Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: When did Wagner compose Tristan und Isolde?
Tristan und Isolde ("Tristan and Isolde", or "Tristan and Isolda", or "Tristran and Ysolt") is an opera, or music drama, in three acts by Richard Wagner to a German libretto by the composer, based largely on the 12th-century romance "Tristan" by Gottfried von Strassburg. It was composed between 1857 and 1859 and premiered at the Königliches Hof- und Nationaltheater in Munich on 10 June 1865 with Hans von Bülow conducting. Wagner referred to the work not as an opera, but called it "eine Handlung" (literally "a drama", "a plot" or "an action"), which was the equivalent of the term used by the Spanish playwright Calderón for his dramas.
Another composer to rework material from "Tristan" was Emmanuel Chabrier in his humorous "Souvenirs de Munich – quadrilles on themes from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde". These were augmented and orchestrated by Markus Lehmann in 1988. Leopold Stokowski made a series of purely orchestral "Symphonic Syntheses" of Wagner's operas during his time as conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, bringing to concert audiences of the 1920s and '30s music they might not otherwise have heard. He made a 'long version' of music from "Tristan and Isolde" which consisted mainly of the act 1 prelude, the from act 2 and the from act 3. A shorter version of music from the 2nd and 3rd acts was called "Love Music from "Tristan and Isolde"". He made recordings of both versions on 78s and again on LP.
"Tristan und Isolde" has a long recorded history. In the years before World War II, Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior were considered to be the prime interpreters of the lead roles, and mono recordings exist of this pair in a number of live performances led by conductors such as Thomas Beecham, Fritz Reiner, Artur Bodanzky and Erich Leinsdorf. Flagstad recorded the part commercially only near the end of her career in 1952, under Wilhelm Furtwängler for EMI, producing a set which is considered a classic recording. Following the war, the performances at Bayreuth with Martha Mödl and Ramon Vinay under Herbert von Karajan (1952) were highly regarded, and these performances are now available as a live recording. In the 1960s, the soprano Birgit Nilsson was considered the major Isolde interpreter, and she was often partnered with the Tristan of Wolfgang Windgassen. Their performance at Bayreuth in 1966 under the baton of Karl Böhm was captured by Deutsche Grammophon—a performance often hailed as one of the best "Tristan" recordings. Some collectors prefer the pairing of Nilsson with the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers, available in "unofficial" recordings from performances in Vienna or Orange.
By 1827, the family had returned to Leipzig. Wagner's first lessons in harmony were taken during 1828–31 with Christian Gottlieb Müller. In January 1828 he first heard Beethoven's 7th Symphony and then, in March, the same composer's 9th Symphony (both at the Gewandhaus). Beethoven became a major inspiration, and Wagner wrote a piano transcription of the 9th Symphony. He was also greatly impressed by a performance of Mozart's "Requiem." Wagner's early piano sonatas and his first attempts at orchestral overtures date from this period.
Although Voigt's Fach is that of the "dramatischer" soprano, she has recently—overlooking the 2003 Vienna performances as Isolde—made the transition into singing the "" soprano with her interpretation of Isolde from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde". She sang the role in the 2007/08 season at the Metropolitan Opera and in the 2008/09 season at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. During one of the performances at the Met, Voigt took ill and had to leave the stage. She returned at the next performance of "Tristan und Isolde" and finished the run to acclaim by most reviewers, including "The New York Times". However, some critics, including "The New York Sun", panned her performance.
In March 2004, Studer sang her first complete Isoldes in three concert performances of the work, in Münster, Germany,
opposite the Tristan of tenor Wolfgang Schmidt. Before these complete Isoldes, she had sung excerpts from all three acts of "Tristan und Isolde" in Gießen, Germany (in 1999), opposite the Tristan of tenor Heikki Siukola.
