Tracing back, there were two influences that led me to buy this CD: Richard and Nietzsche. Sometime in the nineties, probably on one of our New Year holidays, Richard played a tape with an impressive piece of classical music on it: nothing much happened in it, but it built in thick, liquid layers. Reminded me a bit of some of Klaus Schulze's 'floating' music. When I learnt it was a Wagner overture, that made sense, because Klaus frequently acknowledged Wagner as an influence.
Years later, in 2002, I tried reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. I was totally out of my depth, to be honest, and didn't make much of the book, but I guess it put me in mind of Wagner again. And then I either sought out or stumbled across this CD on a visit to a Virgin shop.
It doesn't have the piece that I'd heard on Richard's tape. I'd never made a note of its title, I just knew it was an overture, so I was just gambling when I bought the CD. (At least it has very little of that ghastly operatic singing.)
A few years later, I saw Terence Malick's The New World at the cinema. It's probably the most purely cinematic film I've seen for many a year, and there's a fantastic sequence that uses the Wagner overture that I'd heard on Richard's tape a decade before. Like the music, nothing much happens on screen in the way of moving the plot along, but you just have to let your eyes, and ears, swoon. That helped me track down the title: it's Das Rheingold: Vorspiel. Which seems to translate as Prelude, not Overture, after all. Ah, well, at least I could download it from iTunes then.
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