Richard Wagner and his World

A common denominator of Wagner’s activities as a composer, a dramatist, and a writer might be identified as “the urge to communicate,” as James Treadwell has put it. “Addressing readers as urgently and powerfully as possible seems to be a habit he was born with,” he remarks of Wagner the writer.¹ Such influential critics as Nietzsche and Adorno expressed similar reactions to Wagner the composer. It would be fair to suggest that his central commitment to musical drama as a medium or a genre reflects this urge to speak to his audience at once articulately (through language), immediately (through dramatic representation), and passionately (through music).

The small but interesting corpus of program notes he devised for concert excerpts of his own works, along with several orchestral standards by Beethoven, can be seen as by-products of this same instinct. At a time when “program notes” were by no means the institutional fixture of the concert hall they have since become—indeed, when the genre still scarcely existed—Wagner felt a need to present his concert audiences with an imaginative context for the music he programmed. In the case of overtures, preludes, or other excerpts from his operas, which had not yet become well known on stage, he was naturally concerned to provide an idea of the relevant dramatic content. Such content may necessarily be located in the librettos of the operas, but Wagner also sought to transmute it in “purely musical” terms within the orchestral pieces that introduced Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, or Parsifal.

The role of the program note in mediating between musical and poetic or dramatic representation of that content situates Wagner on the margins, at least, of the debates over form and content in instrumental music central to the emergence of a “New German School.” His championing of the “poetic content” of such Beethoven works as the Eroica and Ninth symphonies or the Coriolan Overture feeds even more directly into those debates, not to mention his larger theories about the evolution of musical composition altogether in the post-Beethovenian era. The notes he produced for Beethoven’s works in Dresden (for the Ninth Symphony, in 1846), and subsequently during his political exile in Zurich, reflect a sense of missionary zeal characteristic of Wagner in the years around 1848, when he was responding to the socialist-utopian and revolutionary energies coursing through Europe and channeling these into his own theories of modern art and culture. He felt convinced that his intuitive understanding of Beethoven’s major works contained vital truths about their expressive value as well as Beethoven’s historical significance for the present and future of music. Naturally he felt the same way about his own music and what he had to say about it. But among the “explanatory notes” he devised for excerpts from his works, only those to the overtures and preludes resemble those for Beethoven’s works in form and hermeneutic ambition. The texts designed to accompany other “numbers” or passages (with or without the vocal parts) are more pragmatic in nature, aiming mainly just to draw the listener’s attention to the characters and situations involved.

That the first and most extensive of Wagner’s program notes was written for Beethoven’s Ninth seems significant on several levels. Not long after the concerts for which the note was written (the 1846 installment of an annual “Palm Sunday” concert series he organized as Kapellmeister of the Dresden court theater) Wagner would be citing the Ninth Symphony as the end of symphonic history and the harbinger of the new musical-dramatic “total artwork” of the future in both The Artwork of the Future (1849) and Opera and Drama (1852). Indeed, the very element of this challenging work that most clearly embodied its epochal status for Wagner was its own impassioned, transgressive “urge to communicate. “Referring to both the striking introductory dissonances of the finale and its use of “instrumental recitative, “Wagner points to the “more distinctly speaking character” assumed by Beethoven’s music: “It leaves behind the character of pure instrumental music that had been maintained throughout the first three movements, the realm of infinite and indistinct expression.” “We must admire,” he continues, “how the master has prepared the entrance of language and the human voice as something both anticipated and necessary by means of that shattering recitative of the double basses when, nearly transgressing the boundaries of absolute music, it engages the other instruments with its powerfully emotional discourse. “

These “boundaries of absolute music” were to become hotly contested in the coming decades, when a belief in the progressive role of programs, “poetic ideas,” and drama in modern music was pitted against a view of pure or “absolute” music influentially articulated in Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Beautiful in Music, 1854). Ironically, Wagner’s 1846 program note on the Ninth is generally accepted as the first instance of the term “absolute music,” a term which he would go on to redefine negatively in the polemical context of Opera and Drama, prior to Hanslick’s defense of “pure, absolute music” in his aesthetic treatise of 1854.² (Similar coinages can be identified in other sources from 1846 or as early as 1836, although it is not possible to claim originary status for any one of these.)³ Wagner’s program notes were not written with the aim of engaging this critical debate, but they offer an intriguing glimpse into its early stages.

Program

In view of the great difficulties an understanding of this wonderfully significant musical work poses to novice listeners trying to achieve a true, inner familiarity with it (and this is surely a sizable proportion of the audience), we might be permitted to attempt in helping them reach, if not an absolute understanding of Beethoven’s masterpiece (such as only direct personal experience could vouchsafe), at least some sense of its artistic conception.⁴ Some indication of this could, at the very least, avoid the confusions or misperceptions that might otherwise afflict the less fully initiated listener confronted by the peculiar, utterly inimitable novelty of this piece. If we admit the nature of higher instrumental music to consist in the expression in tones of that which is inexpressible in words, then we can perhaps best hope to suggest an indirect solution to an impossible task by turning to a text by our great poet Goethe.⁵ Although Goethe’s verses bear no immediate connection to Beethoven’s composition, hence in no wise can be thought to provide a comprehensive exegesis of the purely musical creation, they do nonetheless express so sublimely the higher human spiritual moods underlying the work that, if nothing else, the recollection of these verses might afford the listener a greater degree of emotional engagement with this composition than would otherwise be possible.

First Movement

At the basis of the first movement there seems to be a struggle, conceived in the grandest sense, between the soul striving for joy and the oppression of some inimical power interposing itself between us and earthly happiness. The great principal theme heard at the outset, naked and powerful as if emerging from behind some uncanny concealing veil, could perhaps be translated (in a sense apt also for the entire musical poem)⁶ through Goethe’s line:

Opposing this mighty foe we discover a noble defiance, a virile energy of resistance that increases, in the center of the movement, to a state of open battle against its opponent: two powerful combatants who prove equally invincible, so that each finally desists from the struggle. During a few fleeting moments of light we can perceive a bittersweet smile of happiness, seeking us out (as it seems)—that very happiness toward which we have been struggling, but which our crafty, powerful antagonist has prevented us from finding; now his darksome wings eclipse the desired goal such that we sink back in brooding until roused again to defiance, to renewed struggle against that demon bent upon robbing us of all our joy. Thus the never-ending motion of this astounding musical work is composed of elements of force, resistance, surging combat, yearning, hope, near achievement, renewed loss, renewed searching, and renewed struggle. Throughout, the struggle is reduced now and again to a more sustained state of despondency such as Goethe evokes in these lines:

At the end of the movement this somber, joyless mood swells to huge proportions, as if encompassing the whole world in its terrifying, sublime majesty: this world that God had created—for joy.

Second Movement

Upon hearing the first rhythms of this second movement we are instantly seized with wild abandon: we enter a new world, or rather, we are swept up in a delirium, a frenzy. As if driven by despair, fleeing from it, we seem to be constantly, unceasingly chasing after some new, unknown happiness—since the old one that had earlier radiated its distant smile is now quite thoroughly lost to us. Goethe expresses something like this impulse in these lines:

With the appearance of the Trio a scene of earthly pleasures, amusements, and contentment is suddenly disclosed to us: a certain coarse merriment is expressed in the simple, much repeated theme, a naïveté and self-satisfied cheerfulness which calls to mind Goethe’s description of such simple cheer:

Yet we are not inclined to regard such narrowly circumscribed pleasures as the true goal of our tireless pursuit of happiness and noble joy; our view of this scene becomes clouded, we turn away and yield once more to that unceasing drive that had chased us ever onward in hope of achieving a happiness that (alas!) is never truly to be found in this manner. And so, once again, at the end of the movement we are driven toward that scene of pleasurable contentment previously encountered,¹² and which, no sooner have we recognized it again, we thrust from us with hasty impatience.

Third Movement

How differently these tones speak to our heart! How pure, with what heavenly calm they resolve the defiance, the wild press of the soul driven by despair, into feelings of gentle resignation! It is as if a memory has been awakened of some pure happiness enjoyed long, long ago:

With this memory we also experience a sweet yearning, so beautifully expressed in the second theme of this movement, to which these lines of Goethe might provide an appropriate caption:

It appears as the yearning of love, answered by the hopeful, sweetly calming first theme, and now adorned with a more mobile expression. Thus when the second theme returns it is like the embrace of love and hope, their gentle powers now dispensed upon our tormented spirit.

Our still palpitating heart gently resists this balm, yet its calming power is greater than that of our now relenting defiance. Thus overcome, we throw ourselves into the arms of these fair messengers of purest happiness:

Yes, our wounded heart seems to convalesce, to recover strength and resolve;¹⁷ this we can hear in the almost triumphal passage toward the end of the movement. This newly won resolve is not quite free from repercussions of the storms we have weathered; but each bout of renewed pain is immediately met by that fair, magical power before which, finally, the dissipating storms yield as with the last, faint flickering of lightning.

Fourth Movement

The transition from the third to the fourth movement, which begins with a kind of harsh outcry, we might suitably connect with Goethe’s lines:

With the beginning of this finale Beethoven’s music takes on a more distinctly speaking character: it leaves behind the character of pure instrumental music such as had been maintained throughout the first three movements, the realm of infinite and indistinct expression.^* The further progress of this musical poem ¹⁹ strives toward a resolution, a resolution that can only be articulated by human speech. We must admire how the master has prepared the entrance of language and the human voice as something both anticipated and necessary by means of the shattering recitative of the double basses when, nearly transgressing the boundaries of absolute music, this recitative engages the other instruments with its powerfully emotional discourse, pressing for some resolution, and finally issuing in a lyrical theme.²⁰ The lyrical theme progresses with simple, stately joy, carrying the rest of the instruments along with it and so swelling to great heights. This seems to be the last effort to express a securely circumscribed, unclouded, joyful happiness. But the unbridled element seems incapable of submitting to any constraint, rearing up like a storm-tossed ocean and sinking back, until the wild, chaotic outcry of unsatisfied passion again strikes our ear even more forcefully than before. Here a human voice and the clear, secure expression of language counter the raging of the instruments, and we scarcely know whether it is the master’s bold inspiration we ought to admire, or rather his great naïveté, when he has this voice address the instruments:

With these words a light shines upon the chaos; a surer, more determinate manner of expression is achieved; now, supported by the controlled element of instrumental music, we hear articulated clearly and distinctly that which must seem, in view of the earlier tormented striving for joy, like the greatest happiness finally within our grasp.

