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In 1871, Wagner decided to move to Bayreuth, which was to be the location of his new opera house.[111] The town council donated a large plot of land—the "Green Hill"—as a site for the theatre. The Wagners moved to the town the following year, and the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus ("Festival Theatre") was laid. Wagner initially announced the first Bayreuth Festival, at which for the first time the Ring cycle would be presented complete, for 1873,[112] but since Ludwig had declined to finance the project, the start of building was delayed and the proposed date for the festival was deferred. To raise funds for the construction, "Wagner societies" were formed in several cities,[113] and Wagner began touring Germany conducting concerts.[114] By the spring of 1873, only a third of the required funds had been raised; further pleas to Ludwig were initially ignored, but early in 1874, with the project on the verge of collapse, the King relented and provided a loan.[115] The full building programme included the family home, "Wahnfried", into which Wagner, with Cosima and the children, moved from their temporary accommodation on 18 April 1874.[116] The theatre was completed in 1875, and the festival scheduled for the following year. Commenting on the struggle to finish the building, Wagner remarked to Cosima: "Each stone is red with my blood and yours".[117] A building stands beyond a part-ploughed field and a row of trees. It has five sections. Farthest away, the tallest part with a v-shaped roof contains the stage. Adjoining it is the auditorium section built of patterned brick. Nearest is the royal entrance, made of stone and brick with arched windows and a portico. Two wings adjoin the auditorium. The Bayreuth Festspielhaus: photochrom print of c. 1895 For the design of the Festspielhaus, Wagner appropriated some of the ideas of his former colleague, Gottfried Semper, which he had previously solicited for a proposed new opera house at Munich.[112] Wagner was responsible for several theatrical innovations at Bayreuth; these include darkening the auditorium during performances, and placing the orchestra in a pit out of view of the audience.[118] The Festspielhaus finally opened on 13 August 1876 with Das Rheingold, at last taking its place as the first evening of the complete Ring cycle; the 1876 Bayreuth Festival therefore saw the premiere of the complete cycle, performed as a sequence as the composer had intended.[119] The 1876 Festival consisted of three full Ring cycles (under the baton of Hans Richter).[120] At the end, critical reactions ranged between that of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who thought the work "divinely composed", and that of the French newspaper Le Figaro, which called the music "the dream of a lunatic".[121] Amongst the disillusioned were Wagner's friend and disciple Friedrich Nietzsche, who, having published his eulogistic essay "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" before the festival as part of his Untimely Meditations, was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as Wagner's pandering to increasingly exclusivist German nationalism; his breach with Wagner began at this time.[122] The festival firmly established Wagner as an artist of European, and indeed world, importance: attendees included Kaiser Wilhelm I, the Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, Anton Bruckner, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.[123] Wagner was far from satisfied with the Festival; Cosima recorded that months later, his attitude towards the productions was "Never again, never again!"[124] Moreover, the festival finished with a deficit of about 150,000 marks.[125] The expenses of Bayreuth and of Wahnfried meant that Wagner still sought additional sources of income by conducting or taking on commissions such as the Centennial March for America, for which he received $5000.[126] Last years (1876–83) Following the first Bayreuth Festival, Wagner began work on Parsifal, his final opera. The composition took four years, much of which Wagner spent in Italy for health reasons.[127] From 1876 to 1878 Wagner also embarked on the last of his documented emotional liaisons, this time with Judith Gautier, whom he had met at the 1876 Festival.[128] Wagner was also much troubled by problems of financing Parsifal, and by the prospect of the work being performed by other theatres than Bayreuth. He was once again assisted by the liberality of King Ludwig, but was still forced by his personal financial situation in 1877 to sell the rights of several of his unpublished works (including the Siegfried Idyll) to the publisher Schott.[129] Several floral tributes are laid on a flat gravestone that is in the middle of a large bed full of low leafy plants. A crazy-paved path passes either side of the bed. The Wagner grave in the Wahnfried garden; in 1977 Cosima's ashes were placed alongside Wagner's body Wagner wrote a number of articles in his later years, often on political topics, and often reactionary in tone, repudiating some of his earlier, more liberal, views. These include "Religion and Art" (1880) and "Heroism and Christianity" (1881), which were printed in the journal Bayreuther Blätter, published by his supporter Hans von Wolzogen.[130] Wagner's sudden interest in Christianity at this period, which infuses Parsifal, was contemporary with his increasing alignment with German nationalism, and required on his part, and the part of his associates, "the rewriting of some recent Wagnerian history", so as to represent, for example, the Ring as a work reflecting Christian ideals.