The Siegfried Idyll, WWV 103, by Richard Wagner is a symphonic poem for chamber orchestra.
The Siegfried Idyll, WWV 103, by Richard Wagner is a symphonic poem for chamber orchestra.
Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll as a birthday present to his second wife, Cosima, after the birth of their son Siegfried in 1869. It was first performed on Christmas morning, 25 December 1870, [1] by a small ensemble of the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich on the stairs of their villa at Tribschen (today part of Lucerne), Switzerland. Cosima awoke to its opening melody. Conductor Hans Richter learned the trumpet in order to play the brief trumpet part, which lasts only 13 measures, in that private performance, reportedly having sailed out to the centre of Lake Lucerne to practise, so as not to be heard. [2]
The original title was Triebschen Idyll with Fidi's birdsong and the orange sunrise, as symphonic birthday greeting. Presented to his Cosima by her Richard. "Fidi" was the family's nickname for their son Siegfried. It is thought that the birdsong and the sunrise refer to incidents of personal significance to the couple.
Wagner's opera Siegfried , which was premiered in 1876, incorporates music from the Idyll. Wagner adapted the material from an unfinished chamber piece into the Idyll before giving the theme, to Brünnhilde in the opera's final scene, the "Ewig war ich" love duet between Brünnhilde and Siegfried. [3] This theme, Wagner claimed, came to him during the summer of 1864 at the Villa Pellet, overlooking Lake Starnberg, where he and Cosima consummated their union. He is contradicted, however, by his own obsessive record keeping: the melody was composed that November 14, when he was alone in Munich. [4] The work also uses a theme based on the German lullaby, "Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf", which was jotted down by Wagner on New Year's Eve 1868 and introduced by a solo oboe. [5] Ernest Newman discovered it was linked to the Wagners' older daughter Eva. This and other musical references, whose meaning remained unknown to the outside world for many years, reveal the idyll's levels of personal significance for both Wagner and Cosima. [6]
Wagner originally intended the Siegfried Idyll to remain a private piece. [7] However, due to financial pressures, he decided to sell the score to publisher B. Schott in 1878. [3] In doing so, Wagner expanded the orchestration to 35 players to make the piece more marketable. [3] The original piece is scored for a small chamber orchestra of 13 players: flute, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, trumpet, two violins, viola, cello and double bass. The piece is commonly played today by orchestras with more than one player on each string part. Modern performances are much slower than those of earlier years. [8]
Die Walküre, WWV 86B, is the second of the four epic music dramas that constitute Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. It was performed, as a single opera, at the National Theatre Munich on 26 June 1870, and received its first performance as part of the Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 14 August 1876.
Antonín Dvořák composed his Symphony No. 6 in D major, Op. 60, B. 112, in 1880. It was premiered on 25 March 1881. It was originally published as Symphony No. 1 and is dedicated to Hans Richter, who was the conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. With a performance time of approximately 40 minutes, the four-movement piece was one of the first of Dvořák’s large symphonic works to draw international attention. In it, he manages to capture some of the Czech national style within a standard Germanic classical-romantic form.
The "Ride of the Valkyries" refers to the beginning of act 3 of Die Walküre, the second of the four epic music dramas constituting Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Francesca Gaetana Cosima Wagner was the daughter of the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt and Franco-German romantic author Marie d'Agoult. She became the second wife of the German composer Richard Wagner, and with him founded the Bayreuth Festival as a showcase for his stage works; after his death she devoted the rest of her life to the promotion of his music and philosophy. Commentators have recognised Cosima as the principal inspiration for Wagner's later works, particularly Parsifal.
Siegfried Helferich Richard Wagner was a German composer and conductor, the son of Richard Wagner. He was an opera composer and the artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival from 1908 to 1930.
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Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, was composed by Johannes Brahms in the summer of 1877, during a visit to Pörtschach am Wörthersee, a town in the Austrian province of Carinthia. Its composition was brief in comparison with the 21 years it took Brahms to complete his First Symphony.
Johann Baptist Isidor Richter, or János Richter was an Austro-Hungarian orchestral and operatic conductor.
Tribschen is a district of the city of Lucerne, in the Canton of Lucerne in central Switzerland.
An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64, is a tone poem for large orchestra written by German composer Richard Strauss in 1915. It is one of Strauss's largest non-operatic works; the score calls for about 125 players and a typical performance usually lasts around 50 minutes. The program of An Alpine Symphony depicts the experiences of eleven hours spent climbing an Alpine mountain.
Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40, is a tone poem by Richard Strauss. The work was completed in 1898. It was his eighth work in the genre, and exceeded any of its predecessors in its orchestral demands. Generally agreed to be autobiographical in nature despite contradictory statements on the matter by the composer, the work contains more than thirty quotations from Strauss's earlier works, including Also sprach Zarathustra, Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Death and Transfiguration.
Virko Baley is a Ukrainian-American composer, conductor, and pianist. He was born in Radekhiv in Poland, the only child of Petro (Peter) and Lydia Baley. Petro Baley was interred at Auschwitz concentration camp following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and he and extended family were relocated to Slovakia. The family was reunited on a farm in Germany towards the end of the war to work as farm laborers, after which they relocated to Munich. From 1947 to 1949, the family lived in a displaced person's camp in Regensburg, Germany.
Don Juan, Op. 20, is a tone poem in E major for large orchestra written by the German composer Richard Strauss in 1888. The work is based on Don Juans Ende, a play derived from an unfinished 1844 retelling of the tale by poet Nikolaus Lenau after the Don Juan legend which originated in Renaissance-era Spain. Strauss reprinted three excerpts from the play in his score. In Lenau's rendering, Don Juan's promiscuity springs from his determination to find the ideal woman. Despairing of ever finding her, he ultimately surrenders to melancholy and wills his own death. It is singled out by Carl Dahlhaus as a "musical symbol of fin-de-siècle modernism", particularly for the "breakaway mood" of its opening bars.
Franciszek Zachara (b Tarnów, Austrian Poland (now Poland), 10 December 1898; d Tallahassee, Florida, United States, 2 February 1966) was a Polish pianist and composer who concertized extensively throughout Europe in the years leading up to 1928. He was a professor of piano at a Polish conservatory from 1922–1928, and two American colleges from around this time until his death in 1966. Zachara composed well over 150 works, including many works for piano solo, a piano concerto, a symphony, several works for band, and various chamber pieces. The archive of his manuscripts is held at the Warren D. Allen Music Library at Florida State University. Most of these manuscripts are originals (or copies) from the composer's own hand.
The composition of the epic operatic tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung occupied Richard Wagner for more than a quarter of a century. Conceived around 1848, the work was not finished until 1874, less than two years before the entire cycle was given its premiere at Bayreuth. Most of this time was devoted to the composition of the music, the text having been largely completed in about four years.
Donald Henry Kay AM is an Australian classical composer.
Kossuth, Sz. 21, BB. 31, DD. 75a is a symphonic poem composed by Béla Bartók inspired by the Hungarian politician Lajos Kossuth.
James Francis Brown is an English composer. He studied composition with the Viennese émigré Hans Heimler and then at the Royal Academy of Music, London.
The Richard Wagner Museum is a cultural site in Lucerne, Switzerland, situated on the shore of Lake Lucerne in the district of Tribschen. The composer Richard Wagner lived here from 1866 to 1872; in 1933 it was opened as a museum.
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