Stalwart military strains approach: we seem to hear a band of youths approaching whose joyous heroism is expressed in the lines:

This leads into a joyous combat, expressed by instruments alone: we see those youths courageously hurl themselves into a battle whose victorious issue will be joy. Here once more we are inclined to cite Goethe’s verses:

The victory, which we had never doubted, has been fought and won; the reward of all these exertions is the smile of joy as it breaks out triumphantly in the consciousness of newly achieved happiness:

Now the proclamation of universal philanthropy bursts from the swelling breast as it experiences the fullest feelings of joy; in a state of sublime exaltation we turn from the embrace of the whole human race to the great creator of the natural world, acclaiming his beneficent being—whom, indeed, it seems we can see in a moment of sublime, trance-like clairvoyance through the parting folds of the blue empyrean:

It is as if some revelation has justified us in this most blessed belief: every human being has been created for joy. With the most powerful conviction we cry out to one another:

For now we may experience the purest joy allied with this universal philanthropy, blessed of God. No longer merely in a shuddering of sublime ecstasy, but now by way of expressing a sweetly beneficent truth revealed to us we are able to reply to the question:

In the secure possession of the happiness thus bestowed on us, with a renewed sense of childlike joy, we deliver ourselves to the pleasure of it: we have recovered an innocence of heart, and the gentle wings of joy spread their blessings over us:

Following the calm happiness of joy there ensues its celebration: —thus do we press the world to our breast, jubilation and cheer fill the air like the thunder of heaven, like the roaring of the sea—such things as animate the earth through constant motion and beneficent awe, preserving it thus for the joy of humankind as God gave it to be lived upon, happily.

At the beginning of Wagner’s nearly nine years in Zurich as a political exile from Saxony, following his involvement with the revolutionary insurrection of May 1849 in Dresden, there was much local curiosity to hear the visiting celebrity conduct. Wagner, for his part, was developing an appetite to hear some live music, not least of all something from his last completed opera, Lohengrin (1848). He fairly quickly abjured the idea of working with the severely limited resources of the Zurich theater. He was more willing to collaborate with the local Music Society (Allgemeine Musik-Gesellchaft) in a number of mixed instrumental and vocal programs, conducting as many as twenty-two concerts between January 1851 and February 1855 and featuring forty different works, apart from featured solo or chamber works.²² For a few of the more substantial works he devised the “programmatic commentaries” translated here, later taken up in the fifth volume of the Gesammelte Schriften: Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Coriolan Overture, the overtures to Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser, and the first-act Prelude from Lohengrin.²³ Here is the first, on Beethoven’s Eroica, in which Wagner significantly steers clear of the traditional speculations about a Napoleonic program detailing battles, victories, defeats, a hero’s funeral, and his apotheosis. Instead, he reads the symphony in generalized terms as expressing the heroic struggle of the individual human subject in dialogue with dynamic properties (“power”) and affective ones (“love”), and the ultimate synthesis of these properties.

This highly significant musical poem [Tondichtung]—the master’s third symphony and the work with which he first set out upon his own distinctive path—is in many respects not so easy to understand as its name might lead us to suppose.²⁴ For the title “Heroic Symphony” would instinctively lead us to imagine a series of heroic situations in a more or less historical or dramatic sense, represented by means of musical illustrations [Tonbildungen]. Yet he who approaches an understanding of this work under such premises will find himself at first confused and ultimately disappointed, without having truly achieved any pleasure from the experience. If I therefore permit myself to communicate here as succinctly as possible my own perspective on the poetic content of this musical creation [Tonschöpfung], I do this in the sincere hope of helping many listeners of the upcoming performance of the Eroica Symphony to an understanding that they might otherwise only achieve after repeated hearings and in especially animated performances.

To begin with, the designation “heroic” is to be understood in the broadest sense, in no way limited to that of a specifically military hero. If we understand by “hero” rather the man in general, the complete man in full possession of the purely human feelings of love, suffering, and power in their highest, most powerful degrees, then we have grasped the true object that the artist has communicated to us in the compellingly articulate tones of his composition. The artistic space of this work is filled with all the manifold, powerfully felt sensations of a strong, perfected individuality to whom nothing human is alien—who rather encompasses all truly human attributes within him, and who manifests these in such a way that all the noblest passions are united, from the most tender sensibility to the most energetic force, into a perfect whole. The progress toward this synthesis defines the heroic conception in this artwork.

The first movement encompasses, as in one glowing focal point, all the feelings of a richly endowed human nature, seething with restless youthful activity. Delight and sorrow, pleasure and pain, grace and melancholy, brooding and longing, languishing and wallowing, boldness, defiance, and an unbounded self-confidence alternate and infiltrate one another so fully and immediately that, even though we are able to experience each one of these feelings, no one of them can be perceptibly isolated from any other; rather, our attention is at every moment directed to that one all-feeling persona that seems to address us here.²⁵ Yet all of these feelings emanate from one principal faculty, and that is power [Kraft].

Infinitely augmented through the expression of these diverse feelings and driven to articulate its own excessive nature, this power is the motivating force of the composition: it accrues a truly annihilating strength toward the center of the movement, where its defiant manifestation gives the impression of some world-destroying entity, some titan in combat with the gods.

This annihilating power that fills us with delight and terror at once has pressed toward a tragic catastrophe, one whose earnest significance is demonstrated to our feeling in the second movement of the symphony. The tone poet clothes this demonstration in the musical garb of mourning, as a funeral march. A sentiment chastened by deep sorrow and moved by solemn mourning is communicated to us in compelling musical speech. From out of the lament there emerges a serious, manly sorrow, proceeding through feelings of tender emotion, tears of love, inward exaltation, to the most animated acclamations. Out of sorrow a new power wells up, filling us with sublime warmth; and to nourish this power we instinctively look again to our sorrow, yielding ourselves thereunto, even to the point of collapsing in sighs, though at just this point we rally our full power yet once more: we submit not to defeat, merely to endurance. We do not resist mourning, which we are now able to support upon the strong surge of a courageous, virile heart. Who could possibly convey in words these infinitely various (and for that very reason inexpressible) feelings, ranging from pain to the greatest exaltation, from exaltation to the most tender sorrow, up to a final dissolution into an infinite remembrance? Only the tone poet could convey these, as he has done in this wondrous composition.

Power, whose destructive hubris has now been tamed, returns in the third movement in a spirit of bold cheerfulness. Where before we had wild, restless energy, we now have fresh, jolly activity; a lovable, merry person stands before us, striding with pleasure and high spirits through nature’s fields, smiling at the flowery meadows as the hunting horns sound from the forest heights. What this person feels amid such scenes the composer tells us in this robust, cheerful tone picture—he tells us, finally, through those hunting horns themselves that give expression to the beautiful, cheerful, but also tenderly sentimental feelings of such a person. In this third movement the tone poet exhibits to us the feeling human being in opposition to what is represented in the second movement: there we encountered a deeply, powerfully suffering subject; here it is a merry, cheerful, active person.

These two sides are then combined by the master in the fourth, and last, movement, so as to show us finally the whole man, in harmony with himself and his feelings, in whom even the remembrance of suffering can become a motive toward noble action. With this finale we have arrived at the clear, defining counterpart to the first movement. Where in the first movement we witnessed the full array of human feelings in infinitely varied expression, sometimes penetrating and sometimes vehemently, diversely repelling one another, here in the finale this diverse array is unified into one whole, resolving that diversity into one harmonious conclusion that represents itself to us in a pleasing, well-formed shape. This shape is first of all manifested in a very simple theme, presenting itself securely and determinately, capable of infinite evolution, from the utmost delicacy to the greatest power. This theme, which we can regard as representative of firm masculine individuality, is from the very outset of the movement wreathed by all manner of soft and delicate feelings, evolving into a suggestion of a pure womanly element that reveals itself gradually and with increasing devotion as the overwhelming force of love in relation to the masculine main theme that strides energetically throughout the whole movement. At the conclusion of the movement this power clears a broad path to the heart. The restless motion pauses, and love speaks forth in noble, expressive calm—at first soft and gentle, then expanding to delightful breadth of feeling, and finally encompassing the entire virile heart, down to its deepest core. Here, too, that heart recalls life’s sufferings: the love-filled breast swells, the breast whose rapture does not exclude sorrow, just as rapture and sorrow, as purely human feelings, are ultimately one and the same. The heart tugs once more, and profuse tears of noble humanity pour forth; yet from this delightful sorrow the triumphant power breaks forth, power allied to love, in which union the whole, complete human being affirms and celebrates his divinity.

But only the musical speech of the master can truly articulate that which words, all too aware of their limitations, have here merely attempted to suggest.