By this time Chamberlain had met his first wife, the Prussian Anna Horst, whom he would divorce in 1905 after 28 years of marriage. Chamberlain was an admirer of Richard Wagner, and wrote several commentaries on his works including "Notes sur Lohengrin " ("Notes on Lohengrin") (1892), an analysis of Wagner's drama (1892), and a biography (1895), emphasising in particular the heroic Teutonic aspects in the composer's works. Stewart Spencer, writing in "Wagner Remembered", described Chamberlain's edition of Wagner letters as "one of the most egregious attempts in the history of musicology to misrepresent an artist by systematically censoring his correspondence". In particular, Wagner's lively sex life presented a problem for Chamberlain. Wagner had abandoned his first wife Minna, had an open affair with the married woman Mathilde Wesendonck and had started sleeping with his second wife Cosima while she was still married to her first husband. Chamberlain in his Wagner biography went to considerable lengths to distort the Master's love-life such as implying that Wagner's relationship with Cosima von Bülow only started after the death of her first husband.
Puccini's next work after "La bohème" was "Tosca" (1900), arguably Puccini's first foray into "verismo", the realistic depiction of many facets of real life including violence. Puccini had been considering an opera on this theme since he saw the play "Tosca" by Victorien Sardou in 1889, when he wrote to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, begging him to get Sardou's permission for the work to be made into an opera: "I see in this "Tosca" the opera I need, with no overblown proportions, no elaborate spectacle, nor will it call for the usual excessive amount of music."
The music of "Tosca" employs musical signatures for particular characters and emotions, which have been compared to Wagnerian leitmotivs, and some contemporaries saw Puccini as thereby adopting a new musical style influenced by Wagner. Others viewed the work differently. Rejecting the allegation that "Tosca" displayed Wagnerian influences, a critic reporting on the 20 February 1900 Torino premiere wrote: "I don't think you could find a more Puccinian score than this."
Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his 32 piano sonatas between 1795 and 1822. Although originally not intended to be a meaningful whole, as a set they compose one of the most important collections of works in the history of music. Hans von Bülow called them "The New Testament" of the piano literature (Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Well-Tempered Clavier" being "The Old Testament").
In 1782, almost a decade before Haydn composed the first of his famous London symphonies, he composed a trio of symphonies – 76, 77 and 78 – for a trip to London which fell through. Haydn wrote the following to his Paris music publisher Boyer on July 15, 1783:
The Water Music is a collection of orchestral movements, often published as three suites, composed by George Frideric Handel. It premiered on 17 July 1717, in response to King George I's request for a concert on the River Thames.
The national anthem "La Marseillaise" was composed by Rouget de Lisle in 1792.
The world's first opera was "Dafne" by Jacopo Peri, which appeared in Florence in 1598. Three decades later Heinrich Schütz set the same libretto in a translation by the poet Martin Opitz, thus creating the first ever German-language opera. The music to Schütz's "Dafne" is now lost and details of the performance are sketchy, but it is known to have been written to celebrate the marriage of Landgrave Georg II of Hessen-Darmstadt to Princess Sophia Eleonora of Saxony in Torgau in 1627. As in Italy, the first patrons of opera in Germany and Austria were royalty and the nobility, and they tended to favour composers and singers from south of the Alps. Antonio Cesti was particularly successful, providing the huge operatic extravaganza "Il pomo d'oro" for the imperial court in Vienna in 1668. Opera in Italian would continue to exercise a considerable sway over German-speaking lands throughout the Baroque and Classical periods. Nevertheless, native forms were developing too. In Nuremberg in 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the "spiritual pastorale", "Seelewig", which foreshadows the "Singspiel", a genre of German-language opera in which arias alternate with spoken dialogue. "Seelewig" was a moral allegory inspired by the example of contemporary school dramas and is the first German opera whose music has survived.
The Piano Sonata No. 31 in A major, Op. 110, by Ludwig van Beethoven was composed in 1821. It is the central piano sonata in the group of three, Opp. 109–111, which he wrote between 1820 and 1822, and the thirty-first of his published piano sonatas.
