Il Festival Hall, the theater where the Festival takes place was built on the same sketch by Wagner, it is a decidedly austere red brick building that looks more like a conservatory than a theatre.
The music of Richard Wagner it is known all over the world even by people who have never set foot in it Festival Hall concert hall or in an opera house. The wedding march of Lohengrin, the "Good Friday Spell" of Parsifal, the ride of the Valkyries, have always been hummed and whistled everywhere, performed by barrel organs in circuses for a long time, by pianos in 900th century café-concerts.
No less books and treatises have been written about the life and works of Wagner than about Napoleon
Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig on May 22, 1813last of nine children. Orphaned of a father for less than a year, he found paternal affection in Ludwig Geyer, an actor-painter who had married his mother. In the city of Dresden, where the family had moved, Geyer was engaged by the Court Theater.
It happened every now and then that little Richard performed on stage. At the age of five he played an angel in a play commissioned by the royal household and after the performance a palace servant handed the Geyer family a cake which read: "From the King of Saxony to little Angel!"
It can be said that Wagner interpreted his life as if it were a melodrama, each time assuming a different role: from a young artist struggling to establish himself, to a prestigious conductor, to a hunted revolutionary; from luxury-loving prodigy to indefatigable fundraiser; from playboy to doting husband, and then playboy again. His self-centeredness and insatiable ambition were compared to his exceptional talent. As a young man he refused to study traditional music and taught himself composition by studying scores by Beethoven and other greats. A man full of contradictions – according to sources – he was concerned only with his own needs: everything else took second place to his work and his personal satisfaction. He took full advantage of the hospitality of his friends, their money and even their wives.
However, it must be admitted that if this man suffering from a form of megalomania had not believed so firmly in himself, perhaps he would never have been able to overcome all the difficulties that stood between him and the creation of a new form of art.
He dreamed of a “lyric drama”
A drama that was the expressive synthesis of plot, acting, singing, choir and instrumental performance, all created by a single artist. Abandoned studies at the University of Leipzig in 1833, Wagner became chorus master of the Wurzburg theatre. Nineteenth-century musical theater in Germany was in pitiful conditions: poorly paid and unprepared musicians made havoc with the scores, while capricious dancers and singers used the stage above all to show off their talent. German opera, after producing such famous names as Waber, which had initially aroused Wagner's enthusiasm, had declined by absorbing antiquated fashions imported from Italy and France.
Wagner refused to accept this condition, for him artistic integrity came first. He found inspiration in the ancient sagas and legends, which for him constituted a more genuine form of expression of the movements of the soul, and he read many books, including Germanic mythology by Jakob Grimm. Having first chosen the theme, Wagner outlined the plot, wrote the story in verse, composed the music on the piano and finally elaborated the orchestration.
Of the great composers he was the only one to write the librettos of all his works himself
Wagner's first masterpiece dates from 1839. The young composer and his actress wife Minna were fleeing creditors in Riga, the Baltic city where Wagner had worked as a conductor. Their ship, a somewhat rickety old vessel, was caught in a violent storm and narrowly escaped shipwreck. When the sky finally cleared, the crew broke into a song of gratitude that made a deep impression on Wagner. He then remembered an ancient legend revived by poet Heinrich Heine, and the experience inspired the work "The ghost ship”. It tells of the love of a Dutchman (The Flying Dutchman), condemned to sail forever for a mortal girl, a love destined to end in renunciation and sacrifice. He composed the work in seven weeks on a rented piano, during a period of exile and poverty in Paris.
The first performance of Il Vascello took place in 1843, the year Wagner was appointed conductor of the Dresden Court Theater – his first prestigious position in one of Germany's leading cultural centres. But even here his polemical spirit and his eccentric way of life led him to constant clashes.
The revolutionary fever that shook all of Europe a few years later also infected the capital of Saxony. Regardless of his dependent position vis-à-vis the sovereign, Wagner set about making and writing speeches against the old regime and against the Jews. After the failure of the revolutionary ideals Wagner abandoned his companions and fled to Switzerland; just in time for an arrest warrant to be issued against him on 16 May 1849 in Dresden. Thus he ended his political militancy as the years of exile began.
Nonetheless, this was not too difficult a period for Wagner, as he managed to find a way, between 1849 and 1861, to write and direct.
In August 1858, forced to leave Switzerland, he moved to Venice
Here where he took up lodgings in an apartment Justinian Palace. In the lagoon city the musician wrote the second act of Tristan and Isolde, and could have completed the third as well if the following year the Venetian authorities, in obedience to the Austrian professions, had not invited him to leave and thus return to the Swiss confederation.
During these years of constant wanderings, Wagner could always count on influential friends such as the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, to put in a good word with the authorities and lend him money. In Zurich, the Wagners found hospitality with a wealthy German silk merchant, Otto Wesendock, and his beautiful wife Mathilde, who ignited the composer with passion. Despite the wreck of his marriage to Minna, Wagner went through with the Tristan and Isolt, his densest work of feelings of love.