Writing to Hans von Bülow two days before the Zurich concert of February 17, 1852, which featured the Coriolan Overture, Wagner offered some interesting musical and critical glosses on his reading of the work: the importance of accenting an offbeat eighth note throughout the development section and a general emphasis on the significance of a “poetic” (but also gestural) understanding of the composition in realizing an adequate performance. “If you undertake a detailed comparison… of my own account of the graphic and poetic content of the Coriolan Overture with the composition itself, you will, I am sure, admit the justice of my view, and at the same time be bound to concede that all attempts to convey an understanding of such works, although hitherto regarded as the absolute preserve of the absolute musician, have so far met with total failure on the latter’s part.” “Only now,” he adds, “have I been able to perform this work in such a way that what the poetic composer intended is conveyed clearly and intelligibly at all times: the effect this has on the purely musical execution of the work is unbelievable.”²⁶

This relatively little known work of the great tone poet is nonetheless one of his most significant creations, and no one intimately familiar with the object it represents will fail to come away from a good performance deeply moved.²⁷ I therefore permit myself to describe here this object just as I hear it represented by the tone poet himself, so as to assist sympathetic listeners in enjoying the same sublime pleasure I do when hearing this piece.²⁸

I may assume general knowledge of Coriolanus: a character of limitless power, incapable of cowardly hypocrisy. For that very reason he finds himself banished from his native city, and in league with its enemies in their attempt to destroy it, until he is moved by the pleas of mother, wife, and child to renounce this vengeance, only to be condemned to death for this betrayal of his erstwhile comrades. The poet could draw on a whole range of intricate relationships in creating a richly detailed political portrait; but this was not possible for the musician, who can express only moods, feelings, passions, and the conflicts of these—yet never political relations of any sort. For this reason Beethoven selected only one scene—albeit the single most decisive one—for his representation, so as to locate the true, purely human emotional content of the discursive historical narrative in one focal point, and thereby to communicate it as compellingly as possible to our purely human feelings. This is the scene between Coriolanus, his mother, and his wife at the enemy’s encampment before the gates of his native city.²⁹ —We would not be far from the truth in supposing that nearly all of the master’s symphonic works take as the plastic object of their expression the representation of scenes between man and woman, scenes whose prototype can be identified in the very idea of the dance, from which the symphony as a musical genre may indeed be understood to originate.³⁰ And here we have the most sublime and moving instance of just such a scene. The entire composition could easily be conceived as the musical accompaniment to a pantomimic representation of that scene, but only if we also suppose that this accompaniment simultaneously expresses, in a language intelligible to the hearing, the same object that the pantomime represents in visual terms.

The opening gestures of the composition first present to us the figure of the man himself: incredible power, limitless self-confidence, impassioned defiance, and an annihilating temperament are expressed through feelings of anger, hate, and vengeance. We need only hear the name “Coriolanus” spoken to call up, as with one magical stroke, this figure and to feel an instinctive sympathy for all the emotions of his impatient heart. Right next to him the feminine principle appears: mother, wife, and child in one. The defiant man is confronted by pleasantness, mildness, and gentle dignity; these impulses conspire to deter the proud one from his destructive bent, combining a child’s pleas, a wife’s beseeching, and a mother’s admonition. —Coriolanus recognizes the threat to his defiant resolve: his homeland has sent to him the most dangerous of emissaries. He could with equanimity turn a cold shoulder to any of the clever and virtuous politicians of his homeland: their embassies have addressed only his political reason, his civic wisdom; one word of scorn from him regarding their cowardice sufficed to make him unapproachable. But by this alternative strategy the fatherland has addressed his heart, his purely human and instinctive feelings; against this attack he has no defense but—to protect his eyes and his ears from an irresistible apparition. —And so he does, at the first approach of the imploring group, quickly seek to avert his eyes and ears; we perceive the impatient gesture with which he interrupts the pleas of his wife, closing his eyes—only to hear the woeful lament whose sounds still echo in his averted head. —In the depths of his heart this gigantic figure feels the serpent of remorse begin to gnaw at his defiance. And yet this defiance defends itself mightily; roused by the first sting ofthat serpent, it breaks out in raging pain. Its forceful shouts, its dreadful convulsions betray the terrible majesty of this vengeful defiance along with the burning sensation of pain engendered by the tooth of remorse. We see the woman, deeply moved by this terrible display, break into despairing sobs; her pleas stick in her breast, tormented as she is by the wild suffering of the man. This battle of emotions pitches us fearfully from side to side: the woman had expected to meet only with stubborn pride, but she witnesses instead the most terrible suffering even within the strength of defiance. —Defiance has now become the only source of the man’s strength: without his vengeance, without his destructive anger, Coriolanus would no longer be himself; and if his defiance yields, he must cease to live. This is the clasp that holds firm the very possibility of his life; once banned as a rebel, once allied to the enemies of his country, he can no longer return to what he had been before. To let go of his vengeance would be to let go of his existence; renouncing his vow to destroy his native city would be to destroy himself. He advances to meet the woman and inform her of this terrible, final choice he must make. He cries out to her: “Rome or myself!. One of these must fall!” Here again he exhibits the full sublimity of his annihilating anger. And here, too, the woman regains the power to implore. “Pity! Conciliation! Peace!” she beseeches him. Ah, she does not understand him, she does not grasp the fact that a truce with Rome means—his downfall. But the woman’s lament tugs at his heart; he turns away once more to fight the terrible battle between his defiance and the necessity of self-destruction. In tormenting indecision he pauses and then makes a forceful resolve: he seeks out the gaze of the dear woman, and with painful pleasure he reads his own death sentence in her beseeching gestures. That sight fills his breast with powerful emotion, all the hesitations and the uproar within him condense into one great resolve; his self-sacrifice is decided: Peace and Conciliation! —All the power the hero had heretofore concentrated toward the aim of destroying his homeland, all the thousand swords and arrows of his hate and vengeful ire he now grasps in a terrible, mighty fist, drawing them together into one single point, which—he plunges into his own heart. Thus struck by his own death-dealing blow the colossus falls: at the feet of the woman who had entreated him to peace he breathes his last, dying breath.

Under the influence of his own “programmatic commentaries” to Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Coriolan Overture, Wagner decided that the orchestral movements he had composed to introduce his so-called Romantic operas (Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin) would benefit from similar explications when performed in concert. In particular the Tannhäuser Overture (as suggested in the critical accounts by Liszt and Johann Christian Lobe in Part III of the present volume) became an influential model for the new genre of “symphonic poem” pioneered by Liszt, and the central genre of Romantic program music. As Ernest Newman noted, Wagner even came to believe that this overture belonged more to the concert genre, offering rather too much material to be digested before a performance of his opera in the theater.³¹ As Wagner wrote to his friend Theodor Uhlig after rehearsing the overture with the Zurich Music Society (augmented for the occasion with players from throughout Switzerland), the orchestra had especially requested from him “an explanation of the overture on the model of the one he had written for the Coriolan Overture, “which they said would help them play this new work better and with greater understanding.³² When this note was printed for the concert of March 16 it actually bore the title “The Venusberg,” as if to suggest an independent tone poem based on the opening scene of the opera. Players and audience alike were tremendously impressed by the force of Wagner’s personality as a conductor and even, to their surprise, as a composer. “The effect was terrific,” he reported to Uhlig; “the women in particular were turned inside out, and had to find relief for their emotion in sobs and weeping. “³³ Like the programs to the Holländer Overture and the Lohengrin Prelude, this one was soon printed in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and thereby contributed not a little to the association of Wagner with the major exponents of Romantic program music, Berlioz and Liszt.

At the beginning of the piece the orchestra plays for us the Pilgrims’ song; this approaches from afar, increases to a mighty outpouring, and finally moves away again into the distance.³⁴ —Twilight: the dying strains of the song.³⁵

—As night falls magical forms start to appear: a rosy evening mist swirls up, and ecstatic notes of pleasure reach our ear; the confused motions of a dreadful voluptuous dance can be heard. This is the seductive magic of the “Venusberg,” which can be heard at nighttime by those in whose breast there burns a brazen, sensual longing. A slim, youthful man appears, drawn by these seductive apparitions: this is Tannhäuser, the singer of love. He sounds his proud, triumphant love song as a kind of joyful challenge to that sensual magic, bidding it approach him.

—He is answered by wild cries: the rosy mists close about him more densely, delightful scents surround him and intoxicate his senses. In the seductive twilight atmosphere there materializes before his wonder-struck gaze an unspeakably enticing female form. He hears a voice singing a siren song, tremulous and sweet, and promising the bold youth the satisfaction of his wildest desires. It is Venus herself who has appeared to him.

—Now he is all aflame, heart and soul; a glowing-hot, consuming desire warms the blood in his veins, an irresistible force draws him closer, and he advances before the goddess of love with his song in celebration of love, which now sounds forth ecstatically in her praise. This has the effect of a magical incantation, and all the wonders of the Venusberg suddenly appear to him in brilliant abundance. From all sides can be heard frantic cries of joy and wild rapture. The bacchantes rush at Tannhäuser in drunken revelry, drawing him into their furious dance and conducting him thence into the warm, loving arms of the goddess herself. She embraces him, drunk with rapture; with wild ardor she draws him far away, even to the realm of nonexistence. There is a terrible commotion, like the Wild Hunt, and soon a storm whips up. The air is still filled with humming, voluptuous lament—an eerie, sensual whisper passes like a breath of demonic sensual longing across this site upon which such unholy magical delights have descended, and over which night now spreads again.

—But already morning begins to dawn: from afar we can hear the returning song of the Pilgrims. As the song comes ever closer, as day continues to displace the night, the humming and whispering sounds that had first filled the air like a dreadful lament from the souls of the damned now swell into increasingly joyful waves. Now the sun rises in full splendor and the song of the Pilgrims animatedly proclaims a newly won salvation to all the world and everything that lives upon it, and this sounding wave finally becomes a rapturous roaring of sublime delight. This is the rejoicing of the Venusberg itself, redeemed from its unholy curse, singing out praises to God. Every pulse of life rushes and leaps to this song of redemption; the two sundered elements of spirit and senses, God and Nature, embrace each other in the sacred, unifying kiss of love.

The most extensive sampling of Wagner’s own works offered to the inhabitants of Zurich during the composer’s residence there occurred in the series of concerts produced on May 18, 20, and 22 (the latter date being Wagner’s birthday, which he rarely failed to observe in high style). These included excerpts from Rienzi (the “Messengers of Peace” chorus at the beginning of Act 2), “Senta’s Ballad” and the Act 3 choral-ensemble scene from Der fliegende Holländer, the “Entry of the Guests” (or so-called March) and the orchestral introduction to Act 3 of Tannhäuser, “Elsa’s Procession to the Minster” from Act 2 of Lohengrin, the Prelude and “Bridal Chorus” from Act 3, as well as the Fliegende Holländer Overture (billed as “The Dutchman’s Voyage,” in tune with the programmatic elucidation provided), and the Lohengrin Prelude, which Wagner now was able to hear for the first time in its essential orchestral guise.

