Richard Wagner at 200+

Synopsis

Today’s date marks the anniversary Richard Wagner’s birth. During Wagner’s lifetime, his most famous — and perhaps most perceptive — critic was Prague-born Viennese writer on music Eduard Hanslick.

Hanslick knew Wagner personally, and described him as follows: “A stranger would have seen in his face not so much an artistic genius as a dry Leipzig professor or lawyer. He spoke incredibly much — and fast — in a monotonous sing-song Saxon dialect and always of himself, his works, his reforms, his plans. If he mentioned the name of another composer it was always in a tone of disparagement.”

For Wagnerians, Hanslick was a crusty old conservative who preferred Brahms and was too thick-headed to appreciate the Music of the Future epitomized by Wagner’s operas. But if one actually reads Hanslick’s writings on Wagner, a more nuanced and balanced picture emerges.

“I know very well that Wagner is the greatest living opera composer and the only one in Germany worth talking about in a historical sense,” Hanslick wrote. “But between this admission and the repulsive idolatry which has grown up in connection with Wagner and which he has encouraged, there is an infinite chasm.”

Upon learning of Wagner’s death in 1883, Hanslick wrote: “Wagner stands at the head of the moving forces of modern art. He shook opera and all its associated theoretical and practical issues from a comfortable state of repose bordering on stagnation.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Richard Wagner (1813-1883): Transformation Music from Parsifal

On This Day

Births

• 1813 - German composer Richard Wagner, in Leipzig

Deaths

• 1949 - German composer Hans Pfitzner, 80, in Salzburg

Premieres

• 1813 - Rossini: L’Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Woman in Algiers), in Venice at the Teatro San Benedetto

• 1836 - Mendelssohn: oratorio Paulus (St. Paul), at the Lower Rhine Music Festival in Düsseldorf, with the composer conducting

• 1874 - Verdi: Requiem Mass, at the Milan Cathedral, with the composer conducting

• 1911 - Debussy: Le Martyre de Saint-Sebastien, in Paris at the Théatre du Châtelet, André Caplet conducting

• 1924 - Stravinsky: Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, at the Paris Opéra at a concert conducted by Serge Koussevitzky, with the composer as the piano soloist

• 1931 - William Grant Still: ballet Sahdji, by the Eastman Ballet and Rochester Civic Orchestra, Howard Hanson conducting

• 1950 - R. Strauss: Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra, in London, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängle and Kristen Flagstad the vocal soloist

• 1982 - Alvin Singleton: A Yellow Rose Petal for orchestra, by the Houston Symphony, C. William Harwood conducting

• 1990 - John Harbison: Simple Daylight (to a text by Michael Fried) at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, by soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Alan Feinberg

• 1999 - Bright Sheng: Flute Moon, with soloist Aralee Dorough (flute/piccolo) and the Houston Symphony, Christoph Eschenbach conducting

Others

• 1723 - J.S. Bach, the newly appointed cantor of Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, arrives in that city with his family

• 1790 - Possible premiere of Mozart's String Quartets in D and B-flat at Mozart's apartment in Vienna, likely with the composer as violist

• 1872 - On his 59th birthday, Richard Wagner lays the cornerstone of his Festival Theater in Bayreuth, Germany