Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)

[Giuseppe Verdi at 73, by Giovanni Boldini, 1886]

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (October 10, 1813, La Roncole, near Busseto, Italy [then part of the French Empire] – January 27, 1901) was enrolled in the Roman Catholic church in Latin as Joseph Fortuninus Franciscus. His father, Carlo Giuseppe Verdi, took his son to Busseto, where he was recorded in French as Joseph Fortunin Francois. When he was still a child, Verdi's parents moved from Piacenza to Busseto, where the future composer's education was greatly facilitated by visits to the large library belonging to the local Jesuit school. Also in Busseto, Verdi received his first lessons in composition.

Verdi went to Milan at 20 to study counterpoint privately while attending opera, as well as concerts of German music. Verdi's predecessors who influenced his music were Giocchino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Gaetano Donizetti, and Saverio Mercadante.

Returning to Busseto, he became town music master and, with the support of Antonio Barezzi, a local merchant and music lover who had long supported Verdi's musical ambitions in Milan. Verdi gave his first public performance at Barezzi’s home in 1830. The homeowner invited Verdi to be his daughter Margherita's music teacher and the two soon fell deeply in love.

The production of his first opera, Oberto, at La Scala Milan, achieved a degree of success, after which resident impresario Bartolomeo Merelli, offered Verdi a contract for two more works.

In 1840, Verdi's wife and children died while he was working on Un giorno di regno. The opera was a flop, and he fell into personal and compositional despair vowing to give up music.

Merelli nevertheless persuaded him to write Nabucco in 1842 and its opening performance caused a sensation, with its Act III Va pensiero chorus of the Hebrew slaves connected with Italian yearnings for unificationd (During rehearsals, workmen in the theater stopped what they were doing during the number and applauded its conclusion). When the hymn Immenso Jehova (again sung by the Hebrews to thank God for saving His people) was sung at the premiere in Milan, which then belonged to the large part of Italy under Austrian domination, the audience, responding with nationalistic fervor to the exiled slaves' lament for their lost homeland, demanded an encore of the piece. As encores were expressly forbidden by the government at the time, such a gesture was significant.

The notion of Verdi as the Risorgimento's composer has it that the slogan "Viva VERDI" was used throughout Italy to secretly call for Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia (Victor Emmanuel King of Italy), referring to Victor Emmanuel II, then king of Sardinia.

A large number of operas followed in the decade after 1843, a period which Verdi was to describe as his "galley years." These began with I Lombardi (1843), Ernani (1844), I Due Foscari (1844),


Giovanna d'Arco (1845), Alzira (1845),


Attila (1846),

Macbeth (1847, without a love story, breaking a basic convention in 19th-Century Italian opera), I Masnadieri (1847), and

Jérusalem (1847), a revised and renamed I Lombardi, for the fickle French audience, was produced by the Paris Opera and with the requisite ballets, became Verdi's first exercise in grand opera.

Throughout his career, Verdi rarely utilized high C in his tenor arias, citing the fact that the opportunity to sing that particular note in front of an audience distracts the performer before and after the note appears. However, he did provide high C's to Duprez in Jérusalem and to Tamberlick in the original version of La Forza del Destino (below).


Verdi began his relationship with Giuseppina (Peppina) Strepponi (two years his junior, 1815-1897), a soprano in the twilight of her career. During this cohabitation regarded as scandalous by some, Verdi bought an estate two miles from Busseto in 1848.

Verdi's fecundity continued with Il Corsaro (1848), La Battaglia di Legnano (1849), Luisa Miller (1849), and Stiffelio (1850).


During this time, the composer's parents lived with Verdi and Strepponni, but, after his mother's death in 1851, the couple made the Villa Verdi at Sant'Agata their home until death.

***


As the "galley years" were drawing to a close, Verdi created one of his greatest masterpieces, Rigoletto, premiered in Venice in 1851. The opera quickly became a great success, and appears as number nine on Opera America's list of the 20 most-performed music dramas in North America.

Verdi was commissioned to write a new opera by TheatroLa Fenice, Venice in 1850, when he was already a well-known composer with a certain freedom of choosing the works he would prefer. He then asked Francesco Maria Piave (with whom he had already created Ernani, I due Foscari, Macbeth, Il Corsaro and Stiffelio) to examine the play Kean by Alexandre Dumas, père, but he felt he needed a more energetic subject.

