Teacher's Guide Cambridge Pre-U MUSIC Available for teaching ...

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Cambridge Pre-U Teacher Guide
1861 and Tannhäuser in 1862. In 1863 he had acquired a copy of Wagner’s new edition of the Ring
poems. The preface to this edition contained Wagner’s description of the ideal conditions under which
a performance of the Ring would be given, in a special theatre built in the form of an amphitheatre,
with the orchestra hidden from the audience, and as a festival during which both performers and
audience would be able to immerse themselves completely in the work, with nothing to distract them
and with a shared seriousness of purpose. Wagner expressed his doubt that any existing public
theatre would be able to raise the funds for such a costly venture; a German prince, however, could
easily support it. ‘Can this prince,’ he asked, ‘be found?’ When Ludwig read this, he seems to have
decided that he would be that prince.
Ludwig’s emissary eventually tracked Wagner down in Stuttgart. When Wagner learned of the King’s
enthusiasm for his work he wasted no time in travelling to Munich, where Ludwig paid off his debts,
installed him in a large house (where he was joined by Cosima von Bülow and her two daughters)
and gave him a generous annual allowance. Gottfried Semper (architect of the Dresden opera
house) was summoned to design a festival theatre to Wagner’s specification and Tristan was put
into rehearsal with Hans von Bülow as the conductor. The first performance of Tristan took place in
the Munich Court Theatre (now the Nationaltheater) on 10 June 1865 with the principal roles sung
by Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld and his wife Malvina. Three further performances followed, but
shortly after the last one Ludwig Schnorr died suddenly. Rumours had been circulating for some time
that Tristan was virtually unperformable; now Wagner’s detractors began to describe it as positively
dangerous. Criticism of Wagner had been mounting steadily among the Bavarian ministers of state,
who were alarmed at the amount of time the King was spending with him, the huge sums it was
costing to support him and his projects and the extent of his presumed meddling in affairs of state.
Eventually Ludwig bowed to this pressure and dismissed Wagner from Munich in December 1865.
Wagner moved to Switzerland, where he found a house called Tribschen on the banks of Lake Lucerne
(Wagner’s spelling of ‘Triebschen’ was his own invention). Here he settled and was often joined by
Cosima and her three daughters, the third of whom, Isolde, was his own child. He completed Die
Meistersinger in October 1867 and it was first performed in the Munich Court Theatre on 21 June
1868, conducted by Hans von Bülow. Die Meistersinger differs from Wagner’s other mature music
dramas in several respects. It was originally conceived as a comic companion-piece to Tannhäuser
and Wagner continued to think of it as a light, popular opera until a fairly late stage. It has a defined
historical setting: Nuremberg in the mid-sixteenth century; the action has a genuine historical context,
concerning a Guild of Mastersingers composing songs to strict formal rules and resisting innovation;
and the central character is Hans Sachs (1494–1576), the most famous of the real Mastersingers.
Against this historical background Wagner invented his own story of a song contest to determine who
should marry Eva, the daughter of one of the Mastersingers. The contest is between Beckmesser,
already a Mastersinger, and Walther von Stolzing, a young knight who has yet to win his place in the
Guild. Walther’s Prize Song is so beautiful that he is acclaimed as the winner. The Prize Song is one of
several identifiable ‘numbers’ in the score, which demonstrate the fact that Wagner had by this time
substantially modified his outlook towards music drama and permitted himself to integrate various
traditional operatic forms into his work, without compromising the continuity of the music.
In contrast to the yearning chromaticism of Tristan, the harmonic style of Die Meistersinger is
fundamentally diatonic. That is not to suggest that its language is any simpler than that of Tristan:
it represents a similar expansion of Wagner’s harmonic resources, but in an altogether different
direction. The tonality also has a symbolic function. The clear assertion of C major, especially at
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