Richard Wagner on Music Theory Print

Bridal Chorus

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Text#

Although the chorus is usually played on an organ without singing at most weddings, in Lohengrin, the wedding party sings these words at the beginning of act three. Eight women then sing a blessing to a separate melody. The chorus then gradually proceeds offstage, repeating a slightly modified version of the previous words.

Religious attitudes#

Some Christian churches disagree with the use of the “Bridal Chorus” at wedding ceremonies. In an FAQ on the website of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, it was explained that opposition to the piece dated from before the First World War, when Lutherans were opposed “to any sort of theater”, and Wagner’s operas were seen as “depict ing pagan stories and themes.” A pamphlet issued in 2003 by the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego said that the “Bridal Chorus” was “not to be used”, again because it is a theatrical piece, but also because it is not a processional to the altar in the opera, and because its frequent use in film and television associate it with sentimentality rather than worship.

Das Liebesmahl der Apostel

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History#

Wagner, who had been elected in January 1843 to the committee of a cultural association in the city of Dresden, received a commission to evoke the theme of Pentecost. He had successfully performed Rienzi in Dresden in 1842; however, Der fliegende Holländer, produced there in January 1843, was not received as warmly. The premiere of Das Liebesmahl took place at the Dresdner Frauenkirche on 6 July 1843, and was performed by around a hundred musicians and almost 1,200 singers, from all over Saxony. The work was dedicated to Charlotte Emilie Weinlig, the widow of Wagner’s former teacher Christian Theodor Weinlig. The concert was very well received, but Wagner was disappointed by its “relatively feeble effect” in view of the vast assembly of singers it had brought together.

Das Liebesverbot

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Performance history#

Wagner conducted the premiere in 1836 at the Stadttheater Magdeburg. Poorly attended and with a lead singer who forgot the words and had to improvise, it was a resounding flop and its second performance had to be cancelled after a fist fight between the prima donna’s husband and the lead tenor broke out backstage before the curtain had even risen; only three people were in the audience. It was never performed again in Wagner’s lifetime. The opera was rarely performed over the following hundred years. On 16 February 1965, in the United Kingdom, the first performance was given at University College, London, in a semi-professional production staged by the UCLU Music Society in the old Gymnasium. In 1983, in North America, a successful revival was given, conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch. In 1990, a staged production (with reduced orchestra) was mounted in San Francisco by Pocket Opera, led by, and with an English performing translation by, Donald Pippin. In 1994, was performed at the Wexford Opera Festival, in Ireland. On 19 July 2008, a fully staged production was premiered, by Glimmerglass Opera, in a production by Nicholas Muni, at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York, USA. The cast was led by Mark Schnaible as Friedrich and Claudia Waite as Isabella; Corrado Rovaris conducted. In 2009, a concert production was presented at the International Festival of Young Singers at the Kammeroper Schloss Rheinsberg plus a staged production at the Staatstheater Braunschweig in October. Since 2011, a production of this work has formed part of the repertoire of Helikon Opera Moscow. In 2013, 200 years after the composer’s birth, it was performed in Bayreuth for the first time. A production of the Oper Leipzig was shown in the Oberfrankenhalle, a hall for sports, because Wagner had banned his early operas from the Festspielhaus. It was staged by Aron Stiehl with elements of operetta and revue; Constantin Trinks conducted the Gewandhausorchester. On 24 September 2015, the opera premiered in Romania at the Cluj-Napoca Hungarian Opera. In 2016, the opera was staged by the Teatro Real, Madrid.

Der fliegende Holländer

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Composition history#

At the beginning of 1839, the 26-year-old Richard Wagner was employed as a conductor at the Court Theatre in Riga. His extravagant lifestyle plus the retirement from the stage of his actress wife, Minna Planer, caused him to run up huge debts that he was unable to repay. Wagner was writing Rienzi and hatched a plan to flee his creditors in Riga, escape to Paris via London and make his fortune by putting Rienzi on to the stage of the Paris Opéra. However, this plan quickly turned to disaster: his passport having been seized by the authorities on behalf of his creditors, he and Minna had to make a dangerous and illegal crossing over the Prussian border, during which Minna suffered a miscarriage. Boarding the ship Thetis, whose captain had agreed to take them without passports, their sea journey was hindered by storms and high seas. The ship at one point took refuge in the Norwegian fjords at Tvedestrand, and a trip that was expected to take eight days finally delivered Wagner to London three weeks after leaving Riga. Wagner’s experience of Paris was also disastrous. He was unable to get work as a conductor, and the Opéra did not want to produce Rienzi. The Wagners were reduced to poverty, relying on handouts from friends and from the little income that Wagner could make writing articles on music and copying scores. Wagner hit on the idea of a one-act opera on the theme of the Flying Dutchman, which he hoped might be performed before a ballet at the Opéra. The voyage through the Norwegian reefs made a wonderful impression on my imagination; the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which the sailors verified, took on a distinctive, strange colouring that only my sea adventures could have given it. Wagner wrote the first prose draft of the story in Paris early in May 1840, basing the story on Heinrich Heine’s satire “The Memoirs of Mister von Schnabelewopski” (“Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski”) published in Der Salon in 1834. In Heine’s tale, the narrator watches a performance of a fictitious stage play on the theme of the sea captain cursed to sail forever for blasphemy. Heine introduces the character as a Wandering Jew of the ocean, and also added the device taken up so vigorously by Wagner in this, and many subsequent operas: the Dutchman can only be redeemed by the love of a faithful woman. In Heine’s version, this is presented as a means for ironic humour; however, Wagner took this theme literally and in his draft, the woman is faithful until death. By the end of May 1841 Wagner had completed the libretto or poem as he preferred to call it. Composition of the music had begun during May to July of the previous year, 1840, when Wagner wrote Senta’s Ballad, the Norwegian Sailors’ song in act 3 ("") and the subsequent Phantom song of the Dutchman’s crew in the same scene. These were composed for an audition at the Paris Opéra, along with the sketch of the plot. Wagner actually sold the sketch to the Director of the Opéra, Léon Pillet, for 500 francs, but was unable to convince him that the music was worth anything. Wagner composed the rest of the Der fliegende Holländer during the summer of 1841, with the Overture being written last, and by November 1841 the orchestration of the score was complete. While this score was designed to be played continuously in a single act, Wagner later divided the piece into a three-act work. In doing so, however, he did not alter the music significantly, but merely interrupted transitions that had originally been crafted to flow seamlessly (the original one-act layout is restored in some performances). In his original draft Wagner set the action in Scotland, but he changed the location to Norway shortly before the first production staged in Dresden and conducted by himself in January 1843. In his essay “A Communication to My Friends” in 1851, Wagner claimed that The Dutchman represented a new start for him: “From here begins my career as poet, and my farewell to the mere concoctor of opera-texts.” Indeed - until Rienzi is staged there in 2026 - the opera has been the earliest of Wagner’s works performed at the Bayreuth Festival and, at least for that theatre, has traditionally marked the start of the mature Wagner canon.

Die Feen

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Background and composition#

Die Feen was Wagner’s first completed opera, composed in 1833, when he was 20 years old and working as a part-time chorus master in Würzburg. Although Gozzi’s La donna serpente (The Snake Woman) was the source for Wagner’s plot, he took the names of Die Feens two principal characters, Ada and Arindal, from Die Hochzeit. The libretto also introduced a fantastic theme that was not in the original play.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

