top of page
Wagner. Ride the storm
Sezione 1
Sezione 2
Misunderstandings
DRESDEN, Semperoper Dresden. 1843
PLAY ME
To escape my creditors, I made a
daring escape by sneaking across the Prussian-Russian
border and embarking with Minna on a small sailing ship to London. While witnessing a storm at sea on my voyage, I was inspired to compose The Flying Dutchman, which was my first authentically 'Wagnerian' masterpiece, although still within my youthful period,
which would continue until Lohengrin. I spent several years in Paris in great poverty. All in all, Rienzi's 'Grand-Opera' style was a great success among the French. This enabled me to obtain the position of conductor of the Dresden Opera,which would be the beginning of a brilliant career for my wife Minna.
Confident that this position would help the public's appreciation of my new art, I expected another triumph with The Flying Dutchman, performed in Dresden in 1843. But the strange structure of the play, which abolished closed-form pieces and portrayed the characters with a fiery sensuality, previously unknown, disoriented the
people who came to the theatre...An even more lukewarm response was received by the premiere of Tannhäuser, written in a state of feverish excitement. I felt imprisoned in a world I hated, the mirror of an art linked to the conformism of the time, even though I lived a peaceful bourgeois life with a good annual salary.
Sezione 3
bottom of page