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Wagner Society in NSW Inc
TO RICHARD WAGNER. A DREAM OF THE AGE. Sidney Lanier (1842-1881), the American poet and musician may be typical of people in the later 19th Century who were deeply influenced by Wagner. Lanier began playing the flute at an early age, and his love of that musical instrument continued throughout his life. He fought in the Civil War, captured by the British and imprisoned Shortly after the war, Lanier taught school briefly, he was also a clerk and a musician - he was the regular organist at The First Presbyterian Church in Prattville, Alabama. Later he decided to capitalise on his talent for the flute and travelled to the northeast USA in hopes of finding employment as a musician in an orchestra. He taught himself musical notation and quickly rose to the position of first flautist in the the Peabody Orchestra in Baltimore, Maryland . Apparently, he heard Hans Von Bulow conduct the Peabody Orchestra – but not in Wagner’s music. One can understand at least one aspect of his attraction to Wagner as he wrote a number of works based on mediaeval texts: The Boy's Froissart (1878), a retelling of Jean Froissart's Froissart's Chronicles, which tell of adventure, battle and custom in medieval England, France and Spain, The Boy's King Arthur (1880), based on Sir Thomas Malory's compilation of the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and The Boy's Mabinogion (1881), based on the early Welsh legends of King Arthur. Interestingly, Lanier had a reputation for his interest in the development of the then modern music, and especially in orchestral music. He was familiar with the biographies of Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner and he left behind a translation of Wagner's ‘Rheingold’. According to the biography by Edwin Mims: ‘In New York he revelled in Theodore Thomas's orchestra, then just beginning its triumphant career. He writes, August 15, 1870: ‘Ah, how they have belied Wagner! I heard Theodore Thomas's orchestra play his overture to `Tannhaeuser'. The `Music of the Future' is surely thy music and my music. Each harmony was a chorus of pure aspirations. The sequences flowed along, one after another, as if all the great and noble deeds of time had formed a procession and marched in review before one's EARS instead of one's EYES. These `great and noble deeds' were not deeds of war and statesmanship, but majestic victories of inner struggles of a man. This unbroken march of beautiful-bodied Triumphs irresistibly invites the soul of a man to create other processions like it. I would I might lead a so magnificent file of glories into heaven!’ Another biography of Lanier, quotes from a letter to his wife: ‘The philosophy of my disappointments is, that there is so much CLEVERNESS standing betwixt me and the public . . . Richard Wagner is sixty years old and over, and one-half of the most cultivated artists of the most cultivated art-land, [as to his] music, still think him an absurdity.’ Lanier’s poem is interesting for its prefiguring of George Bernard Shaw’s famous anti-capitalist interpretation in The Perfect Wagnerite, not published until 1898. Lanier signals his socialistic political view in the opening: ‘Labor’s Right and Labor’s Crime’. Another angle is signalled in Lanier’s words: ‘I beheld high scaffoldings of creeds/ Crumbling from round Religion’s perfect Fane;/ And a vast noise of rights, wrongs, powers, needs/ Cries of new Faiths that called, ‘The Way is plain!’’ that reflect the passionate debates over religion and science that characterised the late 19th Century, focussed around Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The whole poem is bathed in a Pre-Raphaelite light, deriving no doubt, from Lanier’s immersion in mediaeval literature and probably influenced by paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt. Lanier’s final heart-felt plea –’O Wagner, westward bring thy heavenly art!’ – gains considerable poignancy in retrospect as Wagner himself was frequently considering moving to America around this time, believing he would receive greater respect, assistance and remuneration and suffer few slings and arrows from the partisan artistic worlds of Europe. Lanier’s final assessment : ‘Thine ears hear deeper than thine eyes can see./…Thou, thou, if even to thyself unknown,/ Hast power to say the Time in terms of tone!’ is also interesting, giving Wagner’s music the last word, so to speak, in defining the age. Lanier’s poem, The Symphony, is a similarly passionate call for art to be given its rightful place over mundane activities. It opens with the apostrophe to that key of capitalism: ‘O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!/The Time needs heart -- 'tis tired of head:/ We're all for love,’ the violins said’. Lanier concludes the poem with a Wagnerian proposition: ‘Music is Love in search of a word.’ You can read the full text of The Symphony at the Gutenberg site for electronic books - http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page. [Editor] ]
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