The Water Music composed by George Frideric Handel premiered on 17 July 1717, when King George I requested a concert on the River Thames. The concert was performed for King George I on his barge and he is said to have enjoyed it so much that he ordered the 50 exhausted musicians to play the suites three times on the trip.
In 1760, one year after Voltaire published "Candide", a sequel was published with the name . This work is attributed both to Thorel de Campigneulles, a writer unknown today, and Henri Joseph Du Laurens, who is suspected of having habitually plagiarised Voltaire. The story continues in this sequel with Candide having new adventures in the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Denmark. "Part II" has potential use in studies of the popular and literary receptions of "Candide", but is almost certainly apocryphal. In total, by the year 1803, at least ten imitations of "Candide" or continuations of its story were published by authors other than Voltaire.
The operetta "Candide" was originally conceived by playwright Lillian Hellman, as a play with incidental music. Leonard Bernstein, the American composer and conductor who wrote the music, was so excited about the project that he convinced Hellman to do it as a "comic operetta". Many lyricists worked on the show, including James Agee, Dorothy Parker, John Latouche, Richard Wilbur, Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Hellman. Hershy Kay orchestrated all the pieces except for the overture, which Bernstein did himself. "Candide" first opened on Broadway as a musical on 1 December 1956. The premier production was directed by Tyrone Guthrie and conducted by Samuel Krachmalnick. While this production was a box office flop, the music was highly praised, and an original cast album was made. The album gradually became a cult hit, but Hellman's libretto was criticised as being too serious an adaptation of Voltaire's novel. "Candide" would be more popular seventeen years later with a new libretto by Hugh Wheeler.
George Frideric Handel's operas comprise 42 musical dramas that were written between 1705 and 1741 in various genres. He began composing operas in Germany and then for a brief time in Italy to modest success. It was not until he moved to England that he found great success in the genre. His first opera in England, "Rinaldo" (1711), was met with enthusiasm, and several more Italian operas soon followed. However, Handel's place as the central figure of opera in England during the eighteenth century was not solidified until, under the influence of Thomas Arne, he began composing large-scale works with English language texts. Though almost all his English language works are technically oratorios and not operas, several of them, such as "Semele" (1743), have become an important part of the opera repertoire. Handel's first opera (opera seria - serious Italian opera) was "Almira" (1705).
The Symphony No. 3 by Gustav Mahler was written in 1896, or possibly only completed in that year, but composed between 1893 and 1896. It is his longest piece and is the longest symphony in the standard repertoire, with a typical performance lasting around 90 to 105 minutes. It was voted one of the ten greatest symphonies of all time in a survey of conductors carried out by the "BBC Music Magazine".
In 1984, Austrian culture minister Helmut Zilk designated Drese as director of the Vienna State Opera in Vienna. Drese began his tenure in 1986 and chose Claudio Abbado as the State Opera's music director. In the following five years, the State Opera experienced a very fruitful period. Abbado conducted both new productions and revivals, among them "Un ballo in maschera" (staged by Gianfranco de Bosio, designed by Emmanuele Luzzati), "L'Italiana in Algeri" (staged and designed by Ponnelle), "Carmen" (revival of the 1978 Franco Zeffirelli-production), "Pelléas et Mélisande" (staged by Antoine Vitez and designed by Yannis Kokkos), "Il viaggio a Reims" (staged by Luca Ronconi and designed by Gae Aulenti), "Don Carlo" (staged and designed by Pier Luigi Pizzi), "Don Giovanni" (staged by Luc Bondy, with Ruggero Raimondi as the Don), "Le nozze di Figaro" (staged by Jonathan Miller). Drese initiated cycle of all the major Mozart-operas.