[131] Many of these later articles, including "What is German?" (1878, but based on a draft written in the 1860s),[132] repeated Wagner's antisemitic preoccupations. Wagner completed Parsifal in January 1882, and a second Bayreuth Festival was held for the new opera, which premiered on 26 May.[133] Wagner was by this time extremely ill, having suffered a series of increasingly severe angina attacks.[134] During the sixteenth and final performance of Parsifal on 29 August, he entered the pit unseen during act 3, took the baton from conductor Hermann Levi, and led the performance to its conclusion.[135] After the festival, the Wagner family journeyed to Venice for the winter. Wagner died of a heart attack at the age of 69 on 13 February 1883 at Ca' Vendramin Calergi, a 16th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal.[136] The legend that the attack was prompted by argument with Cosima over Wagner's supposedly amorous interest in the singer Carrie Pringle, who had been a Flower-maiden in Parsifal at Bayreuth, is without credible evidence.[137] After a funerary gondola bore Wagner's remains over the Grand Canal, his body was taken to Germany where it was buried in the garden of the Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth.[138] Works See also: List of works for the stage by Wagner and List of compositions by Richard Wagner Wagner's musical output is listed by the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis (WWV) as comprising 113 works, including fragments and projects.[139] Operas Musical notation showing a theme in F and in 6/8 time on a treble clef. Leitmotif associated with the horn-call of the hero of Wagner's opera Siegfried Wagner's operatic works are his primary artistic legacy. Unlike most opera composers, who generally left the task of writing the libretto (the text and lyrics) to others, Wagner wrote his own libretti, which he referred to as "poems".[140] From 1849 onwards, he urged a new concept of opera often referred to as "music drama" (although he later rejected this term),[141][n 12] in which all musical, poetic and dramatic elements were to be fused together—the Gesamtkunstwerk. Wagner developed a compositional style in which the importance of the orchestra is equal to that of the singers. The orchestra's dramatic role in the later operas includes the use of leitmotifs, musical phrases that can be interpreted as announcing specific characters, locales, and plot elements; their complex interweaving and evolution illuminates the progression of the drama.[143] These operas are still, despite Wagner's reservations, referred to by many writers[144] as "music dramas".[145] Early works (to 1842) Wagner's earliest attempts at opera were often uncompleted. Abandoned works include a pastoral opera based on Goethe's Die Laune des Verliebten (The Infatuated Lover's Caprice), written at the age of 17,[21] Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), on which Wagner worked in 1832,[21] and the singspiel Männerlist größer als Frauenlist (Men are More Cunning than Women, 1837–38). Die Feen (The Fairies, 1833) was unperformed in the composer's lifetime[23] and Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love, 1836) was withdrawn after its first performance.[25] Rienzi (1842) was Wagner's first opera to be successfully staged.[146] The compositional style of these early works was conventional—the relatively more sophisticated Rienzi showing the clear influence of Grand Opera à la Spontini and Meyerbeer—and did not exhibit the innovations that would mark Wagner's place in musical history. Later in life, Wagner said that he did not consider these works to be part of his oeuvre; none of them has ever been performed at the Bayreuth Festival,[147] and they have been performed only rarely in the last hundred years (although the overture to Rienzi is an occasional concert piece). Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi were performed at both Leipzig and Bayreuth in 2013 to mark the composer's bicentenary.[148] "Romantic operas" (1843–51) Six bars of music are written across 19 pre-printed staves. The page is headed "Overture". Below the heading to the right is Wagner's name. The tempo indication is allegro con brio. Several lines are written diagonally in lighter handwriting. Opening of overture to Der fliegende Holländer in Wagner's hand and with his notes to the publisher Wagner's middle stage output began with Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman, 1843), followed by Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1850). These three operas are sometimes referred to as Wagner's "romantic operas".[149] They reinforced the reputation, among the public in Germany and beyond, that Wagner had begun to establish with Rienzi. Although distancing himself from the style of these operas from 1849 onwards, he nevertheless reworked both Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser on several occasions.[n 13] These three operas are considered to represent a significant developmental stage in Wagner's musical and operatic maturity as regards thematic handling, portrayal of emotions and orchestration.[151] They are the earliest works included in the Bayreuth canon, the mature operas that Cosima staged at the Bayreuth Festival after Wagner's death in accordance with his wishes.