Verdi soon stumbled upon Victor Hugo's Le Roi s'Amuse. He later explained that "It contains extremely powerful positions ... The subject is great, immense, and has a character that is one of the most important creations of the theatre of all countries and all Ages."

It was a highly controversial subject indeed, and Hugo himself had already had trouble with censorship in France, which had banned productions of his play after its first performance nearly twenty years earlier (and would continue to ban it for another 30 years). As Austria at that time directly controlled much of Northern Italy, it came before the Austrian Board of Censors.

From the beginning, Verdi was aware of the risks as was Piave. A letter has been found in which Verdi wrote to Piave: "Use four legs, run through the town and find me an influential person who can obtain the permission for making Le Roi s'Amuse." Correspondence between a prudent Piave and an already committed Verdi followed, and the two remained at risk and underestimated the power and the intentions of Austrians. Even the friendly Guglielmo Brenna, secretary of La Fenice who had promised them that they would not have problems with the censors, was in error.

At the beginning of the summer of 1850, some rumors started to spread that Austrian censorship was going to forbid the production, as a scandalous work.

In August, Verdi and Piave prudently retired to Busseto, Verdi's hometown, to continue the composition and prepare a defensive scheme. They wrote to the theatre, assuring them that the censor's doubts about the morality of the work were not justified but since very little time was left, very little could be done.

For the première, Verdi had Felice Varesi as Rigoletto, the young tenor Raffaele Mirate as the Duke, and Teresina Brambilla as Gilda.

The opening was a complete triumph, and the Duke's cynical aria, La donna è mobile, was sung in the streets the next morning.

Due to the high risk of unauthorised copying, Verdi had demanded the maximum secrecy from all his singers and musicians. Mirate had use of his score only a few evenings before the première and was forced to swear he would not sing or even whistle the tune of La donna è mobile.

Many years later, Giulia Cori, Varesi's daughter, described her father's performance at the premiere. Playing the original Rigoletto, her father was really uncomfortable with the false hump he had to wear; he was so uncertain that, even though he was quite an experienced singer, he had a panic attack when it was his turn to enter the stage. Verdi immediately realized he was paralysed and roughly pushed him on the stage, so he appeared with a clumsy tumble. The audience, thinking it was a gag, was very amused.

With Rigoletto's sensationalist libretto of rape and suicide, Verdi achieved musical drama as a mixture of heterogeneous elements, embodying social and cultural complexity, and beginning from a distinctive fusing of comedy and tragedy. The work's range includes the requisite banda (onstage band music, in Act I), powerful and concise declamations often based on relatively high C and C#'s in Rigoletto and Monterone's upper register, chamber music settings such as the duet between Rigoletto and Sparafucile (with prominent scorings for cello and clarinets), popular arias such as the aforementioned La donna è mobile,

urgent ariosos including Un di,

and intricate counterpoint as in Bella figlia dell'amore" (with an aria transformed into a quartet in its B section, and the A returning with phrase extensions filled by the added singers).



1813VerdiRigolettoAct03



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYRZOEzoOgQ

The emotional-functional roles in the latter are

Gilda (Rigoletto's daughter) - Soprano - "He said such words of love to me" - Despairing descant figuration

Maddalena (assassin Sparafucile's lure-them-to-their death sister) - Alto - "Ha! Ha! I bet you say that to all the girls" - coquetish countermelody

The Duke of Mantua (Mr. Love-Em-and-Leave-Em) - Tenor - "I love you" - Rapturous melody (Beautiful Daughter of Love)

Rigoletto (Humpbacked court jester to Duke) - Bass - "Told ya he was a bum" - Stern bass line

The finale's

Venti scudi

and Storm - Ah piu non ragiono -



make a potent climatic-emotional brew, featuring thunderous low chromatic strings, flashes of lightning flutes, a wind of offstage vocalise male singers in parallel diminished chords, bell chimes, and faux-Gregorian chants of inocence as Rigoletto's daughter sacrifices herself to save an undeserving cad.

Although his orchestration is often masterful, Verdi relied heavily on his melodic gift as the ultimate instrument of musical expression. In fact, in many of his passages, and especially in his arias, the harmony is ascetic, with the entire orchestra occasionally sounding as if it were one large accompanying instrument - a giant-sized guitar playing chords. Some critics maintain he paid insufficient attention to the technical aspect of composition, lacking as he did schooling and refinement. Verdi himself once said, "Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned." He hastened to add, however, "I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music."

However, it would be incorrect to assume that Verdi underestimated the expressive power of the orchestra or failed to use it to its full capacity where necessary. Moreover, orchestral and contrapuntal innovation is characteristic of his style: for instance, the strings producing a rapid ascending scale in Monterone's scene in Rigoletto accentuate the drama, and, in the same opera, the chorus humming six closely grouped notes backstage portrays, very effectively, the brief ominous wails of the approaching tempest. Verdi's innovations are so distinctive that other composers do not use them; they remain, to this day, some of Verdi's signatures.

Verdi was one of the first composers who insisted on patiently seeking out plots to suit his particular talents. Working closely with his librettists and well aware that dramatic expression was his forte, he made certain that the initial work upon which the libretto was based was stripped of all "unnecessary" detail and "superfluous" participants, and only characters brimming with passion and scenes rich in drama remained.

***

There followed the second and third of the three major operas of Verdi's "middle period."

**


Il Trovatore (1853) was produced in Rome, with a highly dramatic story of infanticide, gypsies, and Medievalisms.

Troubadour Song



Anvil Chorus

Act IV, Scene 1, No. 12 (Beginning)


Highlights from Il Trovatore appear to comic ends in the Marx Brothers A Night at the Opera.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCgaZnnHB1I&feature=related

***


La Traviata (1853), premiered in Venice, is based on Alexandre Dumas fils's play The Lady of the Camellias, and features free love, a drinking song, and death by tuberculosis.



Un di felice

Ah fors e lui
Follie!
Sempre libera

***

1855 to 1867 brought more operas :

Les Vêpres Siciliennes (1855),

Le trouvère (1857, revised version of Il Trovatore with a ballet added),

Simon Boccanegra (1857),

Aroldo (1857, revised version of Stiffelio),

Un Ballo in Maschera (1859, the year in which and Verdi and Giuseppina finally married),

La Forza del Destino (commissioned by the Imperial Theatre of Saint Petersburg for 1861 but not performed until 1862),

a revised Macbeth (1865), and

Don Carlos (1867), as with Vespers (above) commissioned by the Paris Opera and initially given in French, but now most often performed in their revised Italian versions.

In 1869, Verdi was asked to compose a section for a Requiem in memory of Gioacchino Rossini and proposed that this should be a collection of sections composed by other Italian contemporaries of Rossini. The work was compiled and completed, but not performed in Verdi's lifetime.

***


Verdi's Aida (1871) -- a story of interracial love, Ancient Egypt, and entombment) -- is sometimes thought to have been commissioned for the celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, but, evidently Verdi turned down the Khedive's invitation to write an "ode" for the new opera house he was planning to inaugurate as part of the canal opening festivities. The opera house actually opened with a production of Rigoletto. It was later in 1869-70, when the organizers again approached Verdi (but this time with the idea of writing an opera), that he again turned them down. When they warned him that they would ask Charles Gounod instead and then threatened to engage Richard Wagner's services, Verdi began to show considerable interest, and agreements were signed in June 1870.


Act I, Scene 1: Celeste Aida (Heavenly Aida)




Act II, Scene 2: Marcia

B section melody,



opening phrase:

Sol Do Re Sol Re Mi Mi Mi Mi Fa Do Mi Re Do Re Mi Mi Re Do Re Mi Mi Re Mi Mi Do Re Re

with an alternation of I and V chords, often in first and second inversions, and some V7's, ultimately leading to vi (v of ii or II) and II (V of V).



With the exception this opera (particularly in Acts III and IV) and his final two, Verdi was free of Wagner's influence. Although respectful of Gounod, the Italian was careful not to learn anything from the Frenchman whom many of Verdi's contemporaries regarded as the greatest living composer. Some strains in Aida suggest at least a superficial familiarity with the works of the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, whom Franz Liszt, after his tour of the Russian Empire as a pianist, popularized in Western Europe.

***


String Quartet (1873)

***


In 1874, Verdi reworked his Libera Me section of the Rossini setting and made it a part of his own complete Requiem, honoring the famous novelist and poet Alessandro Manzoni, who had died in the previous year. The full work was first performed at the cathedral in Milan, on May 22, with the commanding bass drum solo of the Dies Irae resounding.



