Richard Wagner: Die Walkure

Soloists:

Erin Caves, Kirsten Blanck, Catherine Foster

Orchestra, choir:

Staatskapelle Weimar

Conductor:

Carl St.Clair

Director:

Michael Schulz

“A free man is the creator of his own destiny.” Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle reflects both the composer’s autobiography and the political turmoil of his time. As the work progresses, another character emerges as important as the hero Siegfried: the god Wotan, the mouthpiece of Wagner’s ideas. “He is exactly like us: he is the sum of today’s intellectual consciousness, while Siegfried is what we hope the human being of the future will be, but whom we cannot shape, and who must create himself through our destruction!” Our own destruction as the foundation for a happier future? Wagner clothed this Herculean task in a musically expansive, sparkling network of leitmotifs (there are about 20 separate motifs in Die Walküre). Dramaturgically, the conversational style of Das Rheingold leaves room for bourgeois tragedy: incestuous passion, more than one deeply rooted marital enmity, and a lot of talk, a lot of self-justification in the form of repetition. This first day of the tetralogy (Das Rheingold is the “preliminary evening”) was, in the opinion of Wagner’s wife Cosima, undoubtedly “the most moving and tragic” of all Wagner’s works, as she wrote in her diary on August 31, 1873. The text of Die Walküre was completed on July 1, 1852, and the score was finished at the end of March 1856. Wagner's generous friend (and future father-in-law) Franz Liszt helped him financially, and Wagner went to rest from his work on the shores of Lake Geneva.