[152] All three (including the differing versions of Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser) continue to be regularly performed throughout the world, and have been frequently recorded.[n 14] They were also the operas by which his fame spread during his lifetime.[n 15] "Music dramas" (1851–82) Starting the Ring Main articles: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Der Ring des Nibelungen: Composition of the music and Der Ring des Nibelungen: Composition of the poem A youthful valkyrie, wearing armour, cloak and winged helmet and holding a spear, stands with one foot on a rock and looks intently towards the right foreground. In the background are trees and mountains. Brünnhilde the Valkyrie, as illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1910) Wagner's late dramas are considered his masterpieces. Der Ring des Nibelungen, commonly referred to as the Ring or "Ring cycle", is a set of four operas based loosely on figures and elements of Germanic mythology—particularly from the later Norse mythology—notably the Old Norse Poetic Edda and Volsunga Saga, and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied.[154] Wagner specifically developed the libretti for these operas according to his interpretation of Stabreim, highly alliterative rhyming verse-pairs used in old Germanic poetry.[155] They were also influenced by Wagner's concepts of ancient Greek drama, in which tetralogies were a component of Athenian festivals, and which he had amply discussed in his essay "Oper und Drama".[156] The first two components of the Ring cycle were Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), which was completed in 1854, and Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), which was finished in 1856. In Das Rheingold, with its "relentlessly talky 'realism' [and] the absence of lyrical 'numbers'",[157] Wagner came very close to the musical ideals of his 1849–51 essays. Die Walküre, which contains what is virtually a traditional aria (Siegmund's Winterstürme in the first act), and the quasi-choral appearance of the Valkyries themselves, shows more "operatic" traits, but has been assessed by Barry Millington as "the music drama that most satisfactorily embodies the theoretical principles of 'Oper und Drama'... A thoroughgoing synthesis of poetry and music is achieved without any notable sacrifice in musical expression."[158] Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger While composing the opera Siegfried, the third part of the Ring cycle, Wagner interrupted work on it and between 1857 and 1864 wrote the tragic love story Tristan und Isolde and his only mature comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg), two works that are also part of the regular operatic canon.[159] A photograph of a bearded white man with male-pattern baldness wearing glasses Franz Betz, who created the role of Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger, and sang Wotan in the first complete Ring cycle Tristan is often granted a special place in musical history; many see it as the beginning of the move away from conventional harmony and tonality and consider that it lays the groundwork for the direction of classical music in the 20th century.[83][160][161] Wagner felt that his musico-dramatical theories were most perfectly realised in this work with its use of "the art of transition" between dramatic elements and the balance achieved between vocal and orchestral lines.[162] Completed in 1859, the work was given its first performance in Munich, conducted by Bülow, in June 1865.[163] Die Meistersinger was originally conceived by Wagner in 1845 as a sort of comic pendant to Tannhäuser.[164] Like Tristan, it was premiered in Munich under the baton of Bülow, on 21 June 1868, and became an immediate success.[165] Barry Millington describes Meistersinger as "a rich, perceptive music drama widely admired for its warm humanity";[166] but because of its strong German nationalist overtones, it is also cited by some as an example of Wagner's reactionary politics and antisemitism.[167] Completing the Ring When Wagner returned to writing the music for the last act of Siegfried and for Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), as the final part of the Ring, his style had changed once more to something more recognisable as "operatic" than the aural world of Rheingold and Walküre, though it was still thoroughly stamped with his own originality as a composer and suffused with leitmotifs.[168] This was in part because the libretti of the four Ring operas had been written in reverse order, so that the book for Götterdämmerung was conceived more "traditionally" than that of Rheingold;[169] still, the self-imposed strictures of the Gesamtkunstwerk had become relaxed. The differences also result from Wagner's development as a composer during the period in which he wrote Tristan, Meistersinger and the Paris version of Tannhäuser.[170] From act 3 of Siegfried onwards, the Ring becomes more chromatic melodically, more complex harmonically and more developmental in its treatment of leitmotifs.[171] Wagner took 26 years from writing the first draft of a libretto in 1848 until he completed Götterdämmerung in 1874. The Ring takes about 15 hours to perform[172] and is the only undertaking of such size to be regularly presented on the world's stages. Parsifal Wagner's final opera, Parsifal (1882), which was his only work written especially for his Bayreuth Festspielhaus and which is described in the score as a "Bühnenweihfestspiel" ("festival play for the consecration of the stage"), has a storyline suggested by elements of the legend of the Holy Grail. It also carries elements of Buddhist renunciation suggested by Wagner's readings of Schopenhauer.