The idea of an opera about the mastersingers had already occurred to Wagner in the mid-1840s. The Mastersingers’ concept was born from an analogy with ancient Greek custom, where tragedy was followed by satyr play. In this case too, Die Meistersinger was conceived as a comic companion piece to the tragic Tannhäuser.
In February 1862 Wagner settled into a beautiful villa on the banks of the Rhine at Biebrich (near Frankfurt am Main) and composed a good part of this opera. Around this time Wagner finally put a definitive end to his marriage to the actress Minna Wagner: he set Minna up in Dresden, while he himself was surrounded by countless admirers, lived lavishly, and made sure his friends wanted for nothing either.
In 1857 Minna and Richard Wagner settled into a cottage kindly provided to them on the outskirts of Zurich, belonging to the wealthy silk merchant and arts patron Otto von Wesendonck. It was not long before Wagner found himself in a relationship blessed by the muses and by love with his benefactor’s wife, Mathilde Wesendonck (1828–1902) – her stable marriage and five children proving no obstacle to a love story. This was a time of forbidden love – it produced the very quintessence of love, the opera Tristan und Isolde, while at the same time Wagner composed five songs to poems by his beloved, the so-called Wesendonck Lieder, which, through images of nature, angels, a lost homeland, dreams of sacred rays of light and the like, often speak to us more eloquently than any note from biographers or music historians. After completing the Wesendonck Lieder, Richard Wagner wrote to Mathilde with his characteristic modesty: “These songs are the best I have composed, and yet you will hardly set aside much else of what I have created.” Setting aside the composer’s boastfulness, we can agree – this cycle is a singular universe of love, and it has much of value to tell anyone who takes the time to read the verses and listen to the songs, about its creators.
On Jānis Ivanovs’s Fifth Symphony music historian Diāna Albina once wrote: “In March 1945 Jānis Ivanovs completed his new work – the Fifth Symphony. Its sound-images had been accumulating in his consciousness throughout the war years. To all those who, in keeping with the traditions of Soviet-era censorship, wanted to hear a programmatic explanation of the symphony’s imagery from the composer, he flatly refused and stubbornly kept silent… The only clue – the composer’s sparingly offered words – was that “everything that had accumulated over those years is contained here.”
The symphony no longer carried even a trace of the moods expressed in Ivanovs’s earlier works. No picturesque landscapes, no romantic tales and legends. The symphony emerged as the harsh, unsparing judgment of a mature personality on everything that had to be endured in those “to be or not to be” years. Here were the threat of death and the cold horror of annihilation, here were faith and doubt, trust and disillusionment, confidence and scepticism. Here were longings and unfulfillable dreams, separated in those harsh years by front lines, prison cellars and camp barbed wire. On one side and the other. There was none of the poster-like joy of victory and triumphant satisfaction that the evaluators of art in the new social environment now surrounding Ivanovs expected and demanded.
Jānis Ivanovs’s Fifth Symphony was saved from the critics’ attacks in late 1945 by its successful performance in Moscow. Sharper criticism was also held off by Aram Khachaturian’s positive assessment of the work in Riga in the spring of 1946. Yet the clouds were gathering over the powerful work and its defiant author…”
In February 1948 a coup took place in Soviet art – an attack on the so-called formalists, who supposedly failed to properly depict the cheerful everyday life of the working people in their work and wrote something “incomprehensible.” Among the great names placed in this class of formalists were, among others, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. Within the community of Latvian composers, the heaviest blow fell on Jānis Ivanovs for his Fifth Symphony. This outstanding work’s rebirth in the concert hall came at the end of the 1950s, when the “progressive” émigré, the notable and distinctive conductor Leon Reiter, returned from Sweden to Latvia.
SOLOIST/-S
Aga Mikolaja – soprano