Siegfried Wagner

Siegfried Wagner (6 June 1869 - 4 August 1930) was a German composer and conductor, the son of Richard Wagner. He was a very productive opera composer and was the artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival from 1908 to 1930.

Life

Siegfried was born in 1869 to Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima Wagner née Liszt. Through his mother, he was a grandson of Franz Liszt, from whom he received some instruction in harmony.

Some youthful compositions date from about 1882. After he completed his secondary education in 1889 he studied with Wagner's pupil Engelbert Humperdinck, but was more strongly drawn to a career as an architect and studied architecture in Berlin and Karlsruhe.

In 1892 he undertook a trip to Asia with a friend, the English composer Clement Harris. During the voyage he decided to abandon architecture and commit himself to music. Reputedly, it was also Harris who first aroused his homoerotic impulses.Fact|date=June 2008

While on board ship he sketched his first official work, the symphonic poem "Sehnsucht" afterclarifyme Friedrich Schiller. This piece was not completed until just before the concert in which Siegfried Wagner conducted it in London on 6 June 1895. [Peter P. Pachl, booklet notes to Classic Produktion Osnabrück cpo 999 366-2.] He became a very productive composer, composing more operas than his father. Though his works are numerous, none has entered the standard repertory.

Meanwhile he had made his conducting debut as an assistant conductor at Bayreuth in 1894; in 1896 he became associate conductor. In 1908 he took over as Artistic Director of the Bayreuth Festival in succession to his mother Cosima.

Siegfried Wagner was bisexual [Jonathan Keates, " [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/10/04/bocar130.xml Review of "The Wagner Clan" by Jonathan Carr] ", "Daily Telegraph".]

For years, his mother urged him to marry and provide the Wagner dynasty with heirs but Siegfried fought off all these increasingly desparate urgings.

Around 1913, pressurre on Siegfied increased due to the Harden-Eulenburg Affair, in which the journalist Maximilian Harden accused several public figures, most notably Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg-Hertefeld, a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II, of homosexuality. In this climate, Siegfried could no longer avoid marriage. The family found a suitable woman in a seventeen-year-old Englishwoman, Winifred Klindworth, and at the Bayreuth festival of 1914 she was introduced to the then-45-year-old Siegfried. The two married on 22 September 1915.Brigitte Hamann. "Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth". Harcourt, Orlando, Florida (2005).]

The couple had four children:
# Wieland (1917-1966)
# Friedlinde (1918-1991)
# Wolfgang (born 1919)
# Verena (born 1920)

Though the marriage provided for the dynastic succesion, the hope that it would also bring an end to Siegfried's homosexual encounters and the associated costly scandals was disappointed, as Siegfried remained sexually active with other men.Geoffrey Wheatcroft. " [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/books/review/Wheatcroft.t.html?ex=1184299200&en=9fa3d5e9b37fe9cc&ei=5070 A Widow’s Might] ", "New York Times", 11 Marc 2007.]

Peter Pachl, one of Siegfried's biographers, asserted that in 1901 Siegfried had sired an illegitimate son, Walter Aign (1901-1977). However, that assertion remains controversial as he supplied no evidence.Fact|date=June 2008 Nonetheless, several recent authors, such as Frederic Spotts or Brigitte Hamann, have taken up that assertion. [" [http://www.jstor.org/pss/823643 Review of Frederic Spotts. 'Bayreut: A history of the Wagner Festival'] ". "Cambridge Opera Journal´", volume 7, no. 3 (November 1995), p. 277-284.]

Siegfried Wagner died in 1930 and was succeeded at the helm of the Bayreuth Festival by his widow, Winifred, as his two sons were still too young.

Works

Operas

(all in three acts; all with libretto by the composer)

#"Der Bärenhäuter" (1898; premiered Munich 1899)
#"Herzog Wildfang" (1900; premiered Munich 1901)
#"Der Kobold" (1903; premiered Hamburg 1904)
#"Bruder Lustig" (1904; premiered Hamburg 1905)
#"Sternengebot" (1906; premiered Hamburg 1908)
#"Banadietrich" (1909; premiered Karlsruhe 1910)
#"Schwarzschwanenreich" (1910; premiered Karlsruhe 1918)
#"Sonnenflammen" (1912; premiered Darmstadt 1918)
#"Der Heidenkönig" (1913; premiered Cologne 1933)
#"Der Friedensengel" (1914; premiered Karlsruhe 1926)
#"An allem ist Hütchen schuld!" (1915; premiered Stuttgart 1917)
#"Das Liebesopfer" (1917, libretto only; revised version under title "Wernhart", 1929)
#"Der Schmied von Marienburg" (1920; premiered Rostock 1923)
#"Rainulf und Adelasia" (1922; premiered Rostock 1923)
#"Die heilige Linde" (1927; premiered Cologne 2001)
#"Wahnopfer" (1928; orchestration unfinished)
#"Walamund" (1928-29; not orchestrated)
#"Das Flüchlein, das Jeder mitbekam" (1929; not orchestrated by composer apart from the Overture; orchestration by Hans Peter Mohr for 1984 premiere in Kiel)

Orchestral Works

# March for "Gottfried der Spielmann" (c. 1882) [Peter P. Pachl, booklet notes to Classic Produktion Osnabrück cpo 999 366-2.]
# Orchestration of "Ekloge" from Liszt's "Années de Pèlerinage" (1890)
# "Sehnsucht", symphonic poem after Schiller (1892-5)
# Concertino for flute and small orchestra (1913)
# Violin Concerto (1915)
# "Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär", scherzo for orchestra (1922)
# "Glück", symphonic poem (1922-23) [dedicated to the memory of Clement Harris]
# Symphony in C major (1925, rev. 1927). (First version used the Prelude to "Der Friedensengel" as the slow movement, whereas a new movement was composed for the revised version. The scherzo is based on the sketches for an unfinished orchestral tone-poem, "Hans im Glück" [ Peter P. Pachl, notes to Classic Produktion Osnabrück cpo 999 531-2] )

Notes

External links

* [http://www.siegfried-wagner.org/ International Siegfried Wagner Society]
* [http://www.naxos.com/mainsite/default.asp?pn=Composers&char=W&ComposerID=1103 Siegfried Wagner discography]
* [http://www.richard-wagner-museum.ch/en/index/index.php Homepage of the Richard Wagner Museum in Tribschen/Lucerne (where S.W. was born)]
*IMSLP|id=Wagner, Siegfried|cname=Siegfried Wagner