Bach's Legacy by Stinson Russell;

Author:Stinson, Russell; [Stinson, Russell;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190091224
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

3

Bach in Bayreuth

Richard Wagner and the Well-Tempered Clavier

J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier—that monumental and magisterial set of forty-eight preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys—has over the years meant different things to different people. For example, the great nineteenth-century pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow regarded the collection as “The Old Testament” of keyboard literature.1 Robert Schumann also referred to the work in biblical terms, advising young musicians to “let the Well-Tempered Clavier be your daily bread.” The collection likewise seems to have belonged to Johannes Brahms’s daily routine, for he once quipped, after someone noticed the score on his piano, “with this I rinse out my mouth every morning.” Richard Wagner, for his part, described the Well-Tempered Clavier as the “quintessence” of Bach’s art. Wagner’s encounter with “the 48” represents an especially compelling chapter in the history of Bach reception.

Wagner hailed Bach as one of the greatest composers in music history. His thoughts specifically on the Well-Tempered Clavier, hereafter abbreviated as the WTC, are documented by various sources, but particularly by the diaries of his second wife, Cosima.2 Begun in 1869, the year before their marriage, and faithfully kept until the day before Wagner’s death in 1883, these journals were originally intended by Cosima as a way of finishing her husband’s autobiography. In published form, they run over two thousand pages, and they preserve Wagner’s musings on virtually every subject imaginable—especially himself. Entries by Cosima as early as 1869 and as late as 1883 attest to Wagner’s high regard for the WTC, and in many instances she reported on performances of particular works from the collection that took place at the couple’s home in Bayreuth, the famous villa that Wagner dubbed “Wahnfried” (since it was there that his “delusions” found “peace”). The performers at these gatherings included the pianist Joseph Rubinstein (1878, 1879, 1880), Cosima’s father Franz Liszt (1877, 1882), the conductor Hermann Levi (1882), and Wagner himself (1877, 1878, 1879, 1882).3 During 1878, such performances became increasingly common, and they culminated in a series of soirees from December 17, 1878 to March 2, 1879 in which Rubinstein performed in order, with perhaps one exception, all forty-eight preludes and fugues (see Table 3.1 for a summary). Wagner, who was hardly the piano virtuoso that Rubinstein was, played the role of lecturer at these events, commenting extensively—and sometimes enigmatically—on such matters as form, melody, harmony, counterpoint, and the programmatic implications of the music; he also compared certain movements to operas by Mozart and himself. Despite the efforts of Martin Geck, Carl Dahlhaus, and others, Wagner’s remarks as recorded by Cosima still have not received the close attention they deserve.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.