Wagner’s operatic canon takes center stage

Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) 
The Wreckers Overture (1906)  

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: First Oregon Symphony Performance

Instrumentation: piccolo, two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings

Estimated Duration: 7 minutes

Nearly forty years before Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes portrayed the morally-deficient inhabitants of an isolated seaside village and their rejection of a challenger to their comfortable status quo, Ethel Smyth and her librettist Henry Brewster created The Wreckers, a grim story of Cornish villagers who misdirect then plunder passing ships after murdering their crews.

Encased in her suffragette tweeds and puffing on a stogie, Smyth stomped around central Europe attempting to drum up productions of The Wreckers. Being a female composer in a male-dominated profession required grit and determination, and Smyth had copious amounts of both. But she could only do so much on her own. It took the enterprising conductor Sir Thomas Beecham to bring about a complete staged performance in 1910, but only after one of Smyth’s wealthy friends put up the money. A full production of the original version – which Brewster wrote in French as Les naufrageurs – had to wait until 2022. 

If staged productions have been few and far between, the Overture has received a fair amount of attention as a remarkably effective and well-orchestrated concert opener. It handily demonstrates that not only was Smyth fully au courant with current idioms such as whole-tone and pentatonic scales à la Debussy, but that she possessed a gift for melodies with an Anglic folk-music vibe. It opens with a vivid portrayal of the craggy Cornish coast, then moves on to a gentle passage that suggests the central characters Thurza and Marc, who attempt to thwart the villagers’ criminal actions and are executed by those same (seriously unpleasant) villagers. Faster march tempi bring more positive energy, and the Overture ends in a powerful statement of triumph.

Richard Wagner (1813–1883)
Prelude and “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde (1863)

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Carlos Kalmar led the Oregon Symphony on December 3-5, 2016, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, and strings

Estimated Duration: 17 minutes

There had never been anything quite like Tristan and Isolde. To be sure, there had been any number of operas about illicit lovers, operas in which one or both of the leads were dead as the curtain falls, operas filled with ecstatic love music and heart-rending laments, operas with plots set in motion by some minor or silly contrivance. Tristan includes all of those stock elements. It’s not the plot that was so epochal, so daring, and for many, so downright shocking – although prissy types found its unbuttoned sensuality unnerving.

The music was the real bombshell. In seeking an appropriately unsettled and erotically charged idiom for his opera, Wagner had stretched Western tonality past what many considered to be its breaking point. The fundamental principle underlying classical harmony is that of dissonance resolving to consonance – i.e., sonorities that clash leading to those that blend. But here there was no easy resolution, no breath-in, breath-out rhythm of tension-release. It was all increasing tension, as sharp dissonances gave way to weaker ones, the whole avoiding clear resolution for as long as possible. The conservative critic Eduard Hanslick couldn’t stand it. For him, Tristan’s Prelude reminded him of “the old Italian paintings of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body onto a reel.” Hector Berlioz was flummoxed by it. Giuseppe Verdi was utterly blown away by it. Clara Schumann detested it. Mark Twain couldn’t fathom what all the fuss was about. 

It sounds well-nigh unbelievable in hindsight, but Wagner originally conceived of Tristan as a quick ‘n’ easy moneymaker. He wrote his future father-in-law, Franz Liszt, that he meant to create an opera “on a moderate scale, which will make its performance easier” and that would “quickly bring me a good income and keep me afloat for a time.” But such was not to be: Tristan and Isolde wound up complex, lengthy, and brutally demanding of its performers. Not to mention utterly enthralling. “I find it more and more difficult to understand how I could have done such a thing,” Wagner wrote later. 

Perhaps anticipating the difficulties that Tristan would have being produced, much less accepted by the general public, two years before the 1865 premiere Wagner provided a two-movement extract that pairs the opera’s opening and final passages, known as the “Prelude and Love-Death (Liebestod).” The excerpt has proven to be among Wagner’s most durable orchestral compositions and an extraordinarily effective introduction to the opera as a whole. 

The Prelude opens in breathless uncertainty, its opening four notes settling on the so-called “Tristan chord” – its precise identification a topic of contention amongst music theorists for decades thereafter. Several more expressions of yearning follow, and then the music erupts into ecstatic love music, its long-lined melodies in a constant state of flux and development. The beloved conductor Bruno Walter remembered his first time hearing the Prelude: “Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss.” 