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Composition history#

Wagner’s autobiography (My Life) described the genesis of . Taking the waters at Marienbad in 1845 he began reading Georg Gottfried Gervinus’ Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung (History of German Poetry). This work included chapters on master song and on Hans Sachs. I had formed a particularly vivid picture of Hans Sachs and the mastersingers of Nuremberg. I was especially intrigued by the institution of the Marker and his function in rating master-songs … I conceived during a walk a comic scene in which the popular artisan-poet, by hammering upon his cobbler’s last, gives the Marker, who is obliged by circumstances to sing in his presence, his come-uppance for previous pedantic misdeeds during official singing contests, by inflicting upon him a lesson of his own. Gervinus’ book also mentions a poem by the real-life Hans Sachs on the subject of Protestant reformer Martin Luther, called “Die Wittenbergisch Nachtigall” (The Wittenberg Nightingale). The opening lines for this poem, addressing the Reformation, were later used by Wagner in Act III Scene 5 when the crowd acclaims Sachs: "" (Awake, the dawn is drawing near; I hear, singing in the green grove, a blissful nightingale) In addition to this, Wagner added a scene drawn from his own life, in which a case of mistaken identity led to a near-riot: this was to be the basis for the finale of Act II. Out of this situation evolved an uproar, which through the shouting and clamour and an inexplicable growth in the number of participants in the struggle soon assumed a truly demoniacal character. It looked to me as if the whole town would break out into a riot…Then suddenly I heard a heavy thump, and as if by magic the whole crowd dispersed in every direction…One of the regular patrons had felled one of the noisiest rioters … And it was the effect of this which had scattered everybody so suddenly. that was to be a comic opera to follow a tragic opera, i.e. Tannhäuser. Just as the Athenians had followed a tragedy with a comic satyr play, so Wagner would follow with : the link being that both operas included song-contests.

Kaisermarsch

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History#

The victory in the Franco-Prussian War and the consequent proclamation of William I, King of Prussia, as German Emperor spurred patriotism and incited several German composers to write patriotic music dedicated to the nation and the new empire. Johannes Brahms, for example, wrote his Song of Triumph (op. 55) in 1871. Wagner, already known for his musical patriotism in several of his operas, hence composed the Kaisermarsch which entailed both positive and negative reviews but did not succeed in attaining a more prominent status with regard to official ceremonies celebrating the newly achieved victory. Wagner wrote: Wagner’s estranged friend Friedrich Nietzsche wrote derisively of the work, that “to Wagner’s Kaisermarsch, not even the young German Kaiser i.e. Wilhelm II could march”.

Kinderkatechismus

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Background and first performance#

Richard Wagner, by now an established but not yet financially secure composer, wrote a short piece for small orchestra, the Siegfried Idyll in 1870. It was written to celebrate the birthday of his wife, Cosima and was played to her on 25 December, the day after her birthday, at the family’s house at Tribschen, near Lake Lucerne by a small group of players conducted by the composer. It was not intended for public performance, and the Wagners were dismayed when from financial necessity the manuscript was sold for publication in 1877 along with that of . In November 1874 Wagner completed his epic tetralogy (The Nibelung’s Ring). Shortly after doing so he greatly upset Cosima by quarrelling with her; the Wagner scholar Deryck Cooke writes that the finished, orchestrated version of was almost certainly a peace-offering for her birthday that Christmas. The full title is (Children’s Catechism for Kosel’s Birthday) – “Kosel” being Cosima’s pet-name among the family).

Liebestod

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External links#

Act III: Mild und leise wie er lächelt: from Tristan und Isolde, Wagner’s autograph manuscript in the Richard Wagner Foundation
Full text and some performances
, Birgit Nilsson

Lohengrin (opera)

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Literary background#

The literary figure of Lohengrin first appeared as a supporting character in the final chapter of the medieval epic poem Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach. The Grail Knight Lohengrin, son of the Grail King Parzival, is sent to the duchess of Brabant to defend her. His protection comes under the condition that she must never ask his name. If she violates this requirement, he will be forced to leave her. Wagner took up these characters and set the “forbidden question” theme at the core of a story which makes contrasts between the godly and the mundane, and between Early Middle Age Christendom and Germanic paganism. Wagner attempted at the same time to weave elements of Greek tragedy into the plot. He wrote the following in Mitteilungen an meine Freunde about his Lohengrin plans: Who doesn’t know “Zeus and Semele”? The god is in love with a human woman and approaches her in human form. The lover finds that she cannot recognize the god in this form, and demands that he should make the real sensual form of his being known. Zeus knows that she would be destroyed by the sight of his real self. He suffers in this awareness, suffers knowing that he must fulfill this demand and in doing so ruin their love. He will seal his own doom when the gleam of his godly form destroys his lover. Is the man who craves for God not destroyed?

Männerlist größer als Frauenlist

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References#

;Notes ;Sources *Millington, Barry, “Happy Families: A Wagner Singspiel Rediscovered”, in The Wagner Journal, vol. 1 No. 3, London, 2007. *Wagner, Richard (Trans. Andrew Gray), My Life, New York, 1992

Parsifal

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Composition#

Wagner read von Eschenbach’s poem Parzival while taking the waters at Marienbad in 1845. After encountering Arthur Schopenhauer’s writings in 1854, Wagner became interested in Indian philosophies, especially Buddhism. Out of this interest came Die Sieger (The Victors, 1856), a sketch Wagner wrote for an opera based on a story from the life of Buddha. The themes of self-renunciation, rebirth, compassion, and even exclusive social groups (castes in , the knights of the Grail in Parsifal) which were later explored in Parsifal were first introduced in . According to his autobiography , Wagner conceived Parsifal on Good Friday morning, April 1857, in the (German: “Asylum”), the small cottage on Otto Wesendonck’s estate in the Zürich suburb of Enge, which Wesendonck – a wealthy silk merchant and generous patron of the arts – had placed at Wagner’s disposal, through the good offices of his wife Mathilde Wesendonck. The composer and his wife Minna had moved into the cottage on 28April: However, as his second wife Cosima Wagner later reported on 22 April 1879, this account had been colored by a certain amount of poetic licence: The work may indeed have been conceived at Wesendonck’s cottage in the last week of April 1857, but Good Friday that year fell on 10 April, when the Wagners were still living at Zeltweg 13 in Zürich. If the prose sketch which Wagner mentions in was accurately dated (and most of Wagner’s surviving papers are dated), it could settle the issue once and for all, but unfortunately it has not survived. Wagner did not resume work on Parsifal for eight years, during which time he completed Tristan und Isolde and began Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Then, between 27 and 30 August 1865, he took up Parsifal again and made a prose draft of the work; this contains a fairly brief outline of the plot and a considerable amount of detailed commentary on the characters and themes of the drama. But once again the work was dropped and set aside for another eleven and a half years. During this time most of Wagner’s creative energy was devoted to the Ring cycle, which was finally completed in 1874 and given its first full performance at Bayreuth in August 1876. Only when this gargantuan task had been accomplished did Wagner find the time to concentrate on Parsifal. By 23 February 1877 he had completed a second and more extensive prose draft of the work, and by 19 April of the same year he had transformed this into a verse libretto (or “poem”, as Wagner liked to call his libretti). In September 1877 he began the music by making two complete drafts of the score from beginning to end. The first of these (known in German as the and in English as either the preliminary draft or the first complete draft) was made in pencil on three staves, one for the voices and two for the instruments. The second complete draft (, orchestral draft, short score or particell) was made in ink and on at least three, but sometimes as many as five, staves. This draft was much more detailed than the first and contained a considerable degree of instrumental elaboration. The second draft was begun on 25 September 1877, just a few days after the first; at this point in his career Wagner liked to work on both drafts simultaneously, switching back and forth between the two to minimize the time between his initial setting of the text and the final elaboration of the music. The of act 3 was completed on 16 April 1879 and the on the 26th of the same month. The full score () was the final stage in the compositional process. It was made in ink and consisted of a fair copy of the entire opera, with all the voices and instruments properly notated according to standard practice. Wagner composed Parsifal one act at a time, completing the and of each act before beginning the Gesamtentwurf of the next act; but because the already embodied all the compositional details of the full score, the actual drafting of the was regarded by Wagner as little more than a routine task which could be done whenever he found the time. The prelude of act 1 was scored in August 1878. The rest of the opera was scored between August 1879 and 13 January 1882.

Polonia (Wagner)

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References#

;Notes ;Sources * Millington, Barry (ed.) (2001). The Wagner Handbook. London: Thames and Hudson. * Newman, Ernest (1914). “Some Unknown and Little-Known Works of Wagner”, Musical Times, 1 March 1914, pp. 154–157. , accessed 7 March 2015 * Wagner, Cosima, tr. Godfrey Skelton (1980). Cosima Wagner’s diaries (2 vol.). London: Collins. * Wagner, Richard, tr. Andrew Gray (1992). My Life. New York: Da Capo Press.

Ride of the Valkyries

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Context#

The main theme of the “Ride”, the leitmotif labelled , was first written down by the composer on 23 July 1851. The preliminary draft for the “Ride” was composed in 1854 as part of the composition of the entire opera, which was fully orchestrated by the end of March 1856. In the Walküre opera, the “Ride”, which takes around eight minutes, begins in the prelude to the third act, building up successive layers of accompaniment until the curtain rises to reveal a mountain peak where four of the eight Valkyrie sisters of Brünnhilde have gathered in preparation for the transportation of fallen heroes to Valhalla. As they are joined by the other four, the familiar tune is carried by the orchestra, while, above it, the Valkyries greet each other and sing their battle-cry. Apart from the song of the Rhinemaidens in Das Rheingold, it is the only ensemble piece in the first three operas of Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Rienzi

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Composition history#

Rienzi is Wagner’s third completed opera, and is mostly written in a grand opera style. In his 1860 essay “Music of the Future,” Wagner called it “a work full of youthful fire” which was inspired by “the heroic opera of Spontini” and the Parisian grand opera of Daniel Auber, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Fromental Halévy. Rienzis depictions of the mob, the liberal ethos associated with the hero and the political intervention of a reactionary clergy recall Spontini’s La vestale (1807), Halévy’s La Juive (1835), and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836). Each act ends with an extended finale ensemble and is replete with solos, duets, trios and crowd scenes. There is also an extended ballet in act 2 according to the accepted Grand Opera format. Hans von Bülow was later to joke that “Rienzi is Meyerbeer’s best opera”. Wagner began to draft the opera in Riga in 1837, after reading Lytton’s novel (although John Deathridge has argued that Wagner’s work also bears the influence of Mary Russell Mitford’s 1828 “highly successful English play” Rienzi). During a 1839 visit to the bathing resort town of Boulogne, Wagner approached Meyerbeer with a partial draft of Rienzi, and the elder composer responded with encouragement. Meyerbeer also introduced Wagner to Ignaz Moscheles, who was also staying at Boulogne; as Ernest Newman comments, this was “Wagner’s first meeting with real international musical celebrities”. When the opera was completed in 1840, Wagner hoped for it to be premiered at the Berlin Royal Opera or the Paris Opéra. Several circumstances, including his lack of influence, prevented this. Moreover, Wagner’s wife Minna, in a letter of 28 October 1840 to Wagner’s friend Apel, who had likely first made the suggestion that Wagner compose Rienzi, mentions a plan to perform the overture to Rienzi “a fortnight hence”, but contains a clear indication that her husband had just been committed to a debtors’ prison. The full score of Rienzi was completed on 19 November 1840. In 1841 Wagner moved to Meudon, just outside Paris, where the debt laws could be more easily evaded, whilst awaiting developments for Rienzi, having already written to King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, requesting that he order a production of the work in Dresden. With the support of Meyerbeer, a staging of Rienzi was arranged in Dresden; Meyerbeer wrote to the Director of the Opera in Dresden, Baron von Lüttichau, that he found the opera “rich in fantasy and of great dramatic effect”. This, with the proposed staging of Der fliegende Holländer in Berlin, also supported by Meyerbeer, persuaded Wagner to return to Germany in April 1842. During rehearsals the performers were highly enthusiastic; the tenor Tichatschek, in the title role, was so impressed with a passage from act 3 (later deleted because of the opera’s length), that “at each rehearsal, each of the soloists contributed a silver groschen to a fund that Tichatschek had started … No one suspected that what was an amiable joke for them was the means of buying Wagner an extra morsel of sorely-needed food.” The premiere of Rienzi took place on 20 October 1842 in the new Dresden Opera House, designed by the architect Gottfried Semper and opened the previous year. Semper and Wagner were later to become friends in Dresden, a connection which eventually led to Semper providing designs which became a basis of Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. The first performance of Rienzi was well received in Dresden despite running over six hours (including intermissions). One legend is that, fearful of the audience departing, Wagner stopped the clock above the stage. In his later memoirs, Mein Leben, Wagner recalled: No subsequent experience has given me feelings even remotely similar to those I had on this day of the first performance of Rienzi. The only too well-founded anxiety as to their success has so dominated my feelings at all subsequent first performances of my works that I could never really enjoy them or take much notice of the way the audience was behaving. … The initial success of Rienzi was no doubt assured beforehand. But the uproarious way in which the public declared its partiality for me was extraordinary … The public had been forcibly predisposed to accept it, because everyone connected with the theatre had been spreading such favourable reports … that the entire population was looking forward to what was heralded as a miracle … In trying to recall my condition that evening, I can remember it only as possessing all the features of a dream. Subsequently, Wagner experimented with giving the opera over two evenings (at the suggestion of von Lüttichau), and making cuts to enable a more reasonable performance in a single evening.

