Music City Program # 5

Beginnings and Endings: Richard in Dresden

Hello and welcome to another edition in the series “Music City Dresden“ from Deutsche Welle Radio. This is Michael Rothe. For the first time on these programs, a native son of is our subject. His musical career had a meteoric rise in Dresden, but at a later point he fled the city as persona non grata. In this half hour we’ll see how the wheel of fortune made a full turn in just seven years for .

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) : (conclusion) 2:40 Philharmonic Cond: LC 00173, Deutsche Grammophon 00289 474 5022, track 7

Quote: There was a commotion in the city, practically a revolution! Four times they created a tumult calling for me. People assure me that the success that Meyerbeer had here with his ‘Huguenots’ was nothing in comparison to what I’m enjoying here with my ‘Rienzi’.

It was an unheard-of triumph that Richard Wagner scored when his Rienzi premiered on October 20, 1842, at Dresden’s new opera house built by . Thus the boast in the letter we quoted, which he sent to Paris – where a year or so before he’d been scratching out a meager existence with occasional jobs and no hope of getting the he’d already written performed. Misery had been a constant companion for the young man of thirty. But his return to his homeland brought quite a change of fortune. It was the expectation of finally getting his operas staged that drew him back to Saxony in April of 1842. The director of the Dresden opera, Baron von Lüttichau, had held out the prospect of putting on his Rienzi there, and expressed an interest in The Flying Dutchman. The homecoming for Wagner and his wife Minna came after peripatetic years taking them from Würzburg to Magdeburg and and finally to Paris, always just a step ahead of the creditors; a time of more failures than successes. The huge hit that Rienzi turned out to be in Dresden, as directed by Court Kapellmeister Karl Gottlieb Reissiger, took even Wagner by surprise. More than once during rehearsals he’d cast a worried eye at his watch; in fact the production wound up lasting a full six hours. But the audience stayed with him to the tragic end of the Roman tribune’s dramatic story, and then – after -2-

some moments of stunned silence – broke out into loud and lengthy ovations. Wagner himself wanted to make some severe cuts in the interest of shortening the opera, but the public and particularly his star singer in the title role, Josef Tichatchek, would have none of it. “Not a single note!” proclaimed the , saying, “It is too heavenly!“ Tichatchek and the equally famous soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient contributed substantially to Wagner’s first great success. In later years, Frau Schröder-Devrient was not only a frequent and loyal Wagner collaborator, but also something of a financial savior. She also sang the role of Senta at the premiere of The Flying Dutchman. That, too, was in Dresden, in January 1843, after plans for a Berlin production fell through. It was specifically for her that Wagner transposed downward a central scene in the opera, Senta’s Ballad.

Richard Wagner Der fliegende Holländer: Senta’s Ballad (beginning) 1:35 Anja Silja (soprano) BBC Chorus Cond: LC 00110, Angel 763 344 2, (CD 2 Track 2)

Rienzi’s huge success was not repeated with The Flying Dutchman. The Dresden public didn’t take as easily to the story with its dark Nordic elements, a story about a modern eternal wanderer who can be saved from his earthly ordeal only through a woman’s unconditional love. But Wagner’s lot had improved significantly nonetheless. After being named Court Kapellmeister in February 1843, he assumed daily duties at the court. For the first time in his life, he found himself in a position of financial security. It was his to keep or to lose. Wagner’s seven years in Dresden are a high point in the city’s musical history. He reached the goal that had been denied to his predecessor : ending the primacy of Italian opera there, and by extension, in all of . And while Rienzi had been in the tradition of French , with the other works of his Dresden period, Wagner created a new genre of German Romantic opera. The innovative power and significance of The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser and gradually came to be recognized by the opera world far beyond Saxony. Wagner helped his own cause with his charismatic personality. He knew how to convince the best singers and musicians to work for him, and at the highest degree of enthusiasm. Wagner’s conducting style was quite personal as well. It wasn’t simply a matter of beating time with a stick. He’d use the gamut of facial expressions and gestures to draw wondrous sounds from his “magic harp,“ which is what he called the orchestra that still exists today as the . With his hands and baton, he’d “draw“ musical themes like pictures, often singing individual lines, and wouldn’t hesitate to make extreme deviations from the tempi in the score to fit the mood he was seeking. These habits -3-

and techniques put immense pressure on the performers. They didn’t always react kindly to the challenge. And Wagner was determined to make radical changes in the whole musical apparatus of the Dresden court. That had a way of splitting the public into opposing camps. Wagner’s legacy continues to polarize to this very day. Tannhäuser was his first opera composed in and destined for Dresden. The story of the Song Contest at the Wartburg Castle premiered in October 1845. With its medieval pageantry and Christian-Catholic aura, the opera played right into the sensibilities of the Catholic Saxon court at Dresden but took some time to get a friendly reception from local audiences. For Wagner himself, the crux of the matter lay in a certain inadequacy of voices. The public wanted beautiful ones, but Wagner wanted something more.

Quote: My own conception tended toward the opposite: above all, I demanded an actor, and a singer who would only be an aid to the actor. Of course, this also required a public who would demand the same along with me.

With Tannhäuser the composer was far ahead of his public. In this key scene, the title character sings the praises of sensual love and earns the scorn of the “virtuous” society assembled at the Wartburg.

Richard Wagner Tannhäuser: Act 2, Scene 4 3:34 Klaus König Other soloists Bavarian Radio Chorus Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Cond: LC 00542 EMI, CDS 7 47296 8 (D 2, Track 5)

Wagner’s work in Dresden went beyond creating and producing his own operas. Though he neglected his other official duty of supplying music for church services, he made a good name for himself as an interpreter of other composers’ operas, namely those of Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Spohr and Spontini. Performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which – incredibly – had been a bust at its previous performance in Dresden, tied in with Wagner’s ambitious ideas about a pedagogy of art and public education. For the concert he mustered a well-rehearsed orchestra and a chorus of three hundred. With the public it was a great success and for Wagner, a personal triumph. It was the beginning of the era of the star conductor. As director of the male choral society called the Dresdner Liedertafel, literally the “Dresden Song Banquet,“ Wagner also had a hand in Dresden’s civic music life. He created a -4-

monumental choral work for a choir festival held in 1843 in Dresden’s Frauenkirche, the Church of Our Lady – that symbol of Dresden’s cultural revival in our own time. For the performance of this work, “Love Feast of the Apostles,“ Wagner called for no less than twelve hundred singers and an orchestra of one hundred, brilliantly exploiting the reverberant acoustics of the fabled church’s dome. To this day, Wagnerians are wont to overlook this half-hour choral work that he set to a religious text of his own; Wagner himself seemed to dismiss it at one point, calling it his “passion play.“ To give you a more complete picture of Wagner’s Dresden years, here’s a portion of that musical step-child, Liebesmahl der Apostel.

Richard Wagner Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (conclusion) 4:55 Dresden Philharmonic Chorus Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra Cond: Michel Plasson LC 06646, EMI CLASSICS 556 358-2, (Track 6)

The final chapter of Wagner’s Dresden years has more to do with politics than with music. 1848 was a year of revolution in much of Europe, Germany included. Wagner enthusiastically joined the democratic opposition and published articles calling for “the fight against ruling society.“ As a result, he was persona non grata in courtly circles and was dismissed from his official post. Initially, revolutionary forces seemed to gain the upper hand. Representatives from all parts of Germany convened in Frankfurt to form the “Parliament of St. Paul’s Church.“ Saxony’s legislature gave a yes-vote to the liberal constitution hammered out there. But the euphoria was short-lived. Throughout Europe, the reformist factions were beaten back, not without bloodshed. In Saxony, King Frederic Augustus II dissolved the state legislature and installed supporters of the monarchy in positions of power. That provoked armed resistance throughout Saxony. Bloody clashes broke out in Dresden on May 5, 1849. Wagner later tried to downplay his role in these events, but he was in fact deeply involved, alongside other luminaries such as the architect Gottfried Semper and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. We’ll never know the full extent of Wagner’s personal involvement – whether he helped arm hand grenades or exhorted the masses with fiery speeches on the barricades. We do know that at some point he climbed the tower of the Church of the Holy Cross to observe the action from a safe vantage point. Perhaps more than observe, for the tower also served as a look-out post for coordinating the actions of the rebels and keeping track of enemy movements. In any case, Wagner was in a position to personally witness the revolutionary fighters being brutally beaten and killed in the streets by auxiliary forces of the crown. Having been identified as a supporter of the rebellion, it was time to beat a hasty retreat from Dresden. Wagner was a wanted man with a price on his head and the death penalty looming. He sought refuge in neutral Switzerland; German territory would remain off-limits to him for several years. -5-

One of the last events Wagner witnessed in Dresden is noteworthy: the fire that destroyed the old baroque opera at the Zwinger, the palace of the Saxon rulers and the masterwork of the baroque architect Daniel Poppelmann. From Rienzi to Götterdämmerung, fire is a recurring symbol in Wagner’s operas. Sometimes it’s said that Wagner experienced the May rebellion in Dresden with its great fire as a kind of stage spectacle. That’s probably going too far; but for Wagner fire was certainly a potent signal of the redemptive final world conflagration consuming all that is rotten and evil. In his time, what was rotten and evil were the feudal order of aristocratic society and everything he subsumed under the “curse of money“ – to use his words, “usury, paper tricks, interest payments, and bank speculation.“ Understandable complaints from a man who would have probably had to flee from Dresden anyway, as he was again being choked by debts and hounded by creditors. Later he would modify such “socialist” views with vile pronouncements about Jews. That also puts his alleged “democratic“ activities into perspective. Wagner was inclined to project himself as a kind of world savior – in his life as much as his work. The clearest evidence is in the final opera he composed in Dresden, or more specifically at his summer retreat of Graupa in the region known as the “Saxon Switzerland,“ in 1848. Lohengrin, the knight of the swan, represents the light of another world. In him, we are surely meant to see Wagner himself to a degree. Musically, Lohengrin takes a big step beyond Romantic opera and toward music drama. It’s a major departure from the old principle of “opera by the numbers,“ meaning the alternation of recitative and aria. Instead, the music is structured around highly developed Leitmotifs. And for long stretches, the harmony and the tonal idiom are quite ahead of their time. Dresden provided the soil for the growth of that music, though it did not harvest its fruit – it was left to to conduct the premiere of Lohengrin in Weimar in 1850, while the composer was still in exile. Here are the final minutes of the last product of Wagner’s Dresden years.

Richard Wagner Lohengrin: Act 3, Scene 3 (conclusion) 4:21 Soloists Chorus Cond: Claudio Abbado LC 00173, Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft 437 808-2

Before we say Aufwiederhören on today’s program in our series devoted to “Music City Dresden,“ here is a listing of the recordings from which took our musical samples. The Rienzi Overture is taken from a recent Deutsche Grammophon recording of the opera with the Vienna Philharmonic and conductor Christian Thielemann. From a much older recording on the Angel label we heard Anja Silja sing -6-

Senta’s Ballad from The Flying Dutchman, with Otto Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. Again a newer recording provided the excerpt from Tannhäuser, a recording of the complete opera with and the Berlin State Opera Orchestra on Teldec records. The complete Liebesmahl der Apostel from which we took an excerpt can be heard on an EMI Classics recording with the male voices of the Philharmonic Chorus Dresden and the Dresden Philharmonic under the direction of Michel Plasson. Finally, we chose another Deutsche Grammophon recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, this time under the direction of Claudio Abbado, for the closing scene of Lohengrin. This is Michael Rothe at Deutsche Welle Radio; on behalf of the entire production team of writer Markus Schwering, editor and producer Rick Fulker and studio engineer Thomas Schmidt I’d like to thank you for listening today, and to invite you to join us next week at this time for another chapter in the history of “Music City Dresden.“