The Hammock Papers: Bliss.

15 June 2011

Bliss.

The Siegfried Idyll—this title apparently dates from a performance in Meiningen in 1877—remains Wagner's only instrumental work that is regularly played. The main theme is a generous and lilting melody sung by Brünnhilde in act 3 of Siegfried to the words beginning "Ewig war ich" (I always was, I always am, always in sweet yearning bliss). Wagner claimed that this music came to him during the summer of 1864 at the Villa Pellet, overlooking Lake Starnberg, where he and Cosima consummated their union. (He is contradicted, however, by his own obsessive record keeping: the melody was composed that November 14, when he was alone in Munich.) A second theme, introduced by the oboe, is a lullaby Wagner jotted down on New Year's Eve 1868. The music is unusually intimate and restrained for a composer who lived a life of excess. It's the most personal of all his works: the title page of the published score refers to "Fidi-Birdsong and Orange Sunrise"; Fidi was a favorite nickname for little Siegfried, and the sunrise was the "incredibly beautiful, fiery glow," in Cosima's words, of the wallpaper in his room when it was struck by the morning sun. More than any other of Wagner's scores, the Siegfried Idyll marries the private and public sides of the most famous composer of the nineteenth century. The Siegfried of the title is both the third music drama of the Ring cycle and Wagner's son—who was destined to carry his father's name and beaked silhouette into the next century.

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Wagner, Siegfried Idyll

Part 1

Part 2

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL