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
paean in praise of German art. Wagner's work tells of the efforts of the outsider, the
knight Walther von Stolzing, to win the hand of Eva, daughter of the goldsmith Pogner, by
victory in the song contest of the Mastersingers, in which his rival is the town clerk,
Beckmesser, a stern and conservative critic, a caricature of the distinguished Vienna
critic Eduard Hanslick. The opera was first performed in Munich in 1868, conducted by Hans
von Bulow, whose wife Cosima, illegitimate daughter of Liszt, had already born Wagner two
daughters, Isolde and Eva. Wagner was in the royal box by the side of his young friend and
patron King Ludwig. The Prelude to Act I weaves together many of the Leit-motifs of which
the fabric of the music is formed, each associated with some idea or character. The melody
of the Mastersingers is followed by that of Walther's love, of the Guild of Mastersingers,
of conventional art and of youthful ardour. Motifs of love and passion lead to the theme
of the Mastersingers at double speed, for their apprentices, a rapid version of part of
the passion motive and another of gaiety. The motifs of the Mastersingers, the Guild and
love are played at the same time, as the Vorspiel comes to a climax.
The Prelude to the first act of Tristan und Isolde, which itself had a profound
influence on harmonic development, again brings together leading motifs of longing,
mystery, of Tristan and of the look that the lovers exchanged, as Tristan escorted Isolde
over the water to the kingdom of King Mark. Their love is awakened by a love potion, yet
another motif, ending in a potion of death. These melodies and melodic fragments come
together, with motifs of intense yearning, to form remarkably evocative music. All ends in
tragedy, with the death of Tristan, followed, as the drama comes to an end, with that of
Isolde, in the pages of the score that Liszt first called Liebestod - Love Death.
The Siegfried Idyll
is a much more personal and private composition, intended as an Aubade for Cosima, whom he
had eventually married in the summer of 1870. Minna Wagner had died in Dresden in 1866,
and Wagner had rented a villa at Tribschen in Switzerland. Here he was joined by Cosima
von Bulow, with the two of her children that Wagner had fathered. A third child, a son,
Siegfried, was born in June 1869. The Siegfried Idyll
was a surprise birthday present for Cosima, played as a Symphonic Birthday Greeting, and
weaving together musical references to the opera Siegfried and to the couple's son. Such
birthday presents had their precedent at Tribschen, where Wagner had already been awakened
on his last two birthdays in less romantic fashion, in this year by a military band
playing his Huldigungsmarsch at eight o'clock in the morning.
The Twilight of the Gods (Gotterdammerung) was the last opera
of The Ring, reaching a climax in the final funeral pyre of the hero Siegfried, joined in
death by the Valkyrie Brunnhilde, and culminating in the final conflagration that
overwhelms Valhalla, represented in music by motifs from earlier in the whole cycle.
The Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra of Katowice
(PRNSO)
The Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra of Katowice
(PRNSO) was founded in 1945, soon after the end of the World War II, by the eminent Polish
conductor Witold Rowicki. The PRNSO replaced the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra which had
existed from 1934 to 1939in Warsaw, under the direction of another outstanding artist,
Grzegorz Fitelberg. In 1947 Grzegroz Fitelberg returned to Poland and became artistic
director of the PRNSO. He was followed by a series of distinguished Polish conductors - Jan
Krenz, Bohdan Wodiezko, Kazimierz Kord, Tadeusz Strugala, Jerzy Maksymiuk, Stanislaw
Wislocki and, since 1983, Antoni Wit. The orchestra has appeared with conductors and
soloists of the greatest distinction and has recorded for Polskie Nagrania, Etevna and NVC
Thorofon Schallplatten.
Johannes Wildner
Johannes Wildner was born in the Austrian resort of
Mürzzuschlag in 1956 and studied violin and conducting, taking his diploma at the
Vienna Musikhochschule and proceeding to a doctorate in musicology. A member of the Vienna
Philharmonic Orchestra, he has toured widely as leader of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra's
Johann Strauss Ensemble and of the Vienna Mozart Academy. As a conductor he has directed
the Orchestra Sinfonica dell'Emilia Romagna Arturo Toscanini, the Budapest State Opera
Orchestra, the Silesian Philharmonic and the Malmo Symphony Orchestra.