In 1861 Wagner was in Vienna, acclaimed by all as a great conductor, and began work on the opera The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. Because he had never stopped living beyond his means, at 51 he began to flee creditors again and found himself in Stuttgart without money and also without hope.
But just then miraculous help came to him
Without Wagner having ever known the young sovereign Louis II of Bavaria, at 16 he had attended a performance of the Lohengrin in Munich. He had recently ascended the throne when he decided to bring Wagner to his capital and offer him all the help he needed. The young sovereign did not deny anything to his idol, guaranteeing him a generous salary and maximum artistic freedom. But Wagner, faithful to his ways, aroused the indignation of the inhabitants of Munich with his way of life.
The situation worsened when Wagner called one of his best disciples, the maestro, to the city Hans von Bulow, who had a profound contempt for the musicians and the public of Munich and made no secret of it. But that wasn't enough: the scandal around Wagner was even worse when he got involved in an affair with Cosima, daughter of his old friend Liszt and wife of von Bülow.
Between 1864 and 187, however, all of Wagner's works were successfully performed in Munich, conducted by von Bülow, who remained faithful to the composer as an artist.
Meanwhile Cosima had entered Wagner's life as a mistress, giving him three children with the names of the protagonists of his operas, Isolt, Eva, Siegfried. In 1866, four years after Minna's death, Cosima divorced her husband to marry Wagner.
For years Wagner had cherished the dream of a festival dedicated only to his music
And to make this dream come trueApril 1871 he settled in Bayreuth. To raise the necessary funds, despite his advanced age, he began to tour all over Germany, giving concerts and above all encouraging the formation of Wagnerian Societies. Then he returned to Bayreuth, in a villa donated by Ludwing, which he christened Wahnfriend, a name which means freedom from madness and worries.
In this fairly stable and serene environment, Wagner completed a great musical work, The Ring of Nibeluurge : a cycle of four works (Tetralogy) which have caves and forests bathed by the waters of the father Reno as their backdrop, and populated by titans, monsters, gnomes, and other pagan divinities.
During rehearsals he played all the parts to show the performers how he intended to represent his works. To encourage the Rhinedaughters to float naturally as they precariously balanced on moving wagons, he rode those vehicles himself. Once upon a time a baritone couldn't bring himself to throw himself off a cliff in a scene from theRhine gold, and then Wagner cried out: "Aren't you ashamed?". And, after instantly scaling that papier-mâché precipice, he threw himself resolutely onto the stage.
"God denied us Germans the voice of the Italians" said the maestro exaggerating as always "but in return he granted us the faculty of expressing ourselves with instrumental music."
The orchestra which before Wagner had mainly served to offer musical accompaniment to the singers, in Wagner's hands was transformed into a single powerful instrument, which dominated the scene without ever drowning the singers' voices.
Among Wagner's innovations for the Bayreuth theater was the so-called "mystical gulf" in which the orchestra was placed, which remained invisible to the public: the effect was a perfect acoustic balance between the instruments and the voices. In order not to take anything away from the show that took place on the stage, he eliminated all the boxes arranged in a horseshoe and wanted only an audience with sloping tiers. Prioritizing sound over comfort, he had wooden seats made without padding.
The first festival was held on August 13, 1876 and starting from 1882 it was staged regularly every year
Just in 1882 there was the premiere of Parsifal, the last major work of the now elderly composer, conduct completed after a short stay in Palermo, for which the musician was inspired by the legend of the Holy Grail. On the evening of the last performance, Wagner slipped unnoticed into the "mystical gulf" to conduct the last act himself.
At the end of the Festival, the 14 September he left with his family for Venice, where he had rented an apartment on the top floor of the Vendramin-Calergi building. Here Wagner resumed working around an old project for which he was inspired by the Buddhist tradition, The winners (The winners), but on the afternoon of February 13, the master died of a sudden heart failure. His body was transported to Germany to be buried in his beloved Wahnfield. Thus disappeared a great talent, a man full of contradictions, but sometimes, after him, he would never be the same.
It is in this Venetian context that I want to remember a work by my dearest friend Gianni Di Capua with whom I shared several professional moments and perhaps too often enlightened projects, as he himself said, who passed away exactly four years ago, at the end of the summer of 2018. He dedicated the last part of his life to Wagner, creating the documentary-film, planning and realizing "Richard Wagner. Venetian diary of the rediscovered symphony” produced by Kublai Film on the occasion of Richard Wagner's 205th birthday. The charm of this work retraces the historical event linked to the last performance of the "Symphony in C major", written by Wagner in 1832 and re-performed fifty years later for his wife Cosima's birthday. The documentary was broadcast by RAI only after the death of Gianni Di Capua, who several times in the last months of his life went to Rome in the hope that his request would be accepted. A documentary film who remembers Gianni perfectly as he was and as he will always be for those who knew him. Hi Gianni.