Overture to Der fliegende Holländer

The terrible ship of the “Flying Dutchman” is tossed about by storms; it approaches the coast and lands there, where its captain has been promised he might one day find happiness and salvation.³⁶ We perceive the sympathetic strains of this promise of redemption, which suggest the feelings of prayer and lament at once: the accursed man listens, somber and despondent; tired and longing only for death he steps ashore, while his crew silently battens down the ship, likewise exhausted and weary of living.³⁷

—How many times the unfortunate man has gone through this routine! How many times has he steered his ship from the ocean’s waves to the peopled shores, where once each seven years he is allowed to land. How many times has he imagined that his sufferings were at an end, and yet—how many times, bitterly disappointed, has he not had to set sail once again on his endless, senseless sea voyage! Hoping to bring about his own end, he steers madly toward the tempestuous swells: he plunges his ship into the ocean’s gaping maw—and yet this maw will not swallow it; now he steers for the breakers crashing upon the rocks—and yet the rocks will not splinter it. All the terrifying dangers of the sea, at which he once laughed in the abandon of heroic hubris,³⁸ now mock him in turn, by refusing to harm him. For now he is immune to such dangers, condemned to chase forever across the vasty deep in search of treasures he can never enjoy, never to find that one thing that could save him!

—A spry and hearty ship sails by; the Dutchman harks to the merry, carefree singing of its crew, who are on their return voyage and elated by the thought of the imminent arrival at their homeland. Such jollity fills him with rage; he causes his ship to storm furiously past theirs, terrifying and intimidating that happy crew into silence and flight. In his distress the Dutchman utters a dreadful cry for salvation: he is surrounded by men and by the empty seas—but only a woman can achieve his redemption. Where is this savior, in what land does she reside? Where does a feeling heart beat in sympathy with his woes? Where is she who will not flee from him in horror, like these cowardly men who cross themselves in terror at the sight of him?

—Then a light breaks through the night: like a lightning bolt it strikes his tortured soul. For a moment it is extinguished, then it flares up again; the seafarer fastens his gaze on this beacon and steers for it with vigorous determination through wave and current. What draws him on so powerfully is the glance of a woman, radiating sublime pity and divine sympathy. One heart has fathomed the infinite depths of sorrow experienced by this accursed man, and that heart is breaking with sympathy, it is impelled to offer itself in sacrifice, to annihilate itself together with this man’s suffering. The wretched man collapses before this divine apparition, just as his ship shatters into pieces; the ocean swallows up the wreck—but the Dutchman rises from the waves, safe and sound, the victorious redemptress leading him by the hand toward the rosy dawn of sublime love.

Prelude to Lohengrin

It seemed as if love had disappeared from a world now filled with hate and strife: in no human community was it any more present as the ruling spirit.³⁹ Yet amid the dreary concern for gain and possession directing all worldly traffic the inextinguishable longing for love that resides in every human heart still yearned to be satisfied. The more this need increased in intensity under the yoke of reality, the less it could hope to find satisfaction, so long as it remained subject to reality. So it was that the mystic imagination located the source of this intangible longing for love, and likewise its final destination, outside of the empirical world, ascribing to it a marvelous form (in the desire for a consoling physical representation of this metaphysical conception). This object was imagined as really existing, though infinitely far away: it was believed in, longed for, and sought for under the name of the “Holy Grail.” This signified the precious goblet from which long ago the Savior drank farewell to his apostles, which afterward caught his blood as he suffered on the cross out of love for his brothers, and which was thought to have been lovingly preserved ever since as a source of imperishable love. This sacred vessel had been for some time removed from unworthy humanity when a host of angels from on high returned it to a band of devoted, loving men who lived withdrawn from the world. These pure ones were thus consecrated as its guardians, finding themselves marvelously strengthened and blessed by its presence, and so they became earthly champions of eternal love.

The tone poet of Lohengrin chose this episode of the miraculous descent of the Grail accompanied by the host of angels, and their entrusting of it to these happy mortals, as the object of the introduction to his drama concerning the Grail-knight (Lohengrin). It is the representation of this episode in tones that he wishes to elucidate for the imagination by describing it as an object visible to the human eye. —Our rapturous gaze toward the highest, divine yearning for love perceives the clear blue celestial vault; a wonderful, at first scarcely perceptible apparition begins to materialize, magically compelling our sight as it does so. The angelic host is depicted through infinitely delicate lines that gradually take on a more distinct contour; the host descends imperceptibly from the luminous heights, conveying in their midst the sacred vessel. As this apparition comes more fully into view, floating nearer to the terrestrial zone, it seems to emanate sweetly intoxicating scents. This delightful incense wells up like a golden cloud, captivating the senses of the astonished onlooker even to the innermost fibers of his thrilling heart, stirring in him wondrous, sacred feelings. The onlooker is now seized with a rapturous pain, now shudders with blissful pleasure; in his heart every latent kernel of love begins to germinate, irresistibly awakened to wondrous life and growth by the animating magic of this vision. The breast swells, even to the point of breaking, under this powerful longing; it experiences an impulse to surrender and to dissolve such as no human heart has felt before. This feeling is nourished by the greatest, most delightful rapture as the divine vision expands before the transfigured senses, coming into ever closer, more intimate contact with them. When at last the sacred vessel itself is exposed in its wondrous, naked reality to the sight of the privileged beholder, when the Grail radiates from its sacred contents rays of sublime love like the light of a celestial fire such that all hearts around it tremble in the flaming brilliance of this eternal glow—at that point the onlooker’s senses fail him altogether, and he sinks down overwhelmed, devoutly prostrate. Still the Grail pours forth its blessing upon this subject lost in the raptures of sacred love, consecrating him as its knight: the radiant flames die down to a gentler glow, which spreads out over the earth like a breath of inexpressible delight and deep feeling; the breast of the devout servant is filled with an unimaginable serenity. The angelic host ascends toward heaven, looking back with a smile: that source of love that had previously withered on earth has here been restored, as the host leaves behind the Grail in the care of pure men into whose hearts its blessed contents have been tipped. And so the glorious host disappears back into the brightness of the celestial ether, from whence it had first approached.

In addition to the explanations of the Prelude to Lohengrin and the Holländer Overture, Wagner provided short contextual glosses for the other Tannhäuser and Lohengrin excerpts included on the programs of the May 1853 concerts. Although these are primarily paraphrases of the dramatic scenes in question, some interest attaches to them for the way they reveal the composer’s own scenic visualization of these central episodes from the operas. The description of the introduction to the third act of Tannhäuser, however, is a genuine “programmatic commentary” in the same sense as those to the overtures, in this case specifying the way this orchestral piece aims to narrate in musical terms the story of Tannhäuser’s unsuccessful pilgrimage to Rome, which he himself narrates vocally later in the act. The “wedding music” from Lohengrin included both the lively orchestral prelude to Act 3 and the famous “Wedding Chorus” that opens the act, “Treulich geführt ziehet dahin.” In the concert presentation, the orchestral prelude was repeated, da capo, after the gentle chorus and provided with a new conclusion.⁴⁰

Entry of the Guests at the Wartburg

Trumpets from the ramparts announce the arrival at the Wartburg gates of the first of the guests the Landgraf has invited to attend a grand tourney of song.⁴¹ Noble pages jump up to alert the marshal that the guests are to be greeted; he duly appears at the head of a group of heralds and heads toward the door of the hall to receive the arrivals. These guests are dukes and nobles of Thuringia accompanied by their ladies and followed by their pages. They proceed into the hall, arrayed in splendid habiliments; they are led before the Landgraf and Elisabeth, who cordially greet them. The pages and heralds arrange the guests into a broad semicircle, from which position they, in turn, form an audience for the next group of arriving guests. As they observe the proceedings, in eager anticipation of the festive contest about to begin, the guests are moved to sing the praises of the chivalrous and art-loving lord:

The trumpets have repeatedly greeted a great throng of festival guests: the hall is now resplendent with the flower of chivalry. A gracefully executed formation prepares the entrance of the singers themselves: with harps in hand, but also with swords at their side, these singers proceed into the hall in ceremonial costume. They bow to the assembled nobility with dignity and grace; the pages draw lots for them from a golden vessel to determine the rank and order of their seating, which they take now amid repeated greetings from the assembled onlookers. —In this picture is revealed to us the fairest, most appealing image of medieval Ghibelline manners. The following excerpt will show us a different, deep and inward feature of the same culture.

