Grange Park Opera

Wagner was antisemitic but he was not a Nazi. It was not his fault that Hitler loved his music to the extent that he insisted on keeping some of Wagner’s original opera scores in the Berlin bunker with him until his end.

We should listen to Wagner and admire the music – but we should not forget the man.

Wikipedia has a balanced article.

Wagner’s life was anything but boring. Much of it was spent in political exile, in turbulent love affairs, in poverty and repeated flights from creditors. Sometimes many of these intermingled. He took roles conducting, writing, composing and running opera companies.

The start was in Leipzig where the collapse of a theatre company employing him left him with serious money problems. Aged 24 he moved to Riga with his future wife Minna, they amassed such large debts they fled to London. The stormy channel crossing inspired The Flying Dutchman.

In Paris (1839 – 1842) things don’t go well. Meyerbeer, running the Paris Opera, refused to stage his opera Rienzi.

In Dresden, things went better and he was eventually appointed Saxon Court Conductor and completed Lohengrin. However, after his involvement with a left wing uprising in in 1849 (aged 36) he was banned from Germany and fled into exile in Zurich. He begged his friend Franz Liszt (whose daughter he would marry) to stage Lohengrin in Weimar in his absence. Liszt agreed and conducted the premiere in 1850.

For the next 12 years Wagner lived in exile in Zurich but without any income. He turned to writing including his vision of a new type of opera which unified music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts and stagecraft.

Still in Zurich in 1853 he became infatuated with Mathilde Wesendonck, wife of silk merchant Otto Wesendonck, who had made him several loans and lent him a cottage on his estate. She was the inspiration for Isolde. The uneasy affair with Mathilde collapsed in 1858 and Wagner was again down on his uppers.

Among his projects to make money, he gave concerts with the London Philharmonic Society.

The political ban was lifted in 1862 and at this time he finally separated from Minna but there were considerable debts.

Wagner’s fortune took a dramatic upturn when, in 1864, King Ludwig II succeeded to the throne aged 18. Ludwig settled the debts and paid for someone to take dictation from Wagner as he recalled his life. In Munich Wagner met his future wife Cosima, daughter of Liszt. Her husband, Hans von Bulow, was conducting the premiere of Tristan but that didn’t stop Wagner. Still married to von Bulow, she bore Wagner a daughter which scandalised Munich society and he was forced to leave town.

Ludwig installed Wagner at the Lucerne lakeside villa Tribschen and was surprised to discover Cosima residing with him.

Eventually Richard and Cosima were married in 1870. He was 25 years older than her. They settled into a calm domesticity and Wagner applied himself to the Ring Cycle in earnest. They moved to Bayreuth and set about building the new opera house but money was again a problem. Eventually King Ludwig, who had initially refused to pay for it, relented. The first festival in 1876 produced a deficit and money remained a problem.

Wagner’s health was deteriorating. He wrote only one more opera, Parsifal. Ludwig funded it. The premiere was in Bayreuth in 1882. The following February he was in Venice to conduct performances where he died from a heart attack in 1883.

Ludwig was deemed insane in 1886 and drowned a few months later. Suicide or murder?

MALCOLM HERRING

This is the order they were composed. He often wrote the text many years before composition. He would invite friends to his house to hear him recite these texts. These texts are largely autobiographical. Wagner is the star of most of his operas.

1841 Der Fliegende Holländer – first perf 1843
1842 Tannhäuser – first perf 1861
1846-8 Lohengrin – first perf 1850
1853 onwards Das Rheingold (Part 1 of Ring Cycle) – first perf 1869
1854 onwards Die Walküre (Part 2) – first perf 1870
1856 onwards Siegfried (Part 3) – first perf 1876 once Bayreuth was built
1857-9 Tristan und Isolde – first perf 1865
1861-7 Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg – first perf 1868
1871 onwards Götterdämmerung (Part 4) – first perf 1876
1877-82 Parsifal – first perf 1882

Operas had clear arias interspersed with sections that moved the action along. Key to their success would be the librettist creating a succinct text… that the music would expand.

The Italians: Rossini (20 years older than RW), Bellini (a decade older than RW), Verdi (born in the same year). Oddly, Wagner admired Bellini but was generally scathing about Italian musical taste.

The French: Wagner hated Meyerbeer (20 years his senior) who ruled the roost in Paris and didn’t comply with Wagner’s demands. (Saint-Saens, Chabrier, Offenbach were younger than Wagner, and aware of his magic.)

The Germans: Beethoven (40 years Wagner’s senior) wrote only one opera, Fidelio (1800). The inaugural Bayreuth Festival 1876 opened with Beethoven’s 9th symphony. The rest was all Wagner, including The Ring. Wagner was a big fan of Weber (25 years his senior).

Wagner’s 1840 novella A Pilgrimage to Beethoven describes a musical drama in which the standard operatic divisions would disappear. There wouldn’t be arias (apart from the odd one): they would be “through-composed”.

Wagner called his operas Music Dramas. He wrote his own words and he didn’t have an editor. The whole thing was one: the visual, the philosophical, the aural. It was labelled Gesamtkunstwerk – total work of art.

At the premiere of Das Rheingold (1869), the audience’s main interest was the novel scenery and stage effects; Wagner’s new approach to composition largely passed them by.

At any moment in a Rossini aria, you can sing the home note. Even if you sing the wrong note, you have a a sense of a home “key”. It is tonal.

Wagner broke so many rules of composition (adding so much chromaticism and so many suspensions) that the sense of home key is lost.

This is the breakdown of tonality.

At the opening Tristan und Isolde (1865), what is the home key? This breakdown of tonality is the start of modern music.

This is coming soon.

Without Wagner, there’s no Strauss, no Bruckner (he called Wagner ’the Master of Masters”), no Mahler, no Schoenberg, even. No Elgar! Meanwhile the influence of Bayreuth on French composers ran so deep, they had to mount a rearguard action. Debussy, once he had cleared Parsifal out off his system, tellingly declared the Master ‘as dangerous as absinthe’: addictive and potentially lethal.

The chord that opens Tristan is the gateway to 20th century music. A dissonance that doesn’t resolve? Or a dissonance that resolves onto another dissonance? Its influence has been boundless.

That influence extends all the way to Hollywood – and not only in Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo, which  famously quotes Tristan. Movie music was quick to adapt Wagner’s leitmotif principle to identify a specific character, or a specific mood. Next time you’re in a cinema, listen to how an orchestra guides your emotions, tells you what to feel. Then go back and watch the last ten minutes of Die Walküre…

IAIN BURNSIDE