A rivalry continued with Wagner, whom Verdi never met, but perceived as a rival of a totally different school fo musical thought. Indeed, the two composers seemed to resent each other greatly. Verdi's comments on Wagner and his music are few and hardly benevolent ("He invariably chooses, unnecessarily, the untrodden path, attempting to fly where a rational person would walk with better results"), but at least one of them is kind: upon learning of Wagner's death, Verdi lamented: "Sad, sad, sad! ... a name that will leave a most powerful impression on the history of art."

Of Wagner's comments on Verdi, only one is well-known. After listening to Verdi's Requiem, the great German, prolific and eloquent in his comments on some other composers, said, "It would be best not to say anything."


[Verdi in 1876]


[Verdi in Vanity Fair (1879)]

During the following years Verdi worked on revising some of his earlier scores, most notably new versions of Don Carlos, La Forza del Destino, and Simon Boccanegra.


Otello, based on William Shakespeare's play, with a libretto written by the younger composer of Mefistofele, Arrigo Boito, premiered in Milan in 1887. Its music, lacking a prelude, is "continuous" and cannot easily be divided into separate "numbers" to be performed in concert. Some feel that although masterfully orchestrated, it lacks the melodic lustre so characteristic of Verdi's earlier, great, operas, while many critics consider it Verdi's greatest tragic opera, containing some of his most beautiful, expressive music and some of his richest characterizations.


Verdi's last opera, Falstaff -- another Shakespeare play (The Merry Wives of Windsor) to another Boito libretto -- was an international success and an impressive comic opera showing Verdi's gifts as contrapuntalist.

The ailing Strepponi died suddenly on November 14, 1897. Less than four years later, while staying at a hotel in Milan, Verdi had a stroke on January 21, 1901, grew gradually more feeble, and died six days later, on January 27, 1901.

Prior to his body being driven from the cemetery to the official memorial service and its final resting place at the Casa di Riposo, Arturo Toscanini conducted a chorus of 820 singers in the Miserere from Il Trovatore.

Many of his operas, especially the later ones from 1851 onwards are a staple of the standard repertoire. No composer of Italian opera has managed to match Verdi's popularity, perhaps with the exception of Giacomo Puccini.

[8815 Emmett - Dixie / 8813 Verdi / 8813 Wagner]

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) - Music Drama

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (May 22, 1813, Leipzig, Germany - February 13, 1883, Venice, Italy) was a German composer, conductor, music theorist, director, and essayist, primarily known for his operas (or "music dramas", as they were later called). Unlike most other great opera composers, Wagner wrote both the scenario and libretto for his works.

Wagner's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for contrapuntal texture, rich chromaticism, harmonies and orchestration, and elaborate use of leitmotifs: musical themes associated with particular characters, locales or plot elements. Wagner pioneered advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, which greatly influenced the development of European classical music.
He transformed musical thought through his idea of Gesamtkunstwerk ("total artwork"), the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, epitomized by his monumental four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876). To try to stage these works as he imagined them, Wagner built his own opera house.

Richard Wagner was the ninth child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, who was a clerk in the Leipzig police service.

Wagner's father died of typhus six months after Richard's birth, following which Wagner's mother, Johanna Rosine Wagner, began living with the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer, who had been a friend of Richard's father. In August 1814 Johanna Rosine married Geyer, and moved with her family to his residence in Dresden. For the first 14 years of his life, Wagner was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer. Wagner may later have suspected that Geyer was in fact his biological father, and furthermore speculated incorrectly that Geyer was Jewish.

Geyer's love of the theatre was shared by his stepson, and Wagner took part in performances. In his autobiography Wagner recalled once playing the part of an angel. The boy Wagner was also hugely impressed by the Gothic elements of



Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischutz. Late in 1820, Wagner was enrolled at Pastor Wetzel's school at Possendorf, near Dresden, where he received some piano instruction from his Latin teacher. He could not manage a proper scale but preferred playing theatre overtures by ear.

Geyer died in 1821, when Richard was eight. Consequently, Wagner was sent to the Kreuz Grammar School in Dresden, paid for by Geyer's brother. The young Wagner entertained ambitions as a playwright, his first creative effort (listed as 'WWV 1') being a tragedy, Leubald begun at school in 1826, which was strongly influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe. Wagner determined to set it to music; he persuaded his family to allow him music lessons.

By 1827, the family had moved back to Leipzig. Wagner's first lessons in composition were taken in 1828-31 with Christian Gottlieb Müller. In January and March of 1828 he first heard Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 and 9 respectively, performed in the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Beethoven became his inspiration, and Wagner wrote a piano transcription of the latter, plus some of the piano sonatas and orchestral overtures.

