Lost History – How Wagner turned his back on tradition and changed conducting forever
Richard Wagner is credited with revolutionising numerous mediums through his profound and incomparable corpus of masterpieces. His ambitious music dramas and inspiring efforts to realise a vision of Gesamtkunstwerk (a total artwork) irreversibly changed the stylistic and thematic direction of poets, playwrights, philosophers, painters and composers across the continent.
His incredible career as a seminal musician can distract from another lesser-known but nonetheless monumental contribution the controversial composer made to western culture. Wagner was also one of the most gifted and accomplished conductors in Europe of the 19th century. The obscure story of his brief stint performing in Imperial Russia, reveals how the author of the Ring Cycle transformed the manner and bearing of orchestral conductors forever.
Wagner was bedevilled by financial issues for much of his early adult life. To make the money needed to fund his lavish and excessive lifestyle and to ensure the correct execution of his own work, he was obliged to lead an eventful career as a conductor.
This role enabled him to travel widely and to perform in some of the best concert halls in the world. Often at odds with his orchestras, the irascible Wagner was a strict leader with little patience for underachievers.
Like the legislating God, Wotan, Wagner wielded a thick, long staff instead of the customarily lissom baton, with which he’d bang the floor while barking precise instructions to wayward members of his ensemble. But this was not the only way in which Wagner broke with the tradition of conducting.
His unpopularity among his colleagues was not shared by his fellow composers, many of whom eagerly attended his performances. Several famous critics and venerated composers ranked the obstreperous and obdurate maestro as the best conductor in the world, and they weren’t always talking about the conducting of his own works.
Tchaikovsky wrote that only by hearing Wagner conduct Beethoven’s symphonies could an audience genuinely appreciate the greatness of those colossal pieces.
While Wagner was conducting in Tchaikovsky’s homeland, he dramatically diverged from the orthodox practice of facing the audience while performing. He held six concerts in St Petersburg where he presented excerpts of his celebrated operas, amazing everyone at the beginning by standing in front of the orchestra.
Before that time, conductors in Russian, as in the rest of Europe, used to stand in the first row of the orchestra facing the audience, but Wagner stood in front of the orchestra, turning his back to the auditorium, and it seemed so natural and sensible that everyone has done the same since.
Some historians have claimed that Wagner was not the first to pivot away from the audience to address the orchestra directly. Some have asserted that the title of “first to turn” rightfully belongs to Beethoven, but there are various accounts of Wagner doing it and astonishing onlookers.
In all sorts of ways, Wagner shaped the world we know today. I was chatting to an elderly classical music-lover recently who was amazed to learn that Wagner composed the Bridal Chorus. This tune is immediately recognisable once you hear the unofficial lyrics – “here comes the bride”.