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Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) As a boy in Leipzig Richard Wagner was inspired by the example of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, while his literary ambitions drew strength from a study of Shakespeare. Study of music in Leipzig was followed in 1833 by appointments to various opera-houses, finally in Riga, which ended in March 1839, when debts forced him to take flight, sailing to London, but finally finding refuge and a possible realisation of ambitions in Paris. While the French Capital offered experience that proved fruitful, there were practical difficulties in earning a living. In 1842, however, Wagner succeeded, with the help of Meyerbeer, in securing a Staging of his opera Rienzi in Dresden, followed by Die fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) and appointment as music director at the Dresden Court Opera. He held this position until involvement with revolutionaries in 1849 forced him to seek refuge in Switzerland. Years spent there, interrupted by periods in Paris, Venice, and Vienna, brought growing achievement as a composer and the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria in Munich, where the great music dramas of his maturity were staged. Rivalries forced his departure, again to Switzerland, where, on news of the death of his wife, who had remained in Dresden, he was joined by Franz Liszt’s illegitimate daughter Cosima, the wife of the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow. A year before her divorce from von Bülow, she bore Wagner a son, Siegfried, and brought with her two daughters that Wagner had fathered. The couple married in 1870 and the following year Wagner turned his attention to the building of his own opera house in Bayreuth. It was in the new theatre that the first complete performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) was performed in 1876, to be followed in 1882 by the first Staging of Parsifal. Over the years Wagner had generally spent the winter in the warmer climate of Italy. He died in Venice in February 1883. After his escape from Dresden in 1849 Wagner had been helped in Switzerland by the banker Otto Wesendonck, with whose wife, Mathilde, the composer established a relationship, finally exposed by Wagner’s wife, Minna. This domestic intrigue lay, in part, behind the story of doomed lovers in Tristan und Isolde, in which the hero, Tristan, betrays his king and benefactor, King Marke, whose bride, Isolde, he has escorted over the water to her new husband. Their love is brought about by a love potion, administered, during the course of their journey, by Brangäne, Isolde’s servant. The harmonically innovative Prelude to Act I opens with motifs associated with longing and mystery, the love of Tristan and Isolde, to be realised only in death. Tristan’s motif is heard and the thematic element associated with their gaze, as they look at one another in love and not enmity. The Prelude weaves into its texture also the love potion and death potion motifs, the potion administered by Brangäne that is the cause of their love. The second act of the opera is set in the grounds of King Marke’s castle in Cornwall on a summer night. The King himself has just left on a hunting expedition and Tristan and Isolde are together, their love only interrupted by the sound of Brangäne’s warning, as she watches from the tower for the return of the King. The return of King Marke, with Melot, who has betrayed Tristan, leads to the fatal wounding of Tristan, who is held in Isolde’s arm as he dies. She falls insensible to the ground, and later, as she wakes, Brangäne teils her that she has revealed the truth about the love potion to the King, who forgives his intended bride. It is to no avail and in her mystical farewell, Isolde, disregarding all eise, wishes only to join Tristan with love in death, Liebestod. Her hope is fulfilled as she sinks slowly on to her lover’s body.