Siegfried Idyll

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Background#

Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll as a birthday present to his second wife, Cosima, after the birth of their son Siegfried in 1869. It was first performed on Christmas morning, 25 December 1870, by a small ensemble of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich on the stairs of their villa at Tribschen (today part of Lucerne), Switzerland. Cosima awoke to its opening melody. Conductor Hans Richter learned the trumpet in order to play the brief trumpet part, which lasts only 13 measures, in that private performance, reportedly having sailed out to the centre of Lake Lucerne to practise, so as not to be heard. The original title was Triebschen Idyll with Fidi’s birdsong and the orange sunrise, as symphonic birthday greeting. Presented to his Cosima by her Richard. “Fidi” was the family’s nickname for their son Siegfried. It is thought that the birdsong and the sunrise refer to incidents of personal significance to the couple. Wagner’s opera Siegfried, which was premiered in 1876, incorporates music from the Idyll. Wagner adapted the material from an unfinished chamber piece into the Idyll before giving the theme to Brünnhilde in the opera’s final scene, the “Ewig war ich” love duet between Brünnhilde and Siegfried. This theme, Wagner claimed, came to him during the summer of 1864 at the Villa Pellet, overlooking Lake Starnberg, where he and Cosima consummated their union. He is contradicted, however, by his own obsessive record keeping: the melody was composed that 14 November, when he was alone in Munich. The work also uses a theme based on the German lullaby, “Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf”, which was jotted down by Wagner on New Year’s Eve 1868 and introduced by a solo oboe. Wagner originally intended the Siegfried Idyll to remain a private piece. However, due to financial pressures, he decided to sell the score to publisher B. Schott in 1878. :

Symphony in C major (Wagner)

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Form#

The Symphony in C major is in four movements: The performance time is approximately 35 minutes.

I. Sostenuto e maestoso – Allegro con brio#

The first movement is in sonata form movement prefaced by a slow introduction. :

II. Andante ma non troppo, un poco maestoso#

The second movement is in the key of A minor; the overall shape is A + B + B + A + coda, a strong contrast existing between the lyrical A and the signal-like B ideas. The movement begins with a motif from the coda of the first movement. :

Tannhäuser (opera)