Tannhäuser’s Journey to Rome

In the course of the song contest, Tannhäuser has revealed the secret that he has tarried in the Venusberg, in the arms of Venus herself. Elisabeth has interceded on his behalf, shielding him from the swords of the outraged nobles: she has pleaded for his salvation, she whose heart has been pierced by his reckless confession. Softened by her appeal, the men have allowed Tannhäuser to go free, so that he might journey to Rome to attend the ceremony of general pardon there and implore forgiveness for his terrible transgression. This chastened erstwhile knight of Venus has seized upon the sole path to salvation now pointed out to him, terribly aware of the outrage he committed against his good angel Elisabeth. He is stung with remorse and animated solely by the desire to perform the direst acts of penance for the deadly blow dealt to the pure heart of this loving maiden—not for the pleasure of his own redemption, but only so as to be able to return with a pardoned soul and thereby conciliate the angel who has wept for him the bitterest tears of her life.—

At the outset of this piece we perceive the pious song of the faithful band of pilgrims: Elisabeth’s blessing follows the pilgrims as they depart from the homeland. Tannhäuser, however, does not join in that song: rather, bent low and silent, he walks to one side. While his comrades progress upon comfortable paths and strengthen themselves for the continued journey with rest and nourishment, he chooses a route of stones and thorns, hunger and thirst. In this way the flock arrives at its destination. The eternal city lies resplendent before their wondering eyes. In joyful devotion they all sink to their knees before the house of the Lord. From the great church, bathed in the first rays of dawn, sweet, celestial sounds waft upward to the praying pilgrims like the singing of angels, and in an ecstasy of devotion they softly repeat the sacred strains. At the full break of day the gates are opened. He through whom God speaks to His people, His powerful priest on earth, appears upon the steps of the church, amid unparalleled sacred splendor.⁴² He proclaims forgiveness and salvation to all who have assembled at this holy site: the cheerful jubilation of the assembled masses rises up toward heaven. —

Then Tannhäuser approaches the priest. Humbly and deeply mortified he confesses his sin, begging for redemption from the fires of unholy passion that have been lit in him by Venus’s magic. Yet no matter how woefully he prostrates himself in the dust, the priest shows him no mercy: instead, he cries anathema upon this sinner, thunders eternal damnation on this penitent, the most desperate of all for salvation. All Tannhäuser’s senses go dark, and he sinks down. He can still hear the faint echoes of the hymn of salvation as he stares, unconscious, into the twilight. A gentle light appears above the lonely figure in the dark, like the glowing of the evening star; indeed, one eye still watches over the unhappy man, abandoned by all the rest of the world: mournful and alone, Elisabeth remains true to him. She cries tears of infinite sorrow and love for the fallen one; from her lament, impassioned and chaste, she lifts herself with gentle force to issue one last blessed greeting, calling her beloved to heaven.

The returning flock of pilgrims can be heard approaching the peaceful valley of their homeland, their song now piously and joyfully announcing their salvation, filling every breast, moving them to share this joy with every sinner, far and wide.

Male Chorus and Bridal Procession

The young knight of the Holy Grail, Lohengrin, has gone forth into the world.⁴³ He rescues an unjustly accused maiden through divinely ordained victory in a trial by combat. Elsa’s ecstatic love has won the heart of her champion: he will remain by her side, and the dawning day will see the two married in the minster. The present scene conveys to our sympathetic feeling the wonderfully beneficent, inspiring, and compelling impression made upon every heart by this hero sent at God’s bidding.

Wedding Music and Bridal Song

Lively displays to mark the wedding festivities: exuberant praises of the hero ring out in celebration. Alternating with this hearty jubilation is more gentle praise of the lovely maid who has won him, and whose chaste, modest gaze fixes upon him alone amid all joyful tumult. The noisy celebration pauses, so that the happy pair may be led away from all this commotion to the singing of the Bridal Song.

The guests now leave the loving pair to their quiet happiness; when the guests have returned to the brightly lit hall they break out once more in festive jubilation, honoring that high point of human existence: the happiness of a lovingly united pair—which happiness we should like to imagine (putting aside for now the further serious developments of the drama) as forever untroubled.

L. van Beethoven, String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131
Zurich Quartet Society Concert, December 12, 1854

In the autumn of the same year as the Zurich concerts of his own music, Wagner helped sponsor the formation of a “Quartet Society” drawing on the first-chair string players of the Zurich Music Society orchestra. During a brief stay in Paris around the same time he had the opportunity to hear the Maurin-Chevillard Quartet playing the late quartets of Beethoven, still rarely performed in public at the time. This inspired him to coach the Zurich players in the C-sharp Minor Quartet, op. 131, which they programmed in a concert on December 12, 1854. As with the difficult Ninth, Wagner thought it well to mediate this presentation of Beethoven’s unaccustomed late style in print: the short notice translated here was published in the local Eidgenössische Zeitung on 3 October 1853 and again at the time of the performance.⁴⁴

(Adagio). Melancholy morning thoughts of a deeply suffering mind: (Allegro) a pleasant vision awakens new desire for life.⁴⁵ —(Andante and variations). Attraction, pity, longing, love. —(Scherzo). Whimsical moods, humor, exuberance. (Finale). Transition to a mood of resignation. Painful renunciation.

At my special request the gentlemen performers [of the Zurich Quartet Society] have undertaken the very demanding study and rehearsal of this difficult quartet, which, as a work of Beethoven’s late period, is still regarded by many musicians and amateurs as unintelligible—and no doubt, at any rate, it is most often performed quite unintelligibly. For these reasons it may seem audacious to present this work to a larger public, a public still generally unused to this genre as a whole, and inclined to prefer lighter works over more deeply felt ones. Nonetheless I was emboldened to give my sponsorship to a public performance of the work thanks to the success of the extended study of this piece undertaken by these players in collaboration with me. But at the same time I consider it my responsibility to call the audience’s attention to the peculiar nature of this extraordinary work, such that those who are willing and able to do so might follow in this composition all the varied moods of the tone poet’s rich inner life expressed therein: from the melancholy morning thoughts of a deeply suffering mind; through the pleasant visions that take us in and lift us up; through feelings of rapture, delight, desire, love and surrender; then even to a dawning cheerfulness, a playful contentment; until we arrive at the ultimate, painful renunciation of every earthly happiness.

Wagner’s answer, in a sense, to the enigma of Beethoven’s Opus 131 Quartet might be identified as Tristan und Isolde, in particular its Prelude, long regarded as the most influential challenge to the limits of tonal composition in the entire nineteenth century. (At the same time he was coaching the Quartet Society in the Beethoven, Wagner was finishing his first reading of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, another key moment in the prehistory of Tristan). Well before this most radical of Wagner’s music dramas made its way to the stage, the Prelude had been floated a few times before generally bewildered audiences. It was the one recent composition Wagner included on his concerts in Paris at the beginning of 1860, concerts which themselves formed the prelude to the ill-fated French production of Tannhäuser the following year. Words alone were not likely to explain this wholly unfamiliar musical language to its first listeners (Wagner claimed he even had to guide the players laboriously from note to note). Still, he thought it advisable to provide some poetic gloss on his musical conception. The longer program translated here was sent to Mathilde Wesendonck in December 1859, along with an arrangement of his concert ending for the prelude; both were drafted for the Paris concerts. In the event, however, Wagner replaced the program note with a summary account of the Tristan story as represented in the opera.⁴⁶

An old, primeval tale of love—inextinguishable, retold and reshaped in all the languages of medieval Europe—tells us of Tristan and Isolde. The king’s trusty vassal has wooed for his royal liege the very woman he himself would not admit to loving: Isolde. She followed him as his master’s bride; she had no choice but to follow the suitor, helplessly. The goddess of love, jealous of her rights which she saw so disdainfully suppressed, took her revenge: she caused the young pair to be served (by means of a resourceful oversight) a love draught, one that the bride’s mother had thoughtfully provided for her daughter, as was the custom in those times in the case of politically arranged marriages. Having tasted this draught the young pair was suddenly seized by a fervent ardor; they confessed that they loved each other, alone. But now there was no end to love’s longing, yearning, rapture, and distress: the world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty, friendship—all were dispersed like an insubstantial dream. Only one thing remained alive to them: desire, insatiable desire, a longing ever renewed, ever thirsting and languishing. And from this, no salvation but death—annihilation, never again to awaken!

Having chosen this theme for the introduction to his drama of love, the musician had only to be concerned (since he was aware of working here in the peculiar, unbounded element of music) with how to set limits for himself, since it would be quite impossible to exhaust this subject. Therefore he let this insatiable longing well up just once, in one single process spanning several smaller segments:⁴⁷ from the most timid avowal of a delicate inclination; through fearful sighs, hope and trembling, lamentation and prayers, rapture and torment; up to the mightiest pressure, the most forceful efforts to find a breach that will open the way for the infinitely hungering heart to reach the ocean of love’s unending delight. In vain! The heart sinks back unconscious, back into languishing desire, desire without fulfillment, since fulfillment can only initiate new desire. Exhausted, the fading gaze finally catches an anticipatory glimpse of ultimate rapture: the rapture of death, surcease, an ultimate redemption within that wondrous realm from which we stray the furthest when we most strenuously try to force our way into it. Should we call it death? Or is it the nocturnal world of wonder from out of which, as the tale tells us, an ivy plant and a vine grew up over the graves of Tristan and Isolde, to wind about each other in intimate embrace?

Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act 1 and Conclusion
(“Transfiguration”)
Vienna Concert, December 27, 1863

For a concert at the Redoutensaal in Vienna on December 27, 1863, undertaken together with the young piano virtuoso Karl Tausig, Wagner provided these short evocations of the Prelude (here subtitled Liebestod or “love-death”) and the conclusion of the opera (Isolde’s “Transfiguration”)⁴⁸

(a) Prelude (Liebestod)

Taking on the role of suitor for his uncle, the king, Tristan brings to him Isolde.⁴⁹ They love each other. From the most timid complaint of unquenchable longing, from the most delicate quivering, up through the most fearsome outburst confessing a hopeless love, the feeling here traces every phase of this hopeless struggle against inner passion—until, sinking back unconscious, that passion seems to be extinguished in death.

(b) Concluding Movement (Transfiguration)

And yet, what fate has kept apart in life now lives on, transfigured, in death: the gates to their union are open. Isolde, dying atop Tristan’s body, perceives the blessed fulfillment of her burning desire: eternal union in measureless space, no bounds, no fetters, indivisible! —

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Preludes to Acts 1 and 3
Prelude to Act 1, Concert of December 2, 1863
Prelude to Act 3 (Letter of Early July [?] 1868 to Judith Gautier)

Shortly before the Vienna concert with Karl Tausig featuring the short notes to the Tristan Prelude and “Transfiguration, “Wagner conducted the recently completed Prelude to Act 1 of Die Meistersinger in a concert with the private orchestra of Prince Friedrich Wilhelm Konstantin of Hohenzollern-Hechingen at his palace in Löwenberg, near Breslau in Silesia. The following program note to the Prelude was written for this event. The concert also included the two Tristan excerpts along with the Lohengrin Prelude, the Tannhäuser Overture, and the “Ride of the Valkyries.” The first performance of the Meistersinger Prelude had occurred only about a year earlier (November 1, 1862) at a Leipzig Gewandhaus concert organized by the young New German acolyte, Wendelin Weissheimer. The score of the opera as a whole was still far from complete.

The Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen also includes among posthumously published program notes to Wagner’s works a short description of the instrumental introduction to Act 3 of Die Meistersinger, taken from an undated letter to Judith Gautier, apparently written soon after the opera’s Munich premiere in June 1868 (and thus a year before she and her husband, Catulle Mendès, visited Wagner at Tribschen: see the memoir by Mendès included in Part II of this volume). This is the first letter to be addressed by Wagner to Judith, who became an intimate friend of his later years, although their personal encounters were of limited duration. Gautier had sent Wagner a collection of her essays, the contents of which prompted him to observe that she was as yet unfamiliar with Die Meistersinger.⁵⁰ “The introduction to the third act, “he writes, “made a particularly strong impact on our audiences; just recently my barber remarked to me that this piece moved him more than anything else, reminding me how difficult it is to appreciate properly the instincts of the people. “

Prelude to Act 1

The mastersingers process in full festival regalia before the people of Nuremberg; they carry with them the Leges Tabulaturae, the archaic poetic code whose laws they so carefully preserve, even while the true spirit has long been forgotten.⁵¹ A banner bearing the image of King David playing the harp is held proudly aloft, followed by that singular figure of the people, Hans Sachs. His own songs greet him from the mouths of the populace. From amid the crowd we hear a sigh of love. This sigh is addressed to the fair young daughter of one of the masters; she has been designated as the prize for a song contest. She too is decked out in festive finery, though she glances with timid longing toward her beloved: he has achieved the status of poet, but not yet that of master singer. He makes his way through the crowd; with glance and voice he conveys to the object of his desire that old love song of ever-renewed youth. —Eager young apprentices to the masters come between them, carrying out their orders with childish assiduity and interrupting the communion of the two lovers; noisy confusion ensues among the crowd. Hans Sachs, who has wisely perceived that song of love, jumps up to assist the young singer, yielding his place at the head of the procession of masters, close to the beloved daughter. The people greet the masters volubly. The love song rings out in the strains of genuine master song: poetry and pedantry are happily reconciled. All cry out vigorously: “Hail to Hans Sachs!”

Prelude to Act 3

The first motive of the string instruments here has already been anticipated in the third strophe of the cobbler’s song in Act 2. There it expressed the bitter lament of a resigned man, who nonetheless showed to the world a cheerful, energetic mien. Eva had understood this disguised lament, and it pierced her heart so deeply that she wished to flee the spot, merely in order to escape this seemingly so jolly song. Now, in the Prelude to the third act, the motive is isolated and newly evolved so as to die away with a feeling of resignation. Yet at the same moment the horns, as if from a distance, intone a solemn chorale theme, the song with which Hans Sachs greeted Luther and the Reformation, and which won for him an incomparable popularity. After the first strophe of that song the strings take up—very delicately, in hesitating motion—individual details of the actual cobbler’s song, as if Sachs were turning away from his handiwork for a moment to look upward and lose himself in pleasant daydreams. The horns then recommence the master’s hymn melody in greater amplitude, the same hymn with which the assembled population of Nuremberg will greet Hans Sachs upon his arrival at the festival in a great, thunderous unison acclamation. Now the opening string motive returns, with the feeling of a soul deeply moved; calm and settled, it achieves the exalted sense of good cheer that may follow from the achievement of a mild, beatific resignation.

In the early 1870s Wagner was several times in Vienna again, hoping to raise funds for the Bayreuth Festival while at the same time scouting for vocal talent he might draw upon for that great enterprise. He had been cautious about releasing material from the Ring of the Nibelung cycle prior to the festival that would constitute its official unveiling, where every detail was to be carefully supervised by the Master himself. He would not allow his publisher, Schott, to disseminate excerpts from the Ring dramas, for example, although he had been programming a few of these on his own concerts since the early 1860s, in Vienna and elsewhere. In the Vienna concert of March 1, 1875, the audience was granted a preview of the final Ring drama, Götterdämmerung, the full score of which had only been completed the previous November. The notes provided for these four excerpts consist mainly of the relevant stage directions and cues for the libretto text of the excerpts included (except for the Prologue, which was presented without text and continued through the “Rhine Journey” music that forms the transition to Act 1).

I. Prologue

(For the purposes of presenting the orchestral-symphonic portion of this dramatic prologue it was necessary to implement some cuts in accordance with the suppression of the vocal parts, which would not make sense outside the context of an actual stage production.⁵² Since the imagination of the listener must now be called upon to supplement the scenic directions which cannot otherwise be realized here, the following description is offered by way of an explanatory program to the present excerpts; it is meant to suggest the action something in the manner of a pantomime.)

Nocturnal scene upon a rocky mountainside. The three Norns weave the rope of destiny and pass it among themselves: —it breaks; —the Norns wrap the broken ends of this rope about themselves and sink down. —Early dawn, and daybreak. —With the rising sun Siegfried and Brünnhilde appear, Siegfried bearing the arms of the Valkyrie, who also gives him her horse, since he is about to embark in search of new deeds. Ardent vows, oaths of fidelity: a hero’s farewell. —Siegfried leads his horse down the mountainside, Brünnhilde calls joyously after him until he suddenly disappears from view, as if behind an outcropping, and she can only follow him by the sound of his horn from the valley depths. But then she spies him again, as he boldly forges ahead into the distance; overcome, she waves once more to him. He passes through the fire protecting the mountain; the bright tones of his horn seem to set the flames dancing merrily about him as he proceeds on his way. Reaching the Rhine he is welcomed by the Rhine Maidens, who regard him as their champion and savior and who speed him safely on his way. They accompany him as far as the court of the Gibichungs, where he will meet his destiny through Hagen, the heir to the Nibelung’s ring.

II. Hagen’s Watch

(This excerpt from the first act begins with the departure of Siegfried and Gunther for Brünnhilde’s rock. Gutrune gazes raptly after Siegfried as he hurries off, then she turns with high feelings to go to her chamber. Siegfried grasps the oars of the skiff and rows vigorously as he and Gunther make their way upstream, where soon they disappear from view. —Hagen, left to oversee the Hall of the Gibichungs, has sat down comfortably with spear and shield before him; during the following excerpt he leans, motionless, on a post of the entryway.)

(A tapestry conceals the stage from the audience. An orchestral entr’acte provides a transition to the next scene, in which we see Brünnhilde at the entrance to her cave dwelling atop the mountain, gazing upon Siegfried’s ring with sweetly melancholy remembrances—the ring that is the cause of all of the tragedy yet to come.)

III. Siegfried’s Death

(This excerpt from the third act begins with the flight of Wotan’s ravens at the end of Siegfried’s narration concerning the adventure that brought him to Brünnhilde. The orchestra accompanies the events which are here to be imagined pantomimically in the listener’s mind, according to the following stage directions.)

Two ravens fly up from the underbrush, circle over Siegfried, and fly off. Siegfried starts up and looks at the ravens, turning his back to Hagen. Hagen plunges his spear into Siegfried’s back. With two hands Siegfried raises his shield high above him, intending to crush Hagen with it. However, his strength fails him, the shield falls from his hands. He himself crashes to the ground, upon the shield. Hagen points to the fallen hero, signifying that he has merely exacted the vengeance due him for Siegfried’s perjury. With that, he calmly turns aside and strides slowly away up the neighboring hill. Gunther is passionately moved, and leans down to Siegfried’s side. The vassals range themselves about the slain man, as Siegfried opens his bright eyes one last time, and utters in a solemn voice:

(He dies. —Long silence, all deeply moved. —The vassals lift the body upon the shield to accompany it slowly in solemn mourning over the mountain. This last action is accompanied by the orchestra in the manner of a tragic chorus,⁵³ at once celebrating and mourning the origins, the glory, and the sad fate of the hero, praised now as a figure of divinity.)

IV. Conclusion of the Final Act

(This excerpt likewise begins in the middle of an energetic action. In his struggle to gain the Nibelung’s ring Hagen has slain Gunther and now reaches for the hand of the dead Siegfried while crying out: “That ring is for me!”—at which Siegfried’s hand clenches into a fist, threateningly raised aloft. General horror and outcries, during which Brünnhilde strides forward, with firm and solemn step, from the back of the stage.)

During the following passage the younger men erect a mighty funeral pyre close to the banks of the Rhine; the women adorn it with shrouds, which they then strew with herbs and flowers.

BRÜNNHILDE (lost in contemplation of the corpse, her features are gradually transfigured by calmer emotions):

She gestures to the men that they should raise Siegfried’s body and carry it to the pyre; at the same time she takes the ring from Siegfried’s finger, regarding it during the next passage, and finally puts it on her own hand.

She turns toward the back of the stage, where Siegfried’s body now lies outstretched upon the scaffolding; from one of the men she takes a burning torch.

She thrusts the torch into the pyre, which immediately ignites. Two ravens fly up from the riverbank and disappear toward the background. Two young men have led her horse onto the scene. Brünnhilde takes it, and quickly loosens its bridle.

She has vigorously mounted the steed, and jumps it into the burning pyre. At that moment the flames rise up higher until the fire covers the whole area before the hall, and seems to begin engulfing that as well. Then suddenly the flames die down so that only a dark, smoldering cloud remains hovering over the site; this cloud rises and dissipates as the Rhine begins to overflow its bed, flooding the site of the fire and washing up to the edge of the hall. The three Rhine Maidens appear on the cresting flood. Upon seeing them Hagen is seized with a terrible fright and throws himself into the flooding waters as if crazed, crying out: “Stay back from the ring!” Woglinde and Wellgunde wrap their arms about his neck and, swimming back, they draw him into the depths, while Flosshilde, ahead of them, holds the ring aloft in jubilation. —In the sky a bright light breaks out at a great distance, something like the North Star; gradually one can perceive amid this light the hall of Valhalla, the gods ranged about it as if sitting in judgment. A mighty flame suddenly obscures the whole scene, and the curtain falls.

