In the past we chose the approximately five minutes we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st century composers, violin, baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas, Bach, the organ, mezzo-sopranos and music for dance.
Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the music of Richard Wagner, with a very short taste of his very long operas. We hope you can discover and enjoy a lot here; leave your favorites in the comments.
Rian Johnson, filmmaker
The problem with isolating a piece from one of Wagner’s operas is insidiously twofold: you’re going to miss (for my money) the real source of its power, and you won’t realize you’re missing it because the music is so damn good. Take the prelude to “Das Rheingold”. Put on some good headphones, close your eyes, and it will transport you, I guarantee you.
But it wasn’t meant to live in a vacuum. Wagner is a storyteller, and when the piece is in its proper place in the front curtain, taking you from a pinprick of light into the blinding sun of elemental harmony, whose theft will launch an epic, tragic tale of gods and betrayal and love – well, that’s the real stuff.
Katharina Wagner, artistic director Bayreuth Wagner Festival
I grew up with my great-grandfather’s music, but to this day the “Liebestod” is my favorite passage from “Tristan und Isolde”. Isolde expresses her deepest feelings and sings the most blissful passage with great euphoria. Birgit Nilsson, in the recording under Karl Böhm of the Bayreuth Festival in 1966, attests to the dramatic power and passion of her performance, the size and fullness of her voice, the beauty and purity of her intonation and her brilliant acting. She is rightly considered one of the most important singing personalities of her time.
Michael Cooper, Times editor
These are the five minutes (well, the scene) that made me fall in love with Wagner. I was already an opera fan when I first heard it in a music research course at university, but I knew little about Wagner other than his anti-Semitism, his reputation for boredom and bombast, and of course Bugs Bunny and ‘Apocalypse Now’.
This was not what I expected: the sheer beauty of the orchestra and the unexpected tenderness of a father’s loving, lullaby-like farewell to his daughter was a revelation. I became obsessed that year and invested in a whole “Ring” cycle (not cheap in the pre-streaming era); buy Ernest Newman’s book “The Wagner Operas” to accompany me; and scoring a seat in the penultimate row of the top row at the Metropolitan Opera. This was the gateway to what became a not too unhealthy addiction.
Simon Callow, actor, director and author of ‘Being Wagner’
The death of Siegfried, the hero in the “Ring” who should have saved the world, elicits an astonishing arsenal of orchestral sounds of infinite majesty and splendor from Wagner. It also represents the pinnacle of the leitmotif system – melodic and rhythmic fragments related to certain aspects of characters and their emotional histories. Wagner weaves them into the texture with cumulative force, so that it seems as if Siegfried’s entire past is passing us by – his energy, his idealism, his passion, so that you can feel that a whole life is being commemorated. At the same time, we mourn what could have been. The feeling that we will no longer look at him is deeply poignant.
David Allen, Times writer
You could see Richard Wagner as the composer of gods and myths, of the end of the world and a love that destroys – and you’d be right. But if his sheer ambition makes him someone to hold back and be swept away with, in not quite equal measure, then he was also capable of tenderness of the most poignant kind. His “Siegfried Idyll”, initially a personal birthday present to his second wife, Cosima, was first performed by a small ensemble at their home on Christmas morning in 1870; in the later, elaborate orchestration we now hear more often, the ending is a moving representation of blissful contentment—the warmest, most humane music he’s ever written.
Alex Ross, New Yorker critic and author of ‘Wagnerism’
To put it simply, Wagner’s ‘Ring’ is a study of the futility of power, with the god Wotan as the main exhibit. The crux of his fall comes at the beginning of his epic monologue in the second act of ‘Die Walküre’, after his wife, Fricka, destroys his delusions. He cries: “O holy Schmach!”: “O righteous shame! O shameful sorrow! … Infinite rage! Eternal sorrow!” Wagner’s orchestra delivers the sound of power that grinds itself to pieces, with monstrous dissonances piling up above a thump from C. In Joseph Keilberth’s great Bayreuth ‘Ring’ from 1955, Hans Hotter is a howling pillar, beautiful when it collapses.
Patti Smith, artist
I have chosen Waltraud Meier’s excellent performance of the “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde”. I had the privilege of attending the opera’s premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in December 2007. Directed by Daniel Barenboim and directed by Patrice Chéreau, it was the most beautiful and moving production of Wagner’s great romance I have witnessed.
