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The Operas
Richard Wagner's Operas
Early stage
(1832) Die Hochzeit (The Wedding) (abandoned before completion)
Unfinished Opera project: "Die Sieger" (The Victors) - see blog
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Etkilendikleri
About the music on this page
... and also:
About Wagner, women and the cult of Genius
(A.S.-L.)
"What do you say, dearest friend? Does a Genius have the right to be a scoundrel?" - Letter by Minna Wagner
The musical samples on the Wagner Operas main page – two of them non-operatic - have been selected for a common reason; namely, because they are self-referential in one way or another, as well as shedding light on some aspects of Richard Wagner’s personality.
First of all, the final monologue in the “Mastersingers“ ("Scorn not the Masters, I bid you") is a patently obvious statement on Wagner’s self-image of the artist as a catalyst of national identity. While the monologue has frequently been misinterpreted and misappropriated as a manifestation of nationalist grandeur and even chauvinism, it appears that the nationalist revolutionary of 1848 has actually all but abandoned the ideal of German national (re-)unification - a mere four years before the political fact - in favour of a (supposedly) unalienable but endangered cultural unity:
“If the German people and kingdom should one day decay, under a false, foreign rule soon no prince would understand his people (...) What is German and true none would know, if it did not live in the honour of German Masters (...) Even if the Holy Roman Empire should dissolve in mist, for us there would yet remain holy German Art!“
In other words, the “German“ artist is to serve as a cohesive force for an instable and disparate, even dysfunctional heterogenic construct, which capacity elevates art and the artist to “holiness“ by creating “wholeness“ (the intended double-entendre here remains intact in German: “Heil“ – “heilig“). Does the “holiness“ of art, then, place the artist above ethical considerations, possibly by sanctifying the means through which the end, art itself, is achieved? We shall see.
In a recent conversation, Sibylle Zehle, the author of a biography on Wagner’s first wife Minna Planer, pointed out the fact that Minna’s role in Richard Wagner’s life has been vastly underrated in favour of Cosima’s. Minna’s ultimately destructive marriage to Wagner lasted for 28 years, during which difficult time she practically managed her husband’s life. She was the role model for Senta (Flying Dutchman) and Eva Pogner (Mastersingers) - but also, I suspect, for the Walküre’s Fricka. After their divorce, Minna died desolate, ill and pennyless in 1866.
The divorce, in turn, was preceded by the uncovering of Wagner’s illicit - although possibly unconsummated - relationship to Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of his most generous patrons, Otto Wesendonck. Wagner set five of Mathilde’s poems to music, forming the famous “Wesendonck-Lieder“. “Träume“, the Lied featured on this page along with Mathilde’s portrait, quotes (or rather, anticipates) the central love-duet of the second act of “Tristan and Isolde“ (“Nun sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe“ – Sink upon us, night of love; see the "Tristan" opera page), a less-than subtle musical hint at the Zürich love triangle. Wagner has made it abundantly clear that “Tristan“ was inspired by his relationship to Mathilde, ascertaining the artist’s “right“ to a “Muse“.
Wagner’s other, more lasting “Muse“ was his second wife Cosima, daughter of the flamboyant pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Cosima was still the wife of Wagner’s close friend and influential supporter, the conductor Hans von Bülow, when she moved in with Wagner at his home in Triebschen in 1866, and she had already given birth to Wagner’s first daughter. Reportedly, Wagner had the gall to give the name Isolde (!) to his newborn child in the presence of Cosima’s husband.
The “Siegfried-Idyll“, featured on this page (with Cosima’s portrait) in the rarely performed, original version for chamber orchestra, was Wagner’s birthday gift to Cosima on Christmas day, 1870. The “Triebschen-Idyll“, as Wagner himself called it, was the composer’s self-proclaimed “favourite child“. The musical material is derived from Brünnhilde’s final monologue in “Siegfried“ (“Forever I was, forever I shall last“, feautured on the “Siegfried“ opera page). In the context of the opera, the music already betrays Brünnhilde’s dwindling reluctance to give in to Siegfried’s courtship, which she finally succumbs to. Autobiographical? Well, maybe.
Lastly, the third act of the “Meistersinger“ musically quotes from the “Tristan“ prelude, to Hans Sachs’ words: “My child, of Tristan and Isolde i know a sorry tale. Hans Sachs was wise and wanted none of King Marke’s happiness“; King Marke, of course, being Isolde’s cuckolded husband. One might well argue that Marke’s questionable “happiness“ was exactly what Wagner conferred on his friend and ally Hans von Bülow; hence Bülow’s photo as the picture for this music. (Note the facial expression...)
In Wagner’s defence, it may be added that the Causa Cosima does not appear to have been a hostile takeover. It certainly didn’t do much damage to the relationship between Wagner and Bülow. In fact, it has been suggested that Hans von Bülow condoned the union (see the biographical note on this page); Bülow’s letters to Cosima, however, rather smack of heroic abdication. As for Otto Wesendonck, in later years Wagner asked him to “graciously and mildly“ turn over the manuscript of “Rheingold“, an already priceless object in Wesendonck’s posession. Wagner intended to donate it to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, and the erstwhile cuckold (?) Wesendonck “graciously and mildly“ complied.
In the light of the contemporary “Genius Cult“, it seems Wagner found it easy to gather admirers not only willing to bow to the “holiness“ of his genius, but prepared to bend over double if called upon to do so.
Biopic
Caution: Video volume is MUCH higher than music player volume. Turn down your own volume before launching the videos.
From the famous 1984 TV series "Wagner" starring Richard Burton, John Gieldud and Laurence Olivier
Richard Burton played Wagner in this 8-hour biographical drama as one of his last acting roles before he died.
Wagner asks King Ludwig to publish a letter falsely denying the facts about his relationship to Cosima. The scene poignantly illustrates Wagner’s idealized egocentrism and his lack of responsibility towards others, including his Royal patron. (Richard Burton as Wagner, Vanessa Redgrave as Cosima)
Friedrich Nietzsche terminates his friendship with Wagner, making prophetic statements about Wagner’s impact on the German nation.
Born Leipzig, 22 May 1813; died Venice, 13 February 1883
Richard Wagner was the son either of the police actuary Friedrich Wagner, who died soon after his birth, or of his mother's friend the painter, actor and poet Ludwig Geyer, whom she married in August 1814. He went to school in Dresden and then Leipzig; at 15 he wrote a play, at 16 his first compositions. In 1831 he went to Leipzig University, also studying music with the Thomaskantor, C.T. Weinlig; a symphony was written and successfully performed in 1832. In 1833 he became chorus master at the Würzburg theatre and wrote the text and music of his first opera, Die Feen; this remained unheard, but his next, Das Liebesverbot, written in 1833, was staged in 1836. By then he had made his début as an opera conductor with a small company which however went bankrupt soon after performing his opera. He married the singer Minna Planer in 1836 and went with her to Königsberg where he became musical director at the theatre, but he soon left and took a similar post in Riga where he began his next opera, Rienzi, and did much conducting, especially of Beethoven.
In 1839 they slipped away from creditors in Riga, by ship to London and then to Paris, where he was befriended by Meyerbeer and did hack-work for publishers and theatres. He also worked on the text and music of an opera on the 'Flying Dutchman' legend; but in 1842 Rienzi, a large-scale opera with a political theme set in imperial Rome, was accepted for Dresden and Wagner went there for its highly successful premiere. Its theme reflects something of Wagner's own politics (he was involved in the semi-revolutionary, intellectual 'Young Germany' movement). Die fliegende Holländer ('The Flying Dutchman'), given the next year, was less well received, though a much tauter musical drama, beginning to move away from the 'number opera' tradition and strong in its evocation of atmosphere, especially the supernatural and the raging seas (inspired by the stormy trip from Riga). Wagner was now appointed joint Kapellmeister at the Dresden court.
The theme of redemption through a woman's love, in the Dutchman, recurs in Wagner's operas (and perhaps his life). In 1845 Tannhäuser was completed and performed and Lohengrin begun. In both Wagner moves towards a more continuous texture with semi-melodic narrative and a supporting orchestral fabric helping convey its sense. In 1848 he was caught up in the revolutionary fervour and the next year fled to Weimar (where Liszt helped him) and then Switzerland (there was also a spell in France); politically suspect, he was unable to enter Germany for 11 years. In Zürich, he wrote in 1850-51 his ferociously anti-semitic Jewishness in Music (some of it an attack on Meyerbeer) and his basic statement on musical theatre, Opera and Drama; he also began sketching the text and music of a series of operas on the Nordic and Germanic sagas. By 1853 the text for this four-night cycle (to be The Nibelung's Ring) was written, printed and read to friends - who included a generous patron, Otto Wesendonck, and his wife Mathilde, who loved him, wrote poems that he set, and inspired Tristan und Isolde - conceived in 1854 and completed five years later, by which time more than half of The Ring was written. In 1855 he conducted in London; tension with Minna led to his going to Paris in 1858-9. 1860 saw them both in Paris, where the next year he revived Tannhäuser in revised form for French taste. but it was literally shouted down, partly for political reasons. In 1862 he was allowed freely into Germany; that year he and the ill and childless Minna parted (she died in 1866). In 1863 he gave concerts in Vienna, Russia etc; the next year King Ludwig II invited him to settle in Bavaria, near Munich, discharging his debts and providing him with money.
Wagner did not stay long in Bavaria, because of opposition at Ludwig's court, especially when it was known that he was having an affair with Cosima, the wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow (she was Liszt's daughter); Bülow (who condoned it) directed the Tristan premiere in 1865. Here Wagner, in depicting every shade of sexual love, developed a style richer and more chromatic than anyone had previously attempted, using dissonance and its urge for resolution in a continuing pattem to build up tension and a sense of profound yearning; Act 2 is virtually a continuous love duet, touching every emotion from the tenderest to the most passionately erotic. Before returning to the Ring, Wagner wrote, during the mid-1860s, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg: this is in a quite different vein, a comedy set in 16th-century Nuremberg, in which a noble poet-musician wins, through his victory in a music contest - a victory over pedants who stick to the foolish old rules - the hand of his beloved, fame and riches. (The analogy with Wagner's view of himself is obvious.) The music is less chromatic than that of Tristan, warm and good-humoured, often contrapuntal; unlike the mythological figures of his other operas the characters here have real humanity.
The opera was given, under Bülow, in 1868; Wagner had been living at Tribschen, near Lucerne, since 1866, and that year Cosima formally joined him, they had two children when in 1870 they married. The first two Ring operas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were given in Munich, on Ludwig's insistence, in 1869 and 1870; Wagner however was anxious to have a special festival opera house for the complete cycle and spent much energy trying to raise money for it. Eventually, when he had almost despaired, Ludwig came to the rescue and in 1874 - the year the fourth opera, Götterdämmerung, was finished - provided the necessary support. The house was built at Bayreuth, designed by Wagner as the home for his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ('total art work'- an alliance of music, poetry, the visual arts, dance etc). The first festival, an artistic triumph but a financial disaster - was held there in 1876, when the complete Ring was given. The Ring is about 18 hours' music, held together by an immensely detailed network of themes, or leitmotifs, each of which has some allusive meaning: a character, a concept, an object etc. They change and develop as the ideas within the opera develop. They are heard in the orchestra, not merely as 'labels' but carrying the action, sometimes informing the listener of connections of ideas or the thoughts of those on the stage. There are no 'numbers' in the Ring; the musical texture is made up of narrative and dialogue, in which the orchestra partakes. The work is not merely a story about gods, humans and dwarfs but embodies reflections on every aspect of the human condition. It has been interpreted as socialist, fascist, Jungian, prophetic, as a parable about industrial society, and much more.
In 1877 Wagner conducted in London, hoping to recoup Bayreuth losses; later in the year he began a new opera, Parsifal. He continued his musical and polemic writings, concentrating on 'racial purity'. He spent most of 1880 in Italy. Parsifal, a sacred festival drama, again treating redemption but through the acts of communion and renunciation on the stage, was given at the Bayreuth Festival in 1882. He went to Venice for the winter, and died there in February of the heart trouble that had been with him for some years. His body was retumed by gondola and train for burial at Bayreuth. Wagner did more than any other composer to change music, and indeed to change art and thinking about it. His life and his music arouse passions like no other composer's. His works are hated as much as they are worshipped; but no-one denies their greatness.
My regards from Greece!Thank you for accepting my friendship.It's a great thing,that,even through myspace,there are some people who won't let great values of the past,like Wagner and his work,to be forgotten! Eternal Hails to the Great Composer!
Video documentation of a performance piece by my friend Nate Kassel who rode around on his bike slapping high-fives to people who were trying to hail taxi cabs in NYC. Enjoy!