The notes accompanying Siegmund’s “Spring Song,” the “Ride of the Valkyries,” and “Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire Music” from Die Walküre programmed on a private “grand musical performance” (große Musikaufführung) for King Ludwig on December 11, 1869, in contrast to those for the later Vienna concerts presented above, omit the libretto text and offer more extended narrative paraphrases of the episodes in question. Details from both sets of notes can be instructively compared to the published librettos and scores.

I. Siegmund’s Love Song

Siegmund, pursued by overpowering foes and on the point of exhaustion, has found his way to Hunding’s dwelling, where the young wife, Sieglinde, has refreshed and cared for him.⁵⁴ Soon the two begin to share mutual, unspoken intimations. Siegmund had a twin sister he was separated from in earliest childhood; throughout his wild and lonely youth he had never encountered anything or anyone who spoke to him with a sense of intimate, familiar kinship. Sieglinde was likewise torn from her home at a tender age; scarcely had she reached maturity than she was given in marriage to a dark and ill-tempered man. The encounter with Siegmund awakens in her the sense of inner kinship that she, too, has longed to feel. To confirm her intuition, she risks seeking out the guest during the night. He is overwhelmed to discover her by his side, and he draws her close. With a crash the door to the room bursts wide open; alarmed, Sieglinde pulls herself free and cries:

II. The Ride of the Valkyries

The scene represents the peak of a rocky mountainside. Dark strips of cloud scud by the cliffs, as if chased by the storm, illuminated now and then by flashes of lightning. A Valkyrie on horseback comes into view; across her saddle hangs a slain warrior. More Valkyries appear on the scene in similar manner, greeting one another from near and far with wild, exuberant cries. At last they are all assembled on the peak of this place which the sagas later named Brünnnhilde’s rock; they put their flying steeds to pasture and take mutual stock of their quarry. This quarry consists of the corpses of heroes slain in battle, those chosen by the Valkyries upon the field of battle ⁵⁵ to be led, afterward, to Valhalla, where Wotan, the father of battles, will awaken them to new life and where the Valkyries, as wish-maidens, will wait upon them most cordially.

III. Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire

The Valkyrie Brünnhilde, the wish-maiden dearest to Wotan, was initially charged by him, the god of battles, to grant victory to Siegmund over his foe, Hunding. Afterward, greater considerations forced him to sacrifice his favorite among heroes, and accordingly he retracted the orders he had given the Valkyrie. She, however, moved by sublime compassion, dared to protect her charge as she had first been told to do, and as she imagined still to be Wotan’s true wish. Angered by this insubordination, Wotan pursues the Valkyrie with intent to punish her. She has sought refuge from the oncoming god of battles on the aforementioned Valkyrie’s rock. He discovers her there and demands that the band of sister Valkyries desist from protecting her; she throws herself at his feet to receive her punishment. She is to be placed in a deep sleep, alone here upon the mountaintop, so that whichever man should first discover her may awaken her and take her as his wife. Incensed by the shame to which this would expose her, the Valkyrie seeks to wrest from the god a promise that she should never be won in this manner by just any boastful coward. He refuses to concern himself any further with her destiny. In desperation she falls to her knees, embracing his, and implores him with heartrending laments not to dishonor himself in this way, by thus exposing her to such depths of shame—she who was once so dear to him. At the least he might protect the defenseless sleeping maiden with some deterrent terror: let him bid a fire spring up, surrounding the rock with its flickering flames, let the burning tongue of these flames dismay the timid should they think to approach this dreadful cliff. These desperate pleas warm Wotan’s heart to fulsome love for his dearest child; he draws her close to him and looks into her eyes, deeply moved. He kisses each of her eyes, which thereupon close in sleep; she sinks back into his arms in gentle quiescence. He leads her tenderly to a nearby mossy tuft. One last time he regards her features, then closes her helmet firmly over her face. His gaze lingers sadly upon her figure, which he finally covers with the Valkyrie’s own tall steel shield. He strides away, but then turns again; approaching a rocky outcropping with noble resolution, he touches the rock with the point of his spear.

The following paraphrase of the Parsifal Prelude was written for a private performance of the Prelude for Ludwig II in Munich on November 12, 1880, when the composer had only recently embarked on the full orchestral score of the whole opera.⁵⁶ This note evokes the passages from the Act 1 Grail scene referenced in the music of the Prelude: the Eucharistic presentation of the Grail and Amfortas’s tormented reaction to the ceremony. The latter is given a similar, but more extensive poetic gloss by Edouard Dujardin in the “modern paraphrase” of Wagner’s character, published in the first volume of Revue wagnérienne (translated with two other articles from that journal in Part IV of this volume.) Wagner’s note loosely suggests the thematic and structural design of the Prelude; the question mark after the word Hope at the head of the note perhaps reflects the harmonically open-ended nature of the music in its operatic context, where it evanescently floats into the upper reaches of the strings while outlining a dominant seventh sonority.

“Love —Faith: —Hope?”⁵⁷

First theme: “Love”

“Take this, my body; take this, my blood, for the sake of our love!” (Repeated by angelic voices, floating away.)

“Take this, my blood; take this, my body, in remembrance of me.” (Likewise repeated, floating away.)⁵⁸

The prophecy of redemption through faith. Faith proclaims itself, strong and sound, willingly strengthened through suffering. —This prophecy is renewed and answered by faith, which descends from the delicate heights as on the wings of a white dove, drawing toward itself the hearts of humankind, ever wider and fuller, infusing all nature with a mighty power, and then regarding the celestial ether with soft serenity. There arises once more, from out of shuddering loneliness, the lament of loving sympathy: fear, the sacred perspiring anxiety of the Mount of Olives, the divine sufferings of Golgotha—the body is pale, the blood flows forth and glows with a blessed heavenly radiance in the chalice, showering the rapturous grace of salvation through love upon everything that lives and suffers. This prepares our view of Amfortas: with the sinner’s terrible remorse in his heart, he must face the divinely admonishing sight of the Grail—he who is himself the sinning keeper of the Grail. Will the gnawing torments of his soul find redemption? Once more we hear the prophecy, and—we hope!

NOTES

1. James Treadwell, “The Urge to Communicate: The Prose Writings as Theory and Practice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Cambridge, 2008), 181.

2. See, for example, Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago and London, 1989), 18-19. Before Dahlhaus (original German edition 1978), Wagner’s apparent coinage of the term had been pointed out by Klaus Kropfinger, Wagner und Beethoven (Regensburg, 1975), 33.

3. At almost the exact moment Wagner drafted his program notes for the Ninth, the music critic Julius Wend wrote of “pure instrumental music as the actual center of musical expression, as the absolute form of music as such, freed from any heterogeneous elements” (“die reine Instrumentalmusik als das eigentliche Centrum der musikalischen Ausdrucksweise, als die absolute Form in der Tonkunst als solche—abgelöst von jedem heterogene Elemente”) in an article on the aesthetics of modern music prompted by the example of Berlioz: “Berlioz und die moderne Symphonie: Ein Beitrag zu einer Philosophie der Musik,” Wiener allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 6/40 (2 April 1846): 157. Ten years earlier the Berlin critic Ludwig Rellstab had written, in the unlikely context of a notice about a “characteristic rondo” by Charles Haslinger titled “Le voyage sur le Rhin,” of “absolute musical” talent (“… es muß auch eine Funke absoluten musikalischen Talents in ihm keimen”) in Iris im Gebiet der Tonkunst 7 (1836): 55.

4. The text given here is from Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 10 vols. (Leipzig, 1887-1911) (henceforth GSD), 2:56-64; it has been excerpted from “Bericht über die Aufführung der neunten Symphonie von Beethoven im Jahre 1846 in Dresden, nebst Programm dazu,” GSD, 2:50-64.

5. That is, Goethe’s major work, the epic-dramatic poem Faust. The subsequent program is structured around quotations from Faust that Wagner finds illustrative or suggestive of the moods, feelings, and “poetic content” of the symphony, as he understands these.

6. Wagner’s word Tondichtung (musical poem) anticipates the vocabulary of his later programmatic commentaries, particularly that to Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, as well as Hans von Bülow’s commentary on Wagner’s own Faust Overture.

9. This and subsequent translations of the lines quoted from Goethe’s Faust are taken from the 1870 verse translation by Bayard Taylor, as published in the Modern Library edition (New York, 1912). The translations of Schiller’s ode “An die Freude” (To joy) are by the present translator and editor.

10. Wagner slightly reorders the lines quoted here. The first two are emended from three lines of Goethe’s original: “Du hörest ja, von Freud’ ist nicht mehr die Rede./Dem Taumel weih’ ich mich, dem schmerzlichsten Genuß, /Verliebtem Haß, erquickendem Verdruß” (Faust, Part 1, ll. 1765-67; “Faust’s Study”). The following lines: “Laß in den Tiefen der Sinnlichkeit/Uns glühende Leidenschaften stillen!” etc. occur just before that (Faust, Part 1, ll. 1750-59).

11. Goethe, Faust, Part 1, ll. 2162-64; “Auerbach’s Cellar.” Wagner omits the fourth line that completes both the rhyme scheme, the poetic figure, and the sentence; it is inserted here.

17. Wagner’s word Erhebung might also be construed as “elevation” or “uplift.”

18. Wagner again conflates lines from different places in the text: The first two, “Aber ach! … aus dem Busen quillen!” are lines 1210-11 from Part 1, “Faust’s Study”; the following six are lines 454-59 (“Night”), though Wagner somewhat oddly paraphrases the first (well-known) of these, which reads in the original: “Welch Schauspiel! Aber ach, ein Schauspiel nur!”—Faust’s response to the signs of the “Microcosmos” he has conjured from his books of magic. The translation given here reflects the original.

19. Here Wagner’s original phrase is musikalische Dichtung (as compared to Tondichtung above). In either case, the terminology, especially as applied to Beethoven’s Ninth, points toward the vocabulary of the New German School and Liszt’s coinage “symphonic poem” for the characteristic instrumental genre of that school.

