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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: The Great Composers
- Sprache: Englisch
Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.No other composer is at once so revered or so reviled as Richard Wagner. Yet his contribution to opera is immense. His reputation rests on ten epic operas which are constantly performed worldwide, without speaking of the annual festival of his music at Bayreuth, the opera house which he designed and built to stage his works. Four of these operas, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung, make up the monumental 15-hour Ring cycle, based on old Norse-Germanic sagas. Many of the others hark back to medieval and Arthurian legends, often dramatising the conflict between the sacred and profane, the sensual and spiritual. Using leitmotifs – themes which symbolise characters and elements in his opera – Wagner introduced a new musical vocabulary.Endless affairs, twice married, constantly on the run for either political or financial reasons, a prolific writer, an indefatigable composer, Wagner was also, as Michael Steen's narrative shows, a monster of egoism. A revolutionary in his youth, Wagner escaped to Zurich, only to be forced to move on when the businessman bankrolling him was about to uncover Wagner's affair with his wife. He was then lavishly supported in Munich by the 'Mad King' Ludwig II of Bavaria, until the king's ministers objected. Once in Switzerland, Wagner was joined by Cosima von Bülow, Liszt's daughter and the wife of a conductor, who became his second wife and helped him realise his dream at Bayreuth.
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Published by Icon Books Ltd,
Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-84831-809-0
Text copyright © 2003, 2010 Michael Steen
The author has asserted his moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.
Also by the Michael Steen:
The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (ebook and paperback)
Great Operas: A Guide to 25 of the World’s Finest Musical Experiences (ebook and paperback)
Enchantress of Nations: Pauline Viardot, Soprano, Muse and Lover (hardback).
He is currently engaged in a project to publish one hundred ebooks in the series A Short Guide to a Great Opera. Around forty of these have already been published' and further details on these are given at the back of this book.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to our ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.
Extracted from his book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, Michael Steen explores the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.
No other composer is at once so revered or so reviled as Richard Wagner. Yet his contribution to opera is immense. His reputation rests on ten epic operas which are constantly performed worldwide, without speaking of the annual festival of his music at Bayreuth, the opera house which he designed and built to stage his works. Four of these operas, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung, make up the monumental 15-hour Ring cycle, based on old Norse-Germanic sagas. Many of the others hark back to medieval and Arthurian legends, often dramatising the conflict between the sacred and profane, the sensual and spiritual. Using leitmotifs – themes which symbolise characters and elements in his opera – Wagner introduced a new musical vocabulary.
Endless affairs, twice married, constantly on the run for either political or financial reasons, a prolific writer, an indefatigable composer, Wagner was also, as Michael Steen's narrative shows, a monster of egoism. A revolutionary in his youth, Wagner escaped to Zurich, only to be forced to move on when the businessman bankrolling him was about to uncover Wagner's affair with his wife. He was then lavishly supported in Munich by the ‘Mad King’ Ludwig II of Bavaria, until the king's ministers objected. Once in Switzerland, Wagner was joined by Cosima von Bülow, Liszt's daughter and the wife of a conductor, who became his second wife and helped him realise his dream at Bayreuth.
WAGNER
WHEREAS LISZTMAY have caused controversy, few composers are so lastingly controversial as his son-in-law, Richard Wagner. Bizet regarded him as the greatest living composer of his time. But for Berlioz, the Prelude to Tristan proceeded ‘with no theme other than a sort of chromatic groaning’. Scriabin thought that there were two or three enchanting moments in DieWalküre, but ‘all the rest is frightfully dull’. Indeed Verdi, no Wagner enthusiast, said that he dozed off during Tannhäuser. After watching DasRheingold, Clara Schumann wrote: ‘The whole evening I felt as though I were wading about in a swamp.’ The 20th-century novelist Virginia Woolf disliked the ‘bawling sentimentality’. Leo Tolstoy thought the opera Siegfried was a ‘stupid Punch and Judy show, which is much too poor for children over seven years of age. Moreover’, he continued, ‘it is not music. And yet thousands of people sit there and pretend to like it.’1
There are some matters on which people do tend to agree about Wagner – this extraordinary man who was five feet five inches tall with an outsize head and a vile temper.2 That he was utterly unscrupulous, totally self-obsessed, and rapacious. That most of his voluminous writings are not only tedious but often virulently offensive.3 That there are stretches of his music, particularly during a description or explanation, when an ordinary listener becomes bored and the mind inevitably wanders.
Also, Wagner’s poor reputation can be attributed to his anti-Semitism: Hitler was a notorious fan of his works. Yet, many Jews have admired his irrepressible energy and charm. They recognised that Wagner’s genius and the beauty of his works overrode his views and character: the person whom he asked to lead the fund-raising for the enormous project to build an opera house at Bayreuth was Jewish;4 Hermann Levi conducted the pre-mière of Parsifal; Bruno Walter had no reservations about performing his operas; Georg Solti issued the first recording of the complete Ring;5 Daniel Barenboim conducts his works.
A mark of the great composer is to do something different. As such, Wagner was astonishingly ambitious and influential. Others before had thought of creating an amalgam of ‘philosophy, politics, history and literature, as well as myth, language, poetry, drama and music’6 – a Gesamtkunstwerk – but never with such imagination or such vision. In the first few bars of Tristan, Wagner takes us from the 19th century into the 20th, in one leap.7 It has been claimed that ‘never since Orpheus has there been a musician whose music affected so vitally the life and art of generations’. 8 His contemporaries were amazed; of course, those merely out for an evening’s entertainment knew that they were in the wrong place.
We shall follow Wagner’s struggle to build a career, and his part as a revolutionary in 1848. After a lucky escape, he settled in Zurich, where he wrote and read rather than composed.* When the businessman bankrolling him was about to discover that Wagner was having an affair with his wife, it was time to move on. The wanderer became increasingly desperate for his compositions to be performed. As is well known, King Ludwig II of Bavaria came to his help. But Ludwig’s support was unpopular and Wagner was thrown out of Munich. He moved to Switzerland, where Cosima von Bülow joined him and became his wife. We shall look at their life together and see him achieve his dream of building an opera house suitable for his works to be performed. We shall observe his total self-centredness, born not so much from the need to satisfy his personal desires but because he was one of those artists who ‘made their honey as do the bees, and in truth this honey benefited all others, but could be made only on condition of not thinking about others while they made it’.9 The Wagners moved to Bayreuth, but, like his Flying Dutchman, he was always on the move: his death was in Venice.
EARLY DAYS
On 22 May 1813, Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, in Saxony. This was shortly before Napoleon’s Grand Army was defeated in the battle there.* In the wake of military action there was usually an epidemic: so, typhus killed Wagner’s supposed father, a policeman who enjoyed amateur dramatics. Wagner’s mother then married Ludwig Geyer, an actor in the court theatre in Dresden who had comforted her while the policeman was away with one of the amateur actresses. Geyer was very attached to her son, and fulfilled the role of father. As a consequence, for a long time the boy was known as ‘Geyer’ rather than ‘Wagner’.10 He was a lively lad: there is a drawing of him fooling around with his sister, imitating fairground tightrope walkers, dressing in masks and ambushing passers-by.11
The family moved to Prague, where his sister Rosalie, one of the family’s main breadwinners, had a job as an actress. When Wagner was fifteen, they moved on to Leipzig, where he went to the St Nicolas school. There, he was more interested in writing a play which he tried to set to music, than in the normal curriculum. He studied counterpoint and piano with the Cantor of St Thomas’, and he made a piano transcription of Beet-hoven’s Ninth Symphony, but he had no formal musical education as such.
As he grew up, he seems to have been boisterous, and joined his fellow-students in their gambling, swaggering and brawling.12 He was involved in five duels.13 These were a regular feature of Teutonic student life, and the wounds were regarded as a mark of honour.** Wagner was involved in proper street-fighting in July 1830, in response to the revolutionary events in France. But he seems to have suffered little more than a hangover the next day. Around this time he became interested in politics, and associated with members of the pro-democratic and subversive group called Young Germany.
THE STRUGGLE TO GET GOING
In January 1833, Wagner left Leipzig to stay with his brother Albert at Würzburg, where he was appointed chorus master and was responsible for taking the singers through their parts in spectaculars such as Marschner’s Der Vampyr and Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable. Wagner disliked these operas; he considered that the audience simply gaped at the usually absurd and crude spectacle in front of them, and were not emotionally or intellectually involved.15
