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MOS Composer of the Month: Previous Page, Next Page, Index |
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Composer of the Month - April, 2004 Richard Wagner, 1813-1883
Wagner was born to opera. His parents were in a theatrical company, so the dramatic environment seemed very natural to him. He studied music, but taught himself composition by studying opera scores and Beethoven symphonies. Rejecting the pattern set by the Italian and French composers and followed by Mozart, Wagner set his operas in German. Instead of a sequence of arias programmed to elicit applause, he invented the form of leitmotif. With leitmotif (leading motive) identifiable phrases of music are associated with characters or basic themes, such as good and evil. As the story unfolds, these phrases are interwoven with the singers and the orchestra. One result is that the music, in a very real sense, tells the story. Wagner seemed to believe that if he was committed to the composition of an opera, his audience should be committed to hearing it. That is, he loved long operas. His magnum opus, Ring of the Nibelung, was a four-opera set, three of which ran over four hours each. Listeners were polarized by them—there is very little middle ground among Wagner reviewers. Present at the first performance of the complete Ring were such notable musical figures as Tchaikovsky, Gounod, Grieg, Saint-Saens, and Liszt. Tchaikovsky wrote in a review that while Wagner's work might be debatable, it is not forgettable. Some of the music is transcendental and some is inconsequential, depending on which reviewer you happen to be reading. Politically, he was a chameleon, having been labeled anarchist, socialist, fascist, and nationalist, to say nothing of being called vegetarian and anti-semitic. He was forced to leave Germany in 1849 for Switzerland as a result of his participation in a failed revolution. Even then he managed to keep his life in turmoil. In 1864 he was rescued from debtors' prison by the King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig even set him up with his own opera theatre in Munich. There, he fell in love with the daughter of pianist Franz Liszt, and the scandal that resulted from her abandoning her own marriage to marry Wagner forced him to leave Bavaria, returning to Switzerland for a while until the furor subsided. He eventually returned to Germany, where he lived the remainder of his life. The two Wagner choruses presented in the MOS Spring Concert "Music of the Stage," Bridal March from Lohengrin and Pilgrim's Chorus from Tannhauser are both from the early part of Wagner's career, before 1849. The operas were slow to achieve the recognition that has finally been accorded them. The MOS hopes that the audience enjoys them as much as we have enjoyed preparing them. References: Click here for more information about the MOS Composer of the Month feature
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