[5/8/2011] Did Wagner know how to give a birthday present, or what? (continued)

THE SIEGFRIED IDYLL STORY
ACCORDING TO DERYCK COOKE

D.C. stresses, to begin with, that neither the Siegfried Idyll nor "the tiny Catechismus" was intended for publication or public performance: Wagner wrote them entirely as private birthday salutations to his wife Cosima. It was a terrible blow to both of them when for financial reasons they were forced to sell the manuscript of 'their' Idyll to Schotts [the publishing house] in 1877 and allow its publication the next year." As for the Kindercatechismus, he notes that "they can never have envisaged its being heard by anyone but themselves and their intimate circle (it was not published until 1937, seven years after Cosima's death)."

Explaining that "to understand the private significance that these pieces had for Wagner and Cosima," D.C. writes, "it is necessary to know something of the growth of their relationship." In 1857, he reminds us, the 20-year-old Cosima, a daughter of Franz Liszt, married the conductor Hans von Bülow, "already a tireless champion of Wagner's music." Wagner, then 44, "had just completed his orchestral draft of the second act of Siegfried," the third opera of his Ring cycle, "and was now to suspend work on the composition of The Ring for twelve years, while he created Tristan and Die Meistersinger." Cosima and von Bülow had two daughters, but the marriage "did not go well," von Bülow being, er, overmatched by the tempestuous Cosima. Wagner's first marriage wasn't going well either, and In time he and Cosima "recognised each other as soul-mates," and in further time she bore him a daughter, Isolde, and then (after the death of Wagner's wife) another, Eva -- clearly named for the heroines of the two operas Wagner wrote during the Ring hiatus.
Notwithstanding which, the ever-loyal von Bülow conducted the first performance of Die Meistersinger in June 1868.

Finally in November 1868 Cosima left von Bülow and moved in with Wagner in his house at Triebchen on Lake Lucerne. Coincidentally or not, the following March Wagner finally resumed work on Siegfried, resuming with Act III.

In June, while he was working on this, Cosima brought him the happiest moment of his life by bearing him a son, who was of course christened Siegfried. In July of the next year she and Bülow were divorced; and in August she married Wagner, who celebrated their union by composing a special piece of music for her. On Christmas Day, 1870 -- which was her thirty-third birthday -- a small group of musicians, who had been secretly rehearsed by Hans Richter, assembled on the stairs leading to the upper floor of Wagner's house; and there, under Wagner's direction, with Richter playing the trumpet part, they gave the first performance of the Siegfried Idyll, to the delighted amazement of Cosima, her children, and the young Nietzsche, who was staying there at the time.

Now the story gets complicated. As D.C. points out, the general assumption originally was that themes from the Idyll were then incorporated into Act III of Siegfried, but the indefatigable Wagner biographer Ernest Newman discovered that those themes originated in a single-movement string quartet that Wagner wrote, or at least sketched out, for Cosima in 1864, under the inspiration of their first love," and then in 1869 --

he was so carried away by the birth of their son that he incorporated some of the music of 'their' string quartet into the love-duet which forms the final scene, as s private reference for Cosima's benefit. He used the quartet's first theme (Ex. 112) for Brünnhilde's 'Ewig war ich,' its second (Ex. 113) for her 'O Siegfried, herrlicher,' and drew on its development section for her 'Ewig licht': the autobiographical connotations of all this can be seen from a glance at the apposite passages of the poem. Finally, when he came to compose the Idyll in late 1870, he turned back to the whole quartet-movement . . . and incorporat[ed] motives from the opera Siegfried, as well as a lullaby melody which he had noted down (or perhaps composed) in 1868, and which now fell happily into place in the Idyll as a cradle-song for the baby Siegfried.

Ex. 112, The Immortal Beloved

Ex. 113, The World's Treasure

Birgit Nilsson (s), Brünnhilde

[The musical examples, of course, are from the complete Solti-Decca Ring recording.]

Under the lullaby melody in Wagner's notebook stand the lines:

Sleep, baby, sleep;
In the garden are two sheep;
One is black and one is white;
And if the baby will not sleep
The black one will give it a bite.

I am reluctantly foregoing D.C.'s ensuing description of the musical progress of the Idyll (as I mentioned last night, we're going to be returning in time to the Siegfried Idyll, approaching it from a very different direction, and perhaps we can incorporate it there) but will just note his mention of the musicologist Gerald Abraham's "brilliant reconstruction of what must be very near to the lost quartet-movement," which was published in 1847 by Oxford University Press. Well, we should take note of one more theme familiar from the Siegfried-Brünnhilde duet of Act III of Siegfried:

Ex. 105, Love's Resolution

[Note: This isn't Cooke's printed musical example. It's the extended horn part.]

Birgit Nilsson (s), Brünnhilde; Wolfgang Windgassen (t), Siegfried

NOW HERE'S THE WHOLE OF THE SIEGFRIED IDYLL IN THE
CHAMBER VERSION INCLUDED WITH THE DERYCK COOKE LPs

In the CD edition of Deryck Cooke's Introduction to Der Ring des Niblungen, compressed onto two discs, the performances of the Siegfried Idyll and the Kindercatechismus included on side 6 of the original LP edition are omitted. Here's the whole of the Siegfried Idyll, in the chamber version recorded by Georg Solti, which I vaguely recall was actually recorded for the Cooke Introduction set. (Perhaps we'll get to the Kindercatechismus someday.)

WAGNER: Siegfried Idyll (chamber version)
Members of the Vienna Philharmonic, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded November 1965

AND HERE'S THE SIEGFRIED IDYLL AGAIN, ONCE
AGAIN IN ORCHESTRAL GARB

Now here's the Siegfried Idyll again in orchestral garb, in a more gradual performance than the ones we've heard today, though by no means the most leisurely performances on records.

WAGNER: Siegfried Idyll (full-orchestra version)
New York Philharmonic, Giuseppe Sinopoli, cond. DG, recorded October 1985


The CD edition of Deryck Cooke's Introduction to Der Ring des Niblungen, compressed from five LP sides to two CDs, omits the sixth-side performances of two short works associated with The Ring, the Siegfried Idyll and Catechismus. The CD edition, while retaining all of Cooke's printed musical examples, jettisons all the other printed commentary from the LP booklet.


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