High Life

HIGH LIFE 105 Wagner (1813-1883) was born in the eponymous city just five months prior to the Battle of Leipzig, the largest pre-WWI battle, inwhich Napoleon suffered his first decisive defeat. His life and works are an embodiment of Germanness, except his financial limbo and tempestuous affairs, as debauched as those of Claude Debussy’s. An admirer of Carl Maria von Weber, Wagner would later alter his style, as his reading of Arthur Schopenhauer convinced him that music had a unique role in the arts as an immediate expression of the world’s quintessence, such as a blind and impulsive will. This is evident in the pagan world depicted in the Ring Cycle , wherein men yielded to gods, who were in turn subject to fate. The Ring Cycle ’s plot is based on Norse sagas and the German national epic Nibelungenlied , whilst the intertextuality amongst the three alone would warrant a doctoral dissertation. Wagner composed both the libretto and music from 1848 to 1874, during which the German Confederation had become the German Empire, culminating with Das Rheingold as Vorabend (preliminary evening), followed by the trilogy of Bühnenfestspiele (stage festival plays), namely Die Walküre , Siegfried and Götterdämmerung .