Wednesday September 23, 2009

Colorado Music Festival Chamber Orchestra
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor; Glenn Einschlag, bassoon
Richard Wagner: Siegfried Idyll 19:42
Marjan Mozetich: Concerto for Bassoon and Strings with Marimba 21:47 (7/15/07)
Also, Charley anticipates the Boulder Philharmonic Chamber Players (music director Michael Butterman, piano; Jennifer Carsillo, violin; principal cellist Charles Lee) tomorrow at the Arvada Center.
Johannes Brahms: Hungarian Dance No.10
Richard Wagner: Prelude to Die Meistersinger
Boulder Philharmonic/ Michael Butterman
NCA 1:52 + 9:57



Richard Wagner (1813-1883): Siegfried Idyll

Siegfried Idyll was written as a surprise present for Wagner's bride Cosima on her thirty-third birthday. It also celebrated the birth of their first son Siegfried.
The first performance took place on Christmas Day, 1870 on the staircase of the Wagners' villa at ``Triebschen'' near Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Wagner had organized a small band of musicians, who rehearsed in secret and crept into the house at 7:30 in the morning to awaken the sleeping Cosima with the music. By a strange coincidence, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was a house guest at the time.
Cosima was stunned. ``As I awoke,'' she later recalled, ``my ear caught a sound, which swelled fuller and fuller; no longer could I imagine myself to be dreaming: music was sounding, and such music! When it died away, Richard came into my room with the children and offered me the score of the symphonic birthday poem. I was in tears, but so was all the rest of the household.''
The original title for the work was Triebschen Idyll, with Fidi's Bird Song and Orange Sunrise, presented as a Symphonic Birthday Greeting to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870. ``Fidi'' was the parents' nickname for young Siegfried. ``Orange sunrise'' refers to the wallpaper in Cosima's bedroom.
After its initial early morning performance, Siegfried Idyll was played twice more during that Christmas Day in 1870. The assembled musicians also played the Wedding March from Lohengrin and a sextet by Beethoven.
Wagner considered the music too personal for public performance, but in 1878 money worries forced him to sell it. Cosima wrote in her diary: ``My secret treasure is becoming common property; may the joy it will give mankind be commensurate with the sacrifice that I am making.''
Various themes in Siegfried Idyll date back to 1864, so it was the opera Siegfried that borrowed from the Idyll, and not the reverse, as is often supposed. The Idyll also contains the German folk song Schlaf', Kindchen, schlafe (Sleep, Little Child, Sleep).
Cosima was the daughter of Franz Liszt. She first married the conductor Hans von Bülow, but ran off with Wagner after an intense meeting at the Berlin Zoo in 1863. Before her divorce from von Bülow, she had three children by Wagner: Siegfried, Isolde and Eva. Wagner and Cosima were married on August 25, 1869.