, and were popular enough in Europe to my knowledge. I feel if you had to have a national epic, Couldn't Shakespeare's Henriad work as a more quintessential English National Epic than King Arthur?
 
BBadolato said:
It's an idea, but I think as others have mentioned, there might be an issue of origin. Yes Wagner took a fundamentally Norse thing and made it apart of 'German' culture, but in context it could have been Germanic enough to count. With Arthurian Legend, your talking about Welsh legends adapted by the French, and were popular enough in Europe to my knowledge. I feel if you had to have a national epic, Couldn't Shakespeare's Henriad work as a more quintessential English National Epic than King Arthur?
Click to expand...

I don't really think that anyone has mentioned it being an issue of origin. And really, I find myself pretty unconvinced that the Nibelungenlied is in any meaningful sense more German than the Matter of Britain is British. Quite the opposite, if anything.

And as for the Henriad, sure, I'm fully convinced that you can write a story in which there is a British national opera based on Shakespeare's the Henriad. But for whatever reason, I dunno, the Henriad just doesn't feel colourful to me in the same way that the legend of King Arthur feels. The latter is more fantastical in nature, it conjurs up more vivid imagery. It is able to stir something creative in me in a way that the Henriad can't because, well, I'm hardwired to prefer the one over the other I suppose. That's not to say that there's anything bad with the Henriad as such.

It's a matter of taste, I suppose. At the end of the day, it's just that I have always preferred strawberry to chocolate.
 
Alex Richards said:
But otherwise, the plot of that Merlin is essentially leading to the placing of Excalibur into the stone, probably with Merlin making the whole 'Whomsoever pulleth this sword' speech.
Click to expand...

You know, I think this makes for the best feel for it all. Even though this will be the first opera in the cycle, the audience will be sufficiently aware of the rest of the story for this to still have the feel of a prequel, if you will. Have it all end with Merlin plaing Excalibur in the stone, some smashing music in the background, a few prophetic words sung by Merlin, and then the opera ends with only the sword in the stone being illuminated.

 
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