"but here he was imitated and caricatured ... Wagner is not a musician, he is a disease."" Even those who, like Debussy, opposed Wagner (""this old poisoner"") could not deny his influence. Indeed, Debussy was one of many composers, including Tchaikovsky, who felt the need to break with Wagner precisely because his influence was so unmistakable and overwhelming. ""Golliwogg's Cakewalk"" from Debussy's ""Children's Corner"" piano suite contains a deliberately tongue-in-cheek quotation from the opening bars of ""Tristan"". Others who proved resistant to Wagner's operas included Gioachino Rossini, who said ""Wagner has wonderful moments, and dreadful quarters of an hour."" In"
"The leitmotif was also a major feature of the opera ""The Immortal Hour"" by the English composer Rutland Boughton. His constantly recurrent, memorably tuneful leitmotifs contributed in no small way to the widespread popularity of the opera. The critic Theodor W. Adorno, in his book ""In Search of Wagner"" (written in the 1930s), expresses the opinion that the entire concept of the leitmotif is flawed. The motif cannot be both the bearer of expression and a musical 'gesture', because that reduces emotional content to a mechanical process. He notes that 'even in Wagner's own day the public made a crude"
"under the direction of Ferdinand Hiller. Another Wagner detractor was the French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, who wrote to Hiller after attending Wagner's Paris concert on 25 January 1860 at which Wagner conducted the overtures to ""Der fliegende Holländer"" and ""Tannhäuser"", the preludes to ""Lohengrin"" and ""Tristan und Isolde"", and six other extracts from ""Tannhäuser"" and ""Lohengrin"": ""I had imagined that I was going to meet music of an innovative kind but was astonished to find a pale imitation of Berlioz ... I do not like all the music of Berlioz while appreciating his marvellous understanding of certain instrumental effects ..."
"as ""a deeply-felt and eloquently expressed performance...[Beecham] gets to the heart of Brahms's serious Germanic inspiration in such revelatory fashion."" In his memoirs he made no mention of any Brahms performance after the year 1909. Beecham was a great Wagnerian, despite his frequent expostulation about the composer's length and repetitiousness: ""We've been rehearsing for two hours – and we're still playing the same bloody tune!"" Beecham conducted all the works in the regular Wagner canon with the exception of ""Parsifal"", which he presented at Covent Garden but never with himself in the pit. The chief music critic of ""The Times"""
"of Europe's leading composers. Wagner, however, was far from pleased. He was unnerved by an incident involving the kaiser, when the 79-year-old Wilhelm stumbled and almost fell over a doorstep, and was very critical of two of his main singers, Niemann and Betz, whom he deemed ""theatre parasites"" and said he would never employ again – a view he later revised. Among the scenes that he felt had not come off were those on the mountain-top: ""I'll change that some day when I produce ""Walküre"" in heaven, at the right hand of God, and the old gent and I are"
"by Wagner addressed as ""Klappern im Geschirr der Perioden"". Composers such as Bellini and Donizetti knew that certain forms, usually periods of eight measures, were to be filled with music. Occasionally, while the first half of a period was composed with inspiration, the second half was added with mechanical routine. Liszt corrected this by modifying the melody, the bass and - in cases - the harmonies. Many of Liszt's results were remarkable. The ""Sonnambula-fantasy"" for example, a concert piece full of charming melodies, could certainly not have been composed either by Bellini or by Liszt alone. Outstanding examples are also"
"in a letter to Ludwig he denounced the singers Albert Niemann and Franz Betz as ""theatrical parasites"" and complained that Richter had not got a single tempo correct. Months later, Cosima records, his attitude towards the productions was ""Never again, never again!"". After the conclusion of the festival and the departure of the guests, Wagner and Cosima left with the children for Venice, where they remained until December. The festival had accumulated a large financial deficit; this, and Wagner's deep artistic dissatisfaction, precluded the possibility of any repeat in the near future. Wagner's mood was such that he seriously contemplated"
"of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who thought the work ""divinely composed"", and that of the French newspaper ""Le Figaro"", which called the music ""the dream of a lunatic"". Amongst the disillusioned were Wagner's friend and disciple Friedrich Nietzsche, who, having published his eulogistic essay ""Richard Wagner in Bayreuth"" before the festival as part of his ""Untimely Meditations"", was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as Wagner's pandering to increasingly exclusivist German nationalism; his breach with Wagner began at this time. The festival firmly established Wagner as an artist of European, and indeed world, importance: attendees included Kaiser Wilhelm I,"
