walking upstream…
Richard Wagner
photo: franz hanfstaengl · public domain ↗Richard Wagner
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Wagner's father, a Leipzig police clerk, died of typhus six months after his birth in 1813; the next morning, his mother told each child their father "hoped to make something of" him, by Wagner's own later account. The family settled into Dresden's theatrical world -- his stepfather acted and painted scenery -- and Wagner taught himself composition by copying full orchestral scores by hand until he knew them from the inside. That habit fixed first on Beethoven, then on Carl Maria von Weber's opera at the Dresden court, then, as a twenty-year-old choir-master in provincial theaters, on Heinrich Marschner, whose opera he was trusted to rewrite from within. He later built the Bayreuth Festival for his mature works, and -- a separate, documented fact of his biography -- published a virulently antisemitic essay in 1850 and 1869. The instrument never changed: an ear trained one borrowed score at a time.
the sound in question
1870
Die Walküre: Ride of the ValkyriesRichard Wagner
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Ludwig van Beethoven1800s–1810s · Classical / Romantic
As a Leipzig teenager, Wagner got hold of the score to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony -- a work then dismissed around town, he recalled, as "the raving of a semi-madman" -- and set about owning it by copying it out by hand. "At the very first glance at the score," he wrote, "I felt irresistibly attracted by the long-sustained pure fifths with which the first phrase opens... this, I thought, must surely contain the secret of all secrets." He wrote out a full piano arrangement and mailed it to the symphony's publisher, Schott, who declined to print it but paid him in a score of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis instead.
listen: upstream & here
1824
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (I. Allegro ma non troppo)Ludwig van Beethoven
1832
Symphony in C major, WWV 29 (I. Sostenuto e maestoso - Allegro con brio)Richard Wagner
listen forCue up the Ninth's opening bars: bare, sustained open fifths hanging in the orchestra before any theme arrives -- the passage Wagner singled out as "the secret of all secrets." Then play the start of his own teenage Symphony in C major, WWV 29: a slow, weighty introduction, marked sostenuto e maestoso, that clears its throat before an Allegro con brio built on hammering repeated chords. It's a twenty-year-old trying on his idol's gravity -- the sound of imitation, not yet transformation.
Carl Maria von Weber1810s-20s · Opera / Classical
Weber, conductor of the Dresden court orchestra, was a family visitor when Wagner was a boy, and Der Freischütz became his private obsession: "nothing had made so great an impression on me," he wrote decades later, recalling how he chased down anyone who could play him the overture until he'd learned it himself, badly. That memory comes from an autobiography dictated decades on -- and it smooths over a real break. In 1834, the young Wagner published an anonymous essay attacking Weber's handling of song: "Weber did not understand how to handle song." The boyhood devotion was genuine; a straight line to it, by Wagner's own record, was not.
listen: upstream & here
1826
Oberon, J. 306: OvertureCarl Maria von Weber
1833
Die Feen, WWV 32: OvertureRichard Wagner
listen forPlay Weber's Oberon overture: a solitary horn call announces the fairy king before the strings pull the music into stormier, more turbulent territory. Wagner's overture to Die Feen -- his first opera, written the same year he was immersed in Weber's scores as a working conductor -- reaches for the same effect, an atmosphere of enchantment and threat built from horns and strings before either opera's first vocal line arrives. One biographer credits Oberon directly with shaping that music, not just its fairy-tale plot.
Heinrich Marschner1820s-30s · Opera / Romantic
In the winter of 1833, the twenty-year-old Wagner was choir-master at the Würzburg theater, grinding through the chorus parts of Marschner's opera Der Vampyr. The job bored him at first -- until, as he put it, "Marschner's score interested me sufficiently to make the labour seem worth my while," and he did something bolder than any copyist's job required: he composed a new closing section for the tenor aria sung by the character Aubry, writing the words himself. "My work succeeded splendidly," he recalled, "and earned the praise of both the public and my brother." He was composing his own first opera, Die Feen, in the very same months.
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1828
Der Vampyr: Act II, Scene 15, Aria "Wie ein schöner Frühlingsmorgen" (Aubry)Heinrich Marschner
1833
"Doch jetzt, wohin ich blicke, umgibt mich Schreckensnacht" (WWV 33, inserted aria for Marschner's Der Vampyr)Richard Wagner
listen forPlay Marschner's original aria for Aubry, "Wie ein schöner Frühlingsmorgen" -- lyrical and contained, turning dark as the character's dread rises. Then play the piece catalogued under Wagner's own name, WWV 33: the alternate closing Allegro he wrote to replace Marschner's ending in that same Würzburg production, still sung by the same character in the same scene. This is the rare case where you're not comparing two composers from a distance -- you're hearing one aria's original ending, then a twenty-year-old Wagner's rewrite of it, back to back.