Composer, philosopher and conceiver of grand passions,
Richard Wagner
Revolutionary (in more than one sense) and egotistical, Richard Wagner sparked controversy during his lifetime which has hardly abated a century-and-a-half after his death.
Instrumental highlights from Wagner's operas are featured in two concerts at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonic, on Saturday and Sunday, January 27 and 28, under the direction of Alexander Dmitriyev.
Both concerts include the overture to "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg," the overture and prelude to Act III of "Lohengrin," and the prelude and "Liebestod" (love-death) from "Tristan and Isolde."
Although Wagner's "Rienzi" was a great success at the Dresden opera house in 1842, his next two operas, "The Flying Dutchman" and "Tannhaeuser," failed to inspire the public acclaim he craved. The disaffected composer became involved in the Saxon revolutionary movement in 1848, actually manning the barricades in an insurrection in Dresden.
The revolution (or should we say putsch?) fizzled, and Wagner fled to Weimar, and shortly after to Zurich.
In Switzerland, Wagner wrote theoretical tracts in a vein which may seem eerily premonitory of Lenin: "Art and Revolution," "The Art of the Future." Composers before Wagner had been theoreticians and journalists; but Wagner is music's first genuine ideologue. Later he wrote essays on "Art and Religion" and "Heroism and Christianity."
Italian and French composers of opera had mined the vein of classical literature, and Wagner countered by turning to indigenous German narrative materials. In this he was following the lead of E T A Hoffman and Carl Maria von Weber, but unlike his predecessors, Wagner treated his sources with scarcely limited license.
To see Wagner's operatic tetralogy "The Ring of the Nibelung" and to read the 13th-century German epic "The Lay of the Nibelung," is to wonder how the two could be even remotely connected. The two versions share the name of the hero, Siegfried; but his character and the events of his life have been so deeply altered that this fact is less illuminative than the fact that Wagner named his son Siegfried.
Wagner's highly individual approach to his historical materials was thus both ideological and autobiographical. And his life was very much a product of his times.
Not for nothing is the nineteenth century in music called the Romantic Era -- the period was rife with scandalous and near-scandalous liaisons. There was Chopin and George Sand (the Baroness Dudevant), the female novelist who at the age of 15 had learned to ride and to handle a gun in a most unladylike fashion.
There was Liszt and the Countess d'Agoult, whom Parisian society never forgave for their unsanctified union. Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique -- Episodes in the Life of an Artist" was inspired by a violent passion conceived for an English actress he had seen only on the stage.
Nor was Wagner unusually chaste for his day and age. At 23 he married Minna Planner. When Wagner's revolutionary activities drove him into exile, Minna followed him to Zurich. Otto Wesendonck, their neighbor, provided generous financial assistance to Wagner in his plight. Wagner took advantage of Otto's (and Minna's) absence by making love to Otto's wife, Mathilde.
This passion petered out. Wagner then conceived a grand passion for Liszt's daughter, Cosima. This passion Cosima reciprocated.
The only wrinkle in the equation was Cosima's husband, the conductor Hans von Buelow. With a patience which few men could equal, von Buelow continually kept a low profile to avoid a scandal, even though his wife bore Wagner three children before von Buelow finally divorced her -- largely so that she could marry Wagner.
When not otherwise engaged, Wagner was dissatisfied with the state of opera in his day, and decided that he was the man to put it to rights. Criticizing the division of operatic action into arias, recitatives, duets, choruses, et cetera as anti-dramatic, Wagner sought to create a musical continuity truer in spirit to spoken drama, and which he christened "endless melody."
He was the first composer to draw up his own libretti. Finding that the word "opera" didn't quite suit his new conceptions, he coined the phrase "music-dramas."
Wagner felt that for the various aspects of operatic production to be under separate direction dissipated its effectiveness, and so, with the financial support of King Ludwig of Bavaria, he built his own opera house in Bayreuth where he could control all aspects of the production -- set and costume design, lighting, placement of the orchestra.
To listen to the instrumental highlights of Wagner's operas is to appreciate the purely musical aspect of his genius. The Prelude to "Tristan and Isolde" displays such harmonic daring that, while Wagner himself subsequently retrenched into a sturdy diatonicism, many of the harmonic innovations of the 20th century look back to "Tristan."