In this great music drama, he tells the story of Siegmund and Sieglinda, Brünnhilde and the Valkyries who carried the dead warriors from the battle fields on their saddles to Valhalla. You hear in the galloping music of the Ride of the Valkyries and the Fire Music and Love Song of the first act, such music as never was written by anyone but Wagner! Oh, it is a wonderful legend, explaining itself, in Wagner’s own poems and with the short music name tags (leit-motifs) which are enlarged and turned around and intermingled with other name tags and which stand out beautifully when you know how to listen.
Tristan and Isolde and Meistersinger
While in Zürich, Wagner met the merchant Otto Wesendonck, whose beautiful and poetic wife Wagner loved dearly. She was a great influence in his life and they were friends for many years. It was during his friendship that he started the love drama of Tristan and Isolde.
In 1859 he finished the love drama which tells of Tristan and the lovely Queen of Ireland and how they drank the love potion and how they loved and were separated. A noble story with some of the most grippingly beautiful music ever written!
But with this masterpiece of masterpieces completed, he could get nobody to produce it. Everyone said it was impossible to sing it, and we know even today that it takes very special musical gifts and few can do it well. For it is quite true that Wagner, with all his theories about composition, thought little of the singer’s throat muscles and more of what he wanted to say.
Poor Wagner was disconsolate! He could not get his works performed and he was still prevented from returning to Germany, the country he loved. So off he went to Paris and there Tannhäuser failed utterly after three terrible, turbulent, horrible performances, which almost ended in riots, no doubt planned ahead by his enemies.
But to offset this disaster, he was allowed to return home and everyone rejoiced in his arrival. No doubt his treatment in Paris softened the German heart.
Not long after this Wagner and his wife separated and some years later in 1871, he married Cosima Liszt, who had been the wife of Hans von Bülow.
After Wagner conducted opera on a tour through Russia, Hungary, Bohemia (Czecho-Slovakia) and many German cities, Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, sent for Wagner and offered him an income, and from this time on Wagner composed without financial worries. He was commissioned in 1865 to complete The Ring, and Tristan and Isolde was performed by Hans von Bülow.
Again political intrigues and his enemies drove him to Switzerland, and after Tristan and Isolde was given and while he was in Switzerland, he completed The Ring and Die Meistersinger, the most beautiful comic opera in the world, which was also produced by von Bülow in Munich, June 21st, 1868. And now we fulfill our promise to you, which we made in Chapter VIII about the Meistersinger: