Wagner's 'Flying Dutchman' Overture

Another of my program notes:

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

The Flying Dutchman: Overture (1860)

Pursued by creditors, the 26 year-old Richard Wagner and his wife Minna fled for London in 1839 from Riga in Latvia, where he’d been music director. Their ship, the Thetis, was battered by storms and took shelter in a Norwegian cove. There, said Wagner in his memoirs, the idea for his fourth opera, The Flying Dutchman, took root. Listening to the overture’s stormy opening you could believe this. The real inspiration for the opera however, may have been Heinrich Heine’s The Recollections of Herr von Schanbelewopski (1834), which contains a version of the Flying Dutchman tale.

The Flying Dutchman concerns the old legend of a ship’s captain (the Dutchman) and his ghostly crew, condemned by a curse to sail the seas unless, and until, the Dutchman can find the redeeming love of a selfless woman. In Wagner’s opera, that woman is Senta, who sacrifices her life to save the Dutchman’s soul. The overture was written in November 1841, after the rest of the opera. Rather like the overtures of Weber whom Wagner admired, it foreshadows the opera’s concerns in its juxtaposition of tempestuous passages, the pacifying effect of ‘Senta’s Ballad’ (cor anglais solo) and the dance-like middle section based on the Scene 7 chorus, ‘Steuermann! Lass die Wacht!’ which Wagner claimed to have been suggested by the calls of the Thetis’s crewmen echoing round the Norwegian cove’s granite walls.

The Flying Dutchman was the earliest work that Wagner later acknowledged as part of his canon. Senta was the first of the ‘redeemer heroines’ he portrayed, and although Wagner was still decades away from the Music Drama with which he changed operatic history, The Flying Dutchman points the way to those operas in its dramatic sweep and insight into human motivation. It still features a stand-alone overture of course, but that overture is a superb example of 19^th century nature portraiture.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013

    

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:
 
Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013
Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013
Christopher Rouse's Der gerettete Alberich, published 27 August 2013
Richard Strauss Der Rosenkavalier selections, published
Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, published 30 August 2013
'Traditional terms' - an interview with John Adams, published 5 Sep 2013
Berlioz' Waverley Overture, published 9 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's Fatum, published 17 Sep 2013
Wagner, arr. Henk de Vlieger A Ring Adventure, published 29 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's 'Pathetique', published on 29 Sep 2013
Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony, published 13 October 2013 

Henk de Vlieger's 'A Ring Adventure', based on Wagner

Continuing my series of program notes: 

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

arr. Henk de Vlieger (born 1953)

The Ring – An Orchestral Adventure

from Das Rheingold (Prelude – The Rhine Gold – Nibelheim: the smithy – Valhalla)

from Die Walküre (The Valkyries – The Magic Fire)
from Siegfried (Forest Murmurs – Siegfried’s Deeds of Heroism – Brünnhilde’s Awakening)
from Götterdämmerung (Siegfried and Brünnhilde – Siegfried’s Rhine Journey – Siegfried’s Death – Funeral Music – Brünnhilde’s Sacrifice)

Considering that Wagner is widely regarded as the towering genius of 19th-century music, it is remarkable that he didn’t write more instrumental music. But Wagner’s overriding aim was to elevate the dramatic integrity of opera. He sought to achieve a new artform using lessons from the symphonic music of Beethoven to inform theatrical works constructed along the lines of classical Greek drama and based on myths which elevated the German consciousness. His crowning achievement is the 15-hour opera, presented over four nights, Der Ring des Nibelungen, drawn from Nordic myths and the Burgundian Nibelungenlied.

Critics have sometimes assumed that Wagner wasn’t interested in symphonic music. He had derided Brahms for concentrating on a musical form that Wagner considered outmoded the moment Beethoven introduced voices (and therefore texts) into his Ninth Symphony. But according to Cosima, Wagner’s wife, Wagner was considering writing a symphony around the time he was composing his final opera, Parsifal.
Over the years there have been numerous attempts to create concert works out of extracts from The Ring. Herman Zumpe in the late 19^th century popularised extractable moments such as The Ride of the Valkyries. More recently there have been attempts to render the Ring as a symphony-length orchestral work. Henk de Vlieger wrote this ‘Adventure’ in 1991 for Edo de Waart and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.
What helps these arrangers create a purely orchestral work is a device that Wagner invented to aid the drama - the ‘leitmotif’, a musical phrase or gesture, whose changes plot the development of an associated character, object or concept throughout the drama. Considering the length of the Ring, the system of leitmotifs is an important mnemonic device. But the leitmotifs also play a purely musical function. Their transformation and interweaving, creating variety while positing an underlying unity, allows the development of something like a Liszt-style symphonic poem.
De Vlieger’s ‘Ring Adventure’ follows the broad progress of Wagner’s plot. Three minutes’ play on E flat harmony at the beginning portrays the pure environment of the Rhine where Alberich, the dwarf, denied love by the Rhinemaidens steals the gold that sits on the bottom of the river. In Nibelheim, he forges a ring giving him power over all the world (you’ll hear anvils!). Wotan, king of the gods, needing to pay the giants Fasolt and Fafner for building Valhalla steals the ring, incurring Alberich’s curse. We then follow the course of the ring from doomed owner to doomed owner. One of Wotan’s valkyrie daughters courts Wotan’s anger when she rescues a flawed human who was intended to help Wotan evade the curse. Wotan puts her (Brünnhilde) to sleep surrounded by magic fire which none but a true hero can penetrate (you’ll hear Wagner’s marvellous evocation of flickering flames). That hero is Siegfried, whom we first encounter in the forest. But, after waking Brünnhilde, Siegfried travels up the Rhine where he is murdered by Hagen who wants the ring, now in Siegfried’s possession. Brünnhilde decides to put the world back to rights through self-sacrifice. She rides her horse into Siegfried’s funeral pyre. The fire flares up; Valhalla bursts into flames and the flooding Rhine sweeps away Hagen, restoring the golden ring to the river depths.
De Vlieger’s intention in this arrangement was to achieve something like a four-movement symphony – ‘Siegfried’ is the slow movement, for example. And De Vlieger wanted the piece to come across as if perhaps The Ring was conceived in this form in the first place. He maintains Wagner’s orchestration (except for wind instruments occasionally taking vocal lines) and only occasionally alters a transition to keep Wagner’s music in the original key.
What you get is not Wagner’s detailed depiction of downfall caused by denial of love in the quest for power, but something which reveals why  Wagner’s music works in the concert hall and perhaps some indication of what a Wagner symphony might have been like if he’d lived to write one.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2012

This program note was originally written for concerts by orchestras associated with Symphony Australia (www.symphonyinternational.net). Please contact me if you wish to reproduce it in your own program booklets.

Christopher Rouse's "Der gerettete Alberich"

Continuing my series of program notes:

Christopher Rouse (born 1949)

Der gerettete Alberich – fantasy for percussionist and orchestra (1997)

At the end of Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Wagner’s ‘Ring cycle’, Brünnhilde has ridden her horse into Siegfried’s funeral pyre, Valhalla has burned to the ground killing the gods and the Rhine has flooded the world, leaving the earth ripe for renewal. But what has happened to Alberich, the Nibelung-king, who set the chain of destruction in motion by cursing the ring? Wagner doesn’t say. Is he free to wreak havoc all over again?

Arthur Rackham's illustration of Alberich driving the Nibelungs

This is the question that inspired Christopher Rouse when he composed Der gerettete Alberich. What you have here is part-concerto. Composed for Evelyn Glennie, the work demands the soloist’s skill on a different set of percussion instruments in each movement – guiros and a bank of bongos, wood blocks, and other drums in the first; marimba and steel pan in the second; drum kit in the third. But the work is also programmatic. The title can be translated into English as ‘Alberich Saved’ and critic Colin Anderson has outlined the three movements in terms of ‘Alberich plotting his nefarious schemes, then reflecting on his mis-spent and, in some ways, tragic life, and then...on the rampage to once again seek the ring of power to make him lord of the world’.  Rouse himself has described the work as ‘more of a fantasy for solo percussionist and orchestra’. But it’s also ‘a fantasy...on themes of Wagner’.