"six hours (including intermissions). One legend is that, fearful of the audience departing, Wagner stopped the clock above the stage. In his later memoirs, ""Mein Leben"", Wagner recalled: No subsequent experience has given me feelings even remotely similar to those I had on this day of the first performance of ""Rienzi"". The only too well-founded anxiety as to their success has so dominated my feelings at all subsequent first performances of my works that I could never really enjoy them or take much notice of the way the audience was behaving.[...] The initial success of ""Rienzi"" was no doubt assured"
"and Nazism, the performance of his music in the State of Israel has been a source of controversy. Prose works by Wagner Other sources Richard Wagner Wilhelm Richard Wagner (; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, ""music dramas""). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber"
"who were present greeted the work with acclaim, recognising in it evidence of Wagner's genius. One dissident voice was presented by the critic of the ""Süddeutsche Presse"", who was scathing about the dearth of moral standards expressed in the story and futhermore found the whole experience tedious: the first act was, for the most part, ""wearyingly long-winded""; the second act only occasionally sprang to life, while in the third it was ""barely possible to hear isolated shrieks from the singers through the tumult of the orchestra"". The overall effect was ""not agreeable ... permeated with what one can only call"
"find that the music had no pleasing rhythm or melody. Nietzsche claimed that Wagner’s music was a mere means to enhance theatrical posing and gesturing. Wagner was more of an actor than a composer. Nietzsche wants music to be cheerful, profound, unique, wanton, tender, roguish, and graceful. These qualities are lacking in German music, except for the works of Bach, Handel, and also in Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. He praises Liszt, Chopin, Peter Gast, and Rossini, as well as all Venetian music. The Intermezzo ends with Nietzsche's poem “Venice.” 1. The concept of Wagner’s “unending melody” is used to designate what"
"the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. His tragic romances ""Manon"" (1884) and ""Werther"" (1892) have weathered changes in musical fashion and are still widely performed today. The conservative music critics who had rejected Berlioz detected a new threat in the form of Richard Wagner, the German composer whose revolutionary music dramas were causing controversy throughout Europe. When Wagner presented a revised version of his opera ""Tannhäuser"" in Paris in 1861, it provoked so much hostility that the run was cancelled after only three performances. Deteriorating relations between France and Germany only made matters worse and after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, there"
"1853 (from consumption). Although Uhlig's letters to Wagner have not survived, there are nearly 100 letters from Wagner to Uhlig from 1849 to 1853, many of them very lengthy. In these the composer is often very frank about his own moods and depression, and frequently abusive of others, including mutual friends (e.g. accusing his former secretary Ritter of onanism) Uhlig in part repaid Wagner by a series of articles, published in 1850, caustically attacking the opera ""Le prophète"" by Wagner's supposed enemy, Giacomo Meyerbeer. In a series of six essays in the ""Neue Zeitschrift für Musik"", entitled 'Contemporary Reflections', Uhlig"
"Richard Wagner Wilhelm Richard Wagner (; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, ""music dramas""). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the ""Gesamtkunstwerk"" (""total work of art""), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic,"
"""Parsifal"" marked a weakening of Wagner's abilities. The critic Eduard Hanslick gave his opinion that ""The Third act may be counted the most unified and the most atmospheric. It is not the richest musically,"" going on to note ""And Wagner's creative powers? For a man of his age and his method they are astounding ... [but] It would be foolishness to declare that Wagner's fantasy, and specifically his musical invention, has retained the freshness and facility of yore. One cannot help but discern sterility and prosaicism, together with increasing longwindedness."" The conductor Felix Weingartner found that: ""The Flowermaidens' costumes showed"
"of four Wagner tubas gives the overall sound a dusky mass."" He added, ""But what is truly extraordinary about the 22-minute score is the way it grips attention. Insomnia is not, for most people, a pleasurable sensation. Here, though, it is, as Salonen, through an exceptional command of a large orchestra, explores the more distant and sometimes ecstatic reaches of the involuntarily alert mind."" Stephen Johnson of ""BBC Music Magazine"" also praised the work, writing: Arnold Whittall of ""Gramophone"" was more critical, however, remarking, ""The 21-minute, single-movement work ""Insomnia"" displays a similar lack of differentiation, the great washes of sound"