[173] Wagner described it to Cosima as his "last card".[174] It remains controversial because of its treatment of Christianity, its eroticism, and its expression, as perceived by some commentators, of German nationalism and antisemitism.[175] Despite the composer's own description of the opera to King Ludwig as "this most Christian of works",[176] Ulrike Kienzle has commented that "Wagner's turn to Christian mythology, upon which the imagery and spiritual contents of Parsifal rest, is idiosyncratic and contradicts Christian dogma in many ways."[177] Musically the opera has been held to represent a continuing development of the composer's style, and Barry Millington describes it as "a diaphanous score of unearthly beauty and refinement".[27] Non-operatic music A cartoon showing a misshapen figure of a man with a tiny body below a head with prominent nose and chin standing on the lobe of a human ear. The figure is hammering the sharp end of a crochet symbol into the inner part of the ear and blood pours out. André Gill suggesting that Wagner's music was ear-splitting. Cover of L'Éclipse 18 April 1869 Apart from his operas, Wagner composed relatively few pieces of music. These include a symphony in C major (written at the age of 19), the Faust Overture (the only completed part of an intended symphony on the subject), some overtures, and choral and piano pieces.[178] His most commonly performed work that is not an extract from an opera is the Siegfried Idyll for chamber orchestra, which has several motifs in common with the Ring cycle.[179] The Wesendonck Lieder are also often performed, either in the original piano version, or with orchestral accompaniment.[n 16] More rarely performed are the American Centennial March (1876), and Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (The Love Feast of the Apostles), a piece for male choruses and orchestra composed in 1843 for the city of Dresden.[181] After completing Parsifal, Wagner expressed his intention to turn to the writing of symphonies,[182] and several sketches dating from the late 1870s and early 1880s have been identified as work towards this end.[183] The overtures and certain orchestral passages from Wagner's middle and late-stage operas are commonly played as concert pieces. For most of these, Wagner wrote or rewrote short passages to ensure musical coherence. The "Bridal Chorus" from Lohengrin is frequently played as the bride's processional wedding march in English-speaking countries.[184] Prose writings See also: Category:Essays by Richard Wagner and Category:Autobiographical works by Richard Wagner Wagner was an extremely prolific writer, authoring numerous books, poems, and articles, as well as voluminous correspondence. His writings covered a wide range of topics, including autobiography, politics, philosophy, and detailed analyses of his own operas. Wagner planned for a collected edition of his publications as early as 1865;[185] he believed that such an edition would help the world understand his intellectual development and artistic aims.[186] The first such edition was published between 1871 and 1883, but was doctored to suppress or alter articles that were an embarrassment to him (e.g. those praising Meyerbeer), or by altering dates on some articles to reinforce Wagner's own account of his progress.[187] Wagner's autobiography Mein Leben was originally published for close friends only in a very small edition (15–18 copies per volume) in four volumes between 1870 and 1880. The first public edition (with many passages suppressed by Cosima) appeared in 1911; the first attempt at a full edition (in German) appeared in 1963.[188] There have been modern complete or partial editions of Wagner's writings,[189] including a centennial edition in German edited by Dieter Borchmeyer (which, however, omitted the essay "Das Judenthum in der Musik" and Mein Leben).[190] The English translations of Wagner's prose in eight volumes by W. Ashton Ellis (1892–99) are still in print and commonly used, despite their deficiencies.[191] A complete edition of Wagner's correspondence, estimated to amount to between 10,000 and 12,000 items, is still under way under the supervision of the Institute for Music Research at the University of Würzburg. As of November 2014, 21 volumes have appeared, covering the period to 1870.[192] Influence and legacy Influence on music Wagner's later musical style introduced new ideas in harmony, melodic process (leitmotif) and operatic structure. Notably from Tristan und Isolde onwards, he explored the limits of the traditional tonal system, which gave keys and chords their identity, pointing the way to atonality in the 20th century. Some music historians date the beginning of modern classical music to the first notes of Tristan, which include the so-called Tristan chord.[193][194] Middle-aged man, seated, facing towards the left but head turned towards the right. He has a high forehead, rimless glasses and is wearing a dark, crumpled suit Gustav Mahler Wagner inspired great devotion. For a long period, many composers were inclined to align themselves with or against Wagner's music. Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf were greatly indebted to him, as were César Franck, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, Jules Massenet, Richard Strauss, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Pfitzner and numerous others.