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Sources#

The libretto of Tannhäuser combines mythological elements characteristic of German Romantische Oper (Romantic opera) and the medieval setting typical of many French Grand Operas. Wagner brings these two together by constructing a plot involving the 14th-century Minnesänger and the myth of Venus and her subterranean realm of Venusberg. Both the historical and the mythological are united in Tannhäuser’s personality; although he is a historical poet-composer, little is known about him besides the myths surrounding him. Wagner wove a variety of sources into the opera narrative. According to his autobiography, he was inspired by finding the story in “a Volksbuch (popular book) about the Venusberg”, which he said “fell into his hands”, although he admits knowing of the story from the Phantasus of Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story, Der Kampf der Sänger (The Singers’ Contest). Tieck’s tale, which names the hero “Tannenhäuser”, tells of the minnesinger-knight’s amorous adventures in the Venusberg, his travels to Rome as a Pilgrim, and his repudiation by the pope. To this Wagner added material from Hoffmann’s story, from Serapions-Brüder (1819), describing a song contest at the Wartburg castle, a castle which featured prominently in Thuringian history. Heinrich Heine had provided Wagner with the inspiration for Der fliegende Holländer and Wagner again drew on Heine for Tannhäuser. In Heine’s sardonic essay “Elementargeister” (Elemental spirits), there appears a poem about Tannhäuser and the lure of the grotto of Venus, published in 1837 in the third volume of Der Salon. Other possible sources include Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s play Der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg and Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue, 1818). The legend of Tannhäuser, the amorous crusading Franconian knight, and that of the song contest on the Wartburg (which did not involve Tannhäuser, but the semi-mythical minnesinger Heinrich von Ofterdingen), came from quite separate traditions. Ludwig Bechstein wove together the two legends in the first volume of his collection of Thuringian legends, Der Sagenschatz und die Sagenkreise des Thüringerlandes (A treasury of the tales of Thuringian legends and legend cycles, 1835), which was probably the Volksbuch to which Wagner refers in his autobiography. Wagner also knew of the work of another contemporary, Christian Theodor Ludwig Lucas, whose Über den Krieg von Wartburg of 1838 also conflated the two legends. This confusion (which explains why Tannhäuser is referred to as ‘Heinrich’ in the opera) does not fit with the historical timeline of the events in the opera, since the Singers’ Contest involving von Ofterdingen is said to have taken place around 1207, while Tannhäuser’s poetry appeared much later (1245–1265). The sources used by Wagner, therefore, reflected a nineteenth-century romantic view of the medieval period, with concerns about artistic freedom and the constraints of organised religion typical of the period of Romanticism. During Wagner’s first stay in Paris (1839–1842), he read a paper by Ludwig Lucas on the Sängerkrieg which sparked his imagination, and encouraged him to return to Germany, which he reached on 7 April 1842. Having crossed the Rhine, the Wagners drove towards Thuringia, and saw the early rays of sun striking the Wartburg; Wagner immediately began to sketch the scenery that would become the stage sets. Wagner wrote the prose draft of Tannhäuser between June and July 1842 and the libretto in April 1843.

Tristan und Isolde

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Composition history#

Wagner was forced to abandon his position as conductor of the Dresden Opera in 1849, as there was a warrant for his arrest for his participation in the unsuccessful May Revolution. He left his wife, Minna, in Dresden, and fled to Zurich. There, in 1852, he met the wealthy silk trader Otto Wesendonck. Wesendonck became a supporter of Wagner and bankrolled him for several years. Wesendonck’s wife, Mathilde, became enamoured of Wagner. Though Wagner was working on his epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, he found himself intrigued by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The rediscovery of medieval Germanic poetry, including Gottfried von Strassburg’s version of , the , and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, left a large impact on the German Romantic movements of the mid-19th century. The story of Tristan and Isolde is a quintessential romance of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Several versions of it exist, the earliest dating to the middle of the 12th century. Gottfried’s version, part of the “courtly” branch of the legend, greatly influenced German literature. According to his autobiography, Mein Leben, Wagner decided to dramatise the Tristan legend after his friend Karl Ritter attempted to do so: He had, in fact, made a point of giving prominence to the lighter phases of the romance, whereas it was its all-pervading tragedy that impressed me so deeply that I felt convinced it should stand out in bold relief, regardless of minor details. This influence, together with his discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy in October 1854, led Wagner to find himself in a “serious mood created by Schopenhauer, which was trying to find ecstatic expression. It was some such mood that inspired the conception of a Tristan und Isolde.” Wagner wrote of his preoccupations with Schopenhauer and Tristan in a 16 December 1854 letter to Franz Liszt: Never in my life having enjoyed the true happiness of love I shall erect a memorial to this loveliest of all dreams in which, from the first to the last, love shall, for once, find utter repletion. I have devised in my mind a Tristan und Isolde, the simplest, yet most full-blooded musical conception imaginable, and with the ‘black flag’ that waves at the end I shall cover myself over – to die. By the end of 1854, Wagner had sketched out all three acts of the opera, based on Gottfried von Strassburg’s version of the story. The earliest extant sketches are from December 1856, but only in August 1857 did Wagner begin devoting his attention entirely to the opera, putting Siegfried aside to do so. On 20 August he began the prose sketch for the opera, and the libretto (or poem, as Wagner preferred to call it) was completed by 18 September. Wagner had moved into a cottage built in the grounds of Wesendonck’s villa, where, during his work on Tristan und Isolde, he became passionately involved with Mathilde Wesendonck. Whether this relationship was platonic is uncertain. One evening in September that year, Wagner read the finished poem of Tristan to an audience including Mathilde; his wife, Minna; and his future wife Cosima von Bülow. By October 1857, Wagner had begun the composition sketch of the first act. In November, he set five of Mathilde’s poems to music known today as the Wesendonck Lieder. This was unusual for Wagner, who almost never set to music poetic texts other than his own. Wagner called two of the songs – “Im Treibhaus” and “Träume” – “Studies for Tristan und Isolde”: “Träume” uses a motif that forms the love duet in act 2 of Tristan, while “Im Treibhaus” introduces a theme that later became the prelude to act 3. But Wagner resolved to write Tristan only after he had secured a publishing deal with the Leipzig-based firm Breitkopf & Härtel, in January 1858. From then on, Wagner finished each act and sent it off for engraving before he started on the next – a remarkable feat given the score’s unprecedented length and complexity. In April 1858, Minna intercepted a note from Wagner to Mathilde and, despite Wagner’s protests that she was giving it a “vulgar interpretation”, accused first Wagner and then Mathilde of infidelity. After enduring much misery, Wagner persuaded Minna, who had a heart condition, to rest at a spa while Otto Wesendonck took Mathilde to Italy. During the two women’s absence, Wagner began the composition sketch of the second act of Tristan. Minna’s return in July 1858 did not clear the air, and on 17 August Wagner was forced to leave both Minna and Mathilde and move to Venice. Wagner later called his last days in Zurich “a veritable Hell”. Minna wrote to Mathilde before departing for Dresden: I must tell you with a bleeding heart that you have succeeded in separating my husband from me after nearly twenty-two years of marriage. May this noble deed contribute to your peace of mind, to your happiness. Wagner finished the second act of Tristan during his eight-month exile in Venice, where he lived in the Palazzo Giustinian. In March 1859, fearing extradition to Saxony, where he was still considered a fugitive, Wagner moved to Lucerne, where he wrote the last act, completing it in August 1859.

