(VI) Piano.

Wagner’s works for piano fall into two groups: those dating from his student years and those written for and dedicated to particular individuals at various points in his life. The works in the first group – disregarding a pair of lost sonatas from 1829 – were composed in Leipzig in 1831 and 1832. The primary influence in the sonatas in B and A is Beethoven, but the more quirkily individual Fantasia in F minor also betrays Wagner’s fascination at that time with Bellinian bel canto.

The earliest work in the second group was the Albumblatt in E major (the title ‘Lied ohne Worte’ was added on its first publication in 1911), apparently written for Ernst Benedikt Kietz in 1840. Further Albumblätter were composed for Princess Pauline Metternich (1861), Countess Pourtalès (‘Ankunft bei den schwarzen Schwänen’, also 1861) and Betty Schott (1875). Wagner’s most substantial work for piano, however, is the sonata for Mathilde Wesendonck (Sonate für das Album von Frau MW), a comparatively rare example in the 19th century of a single sonata-form movement (as opposed to the Lisztian model of several movements integrated into one).

Wagner: (1) Richard Wagner

12. Projected and unfinished dramatic works.

The five-act tragedy Leubald (1826–8), dating from Wagner’s adolescence, was the earliest of his ambitious dramatic schemes, drawing, as he later reported in Mein Leben, on Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, as well as Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen. He planned incidental music for it in the style of Beethoven’s Egmont, but if any was written, it has not survived.

Die Hochzeit (1832–3) was specifically conceived as an opera, but the poem is lost, and of the music only an introduction, chorus and septet were written. The prose scenario for Die hohe Braut, oder Bianca und Giuseppe, a grand opera in four or five acts, was probably sketched by Wagner in Königsberg in 1836. He subsequently sent it to Scribe in Paris, in the hope that the librettist might develop it into a text which Wagner could then be commissioned to set to music for the Opéra. Die hohe Braut was eventually elaborated into a libretto, however, by Wagner himself in Dresden, in 1842, and set to music by J.B. Kittl.

Männerlist grösser als Frauenlist, oder Die glückliche Bärenfamilie (‘Man’s Cunning Greater than Woman’s, or The Happy Bear Family’, ?1838), based on a story from The Thousand and One Nights, was intended as a comic opera, in the form of a Singspiel, with prose dialogue and individual numbers, of which only two were composed. Die Sarazenin (‘The Saracen Woman’), a projected five-act opera, on the subject of the Hohenstaufen prince Manfred, son of Friedrich II, and a mysterious Saracen prophetess, Fatima, was conceived almost certainly in Paris, late in 1841. Wagner subsequently elaborated his draft in Dresden, in 1843, but proceeded no further, and wrote no music for it. Die Bergwerke zu Falun (‘The Mines of Falun’, 1842), based on a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, was another aborted project also dating from Wagner’s Paris years. The years surrounding the Dresden uprisings of 1848–9 produced four different attempts to find a satisfactory vehicle for ideas that achieved final form in the Ring: the historical subject of Friedrich I (the 12th-century emperor Friedrich Barbarossa) was abandoned (though not quite as readily as Wagner later suggested) in favour of the greater potential afforded by the Nibelung myth, while a three-act drama on the subject of Achilles, with its themes of a free hero and of the gods yielding to humanity, the five-act Jesus von Nazareth, with its advocacy of a new religion of humanity, and the ‘heroic opera’ Wieland der Schmied were similarly all superseded by the Ring. The Buddhist subject matter of Die Sieger (‘The Victors’), dealing with the conflict between passion and chastity, preoccupied Wagner from the mid-1850s until the end of his life, but again the theme was treated definitively in another work, Parsifal.

Only prose sketches exist for the drama Luthers Hochzeit (1868), treating one of the decisive acts of the Reformation – Luther’s rejection of his priestly celibacy and his marriage to Catharina von Bora – and Wagner appears not to have attempted to compose any music; ten years later he considered writing a prose play on the subject. Eine Kapitulation (1870), described as a ‘comedy in the antique style’, was a heavy-handed farce in somewhat dubious taste, set in Paris at the time of the siege in that city. Wagner did not set the text himself, but he may have tinkered with the setting undertaken by Hans Richter, which has not survived (possibly destroyed by Richter himself).

Wagner: (1) Richard Wagner