Madam, - The interesting article by Arminta Wallace on the "Wagner strand - albeit a modest one" in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's new season programme makes one wonder whether the concert-planners have their heads "screwed on" at all (Arts, September 6th).
Only the Wesendonck Lieder (in the first concert) can be said to represent a truly free-standing work. For the rest we are back to the "bleeding chunks" which Wagner himself so much hated and wished to resist, involving Rienzi (second concert), Tristan und Isolde (third), and the "Ring" cycle (fourth).
It would have been better to go for other free-standing works, such as the underestimated Symphony in C (1832), which Robert Schumann so much admired, and for which Wagner himself felt so much affection that he conducted it in Venice on December 24th 1882 (seven weeks before his death), the Faust Overture (1840/1855), the Siegfried Idyll (1870) in its original chamber form, or even the cantata Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (1843), which Wyn Morris championed in his spectacular 1978 recording.
An acceptable alternative would have been to give a concert performance of a self-sufficient Act from one of the music-dramas, such as Otto Klempere so successfully did in London with Act 1 of Die Walküre on October 28th 1969.
By contrast, what is planned is simply the wrong way of going about things, and serves Wagner's cause most unsatisfactorily. - Yours, etc,
Dr MARTIN PULBROOK,
Enniscoffey,
Mullingar,
Co Westmeath.