A Sound Tradition. Christoph Wagner-Trenkwitz
opera composer, who first encountered the Philharmonic in 1861, deserves a more extensive digression, which will take us up into the 1870’s.
Richard Wagner had revealed himself as a revolutionary and had to flee Dresden in 1849. As he had been declared a persona non grata in Germany, he now lived in exile in Switzerland. In May of 1861 he heard the orchestra of the Vienna Opera for the first time, and likewise his own Lohengrin as well. The maestro wrote to his wife Minna Planer, “for the first time in my difficult and painful life I have felt an unalloyed joy that is the conciliation for everything.” This was succeeded a few days later by a no less acclaimed Der fliegende Holländer, after which Wagner announced in an address his plan to come to Vienna to rehearse his new opera: Tristan und Isolde. But after 77 rehearsals and the illness of the tenor Alois Anders the daring project of giving Tristan its world premiere in Vienna was abandoned. The composer, heavily in debt, had to flee his villa in Penzing. This “work of the century” first saw the light of the stage in Munich in July of 1865.
Richard Wagner at a time when he was more interested in musical than political revolution
Worth mentioning is a world premiere that took place at the Kärntnertor-Theater, but without receiving the hoped-for acclaim. In February 1864, Jacques Offenbach’s Rhein-Nixies was put on stage, from which years later the Frenchman took the most famous melody into his last work: the Barcarolle in The Tales of Hoffmann.
Wagner may have been disappointed by the opera administration’s unwillingness to sacrifice everything for the world premiere of his Tristan; but he kept a lifelong feeling of affection for the Vienna orchestra, which was manifested as early as the 1862/63 season in several epochal, extraordinary concerts. Excerpts from Der Ring des Nibelungen and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg were heard in succession at the Theater an der Wien.
The first photograph of the Vienna Philharmonic (1864) on stage at the Kärntnertor-Theater. Center left is the conductor Otto Dessoff (in light trousers).
In May of 1872, just before laying the cornerstone at Bayreuth, the master guest conducted in the Musikverein, once again praising the Philharmonic in a rehearsal as “the best orchestra of the world,” and adding, “Being with you and making music with you is a delight!” In a concert on the 12th of May, which also featured the finale of Walküre, a special effect occurred: just as Wotan summoned the fire god Loge to appear, a deafening thunderstorm broke out.
Some telling stories have come down to us about Wagner’s visits to Vienna in March and May of 1875. The Court Opera singer Amalie Materna came to a rehearsal of excerpts from Götterdämmerung, exhausted from a prior rehearsal of Goldmark’s Queen of Sheba. When she attempted to get through the rehearsal on half voice (“marking”), Wagner’s reaction was: “Please don’t mark! You can do your Goldmarking in the opera!” In the concert itself, it was yet again a Jewish rival who was detracting from his artistic energies. While the frenetically applauding public was trying to force the orchestra to encore the Funeral March from Götterdämmerung, the brass section members begged the maestro to spare them, since they had to play in Meyerbeer’s Die Afrikanerin (L’Africaine) that night. Wagner explained the situation to the public and called the opera—whether erroneously or sarcastically is anyone’s guess—“Die Amerikanerin.”
The one time Wagner conducted at the Court Opera was on March 2, 1876, at a benefit performance of his Lohengrin. The composer-librettist scattered roses in front of the concertmaster (“You play that so much better than I composed it”), but as an unpracticed Kapellmeister was able to depend on a “secret” sub-conductor, who thus prevented many blunders. This was no less a person than Hans Richter, the court Kapellmeister, who was devoted to Wagner: he took his place by the timpani and conducted at tricky places “with his drumstick, without Wagner being aware of it,” as Joseph Sulzer, a contemporary witness in the cello section, reported.
After 1876, Wagner never visited the orchestra again, but it followed him: for many years, starting with the first Bayreuth festivals, members of the Vienna Philharmonic assisted in the festival orchestra. They were not all admirers of Wagner’s “Music of the Future.” Court Opera bassoonist Wilhelm Krankenhagen, e.g., noted in his Götterdämmerung part:
Der Zukunft Musik dereinst oben
Wird hoffentlich anders sein,
Sonst möcht’ ich nach hiesigen Proben,
Nicht in den Himmel hinein.
(The Music of the future will be different in heaven,
I hope, than it is here at home:
If it’s not, after all these rehearsals,
To Heaven I don’t need to come.)
And Krankenhagen’s Parsifal part contains these verses:
Zwei Knaben gingen nach Bayreuth,
Der eine dumm, der andre g’scheit.
Und als der Parsifal war um,
Da war der G’scheite auch schon dumm.
(Off to Bayreuth two boys went
One quite dull, and one intelligent,
But once Parsifal was done,
It also made the bright boy dumb.)
And second violinist Johann Czapauschek could not have been much of a fan either: Where Lohengrin confesses in Act I, “Elsa, I love you” he wrote into his part: “Here Czapauschek recommends an A major flourish from the brass, and finis operis!”
Living Composers and Historic Preservation
Back in the 1860s, important composers regularly stood at the podium of our orchestra, as for instance Max Bruch in concert or Charles Gounod, who conducted his opera Roméo et Juliette in the Kärntnertor-Theater. Celebrated concert soloists such as the pianist Anton Rubinstein and the violinist Joseph Joachim were also featured.
In 1865, the opera orchestra played to benefit the placement of a Schubert memorial (the monument by sculptor Karl Kundmann can be seen in the Vienna Stadtpark today) and in the following year for a Mozart memorial, at which, as yet unpublished compositions of Rossini, that the composer had made available to the orchestra, were heard in the Great Redoutensaal. And finally in 1878, the orchestra volunteered to serve on a further memorial project: the Beethoven Monument by Caspar von Zumbusch was unveiled in 1880 on Lothringerstrasse, known today as Beethoven-Platz. The original model of the seated figure can be seen across the way in the Vienna Konzerthaus.
On the one hand, opera director Franz von Dingelstedt, appointed in October of 1867, campaigned for increasing the still meager orchestra salaries, but on the other attempted to bring the Philharmonic concerts under the Court Opera’s control. “In the theater world, any independent organization working for its own private objectives is an anomaly that should not be tolerated, let alone protected,” said Dingelstedt. But even if combining the opera with the concert business would have had resulted in “substantial alleviations in work conditions,” the ‘Philharmonic idea’ and thus the Philharmonic itself would then have ceased to exist (Hellsberg). The orchestra stonewalled diplomatically, the new director decided to put off any sort of reform of this type until the time of the new house opening— and this moment was imminent.
The Opera House on the Ring
The new construction was not met with pleasurable anticipation. The plans were ridiculed, there was talk of things like “a sunken whale” and the “Königgrätz of architecture” (an allusion to the devastating defeat of the Austrian army at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866).