Wagner: Tannhäuser - Pilgrims Chorus

Richard Wagner, musician, dramatist, linguist, philosopher and politician, born in Leipzig in 1813, is part of the bunch of great composers who came to the world around 1810 (Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn and Verdi, the latter in 1813).
Founder of the German opera "for the Germans", Wagner did not have special skills as an instrumentalist and for many years he worked as conductor of choirs and orchestras in German theatres. In the century of liberalism, class struggle and progress, he claimed for himself and for his profession the sacred condition of Art. Consistent with this, he wanted to live and succeed as a professional composer. It was not easy.

In the year 1834, he met the singer Minna Planer in a spa where the orchestral group in charge of Wagner in Dresden was spending the summer. After two years of loving courtship, they got married. The marriage, that had to face huge and diverse financial hardship, was always marked by a cluster of misunderstandings, separations and marital infidelities on both sides, although eventually, one or the other, returned home, with the tail between the legs and their heads down. It was the time of reconciliation.

Richard Wagner (1813 - 1893)

Precisely in a lovely moment, and fleeing the debtors, they tried fortune for a few years in Paris, but the expedition ended in a complete failure. They returned to Dresden in 1842 and a few months later the premiere of Rienzi, the Wagner's opera now almost forgotten, was produced. This time the success was by their side. The public waved to his young countryman rejected in Paris.

Life began to smile at them. Shortly after, Wagner is appointed the chapel master of the court of Saxony for life, and with a remarkable compensation. By the year 1848, Wagner has already composed Lohengrin and Tannhäuser and is also a much sought-after conductor. But life is going to get complicated again.

Wagner, the anarchist
The year 1848 is the year Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto, written in conjunction with his friend Friedrich Engels. And it is also the year in which the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin arrives in Dresden from Prague, to stay at the house of Wagner's assistant, who professed the same faith as Bakunin. Wagner and Bakunin became fond of each other, and mutual admiration, respect and friendship did emerge between them, endorsed each evening on long walks through the dark streets of Dresden, unaware Wagner that years later Bakunin will end up expelled from the First Communist International, by an indication of Karl Marx himself.

And 1848 is also the year of the "May Uprising", a series of popular demonstrations that resulted in the constitution of the first German parliament, which drafted a new constitution for Germany. But the King of Saxony rejected that constitution the following year and in response to the rejection broke out the May 1849 uprising that filled the streets of Dresden with barricades.

Richard Wagner actively participated in the revolt: he distributed propaganda and liaised with the "provisional government", of which Bakunin was a member. But the uprising failed and Wagner's anarchist friend was arrested and sentenced to death although later the Saxon authorities handed him over to the Russians, who did not hesitate to imprison him.

As for Richard, he had an arrest warrant for him that forced him to leave Dresden and with it, his lifetime employment. A few days later, Richard and Minna reached Weimar where they were welcomed by the eternally generous Franz Liszt. Eleven years of total exile from Germany will follow.

Tannhäuser
"Tannhäuser and the Minnesingers' Contest at Wartburg" (the full title) is one of Wagner's most popular works. Its Overture and the famous Pilgrims Chorus (end of Act 2) belong to the "classical" repertoire of European musical literature. With a bad reception at its premiere in Dresden, in 1845, is an opera in three acts, with music and texts in German written by Wagner himself, based on old German legends, related to the struggle between sacred love and profane love:

The Pilgrims Chorus
When in the castle of Wartburg the knight Tannhäuser confesses that he has lived on the mountain of Venus in mortal sin, the other knights threaten him with death. Elisabeth, his earthly love, saves him from it, but he is expelled from the castle and ordered to join the pilgrims who are on their way to Rome to receive absolution and whose song comes from the valley.

The rendition is by the Ponte Singers and the Ponte Orchestra, from Hong Kong, conducted by Stephen Lam Lik Hin. The beginning, pianissimo, compels listening to it with hearing aids.

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