In 1829, he saw the dramatic soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient on stage, and she became his ideal of the fusion of drama and music in opera. In his autobiography, Wagner wrote, "If I look back on my life as a whole, I can find no event that produced so profound an impression upon me." Wagner claimed to have seen Schröder-Devrient in the title role of Fidelio; however, it seems more likely that he saw her performance as Romeo in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi.

The composer enrolled at the University of Leipzig in 1831, and took composition lessons with the cantor of Saint Thomas church, Christian Theodor Weinlig. Weinlig was so impressed with Wagner's musical ability that he refused any payment for his lessons, and arranged for one of Wagner's piano works to be published. A year later, Wagner composed his Symphony in C Major, a Beethovenesque work which gave him his first opportunity as a conductor in 1832. He then began to work on an opera, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), which he never completed.

In 1833, Wagner's older brother Karl Albert managed to obtain Richard a position as chorusmaster in Würzburg. In the same year, at the age of 20, Wagner composed his first complete opera, Die Feen (The Fairies). This opera, which clearly imitated the style of Carl Maria von Weber, would go unproduced until half a century later, when it was premiered in Munich shortly after the composer's death in 1883.

Meanwhile, Wagner held brief appointments as musical director at opera houses in Magdeburg and Königsberg, during which he wrote Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), based on William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. This second opera was staged at Magdeburg in 1836, but closed before the second performance, leaving the composer (not for the last time) in serious financial difficulties.



[Is that Robber?...]

On 24 November 1836, Wagner married actress Christine Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer. In June 1837 they moved to the city of Riga, then in the Russian Empire, where Wagner became music director of the local opera. A few weeks afterwards, Minna ran off with an army officer who then abandoned her, penniless. Wagner took Minna back; however, this was but the first debâcle of a troubled marriage that would end in misery three decades later.

By 1839, the couple had amassed such large debts that they fled Riga to escape from creditors (debt would plague Wagner for most of his life). During their flight, they and their Newfoundland dog, Robber, took a stormy sea passage to London, from which Wagner claimed to draw the inspiration for Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman -- it was actually based on a sketch by Heinrich Heine -- although, in a sense, Wagner himself was playing the role of the Flying-from-Debt German). The Wagners spent 1840 and 1841 in Paris, where Richard made a scant living writing articles and arranging operas by other composers, largely on behalf of the Schlesinger publishing house.

Wagner completed writing his third opera -- Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes) -- in 1840. Largely through the agency of Meyerbeer, it was accepted for performance by the Dresden Court Theatre (Hofoper) in the German state of Saxony. Thus in 1842, the couple moved to Dresden, where Rienzi was staged to considerable acclaim. Wagner lived in Dresden for the next six years, eventually being appointed the Royal Saxon Court Conductor. During this period, he completed and staged Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) (1843) and Tannhäuser (1845), the first two of his three middle-period operas.

***

Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) (1843): Overture



Tannhäuser (1845): Overture





***

The Wagners' stay at Dresden was brought to an end by Richard's involvement in leftist politics. A nationalist movement was gaining force in the independent German States, calling for constitutional freedoms and the unification of the weak princely states into a single nation. Richard Wagner played an enthusiastic role in this movement, receiving guests at his house who included his colleague August Röckel, who was editing the radical left-wing paper Volksblätter, and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

Widespread discontent against the Saxon government came to a head in April 1849, when King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony dissolved Parliament and rejected a new constitution pressed upon him by the people. The May Uprising broke out, in which Wagner played a minor supporting role. The incipient revolution was quickly crushed by an allied force of Saxon and Prussian troops, and warrants were issued for the arrest of the revolutionaries. Wagner had to flee, first to Paris and then to Zürich. Röckel and Bakunin failed to escape and endured long terms of imprisonment.

***

Lohengrin (1849): Overture



***

Wagner spent the next 12 years in exile. He had completed Lohengrin (1849) before the Dresden uprising, and now wrote desperately to his friend Franz Liszt to have it staged in his absence. Liszt, who proved to be a friend in need, eventually conducted the premiere in Weimar in August 1850.