Waltraud Meier is not only a good actress, but also one of our great singers. In this piece she projects the full range of Isolde’s devotion, desire, madness and loss. She brought humility and expertise to her performance and fully understood the meaning of transcendent love.
Backstage I saw her in the shadows. She was still spattered with Tristan’s blood and still had something of Isolde in her expression.
Seth Colter Walls, Times writer
Do Wagner’s operas contain almost endless melodies? Certainly. But he also knew how to write conflicts – sometimes even in short bursts. Take this climax from the second act of ‘Lohengrin’. The plot is complex, but even if you don’t know what’s being said, you can feel the heat of the moment: the sorceress Ortrud, at the entrance of a church, not counting the arrival of Elsa, there as bride-to-be. to be. The townspeople in the chorus gasp as these Real Housewives of Antwerp do it regarding the relative status of their partners; you can feel fast-paced with those assembled voyeurs while listening to mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig and soprano Elisabeth Grümmer.
Celia Applegate, historian
Compassion is at the heart of ‘Parsifal’, Wagner’s last and, for many, the greatest opera. The music of the prelude connects all living beings in its embrace. It is not heavenly music. It is music of this world, expressing suffering, struggle, the inevitability of death and the peace of understanding and acceptance. Its slow tempo and beautiful sounds almost put you in a trance. But somehow you also feel the presence of all things on this earth – and our responsibility to care for and care for it.
Morris Robinson, bass
“Das Rheingold” just goes along, ebb and flow, when suddenly, without warning, this incredibly loud, intrusive, majestic musical theme “debos” finds its way onto the score. Everyone – in the story and in the audience – realizes that something huge and potentially destructive is about to appear.
I’m thinking Incredible Hulk vibes, except Wagner made one couple- of Hulks, the brother giants Fasolt and Fafner. After playing Fasolt several times, I can assure you that the theme music captures the moment and also encourages the singers to get out there and invest mentally in their characterization. My aim is to ensure that immediately after this fantastic introduction, my vocal quality matches the intensity and volume of Wagner’s fantastic orchestration, which consists of extremely heavy brass and pulsating, pounding timpani.
Joshua Barone, Times Editor
A word associated with Wagner is ‘cinematic’, in part because of his innovations at the Bayreuth Festival Theater – where the darkened stage takes on the focus of a silver screen and where the sound of the hidden orchestra fills the room like a Dolby sound. system. But I also see film in his patient moments of diegetic music, such as when Tannhäuser returns fresh earthbound from the orgiatic Venusberg. The orchestra fades, first to a clarinet solo, then seamlessly to an English horn, taking the place of a shepherd’s pipe, singing an a cappella ode until pilgrims pass with a hymn. Wagner weaves the pipe and chorus, beautifully but with a sense of naturalism: the orchestra does not even return until Tannhäuser, overwhelmed by what he sees, exclaims: “Praise You, Almighty God!”
Javier C. Hernández, classical music and dance reporter for the Times
“Der Fliegende Holländer” is the opera that launched Wagner’s career. He was 29 when it premiered in Dresden, and it is widely regarded as his greatest early achievement, with hints everywhere of the dramatic intensity and musical flow that would come to characterize his later works. The stirring ‘Sailor’s Chorus’ from the third act shows his early mastery of grand orchestral and choral sounds.
Stephen Fry, actor in ‘Wagner and I’
Who would present a single block of a pyramid to represent the whole of Egypt? Wagner’s epic scale is certainly its signature quality. But here goes: the last five minutes of “Tristan und Isolde” offer one of the most astonishing moments in all art. Echoing the tremendous pounding of the sea in front of her, Isolde sings herself to death in a crushing musical climax. The orgasmic passage is known as the “Liebestod”: love-death. Its ravishing, horrific rise and fall are still mind-boggling. Finally, it evens out over the sand in a superb release.
Zachary Woolfe, Times Classical Music Editor
Five minutes to make you love and hate Wagner. At the end of his sprawling comedy “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg,” a speech by the friendly cobbler protagonist, Hans Sachs, takes a dark swerve as Sachs warns of foreign invaders trying to infect “sacred German art.” taken by a fiery crowd – a communal feast that became a nationalist gathering. This rousing choral melody may have been the first Wagner piece I loved. But it’s one of the moments in his work that now mixes sensation and nausea for me. Here it is performed in Vienna in 1944 by Karl Böhm, whose complicity with the Nazis was great.