The musical style which developed from these early experiments was called monody. In the 1590s, monody developed into a vehicle capable of extended dramatic expression through the work of composers such as Jacopo Peri, working in conjunction with poet Ottavio Rinuccini. In 1598, Peri and Rinuccini produced "Dafne", an entire drama sung in monodic style: this was the first creation of a new form called "opera". Though Peri's Dafne was the first performed opera, its music has been lost to the centuries. Instead, L'Euridice, his second opera is most-often heralded as the history-making work. The new form of opera also borrowed, especially for the librettos, from an existing pastoral poetic form called the intermedio; it was mainly the musical style that was new. The instrumentation for an opera from the Camerata composers (Caccini and Peri) was written for a handful of gambas, lutes, and harpsichord or organ for continuo.
Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 in E major (WAB 107) is one of his best-known symphonies. It was written between 1881 and 1883 and was revised in 1885. It is dedicated to Ludwig II of Bavaria. The premiere, given under Arthur Nikisch and the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the opera house at Leipzig on 30 December 1884, brought Bruckner the greatest success he had known in his life. The symphony is sometimes referred to as the "Lyric", though the appellation is not the composer's own, and is seldom used.
It was only after King Ludwig II of Bavaria became a sponsor of Wagner (he granted the composer a generous stipend, and supported Wagner's artistic endeavours in other ways) that enough resources could be found to mount the premiere of "Tristan und Isolde". Hans von Bülow was chosen to conduct the production at the Nationaltheater in Munich, despite the fact that Wagner was having an affair with his wife, Cosima von Bülow. Even then, the planned premiere on 15 May 1865 had to be postponed until the Isolde, Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, had recovered from hoarseness. The work finally premiered on 10 June 1865, with Malvina's husband Ludwig partnering her as Tristan.
Wagner was forced to abandon his position as conductor of the Dresden Opera in 1849, as there was a warrant posted for his arrest for his participation in the unsuccessful May Revolution. He left his wife, Minna, in Dresden, and fled to Zürich. There, in 1852, he met the wealthy silk trader Otto Wesendonck. Wesendonck became a supporter of Wagner and bankrolled the composer for several years. Wesendonck's wife, Mathilde, became enamoured of the composer. Though Wagner was working on his epic "Der Ring des Nibelungen", he found himself intrigued by the legend of Tristan and Isolde.
Niemann visited Wagner in the Asyl, at the composer's invitation, in summer 1858. Wagner had him in mind to create the role of Siegfried. From 1859, Wagner had involved Niemann (then at Hanover) in his plan to form a model German company to perform some operas, including "Tristan und Isolde", in Paris in 1860. The plan was for Niemann to sing "Tannhäuser" and Josef Tichatschek to sing "Lohengrin", alternating to rest their voices and able to replace each other if needed, and both to share a production of "Tristan und Isolde" as well. However, the projected Isolde, Frau Bürde-Ney, could not be released from a Leipzig contract, and the project foundered.
"Tristan und Isolde" proved to be a difficult opera to stage, and Wagner considered various possibilities for the venue. In 1857 he was invited by a representative of Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, to stage his operas in Rio de Janeiro (in Italian, the language of the Imperial Opera); he told Liszt he was considering settling in Rio, and that that city would be given the honour of premiering "Tristan". Wagner sent the Emperor bound copies of his earlier operas in expression of his interest, but nothing more came of the plan. He then proposed that the premiere take place in Strasbourg, following interest in the project shown by the Grand Duchess of Baden. Again, the project failed to eventuate. His thoughts then turned to Paris, the centre of the operatic world in the middle of the 19th century. However, after a disastrous staging of "Tannhäuser" at the Paris Opéra, Wagner offered the work to the Karlsruhe opera in 1861. When he visited the Vienna Court Opera to rehearse possible singers for this production, the management at Vienna suggested staging the opera there. Originally, the tenor Alois Ander was employed to sing the part of Tristan, but later proved incapable of learning the role. Parallel attempts to stage the opera in Dresden, Weimar and Prague failed. Despite over 70 rehearsals between 1862 and 1864, "Tristan und Isolde" was unable to be staged in Vienna, winning the opera a reputation as unperformable.