Wagner, R.: Orchestral Highlights From Operas

Description

Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) Orchestral Highlights Richard Wagner inspired in his contemporaries extremes of reaction. For some his music seemed as misguided and repulsive as his anti-Semitism, while others were overwhelmed by the size of his ambition and achievement, to which everything had to be sacrificed. Wagner's career was in many ways thoroughly discreditable. He betrayed friends and patrons, accumulated debts with abandon, and seemed, in pursuit of his aims, an unprincipled opportunist. Nevertheless, whatever his defects of character, he exercised a hypnotic influence over his immediate followers, while his creation of a new form of music-drama, in which the arts were combined, and the magnitude of his conception continue to fascinate.Wagner's early career was as a conductor in the minor opera-houses of German-speaking countries, followed by an unhappy period in Paris. His first real success was in Dresden, where Rienzi was staged in 1842, followed by The Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser. In 1849 he was obliged to leave his position as conductor at the opera in Dresden in some haste, having rashly supported the rising against the King in that year. Taking refuge in Switzerland, he was able to continue work on his great tetralogy, The Ring, eventually completed in 1872 and first performed four years later.In Switzerland Wagner received help from the banker Otto Wesendonck and his love affair with Wesendonck's wife Mathilde, finally exposed by Wagner's wife Minna, was in part behind the composition of the opera Tristan und Isolde, a story of illicit love, in which the hero Tristan betrays his master, King Mark, by his love for the royal bride, Isolde.It was at the same time that Wagner made his first sketches of the text for the opera Parsifal, completed only in 1882 and performed at the new Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, itself a monument to Wagner. The opera, described as a Buhnenweihfestspiel, a sacred festive drama, deals with the knight Parsifal's mystical search for the sacred spear that will heal King Amfortas and, through his purity, bring his eventual accession as King of the Holy Grail. Bayreuth had been made possible through the help of the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was infatuated with the composer, and ready to offer every assistance in the staging of Wagner operas in Munich, where Tristan und Isolde was first performed, in 1865, and in the establishment of a festival theatre in Bayreuth, where Wagner moved in 1872. The new theatre opened with The Ring cycle in 1876 and the deficit on this first Wagner festival was eventually made up by King Ludwig. No further festival took place until the staging of Parsifal in 1882. Wagner died, during the course of a winter stay in Venice, in February 1883. Wagner's opera, based on the unreliable scholar Wagenseil's Buch von der Meister-Singer holdseligen Kunst Anfang, Fortubung, Nutzbarkeiten, und Lehrsatzen, published in 1680, elevated the art of the Mastersingers of Nuremberg into a p