A Wagner Bicentennial Roast: Lighthearted YouTube Videos and Recordings: The New Yorker The second in a short series of posts marking Richard Wagner's two-hundredth birthday, which arrives tomorrow. How better to celebrate Wagner's bicentennial than with a Belgian-Norwegian rag mash-up of his most famous hits? Granted, there are more dignified ways to commemorate the birthday of the man whom Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam once called "a genius such as appears on the earth once every thousand years." You could delve into the sacred mists of "Parsifal," as Richard Brody did on this site a couple of months ago; or try to capture a single moment in the mammoth "Ring," as I did in a New Yorker essay in 2011; or wrestle with the dark question of Wagner's posthumous relationship with the Third Reich. You could ponder Thomas Mann's 1933 lecture "The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner," or read Willa Cather's piercing story "A Wagner Matinée," or become engulfed by Tony Palmer's eight-hour film, "Wagner." Or, of course, you could plunge into the music itself, whether by way of a historic recording (Wilhelm Furtwängler's "Tristan und Isolde" and Joseph Keilberth's 1955 "Ring" are two of the greatest) or a DVD (there is no finer Wagner staging on film than Patrice Chéreau's "Ring"). Not much Wagner is being played live in America this week, but there's a weltering wave of events in Europe, including a bacchanal in Bayreuth, the seat of Wagner's festival of himself. That's all a bit heavy, though; let's have something more lighthearted. Wagner did, after all, possess a distinctly antic, clownish personality, and while he entirely lacked a sense of humor about his own work he provoked satire and silliness almost from the first moment he stepped onto the public stage. Even those who worshipped the Meister often found it necessary, as a way of retaining mental balance, to puncture the aura of solemnity that surrounded him. In that spirit, I've assembled a few Wagner send-ups and pop adaptations going back a century and a half. In the video above, the Ophelia Ragtime Orchestra, based in Norway, plays a swinging arrangement of "Wagneria," concocted in the twenties by the Belgian jazz pianist Clément Doucet. The "Pilgrim's Chorus" from "Tannhäuser" is the main source, but you hear also the "Parsifal" bells (right at the start), Siegfried's horn, the Venusberg and "Song to the Evening Star," and the prelude to Act III of "Lohengrin." Here is the original, recorded in 1927: This was hardly the first bit of Wagner foolery. Jacques Offenbach lampooned the idea of a Wagnerian "music of the future" in the "Symphony of the Future" scene of "Le Carnaval des Revues," from 1860: Laurent Naouri, bass-baritone, with Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble conducted by Marc Minkowski, from Anne Sofie von Otter's Offenbach album. For the American centennial celebrations of 1876, which I mentioned in my "Walking Tour of Wagner's New York," the young John Philip Sousa wrote a fantasy on national airs that ended with "The Star-Spangled Banner" bedecked in "Tannhäuser" orchestration. One assumes he did it with a wry grin: (From the United States Marine Band's recording "The Heritage of John Philip Sousa, Vol. For more on Sousa and Wagner, go here.) Many French composers of the late nineteenth century were deeply under Wagner's spell, making regular pilgrimages to Bayreuth. While their appreciation was sincere, they felt the need to deflate the cultish atmosphere of the festival, not least because of unresolved Franco-German tensions. In 1886, Emmanuel Chabrier produced a four-hand-piano piece entitled "Souvenirs de Munich," a quadrille on themes from "Tristan." This idiomatic orchestration is by David Matthews: A couple of years later, Gabriel Fauré and André Messager perpetrated "Souvenirs de Bayreuth" - kudos to the YouTube user musicanth for the accompanying image: Debussy dropped a "Tristan" quotation into "Golliwog's Cakewalk," rendered here in a creative arrangement for twelve saxophones (see especially 1:18): Another irresistible Clément Doucet number, "Isoldina": And here is a dazzling take on "Tannhäuser" by the stride pianist Donald Lambert (thanks to Ethan Iverson, of The Bad Plus, for sending this my way): At a rather lower level is Stan Kenton's "Ride of the Valkyries" (with a tip of the hat to Mark Stryker of the Detroit Free Press): We cannot omit Bugs Bunny: In 1974, Peter Schickele, also known as P.D.Q. Bach, wrote a piece entitled "Last Tango in Bayreuth," for a quartet of bassoons. Beginning with a loungey revision of the "Tristan" prelude, it's very much in the spirit of the French Wagner takeoffs, and, silliness aside, it has a wistful beauty all its own. Needless to say, bassoonists have gone to town with it: So, happy birthday to the old magician, about whom Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was, in the end, absolutely right.