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Updated: August 18, 2024
He knew it too well, he had seen it in reality, the type of German Pharisee, foppish, impeccable, and hard, bowing down before its own image, the divinity to which it has no scruple about sacrificing others. The Flying Dutchman overwhelmed him with its massive sentimentality and its gloomy boredom. The loves of the barbarous decadents of the Tetralogy were of a sickening staleness.
The successive phases of this struggle may be compared to a vast tetralogy, with a Prelude of which the actors and setting are Huss and Jerome, the Council of Constance and Sigismund, the traitor of traitors, who gave John Huss "the word of a king," and Huss, solitary at the stake, when the flames wrapped him around, learned the value of the word of a king.
"Wagner began at once sketching the subject, but gradually the immense breadth and grandeur of the old types began to expand under his hands, and the result was a trilogy, or rather tetralogy, of enormous dimensions, perhaps the most colossal attempt upon which the dramatic muse has ventured since the times of Æschylus."
He is said to have displayed both diligence and remarkable quickness of apprehension, combined too with the utmost gravity and modesty. He not only acquired great familiarity with the poets, but composed poetry of his own dithyrambic, lyric, and tragic; and he is even reported to have prepared a tragic tetralogy, with the view of competing for victory at the Dionysian festival.
This particular theme of Sieglinda's is, in truth, of no great musical merit: it might easily be the pet climax of a popular sentimental ballad: in fact, the gushing effect which is its sole valuable quality is so cheaply attained that it is hardly going too far to call it the most trumpery phrase in the entire tetralogy.
I hope to submit to you the whole poem of the tetralogy before the end of the summer. The music will be easily and quickly done, for it is only the execution of something practically ready. Farewell, and let me soon have news of you. Did the Imperial Russian "Tannhauser" come off? You are in the midst of great Musical Festival troubles, are you not? Much luck and joy to it! Wholly thine,
He regretted subsequently that he did not ask Niemann to create the rôle of Siegfried in the last drama of the Tetralogy, as well as that of Siegmund in the second. Thanks to this mistake, New Yorkers had the privilege of hearing Niemann's début in this rôle at the age of fifty-seven, an age when most tenors have retired on their pensions.
'Die Walküre' is the most generally popular of the four works which make up Wagner's great tetralogy, for the inordinate length of some of the scenes in the second act is amply atoned for by the immortal beauties of the first and third.
This was congenial work, affording him relief from the mental strain imposed on him by his labors on the Ninth Symphony, which was then under way. These variations are extremely elaborate and difficult, a characteristic of most of his work in these years. Wagner never tired of exploiting the variation form in his operas, particularly in the Tetralogy.
As a frame for them I should like temples; as scenery, the illimitable land of thought; as actors, our dreams. The first act of Siegfried is one of the most dramatic in the Tetralogy. Nothing satisfied me more completely at Bayreuth, both as regards the actors and the dramatic effects.
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