The Program
RICHARD WAGNER
Overture to Tannhäuser
Tannhäuser is among Wagner's first mature operas and,
along with Der fliegende Holländer and
Lohengrin, is one of his three earlier works still
frequently performed. Like most of Wagner's canon,
Tannhäuser—which tells the tale of its eponymous hero, a
13th-century knight and minstrel struggling with the competing
merits of sacred and profane love—is based on medieval Germanic
legend and employs a libretto written by the composer. As the
curtain rises, we learn that Tannhäuser, despite having won the
love and devotion of the virginal Elisabeth, has spent the last
year a "captive" in Venusberg, a steamy mountain pleasure palace in
which the knight has been enjoying the rather less pure
ministrations of Venus, the fallen goddess of love. Over the course
of the opera, Tannhäuser quits Venusberg to seek redemption and
true love with Elisabeth, joins a pilgrimage to Rome in hopes of
atoning for his sins, and dies of grief after he discovers that
Elisabeth has herself died of a broken heart.
The overture introduces the opera's main themes and musically
captures the work's central conflict between the virtuous and
spiritual fulfillment of faith and love (represented by the
"Pilgrims' Chorus," the warm, stirring chorale that begins the
overture) and the sensuous pleasures of the flesh (represented by
the surging, swelling frenzy of the Venusberg music, speeding
forward with scurrying strings and punctuated with percussion). As
the overture progresses, these two musical ideas become
increasingly tangled, competing and then intertwining to form an
articulate musical illustration that requires no words to
communicate Tannhäuser's dilemma. In 1873, at the request of
orchestra musicians performing the overture in Zurich, the composer
wrote the following synopsis of what the music represents:
At first the orchestra introduces us to the "Pilgrims' Chorus"
alone. It approaches, swells to a mighty outpouring, and finally
passes into the distance. As night falls … a rosy mist swirls
upward, and the blurred motions of a fearsomely voluptuous dance
are revealed ... This is the seductive magic of the Venusberg.
Lured by the tempting vision, Tannhäuser draws near. It is Venus
herself who appears to him ... His heart and senses glow, the blood
in his veins takes fire, an irresistible attraction draws him
nearer, and he steps before the goddess with his exultant chant of
love … Venus … embraces him with fiery passion ... The storm
subsides. Only a soft, sensuous moan lingers in the air over the
spot where the unholy ecstasy held sway. Yet already the morning
dawns: From the far distance, the "Pilgrims' Chorus" is heard
again. As it draws ever nearer and day repulses night, those
lingering moans are transfigured into a murmur of joy so that at
last, when the sun rises in splendor and the "Pilgrims' Chorus"
proclaims salvation to all the world, the joyous murmur swells to
the mightiest, noblest rejoicing.
—Jay Goodwin
RICHARD WAGNER
Wesendonck Lieder
In May 1849, after a brief tenure as music director of the Royal
Saxon Court in Dresden, Wagner fled the city when a leftist
uprising—which the composer actively supported—was crushed by the
military and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Forced into
exile, Wagner and his first wife, Minna, left Germany for Paris,
and eventually settled in Zurich. Stranded in Switzerland with no
financial resources to speak of, Wagner was lucky in 1852 to
befriend the successful textile merchant Otto Wesendonck—and his
striking young wife Mathilde, an amateur poet—who extended the
composer generous loans and, beginning in 1857, provided Wagner and
his wife with lodging in a small house on his estate.
The nature of the relationship that eventually developed between
Richard and Mathilde has become the subject of much presumption and
debate. What is certain is that the two became infatuated with one
another, and their friendship/affair provided inspiration for some
of the composer's greatest music. The relationship likewise
stimulated Mathilde's creative juices, one result of which was the
text for the Wesendonck Lieder of late 1857 and early
1858.
In the melodramatic, all-devouring emotion of their text and the
yearning, chromatic intensity of their musical language, these five
songs point directly toward Wagner's ultimate paean to forbidden
and transformative love, Tristan und Isolde. Indeed, at
the same time the composer was working on the Wesendonck
Lieder, struggling with his own feelings for Mathilde and
taking intellectual refuge in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, he
temporarily put aside his ongoing work on Der Ring des
Nibelungen and threw himself into Tristan, which
consumed the next two years of his life. Wagner even went so far as
to call two of the Wesendonck Lieder—"Im Treibhaus" and
"Träume," specifically—"studies for Tristan und Isolde."
(Their music can be heard in the opera in the Prelude to Act III
and the beginning of Tristan's dying monologue, and in the great
love duet at the end of Act II, respectively.)
