Program Notes

Richard Wagner

BORN: May 22, 1813 in Leipzig, Germany

DIED: February 13, 1883 in Venice, Italy

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (1868)

PREMIERE: June 21, 1868 at the Hoftheater in Munich, Germany

Approximate performance time for both pieces is 15 minutes.

As with any revolutionary composer, Richard Wagner encountered much critical resistance during his career. In his only successful comic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg), Wagner lampoons his critics, but also acknowledges that youthful inspiration must be tempered by the wisdom of tradition.

Die Meistersinger takes place in Nuremberg toward the middle of the 16th century. The young knight Walther von Stolzing is in love with Eva, daughter of Veit Pogner, a member of the Nuremberg Mastersingers’ guild. In order to win Eva as his bride, Walther attempts to join the Mastersingers. But the guild members, led by the pedantic town clerk Sixtus Beckmesser (also a rival for Eva’s hand), reject the knight’s inspired but undisciplined song. Even the support of the cobbler Hans Sachs, the most respected Mastersinger, fails to aid Walther.

The next day, Sachs assists Walther in crafting a song that synthesizes the knight’s youthful eloquence with accepted musical structure and discipline. At the contest, Beckmesser attempts to present the song as his own, but humiliates himself by mangling the piece. Walther’s rendition wins the admiration of the Mastersingers. With the urging of Sachs, Walther accepts membership in the Mastersingers guild and marries Eva. Those assembled join in praising Nuremberg’s beloved Sachs.

This concert features two orchestral excerpts from the opera. The majestic orchestral Prelude to Act I opens with a grand statement of the Mastersingers’ theme. Other themes include melodies associated with Walther’s love for Eva, and the knight’s conflict with Beckmesser. Wagner manipulates (and often brilliantly combines) the various melodies, as the Prelude resolves to a final grand statement of the Mastersingers’ theme. The Prelude to Act III depicts Hans Sachs in his shop, contemplating a fracas that took place the previous night in the Nuremberg streets.

Lohengrin (1850)

PREMIERE: August 28, 1850 at the Hoftheater in Weimar, Germany

Approximate performance time for both pieces is 12 minutes.

The story of Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin, takes place in Antwerp, in the early 10th century. The maiden Elsa is falsely accused of murdering her brother, the rightful heir to the throne. A knight arrives in a swandrawn boat and agrees to defend Elsa’s honor. The knight demands that Elsa never try to determine his origin or name. Elsa consents, and the knight defeats her accuser. Elsa and the knight wed, but soon, she becomes suspicious. Finally, she asks the knight the forbidden question. The knight reveals his identity. He is Lohengrin, a Knight of the Holy Grail. Because Elsa has violated his trust, the heartbroken Lohengrin must leave her forever. Before he departs, Lohengrin prays and the swan is transformed back into Elsa’s brother.

Wagner perceived the story of Lohengrin as a metaphor for the artist’s attempt to gain understanding within society. Wagner began work on the text of Lohengrin in 1845, finally completing the score on April 28, 1848. The opera received its premiere in Weimar, under the direction of Franz Liszt, on August 28, 1850. In time, Lohengrin emerged as one of Wagner’s most beloved works.

The Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin is one of Wagner’s most sublime compositions. According to the composer, it is a depiction of the “miraculous descent of the Holy Grail, accompanied by an angelic host, and its consignment to the custody of exalted men…The infinitely delicate outline of a miraculous band of angels takes shape, floating imperceptibly down from Heaven and bearing a sacred vessel.” Finally, the orchestra majestically proclaims the appearance of the Grail, “the precious vessel out of which our Savior drank at the Last Supper with His disciples; in which his blood was caught when, for love of His brethren, He suffered upon the cross…” After entrusting the Grail to the knights, “the seraphic hosts disappear into the bright light of the celestial blue from which they first emerged.”

The brief, energetic Prelude to Act III depicts the celebrations attending the wedding of Elsa and Lohengrin.

The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure

arr. Henk de Vlieger (1991)

PREMIERE: August 13–17, 1876 at Bayreuth (complete cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen) Approximate performance time is 70 minutes.

Richard Wagner’s creation of his epic The Ring of the Nibelung, “A stagefestival play for three days and a preliminary evening,” spanned twentyeight years. In 1848, Wagner began the prose sketch of what ultimately became the Ring’s final opera, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). In August of 1876, the premiere of the complete 18-hour Ring Cycle took place at Bayreuth, in the theater Wagner specially constructed for festival performances of his masterwork.

The two principal sources for the story of Wagner’s Ring Cycle are The Poetic Edda, a collection of ancient Norse poems, and the thirteenthcentury Nibelungenlied. Wagner employed these ancient tales as a forum for his own philosophical views. In an 1854 letter to his friend August Röckel, Wagner described the meaning of his Ring:

We must learn to die, in fact, to die in the most absolute sense of the word. Fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness, and it arises only where love itself has already faded. How did it come about that mankind so lost touch with this bringer of the highest happiness to everything living that in the end everything they did, everything they undertook and established, was done solely out of fear of the end?

My poem shows how...The course of the drama thus shows the necessity of accepting and giving way to the changeability, the diversity, the multiplicity, the eternal newness of reality and of life.

The Ring is one of the most significant works in the history of lyric theater. In The Ring, Wagner attempted to move away from what he viewed as the singer-oriented excesses of French and Italian grand opera to create a Gesamtkunstwerk (“total artwork”), a fusion of text, music, and stage drama. One of the most revolutionary aspects of The Ring is Wagner’s elevation of the orchestra from its traditional role as accompanist to that of another protagonist in the drama. This, Wagner achieved not only by the deployment of an ensemble of impressive size and instrumental variety and color, but also by the ingenious use of leitmotifs, or symbolic musical phrases. These leitmotifs journey and develop throughout The Ring to illuminate the dramatic and psychological flow of the drama.

In 1991, Dutch composer and percussionist Henk de Vlieger (b. 1953), created The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure, a one-hour suite featuring excerpts from all four of the operas (The Rheingold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods). The excerpts, performed without pause, track the dramatic and musical flow of Wagner’s masterpiece.

The Ring begins in the River Rhine. The dwarf, Alberich, steals the Rhinemaidens’ gold before returning to his home in Nibelheim. Alberich, hoping to rule the world, forges the Rhine gold into a ring. The hero Siegfried recovers the ring. He discovers the Valkyrie warrior maiden, Brünnhilde, and the two fall in love. Alberich’s son, Hagen, murders Siegfried. Brünnhilde orders that a funeral pyre be built for her beloved. Brünnhilde rides her horse into the flames to join Siegfried. As she does, Brünnhilde returns the ring to the Rhine and the Rhinemaidens. Brünnhilde’s act of self-sacrifice removes the curse of the ring, and redeems the world.