Use of quotation is nothing new in Rouse’s work – his Symphony No.1 incorporated the Adagio from Bruckner’s Symphony No.7; the Trombone Concerto cited music of Leonard Bernstein who had recently died. But Rouse’s use of quotation is not gimmickry. Rather it is a Mahlerian embrace of the world. Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed has spoken of Rouse incorporating ‘ uncontrived, the range of the musical experience typical of his generation’, and this includes Rock ‘n Roll, which no doubt inspired ‘Alberich’’s drum kit workout at the beginning of movement three.

You can cite impressive facts about Rouse. He’s currently the Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his Trombone Concerto and has won a Grammy Award for his Guitar Concerto, Concert de Gaudi (2002). What is perhaps more impressive is the genuine emotional experience he can provide to an audience. Early works could be speedy and harrowing; a change of direction saw him master the slow movement. Many listeners have remarked on a darkness in Rouse’s vision. The last page of his Symphony No.1 carries the inscription ‘de profundis clamavi’ (From the depths I have cried out to you, O Lord). But works from the late 1990s marked a ‘look towards the light’. Der gerettete Alberich could be thought to straddle both dark and light visions.

The work opens with the closing bars of Götterdämmerung (the ‘Redemption through Love’ motif). Then Alberich insinuates his return on the guiro. This segues into music to which Alberich slipped on rocks at the bottom of the Rhine in Das Rheingold. The return of this motif later, after much development of themes, signals a kind of recapitulation. The second movement is one of Rouse’s ‘wondrous’ slow movements. The appropriateness of Alberich’s ‘Renunciation of Love’ motif, played by a forlorn solo oboe after a downward string glissando, is almost uncanny. The dawn music followed by the baleful pronouncement of the ‘Power of the Ring’ motif leads into the third movement which begins sounding almost like an American high school football marching band. In this movement ‘Alberich’ wreaks maximum havoc, most obviously in timpani and percussion cadenzas on the Nibelung motif. It’s terrifying but not without humour when you realise that Rouse has used the ‘Alberich turning himself into a serpent’ motif to wind up tension in the bass.

It is marvellous the way Rouse weaves Alberich-related motives from Wagner’s masterwork into his own composition. But the work is not really an excuse to play ‘spot the quote’ (although you get the impression Rouse would not begrudge any audience that fun). It’s probably enough to acknowledge that this work exemplifies Rouse’s music as some of the most compelling, enjoyable and satisfying around today and that Der gerettete Alberich is a spectacular showcase for a percussion soloist.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013 
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013 
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013 
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013  
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013 
Wagner's  Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013

Wagner's "Götterdämmerung" (Immolation Scene)

Continuing my series of program notes:

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Götterdämmerung: ‘Starke scheite…’ (Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene)

Hanfstaengl's 1871 portrait of Wagner

‘Let great logs be brought to the bank and heaped in a mighty pile. Let the flames…consume the noble corpse of this first of all men.’ So sings Brünnhilde in the spectacular end not only to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, but his entire Ring cycle. Here, Wagner must not only fulfill the premise of his great drama, but close off the largest harmonic structure in the history of western music - one that began three nights ago in the depths of the Rhine with three minutes of E flat major, representing the undisturbed gold on the bed of the Rhine, an image of unalloyed purity.

Since then the dwarf Alberich has obtained the gold by renouncing love; Wotan, king of the gods, has stolen the ring fashioned from that gold, to pay the giants who built his citadel; Alberich has cursed the ring, and Wotan has created humans, who, through free will, will save the gods from the destruction attached to the gods by the curse. Now the mortal hero, Siegfried, Brünnhilde’s beloved, is dead, murdered by Hagen in his quest for the world-domination accorded by the ring. But Brünnhilde possesses the ring and plans to immolate herself in Siegfried’s funeral pyre; the Rhinemaidens may retrieve the ring from her ashes.

This scene completes one of the great operas. Wagner was the towering figure of 19th century music. But his aim was to raise the dramatic integrity of opera, by using lessons learnt from Beethoven to inform dramas based on Teutonic myth constructed along the lines of Classical Greek Drama. His Ring cycle is the fullest expression of that achievement.