Leaving aside their relationship to the composer's dramatic work,
however, perhaps the most profound effect the Wesendonck
Lieder leave on the listener is regret that Wagner left us
nothing else in this genre. These are powerful, technically
accomplished, and beautiful songs. They display the full measure of
Wagner's tremendous gifts of melody, harmony, and seamless text
setting, as well as his unmatched ability to channel human emotion
through music.
Though they are most often performed today with orchestral
accompaniment, the Wesendonck Lieder were originally
written for voice and piano. Wagner supplied an orchestration only
for "Träume"; the other four songs were orchestrated with the
composer's approval by Austrian conductor Felix Mottl.
—Jay Goodwin
RICHARD STRAUSS
Eine Alpensinfonie, Op. 64
Childhood experiences have a way of shaping people, retaining
and often gaining personal significance even as age clouds their
details. For Strauss, one such memory was a late summer's hike
through the Bavarian Alps as a 14-year-old in 1878. Writing to
fellow aspiring composer Ludwig Thuille afterwards, he described
the trek as beginning "at two in the morning with handcart, five
hour ascent; as a result of losing our way, a steep, five-hour
backtrack downhill off the path; 12-hour march in all, towards the
end soaked to the skin with rain and storm. Then an unplanned stop
for the night in a farm house … The next day I illustrated the
whole outing on the piano. Naturally, it was all monstrous tone
painting and rubbish (à la Wagner)."
Over the next 20 years, Strauss built his career by making an art
of monstrous tone painting, earning acclaim for works such as
Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegelslustige
Streiche, Also sprach Zarathustra, and
EinHeldenleben. Along the way, he emphatically
reversed his opinion of Wagner and eventually turned his own
attentions to staged works. Largely leaving behind the concert hall
in favor of the opera house, Strauss quickly proved himself a
visionary and popular dramatist, sparking controversy with the
likes of Salome and Elektra, then achieving
massive success with Der Rosenkavalier.
Though he would live until 1949, Strauss returned to the grandeur
and bombast of the symphonic poem-the form that made him
famous-just once after he found success in the theater. For what
would become Eine Alpensinfonie, his last and most
extravagant work in the genre, Strauss revisited childhood
memories. Despite surely augmenting reality with an extra dollop of
drama, this musical depiction of a 24-hour Alpine climb-both ascent
and descent-clearly follows the outline of the composer's teenaged
mountainous escapade in Bavaria.
Composed between 1911 and 1915, Eine Alpensinfonie is
scored for an enormous orchestra of some 125-150 players, including
offstage brass, a menagerie of alternate wind instruments, harps,
celesta, organ, and a battery of percussion. Strauss was always a
master of orchestration, able to use these varied forces to create
a vivid image of just about anything he chose in the listener's
mind. In this respect, Eine Alpensinfonie is some of his
finest work. A single sprawling movement, the work is divided into
22 connected sections, each with a descriptive title helpfully
supplied by the composer, and it is quite easy (and fun) to follow
along with the mountaineers' progress throughout the day. It takes
just the minimum of imagination for the various scenes—a brilliant
sunrise, running streams, a waterfall, flowers, the sharp glare of
sun on ice, tenuous balance on treacherous footing, the drenching
of a sudden storm, and the final return to the foot of the mountain
as the sun falls below the horizon—to materialize before your
eyes.
For Strauss, however, there was more to this work than the literal
ascent of a mountain. In 1911, early in his work on Eine
Alpensinfonie, Strauss received news that Gustav Mahler, his
friend and artistic confederate, had died. In a state of mourning
and contemplation, Strauss looked for meaning and guidance, as he
often did, in the writings of Nietzsche—in this case, the essay
Der Antichrist (roughly, "Anti-Christianity"), in which
Nietzsche argues for achieving one's goals through inner strength
and willpower without reliance on religious belief.
The following day, he recorded his thoughts in his diary: "The
death of this aspiring, idealistic, energetic artist [is] a grave
loss ... Mahler, the Jew, could achieve elevation [only by
converting to] Christianity. As an old man, the hero Wagner
returned to it under the influence of Schopenhauer. It is clear to
me that the German nation will achieve new creative energy only by
liberating itself from Christianity." Though Strauss eventually
abandoned his plan to expand and make explicit the work's
philosophical undercurrents, Eine Alpensinfonie remains
the self-affirming testament of a successful man at the height of
his achievement and popularity. It is a musical representation, the
composer wrote, of "moral purification through one's own strength,
emancipation through work, and the adoration of eternal, glorious
nature."
—Jay Goodwin