After reaching a peak with a sustained statement of the Tristan chord, the music slowly dissipates into Isolde’s “love-death” over Tristan’s dead body at the opera’s conclusion. This is no mere lament, but a full-on transfiguration of the spirit, an ultimate release from the pain of existence into a wondrous realm. The Liebestod (and the opera) ends as it must, on a magically orchestrated major triad that provides that final and long-delayed resolution.

Selections from The Valkyrie and Twilight of the Gods (1876)

⁠"The Ride of the Valkyries" from The Valkyrie (arr. Hutschenruyter) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Jeff Tyzik led the Oregon Symphony on October 25 & 26, 2025, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, six horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 5 minutes 

“Siegfried's Death & Funeral Music” from Twilight of the Gods (arr. Hutschenruyter) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: First Oregon Symphony Performance 

Instrumentation: piccolo, two flutes, three oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four Wagner tubas, three trumpets, three trombones, bass trumpet, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 12 minutes 

“Siegfried's Rhine Journey” from Twilight of the Gods (arr. Humperdinck) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Norman Leyden led the Oregon Symphony on April 28-30, 2001, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 10 minutes 

“Brünnhilde’s Immolation” from Twilight of the Gods (orch. Lessing) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: First Oregon Symphony Performance 

Instrumentation: three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), three bassoons, six horns (third through sixth doubling Wagner tubas), three trombones, bass trumpet, contrabass tuba, two sets of timpani, percussion, two harps, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 18 minutes 

Richard Wagner may have been a repugnant human being, but he lacked neither vision nor courage. The operatic cycle The Ring of the Nibelungs takes place over four performances and lasts about 16 hours. It requires a gigantic orchestra, an equally large cast and, in most productions, budget-busting levels of stagecraft. It took about 30 years to create and mandated an innovative new theater (the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, financed by King Ludwig II of Bavaria) for its official premiere in 1876. 

Wagner developed his epic story from various Nordic and Celtic sources. It concerns the forging of a great ring of power that confers extraordinary abilities on its bearers while also corrupting and ultimately destroying them. The ring becomes the center of a world-spanning power struggle led by a great hero; eventually the ring is destroyed in the source whence it sprang, taking the life of its final bearer along with it. 

And if that sounds familiar, it’s because J.R.R. Tolkien drew from those same sources for The Lord of the Rings. (For what it’s worth, Tolkien vehemently denied any connection to Wagner’s Ring Cycle, insisting that the only resemblance between the two was that the ring is circular in both.) Wagner took the story in a lot of directions that Tolkien didn’t, and vice versa; on the whole, the differences far outweigh the similarities. 

Perhaps the most impressive thing about The Ring of the Nibelungs is the way Wagner avoided the hidebound conventions of grand opera to create a vast musical canvas to hold his teeming cast of characters. His primary resource is what is now called a leitmotif, or a ‘signature figure.’ It is typically a snippet of melody, rhythm, harmony, or even a bit of orchestration, that not only stands in for a character, an idea, or a situation, but that also grows and evolves along with the story arc. Leitmotifs have become familiar to most people over the past century, given their use in many film scores; consider the quickstep figure that announces the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, or the sweet little folk tune that accompanies Frodo’s thoughts of returning home to The Shire in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.  

The Ring Cycle is also a collection of magnificent orchestral interludes, many of which have become concert staples, none more so than Ride of the Valkyries from The Valkyrie, which accompanies the winged-helmet goddesses as they charge through the skies on their airborne steeds. The closing opera of the cycle, Twilight of the Gods, is the source for several extended interludes pertaining to the mythic hero Siegfried, he with the face of an angel, the body of a warrior, the heart of a saint, and the IQ of a rabbit. His Rhine Journey kicks off Twilight of the Gods as Brünnhilde sends Siegfried off to new adventures along the eponymous river.  

Unlike some heroes, Siegfried does not survive his story, but is murdered by the half-human Hagen. His Death and Funeral March incorporates themes from all of the previous operas, including the motif that signifies the curse of the Ring, which Brünnhilde removes from his finger and orders his funeral pyre to be built. With that, she launches into her Immolation Scene, riding her horse into the fire and cleansing the Ring of its curse. Valhalla, home of the gods, burns in the fire, along with the entire mythic world. It ends with the Rhine Gold from which the Ring was forged back in the Rhine whence it came. It could start all over again – a ‘cycle’ in every sense of the word.