Tuesday, August 3, 2010

You Put Your Lips Together and...


One of the many things Wagner is known for is the length of his operas: A typical opera will last well over four hours; his longest is more than five. By comparison, Puccini's La Boheme is a bit more than two hours, and Verdi's Aida, less than two and a half; Beethoven's Symphony no. 9, his longest, is a little over an hour. The four operas in the Ring cycle run a total of 18 hours. If it's a good performance, of course, the time flies by when you're sitting in the audience. But what if you're in the orchestra pit?

I went to the opera house lately to discuss this with William Klingelhoffer, whose name is a Wagnerian mouthful in itself (though far be it for me to titter over a multisyllabic German surname). With another horn player, Bill leads the opera orchestra's French horn section. For the Ring, Wagner demands eight French horns--as opposed to the normal four--so when Bill is first horn, he's head of a large section that includes four horn players who don't normally perform with his orchestra. He says it's like being a baseball pitcher, who's mindful of the whole game but also has to narrow his focus to simply getting those fastballs over the plate. Bill has to concentrate on making a big sound with all those other horns as well as on playing solos. And the first horn in a Ring orchestra is like a Tim Lincecum with his repertoire of pitches. Over the course of these operas, the French horn evokes the river Rhine, a rainbow after a storm, the interior life of a hero, a blast on the hero's horn bold and brassy enough to wake a dragon.

Of course, a ball player sits in the dugout from time to time, while a horn player has little respite when performing Wagner. The horn functions as both woodwind and brass--a part of two sections of the orchestra--"so we're playing all the time," says Bill. "It takes physical strength to sit there and blow a French horn for three or four hours. You have to be sure you're doing your aerobic exercises." (Bill says he tries to walk for an hour each day; one of his favorite walks is up 300 steps to Grand View Park, just east of 19th Avenue in San Francisco's Sunset district, and back down again. Oy.)

"And you have to pace yourself, like a pitcher paces himself over the game. You want to make sure what you're playing is exciting, but you can't get excited yourself. You have to remember that you need something in reserve for three hours from now. I mean, the first act of Gotterdammerung is something like an hour and 45 minutes just by itself. That's longer than a whole concert the symphony performs."

In this small town, San Francisco Symphony performs just across the street from the opera house, and Bill's wife, Jill Brindel, plays cello with that orchestra. "They're wimps over there," Bill says with pride and a good-natured laugh. "We're playing Wagner."

1 comment:

  1. What a great blog; you have me salivating over the Ring even though Wagner isn't my favorite and the Wagner opera is the only one this fall SF season I'm not going to. The writing is wonderful and I loved the interview with the horn player. I have never even considered the possibility that musicians have to pace themselves like athletes.

    Tracy

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