Wesendonck Lieder

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History#

The songs are settings of poems by Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of Richard Wagner’s patrons. Wagner had become acquainted with Otto Wesendonck in Zürich, where he had fled on his escape from Saxony after the May Uprising in Dresden in 1849. For a time Wagner and his wife Minna lived together in the (German for Asylum in the sense of “sanctuary”), a small cottage on the Wesendonck estate. It is sometimes claimed that Wagner and Mathilde had a love affair; in any case, the situation and mutual infatuation certainly contributed to the intensity in the conception of Tristan und Isolde. Wagner sold the settings to the publisher Schott in 1860 for 1000 francs. The first published version (1862) was titled Fünf Gedichte für eine Frauenstimme (Five poems for a female voice), and the first performance was given at the publisher’s residence in Mainz, by the soprano Emilie Genast, accompanied by Hans von Bülow. No name was given for the author of the texts at the first publication; it was not publicly revealed until after Mathilde’s death (1902). The present order of the songs appears for the first time in the published version, and this has raised doubts as to whether the sequence is a genuine song cycle, or should be regarded simply as a collection of individual pieces.

Richard Wagner on Music Theory Print

Bridal Chorus

Text#

Religious attitudes#

Das Liebesmahl der Apostel

History#

Das Liebesverbot

Performance history#

Der fliegende Holländer

Composition history#

Die Feen

Background and composition#

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Composition history#

Kaisermarsch

History#

Kinderkatechismus

Background and first performance#

Liebestod

Further reading#

External links#

Lohengrin (opera)

Literary background#

Männerlist größer als Frauenlist

References#

Parsifal

Composition#

Polonia (Wagner)

References#

Ride of the Valkyries

Context#

Rienzi

Composition history#

Siegfried Idyll

Background#

Symphony in C major (Wagner)

Form#

I. Sostenuto e maestoso – Allegro con brio#

II. Andante ma non troppo, un poco maestoso#

Tannhäuser (opera)

Sources#

Tristan und Isolde

Composition history#

Wesendonck Lieder

History#