20. Gesangsthema, literally, “song theme.” This term was often applied as a generic-formal rubric for the second theme of a sonata form, regarded by this time in the nineteenth century as typically lyrical, in contrast to the more forceful motivic-rhythmic character considered appropriate to first themes.

22. Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols. (New York, 1933-47; repr. Cambridge and New York, 1976), 2:178. Eventually Wagner did agree to productions of Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser at the Aktientheater in Zurich, in April-May 1852 and February-March 1855, respectively. For more details on the Zurich concerts, see also Max Fehr, Richard Wagners Schweizer Zeit, 2 vols. (Aarau, 1934), 1:73-98, 129-51, 215-43; as well as the entries by Uri Fischer (on the Allgemeine Musik-Gesellschaft and the Aktientheater) and Eva Martina Hanke (on Wagner’s orchestral programs with the Musik-Gesellschaft) in the exhibit catalog Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft: Richard Wagner und Zürich, 1849-1858, ed. Laurenz Lütteken and Eva Martina Hanke (Zurich, 2008), 53-61 and 63-65.

23. The Beethoven program notes were first printed by Brendel in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in the issues of 15 October 1852 (Eroica), 5 November 1852 (Coriolan); the note for Tannhäuser appeared in the issue of 14 January 1853.

25. The list of complementary and contrasting affects Wagner hears so fully commingled in this movement is, in the original German, audibly informed by the idea of alliterative verse or Stabreim that preoccupied him in Part 3 of Opera and Drama, completed around the same time as the first set of orchestral concerts in Zurich for which the Eroica program was drafted: “Wonne und Wehe, Lust und Leid, Anmut und Wehmut, Sinnen und Sehnen, Schmachten und Schwelgen, Kühnheit, Trotz und ein unbändiges Selbstgefühl” (GSD, 5:170). In particular, the first two pairs in this series recall the lines with which Wagner sought to illustrate the concept of a “poetic-musical period” in Part 3: “Die Liebe bringt Lust und Leid” and, subsequently, “Doch in ihr Weh auch webt sie Wonnen” (GSD, 4:152, 153). Wagner alludes to the same affective-verbal pairing again toward the end of the present note when he writes: “The love-filled breast swells out, the breast whose rapture [Wonne] does not exclude sorrow [Weh], just as rapture and sorrow, as purely human feelings, are ultimately one and the same.”

26. Wagner to Hans von Bülow, letter of 15 February 1852, in Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (New York, 1988), 245.

27. Text given here was first published in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 5 November 1852, and reprinted in GSD, 5:173-76.

28. Following this short introductory paragraph, Wagner divides his program note into two long paragraphs, the first outlining the subject of Coriolanus and his enforced conflict with fatherland and family, the second describing Beethoven’s composition of the subject. These two paragraphs (particularly the second) are broken up by a series of dashes. The format is maintained in this translation, since it appears to be Wagner’s purpose to represent in this way the continuity of the musical “narrative” within his text.

29. Wagner was perhaps aware that Beethoven’s overture was written for the 1804 neoclassical tragedy Coriolan by the Viennese dramatist Heinrich Josef von Collin (1771-1811), yet the confrontation between Caius Martius Coriolanus and his family is most likely being recalled here with reference to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (Act 5, scene 3). His generalized account here could equally well be derived from the common source for both dramas in Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans.

30. Throughout the program note Wagner continues to refer to the characters generically as Mann and Weib. The German terms allow him to suggest at one and the same time a generalized “male” and “female” principle (as in the foregoing characterization of the fundamental principles of “dance” and dance forms) and the specific roles of husband and wife. Since both Coriolanus’s wife, Virgilia, and especially his mother, Volumnia, are implicated in the confrontation identified here as the subject of Beethoven’s overture, Wagner makes use of the semantic fluidity of the German words Mann and Weib, meaning either “husband and wife” or “man and woman.” To that end, he avoids the possessive forms ihr Mann or sein Weib that would point specifically to the meanings “husband” and “wife.”

32. Richard Wagner, letter of 26 February 1852, in Sämtliche Briefe, ed. Gertrud Strobel, Werner Wolf et al. (Leipzig, 1967-), 4:298.

33. Ibid., letter of 20 March 1852, 319. See also Newman, Life of Richard Wagner, 2:179. Wagner refers in this letter to the remarkable Wirkungssymptome or “effective symptoms” produced by his music, anticipating a significant trend of later critical discourse on his music dramas concerned with the psychic and even physical “pathology” of their effects. From the beginning, Tannhäuser played a central role in this discourse.

35. The originally continuous text of this note has been broken into separate paragraphs according to the articulating dashes in the text corresponding to implied divisions of introduction—Allegro/exposition—development—recapitulation—coda.

37. As with the program notes to Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and Wagner’s own Tannhäuser Overture, Wagner gives his account of the musical “narrative” of the Holländer Overture in one continuous paragraph, articulated by dashes. Because the principal articulating dashes (following the introductory paragraph) clearly correspond to the principal musical divisions of exposition—development—coda in the overture, this text has been broken into three paragraphs.

38. Wagner’s original phrase, “in wilder Männertaten-Gier,” would mean more literally “in men’s wild impulse toward deeds.”

40. See Wagner’s letter to Franz Liszt of 30 May 1853. Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, 5:304.

41. Text from Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 16 vols. (Leipzig, 1911-16), 16:167-69 (henceforth SSD).

42. As in the libretto, Wagner avoids specific references to the Pope (or St. Peter’s), which would have created problems with the censors in much of 1840s Europe.

46. See Robert Bailey, ed., Wagner: Prelude and Transfiguration from “Tristan und Isolde” (New York, 1985), 28. The present translation is based on the text from SSD, 12:346-47.

47. Wagner’s original phrase here “im lang gegliederten Zuge” has a singular predicate (Zug, a line or trajectory), while the adjectival phrase modifying it (literally, “broadly articulated”) suggests the idea of multiple segments or subdivisions.

48. Liszt’s piano arrangement of the “Transfiguration” transferred the name Liebestod to this concluding portion of the opera, by which name it has long since been known. On Liszt’s arrangement, see Kenneth Hamilton’s essay in this volume.

50. Richard Wagner, Die Briefe Richard Wagners an Judith Gautier, ed. Willi Schuh (Zurich and Leipzig, 1936), 103. The letter, like the rest of Wagner’s correspondence with Gautier, was originally written in his “wretched French” (as he apologized to her), but is given in Schuh’s edition in German translations by Paul Amann. It differs only in minor details from the translation of the letter excerpt in SSD, 12:348-49.

51. Text first printed in the Bayreuther Blätter 8 (1885): 291; and 25 (1902): 168; reprinted in SSD, 12:347-49.

53. In the original, “in der Weise eines Trauerchores,” which could be construed either as “in the manner of a mourning chorus” or “of a tragic chorus” (i.e., the chorus of ancient Greek tragedy).

55. Wallstatt, a word whose prefix (signifying those slain in battle) relates it to Walküre as well as to Walhalla.

56. König Ludwig II. und Richard Wagner: Briefwechsel, ed. Otto Strobel, 4 vols. (Karlsruhe, 1936), 3:186-87.

57. Text first printed in the Bayreuther Blätter 8 (1885): 291; this translation is based on the text as given in SSD, 12:349.

58. The quoted lines are from the Grail scene of Act 1 of Parsifal, whose accompanying stage directions are included in somewhat altered, simplified form. In Parsifal, following Titurel’s injunction to reveal the Grail (“Enthüllet den Gral!”) a version of the Christian Eucharist is reenacted by the Grail knights.

^* Regarding the character of instrumental music from a similar point of view, [Ludwig] Tieck was moved to observe: “In these symphonies we perceive, as from out of the furthest depths, an insatiable yearning that wanders forth only to be turned back on itself, the inexpressible longing that nowhere finds fulfillment and so, in a consuming passion, casts itself into a current of madness, now struggling against all manner of notes, now overcome, now proclaiming its victory from amid the torrent, and now seeking rescue as it sinks deeper and deeper.” —It almost seems to us that Beethoven was moved by a similar conception of the nature of instrumental music in the conception of this symphony. [Footnote by Wagner, GSD, 2:61.]

Wagner Introduces Wagner (and Beethoven)

Program Notes Written for Concert Performances
by and of Richard Wagner
1846-1880
TRANSLATED, ANNOTATED, AND INTRODUCED
BY THOMAS S. GREY

Program

First Movement

Second Movement

Third Movement

Fourth Movement

Overture to Der fliegende Holländer

Prelude to Lohengrin

Entry of the Guests at the Wartburg

Tannhäuser’s Journey to Rome

Male Chorus and Bridal Procession

Wedding Music and Bridal Song

(a) Prelude (Liebestod)

(b) Concluding Movement (Transfiguration)

Prelude to Act 1

Prelude to Act 3

I. Prologue

II. Hagen’s Watch

III. Siegfried’s Death

IV. Conclusion of the Final Act

I. Siegmund’s Love Song

II. The Ride of the Valkyries

III. Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire

NOTES

Wagner Introduces Wagner (and Beethoven)

Program Notes Written for Concert Performancesby and of Richard Wagner1846-1880TRANSLATED, ANNOTATED, AND INTRODUCEDBY THOMAS S. GREY

Program

First Movement

Second Movement

Third Movement

Fourth Movement

Overture to Der fliegende Holländer

Prelude to Lohengrin

Entry of the Guests at the Wartburg

Tannhäuser’s Journey to Rome

Male Chorus and Bridal Procession

Wedding Music and Bridal Song

(a) Prelude (Liebestod)

(b) Concluding Movement (Transfiguration)

Prelude to Act 1

Prelude to Act 3

I. Prologue

II. Hagen’s Watch

III. Siegfried’s Death

IV. Conclusion of the Final Act

I. Siegmund’s Love Song

II. The Ride of the Valkyries

III. Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire

NOTES

Program Notes Written for Concert Performances
by and of Richard Wagner
1846-1880
TRANSLATED, ANNOTATED, AND INTRODUCED
BY THOMAS S. GREY