"that the short was the whole of Wagner's 17-hour Opera Cycle ""Der Ring des Nibelungen"" (The Ring of the Nibelung, which he mispronounced as ""The Rings of Nibble-lung"" in his Brooklynese accent), condensed into only 7 minutes. He also pronounced Richard Wagner as it would be pronounced in English (""wag-ner""), instead of its usual German pronunciation ""Rikard Vagner"". Besides the second opera of Ring, ""Die Walküre"" (""The Valkyrie"") and the third opera of the Ring, ""Siegfried"", other Wagnerian music present in the cartoon comes from ""Tannhäuser"", ""The Flying Dutchman"" and ""Rienzi"". Specific excerpts include: The cartoon is widely regarded as"
"to avoid consonant harmonies as well as natural modulations, and had to take care that his music was by no means pleasing. Instead, listeners had to become acquainted with richness of dissonances, horrible modulations and a rhythmical chaos of the middle voices. (Of course, neither Liszt nor Wagner had in their writings claimed anything of the kind) To calm down the debate, Wagner, in the ""Journal des Débats"" of February 22, 1860, published an open letter to Berlioz. He explained, he had written his essay ""The Artwork of the Future"" under the impression of the failed revolution of 1848. From"
"the Symphonies of Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann, however magnificent and beautiful they were, could only be regarded as the works of epigones {i.e. after Beethoven]. ""See also Music of the Future for additional background."" To improve future debates, Brendel made several suggestions; in particular, that in future, use of the term"" ""Zukunftsmusik"" ""('Music of the Future') should be avoided. The term had been derived from Wagner's essay ""The Artwork of the Future"", but none fully subscribed to the ideas Wagner set out there about his ideals for music drama. Wagner's exaggerated and combative style meant that many whom he had"
"composer's works. Stewart Spencer, writing in ""Wagner Remembered"", described Chamberlain's edition of Wagner letters as ""one of the most egregious attempts in the history of musicology to misrepresent an artist by systematically censoring his correspondence."" In particular, Wagner's lively sex life presented a problem for Chamberlain. Wagner had abandoned his first wife Minna, had an open affair with the married woman Mathilde Wesendonck and had started sleeping with his second wife Cosima while she was still married to her first husband. Chamberlain in his Wagner biography went to considerable lengths to distort the Master's love-life such as implying that Wagner's"
"opera. Sometimes you get lucky and you play Strauss’s Elektra which is maybe two hours long, but if you have a Wagner opera then it’s six hours long. My wife was alone taking care of our son all the time, and we both realized something had to change.” . . . “I think our woodwinds our tough to beat,” says Mr. Bouriakov confidently but not arrogantly, “and our brass too. Our combined winds are the best of any orchestra I’ve played in. Both Tom [Hooten] and Andrew [Bain] are amazing players. I was blown away the first time I heard"
"an encore an extract from ""Tristan und Isolde"", which divided the audience between applause and protest. A concert with works by Wagner was announced for 18 June 2012 in Tel Aviv; however these plans were abandoned after protests. Wagner controversies The German composer Richard Wagner was a controversial figure during his lifetime, and has continued to be so after his death. Even today he is associated in the minds of many with Nazism and his operas are often thought to extol the virtues of German nationalism. The writer and Wagner scholar Bryan Magee has written: I sometimes think there are"
"introduced Covent Garden audiences who had rarely if ever heard them to ""Così fan tutte"", ""Der Schauspieldirektor"" and ""Die Entführung aus dem Serail""; he also regularly programmed ""The Magic Flute"", ""Don Giovanni"" and ""The Marriage of Figaro"". He considered the best of Mozart's piano concertos to be ""the most beautiful compositions of their kind in the world"", and he played them many times with Betty Humby-Beecham and others. Beecham's attitude towards 19th-century German repertoire was equivocal. He frequently disparaged Beethoven, Wagner and others, but regularly conducted their works, often with great success. He observed, ""Wagner, though a tremendous genius, gorged"
"the Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, Anton Bruckner, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Wagner was far from satisfied with the Festival; Cosima recorded that months later, his attitude towards the productions was ""Never again, never again!"" Moreover, the festival finished with a deficit of about 150,000 marks. The expenses of Bayreuth and of Wahnfried meant that Wagner still sought additional sources of income by conducting or taking on commissions such as the ""Centennial March"" for America, for which he received $5000. Following the first Bayreuth Festival, Wagner began work on ""Parsifal"", his final opera. The composition took four years,"