Nevertheless, Wagner found himself in grim personal straits, isolated from the German musical world and without any income to speak of. Before leaving Dresden, he had drafted a scenario that would eventually become his mammoth cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). He wrote the libretto for a single opera, Siegfried's Tod (Siegfried's Death) in 1848. After arriving in Zurich he expanded the story to include an opera about the young Siegfried. He completed the cycle by writing Die Walküre and Das Rheingold and revising the later operas to agree with his new concept. His wife Minna, who had disliked the operas he had written after Rienzi, was falling into a deepening depression. Finally, he fell victim to erysipelas, which made it difficult for him to continue writing.

Wagner's primary published output during his first years in Zürich was a set of notable essays: The Art-Work of the Future (1849), in which he described a vision of opera as Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total artwork," in which the various arts such as music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts, and stagecraft were unified; Judaism in Music (1850), a tract directed against Jewish composers; and Opera and Drama (1851), which described ideas in aesthetics that he was putting to use on the Ring operas.

By 1852 Wagner had completed the libretto of the four Ring operas, and he began composing Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold) in November 1853, following it immediately with Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) in 1854.



[Terrence Malick - The New World (2005),
featuring Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold: Prelude]

He then began work on the third opera, Siegfried in 1856, but finished only the first two acts before deciding to put the work aside to concentrate on a new idea: Tristan und Isolde.

***

Die Walküre (The Valkyrie): The Ride of the Valkyries (1854)





[Francis Ford Coppola - Apocalypse Now (1979),
utilizing Richard Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries]

***

Wagner had two independent sources of inspiration for Tristan. The first came to him in 1854, when his poet friend Georg Herwegh introduced him to the works of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner would later call this the most important event of his life. His personal circumstances certainly made him an easy convert to what he understood to be Schopenhauer's philosophy, a deeply pessimistic view of the human condition. He would remain an adherent of Schopenhauer for the rest of his life, even after his fortunes improved.

One of Schopenhauer's doctrines was that music held a supreme role amongst the arts, since it was the only one unconcerned with the material world. Wagner quickly embraced this claim, which must have resonated strongly despite its direct contradiction with his own arguments, in "Opera and Drama", that music in opera had to be subservient to the cause of drama. Wagner scholars have since argued that this Schopenhauerian influence caused Wagner to assign a more commanding role to music in his later operas, including the latter half of the Ring cycle, which he had yet to compose. Many aspects of Schopenhauerian doctrine undoubtedly found their way into Wagner's subsequent libretti. For example, the self-renouncing cobbler-poet Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger, generally considered Wagner's most sympathetic character, is a quintessentially Schopenhauerian creation (despite being based on a real person).



Wagner's second source of inspiration was the poet-writer Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the silk merchant Otto von Wesendonck. Wagner met the Wesendoncks in Zürich in 1852. Otto, a fan of Wagner's music, placed a cottage on his estate at Wagner's disposal. By 1857, Wagner had become infatuated with Mathilde.

Though Mathilde seems to have returned some of his affections, she had no intention of jeopardizing her marriage, and kept her husband informed of her contacts with Wagner. Nevertheless, the affair inspired Wagner to put aside his work on the Ring cycle (which would not be resumed for the next 12 years) and begin work on Tristan, based on the Arthurian love story.

The uneasy affair collapsed in 1858, when Minna intercepted a letter from Wagner to Mathilde.

After the resulting confrontation, Wagner left Zürich alone, bound for Venice. The following year, he once again moved to Paris to oversee production of a new revision of Tannhäuser, staged thanks to the efforts of Princess de Metternich. The premiere of the Paris Tannhäuser in 1861 was an utter fiasco, due to disturbances caused by members of the Jockey Club. Further performances were cancelled, and Wagner hurriedly left the city.

In 1861, the political ban against Wagner in Germany was lifted, and the composer settled in Biebrich, Prussia, where he began work on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Despite the failure of Tannhäuser in Paris, the possibility that Der Ring des Nibelungen would never be finished and Wagner's unhappy personal life, this opera is by far his sunniest work. Wagner's second wife Cosima would later write, "when future generations seek refreshment in this unique work, may they spare a thought for the tears from which the smiles arose." In 1862, Wagner finally parted with Minna, though he (or at least his creditors) continued to support her financially until her death in 1866.

Between 1861 and 1864 Wagner tried to have Tristan und Isolde produced in Vienna. Despite over 70 rehearsals the opera remained unperformed, and gained a reputation as being "unplayable," which further added to Wagner's financial woes.



[Ludwig II at 18, upon his accession to the throne (1864)]

Wagner's fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864, when King Ludwig II assumed the throne of Bavaria at the age of 18. The young king, an ardent admirer of Wagner's operas since childhood, had the composer brought to Munich. He settled Wagner's considerable debts, and made plans to have his new operas produced. After grave difficulties in rehearsal, Tristan und Isolde premiered to enormous success at the National Theatre in Munich on 10 June 1865, the first Wagner premiere in almost 15 years.

***

Tristan und Isolde (1865)



Act I: Prelude





Act II: Love-Death





***



In the meantime, Wagner became embroiled in another affair, this time with Cosima von Bülow, the wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow, one of Wagner's most ardent supporters and the conductor of the Tristan premiere. Cosima was the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and the famous Countess Marie d'Agoult, and 24 years younger than Wagner. Liszt disapproved of his daughter seeing Wagner, though the two men were friends. In April 1865, she gave birth to Wagner's illegitimate daughter, who was named Isolde. Their indiscreet affair scandalized Munich, and to make matters worse, Wagner fell into disfavor amongst members of the court, who were suspicious of his influence on the king. In December 1865, Ludwig was finally forced to ask the composer to leave Munich. He apparently also toyed with the idea of abdicating in order to follow his hero into exile, but Wagner quickly dissuaded him.

Ludwig installed Wagner at the villa Tribschen, beside Switzerland's Lake Lucerne. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) was completed at Tribschen in 1867, and premiered in Munich on 21 June the following year. In October, Cosima finally convinced Hans von Bülow to grant her a divorce, but not before having two more children with Wagner. They had another daughter, named Eva, and a son named Siegfried. Richard and Cosima were married on 25 August 1870. On Christmas Day of that year, Wagner presented the Siegfried Idyll for Cosima's birthday. The marriage to Cosima lasted to the end of Wagner's life.

***

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg): Overture (1867)



Siegfried (previously entitled Jung-Siegfried [Young Siegfried] and Der Junge Siegfried [ The Young Siegfried]) (1871)

Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) (originally entitled Siegfrieds Tod [The Death of Siegfried]): Immolation of the Gods (1874)





***

Wagner, settled into his newfound domesticity, turned his energies toward completing the Ring cycle. At Ludwig's insistence, "special previews" of the first two works of the cycle, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were performed at Munich, but Wagner wanted the complete cycle to be performed in a new, specially-designed opera house.




[Richard Wagner at Bayreuth. Liszt, who was also his father-in-law, can be seen at the piano]

In 1871, he decided on the small town of




Bayreuth as the location of his new opera house. The Wagners moved there the following year, and the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus ("Festival House") was laid. In order to raise funds for the construction, "Wagner societies" were formed in several cities, and Wagner himself began touring Germany conducting concerts. However, sufficient funds were only raised after King Ludwig stepped in with another large grant in 1874. Later that year, the Wagners moved into their permanent home at Bayreuth, a villa that Richard dubbed Wahnfried ("Peace/freedom from delusion/madness", in German).



The Festspielhaus finally opened in August 1876 with the premiere of the Ring cycle and has continued to be the site of the Bayreuth Festival ever since.

Following the first Bayreuth festival Wagner spent a great deal of time in Italy where he began work on Parsifal, his final opera. The composition took four years, during which he also wrote a series of increasingly reactionary essays on religion and art.

Wagner completed Parsifal in January 1882, and a second Bayreuth Festival was held for the new opera. Wagner was by this time extremely ill, having suffered through a series of increasingly severe angina attacks. During the 16th and final performance of Parsifal on August 29, he secretly entered the pit during Act III, took the baton from conductor Hermann Levi, and led the performance to its conclusion.



[Grave of Richard and Cosima Wagner in the garden of the Villa Wahnfried, Bayreuth]

After the Festival, the Wagner family journeyed to Venice for the winter. On February 13, 1883, Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal. His body was returned to Bayreuth and buried in the garden of the Villa Wahnfried.

Franz Liszt's memorable piece for pianoforte solo, La lugubre gondola, evokes the passing of a black-shrouded funerary gondola bearing Richard Wagner's remains over the Grand Canal.



[F Minor Scales / Ab, Db Major / Chromatic Scale / Chord Qualities in C]

N.B. Generic Chromatic Scale descends in flats (avoid Cb and Fb)

Solfege (Ascending/Descending):

Do Di Re Ri Mi Fa Fi Sol Si La Li Ti Do
Do Ti Te La Le Sol Se Fa Mi Me Re Ra Do


[8813 Verdi / 8813 Wagner / 8811 Liszt]