Note: The Ring is meant to be experienced as Music Drama. But the ‘Immolation Scene’ is a favourite item on the concert platform. Brünnhilde’s peremptory utterances are overwhelming in their command. As Brünnhilde rides her horse into the flames, Wagner reviews some of the Ring cycle’s best-loved themes (his famous lietmotifs) in a mini tone poem which depicts the burning down of Valhalla, the flooding of the Rhine, the curse motif, and, as the floodwaters recede, the Rhinemaidens’ high-spirited theme, expressing renewed gaiety, combined with the melody Sieglinde had sung when she discovered she was pregnant with Siegfried.

It’s a triumphal ending, or is it? The translation of the work’s title is Twilight of the Gods. Wagner actually struggled with this scene. By 1874 when he completed the score, he had greatly changed his 1848 concept of Siegfried as the hero who unerringly saves the gods. Wotan, a god who willed his downfall, had become more fascinating. Now Brünnhilde emerges as the cycle’s heroine.

Vengefully, Brünnhilde deliberately starts the fire that will consume Valhalla and the gods. The aged Wagner is a pessimist. But his music tells a different story. In Music Drama, we are meant to read music and action simultaneously. But the music tells us ‘love will conquer all’. Wagner’s aim may have been to raise the dramatic integrity of opera, but he became the towering figure in 19^th century music. Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene works spectacularly well in the concert hall.

Gordon Kalton Williams © 2007


Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013 
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013 
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013 
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013  
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013

Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde": Prelude and Liebestod

Continuing my series of program notes:

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Tristan und Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod

Aubrey Beardsley's 1899 illustration of Isolde drinking the love potion

It is ironic that Tristan und Isolde was written while Wagner took a break from what would become his epic 15-hour masterpiece, The Ring of the Nibelung. Tristan, first staged in 1865, is itself a pinnacle of music history. In it – and it is discernible even in this customary extract – Wagner stretched European music beyond its prior expressive capabilities.

In many respects Tristan was simpler than the Ring. Based on Arthurian legend as set down by the 13^th century poet Gottfried von Strassburg, the plot can be summarised quickly: Tristan is taking Isolde back to Cornwall to wed his uncle, King Marke, but they fall into a world-defying love when Isolde’s servant substitutes a love potion for the deadly poison Isolde intended for Tristan; when they are caught, Tristan flees mortally wounded; he dies as Isolde comes to him in Brittany, and she expires in expectation of joining him beyond earthly life. This all takes place with a minimum of action. The settings are aboard ship from Ireland, in Cornwall, and in Brittany, but could be anywhere. Dramatic incident is stripped down basically to entrances and exits. Act II is essentially one long love duet.

But Tristan und Isolde is not simple in philosophical or psychological terms. It may be opera’s ‘greatest love story ever told’ (the real life inspiration was Wagner’s white hot passion for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a Zurich silk merchant) but in Tristan und Isolde, Wagner was wrestling with something beyond earthly passion. Influenced by Ludwig Schopenhauer whose writings were a German gloss on Buddhist detachment, Wagner was trying to express a transcendence of earthly passion in death. 

In trying to convey all this, Wagner almost exhausted Western harmony’s unique ability to express desire. The Prelude begins with four notes of cello in a yearning arc which culminates in the famous ‘Tristan’ chord, a tensely knotted harmony, which unfurls to a merely less dissonant chord. This is the pattern of tension and not-quite release for the next few hours (and certainly the Prelude) - dissonance, a passing colouristic effect in classical era tonality, milked for all its expressive worth.

Franz Hanfstaengl's 1871 portrait of Wagner

In concert, the Prelude is usually paired with the opera’s very end, Isolde’s final monologue, the Liebestod. Such is the richness of Wagner’s orchestration by this stage that these pages are often performed in concert as written, but minus singer. The Liebestod is more diatonic (comprised of common chords) than the Prelude though constantly modulating and thus still unsettled. Its melody derives from Act II where Tristan sang: ‘Thus might we die, undivided…’ In Act II, the buildup culminated in an ugly interrupted cadence. Here there is complete release as Isolde sings of tasting Tristan’s respiration in ‘sweet perfume, in the surging swell, in the ringing sound of the world’s breath’ – a flood of sensation suggesting transcendence beyond surfeit.

The effect is overwhelming in the opera house. It is still palpable in the concert hall, which Wagner must have known when he established the convention of making a concert item out of what he called Love-death and Isolde’s Transfiguration.

Gordon Kalton Williams ©2009


Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013