[195] Gustav Mahler was devoted to Wagner and his music; aged 15, he sought him out on his 1875 visit to Vienna,[196] became a renowned Wagner conductor,[197] and his compositions are seen by Richard Taruskin as extending Wagner's "maximalization" of "the temporal and the sonorous" in music to the world of the symphony.[198] The harmonic revolutions of Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg (both of whose oeuvres contain examples of tonal and atonal modernism) have often been traced back to Tristan and Parsifal.[199] The Italian form of operatic realism known as verismo owed much to the Wagnerian concept of musical form.[200] Wagner made a major contribution to the principles and practice of conducting. His essay "About Conducting" (1869)[201] advanced Hector Berlioz's technique of conducting and claimed that conducting was a means by which a musical work could be re-interpreted, rather than simply a mechanism for achieving orchestral unison. He exemplified this approach in his own conducting, which was significantly more flexible than the disciplined approach of Mendelssohn; in his view this also justified practices that would today be frowned upon, such as the rewriting of scores.[202][n 17] Wilhelm Furtwängler felt that Wagner and Bülow, through their interpretative approach, inspired a whole new generation of conductors (including Furtwängler himself).[204] Amongst those claiming inspiration from Wagner's music are the German band Rammstein,[205] and the electronic composer Klaus Schulze, whose 1975 album Timewind consists of two 30-minute tracks, Bayreuth Return and Wahnfried 1883. Joey DeMaio of the band Manowar has described Wagner as "The father of heavy metal".[206] The Slovenian group Laibach created the 2009 suite VolksWagner, using material from Wagner's operas.[207] Phil Spector's Wall of Sound recording technique was, it has been claimed, heavily influenced by Wagner.[208] Influence on literature, philosophy and the visual arts A moustachioed man in his late thirties looks to the left of the photo. His head rests on his far hand. Friedrich Nietzsche Wagner's influence on literature and philosophy is significant. Millington has commented: [Wagner's] protean abundance meant that he could inspire the use of literary motif in many a novel employing interior monologue; ... the Symbolists saw him as a mystic hierophant; the Decadents found many a frisson in his work.[209] Friedrich Nietzsche was a member of Wagner's inner circle during the early 1870s, and his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, proposed Wagner's music as the Dionysian "rebirth" of European culture in opposition to Apollonian rationalist "decadence". Nietzsche broke with Wagner following the first Bayreuth Festival, believing that Wagner's final phase represented a pandering to Christian pieties and a surrender to the new German Reich. Nietzsche expressed his displeasure with the later Wagner in "The Case of Wagner" and "Nietzsche contra Wagner".[210] Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine worshipped Wagner.[211] Édouard Dujardin, whose influential novel Les Lauriers sont coupés is in the form of an interior monologue inspired by Wagnerian music, founded a journal dedicated to Wagner, La Revue Wagnérienne, to which J. K. Huysmans and Téodor de Wyzewa contributed.[212] In a list of major cultural figures influenced by Wagner, Bryan Magee includes D. H. Lawrence, Aubrey Beardsley, Romain Rolland, Gérard de Nerval, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Rainer Maria Rilke and numerous others.[213] In the 20th century, W. H. Auden once called Wagner "perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived",[214] while Thomas Mann[210] and Marcel Proust[215] were heavily influenced by him and discussed Wagner in their novels. He is also discussed in some of the works of James Joyce.[216] Wagnerian themes inhabit T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which contains lines from Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung and Verlaine's poem on Parsifal.[217] Many of Wagner's concepts, including his speculation about dreams, predated their investigation by Sigmund Freud.[218] Wagner had publicly analysed the Oedipus myth before Freud was born in terms of its psychological significance, insisting that incestuous desires are natural and normal, and perceptively exhibiting the relationship between sexuality and anxiety.[219] Georg Groddeck considered the Ring as the first manual of psychoanalysis.[220] Influence on cinema Wagner's concept of the use of leitmotifs and the integrated musical expression which they can enable has influenced many 20th and 21st century film scores. The critic Theodor Adorno has noted that the Wagnerian leitmotif "leads directly to cinema music where the sole function of the leitmotif is to announce heroes or situations so as to allow the audience to orient itself more easily".[221] Amongst film scores citing Wagnerian themes are Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which features a version of the Ride of the Valkyries, Trevor Jones's soundtrack to John Boorman's film Excalibur,[222] and the 2011 films A Dangerous Method (dir. David Cronenberg) and Melancholia (dir. Lars von Trier).[223] Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's 1977 film Hitler: A Film from Germany's visual style and set design are strongly inspired by Der Ring des Nibelungen, musical excerpts from which are frequently used in the film's soundtrack.[224] |
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