"two great composers of the era who wrote their major works in other genres yet also composed operas: Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. Schubert wrote over a dozen operas, mostly in the ""Singspiel"" style. Hardly any were performed during the composer's lifetime. Schumann only wrote one opera, ""Genoveva"", first staged in Leipzig in 1850. Though praised by Liszt, it failed to win lasting success. The verdict on both these composer's operas has generally been that, though they contain excellent music, they have too many dramatic weaknesses to be acclaimed as great stage works. Richard Wagner was one of the most"
"and notable works. A few examples: In 1880, German composer Richard Wagner encountered difficulty in getting ""Parsifal"" performed in Bayreuth. Annoyed because of his large expenditures on the Festival Theater, the venue at which he had intended to hold the performance, and bureaucratic opposition, he said in a letter to American dentist Newell S. Jenkins: ""It seems to me as if, in my hopes of regarding Germany and her future, my patience would very soon be exhausted."" In a display of his notorious ego, Wagner proposed that if an American organization would give him $1,000,000, he would agree to come"
"Nietzsche regards as the chaotic degeneration of rhythmic feeling. This tendency results in a dangerous use of music to merely produce a dramatic effect. 2. Wagner’s music tries to produce a physically jarring effect on the Biedermeier audience. Mozart’s opera ‘’Don Giovanni’’, in contrast, had a serious music that was cheerful and tender. Music expresses the decline of a culture. Wagner’s music, in its relation to old Germanic and Scandinavian myths and sagas, is the song of a dying swan. Nietzsche admitted that he had mistakenly thought that Schopenhauer’s philosophy was the result of a strong attachment to life that"
"developmental in its treatment of leitmotifs. Wagner took 26 years from writing the first draft of a libretto in 1848 until he completed ""Götterdämmerung"" in 1874. The ""Ring"" takes about 15 hours to perform and is the only undertaking of such size to be regularly presented on the world's stages. Wagner's final opera, ""Parsifal"" (1882), which was his only work written especially for his Bayreuth Festspielhaus and which is described in the score as a """"Bühnenweihfestspiel"""" (""festival play for the consecration of the stage""), has a storyline suggested by elements of the legend of the Holy Grail. It also carries"
"under Wagner's spell, but he took from the earlier composer a richness of orchestration and a fluency in treatment of musical themes. Although when he chose Massenet could write noisy and dissonant scenes – in 1885 Bernard Shaw called him ""one of the loudest of modern composers"" – much of his music is soft and delicate. Hostile critics have seized on this characteristic, but the article on Massenet in the 2001 edition of ""Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians"" observes that in the best of his operas this sensual side ""is balanced by strong dramatic tension (as in ""Werther""), theatrical"
"suspicion. Cosima's demeanour as the festival's hostess was described by a young American visitor in fulsome terms: ""Mme Wagner is exceedingly gracious and affable ... a magnificent-looking woman, a perfect queen ..."" The festival began on 13 August and lasted until 30th. It consisted of three full ""Ring"" cycles, all under the baton of Hans Richter. At the end, critical reactions ranged between that of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who thought the entire work ""divinely composed"", and that of the French newspaper ""Le Figaro"" who called the music ""the dream of a lunatic"". Wagner himself was far from satisfied;"
"rehearsal. Ludwig was unmoved; he denounced Wagner, sacked Richter, appointed another conductor, Franz Wüllner, and rescheduled the premiere for 22 September. Wagner was refused admission to the rehearsals at the theatre, and returned, angry and defeated, to his home in Triebschen. Accounts differ as to the success or otherwise of the Munich premiere. Osborne maintains that the performance was successful, as does Holman, while Oliver Hilmes in his biography of Cosima describes it as ""an artistic disaster"". Cosima's diary entries for 24 and 27 September note that the performance was portrayed in the Munich press as a ""succès d'estime"", or"
"Der Ring des Nibelungen ' (The Ring of the Nibelung), WWV 86, is a cycle of four German-language epic music dramas composed by Richard Wagner. The works are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the ""Nibelungenlied"". The composer termed the cycle a ""Bühnenfestspiel"" (stage festival play), structured in three days preceded by a (""preliminary evening""). It is often referred to as the Ring Cycle""""', ""Wagner's Ring"", or simply ""The Ring"". Wagner wrote the libretto and music over the course of about twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874. The four parts that constitute the ""Ring"" cycle are, in"