The Mozart Requiem and the Rossini Stabat Mater are connected historically (or perhaps hysterically)…so the young Richard Wagner would have us believe!
It is no secret that Richard Wagner (1813-1883) had a rocky and unrequited relationship with the artistic high society of Paris. As a hot-headed young man in his mid to late twenties, from late 1839 to 1842, he lived in Paris in impoverished fashion. To make a living, the young, undiscovered composer wrote articles for magazines, arranged the operas of others for publication and completed his own, unperformed, third and fourth operas: Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer.Fast forward about seventeen years to November of 1859. We find Wagner has returned to Paris as a well-established composer. It was during this sojourn that he faced the debacle of the March 1861 performances of Tannhäuser. This infamous fiasco, which resounds throughout musical history, came at the hands (and cat-calls!) of the haughty bon vivants of the Jockey Club. Wagner had the audacity to compose a ballet to be danced in Act I of Tannhäuser; but the Jockey Clubbers demanded it be in Act II so as not to spoil their dinners—and/or assignations with the ballerinas! Wagner got his way, but the Jockey Club booed him out of the opera house and out of Paris.
Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), on the other hand, had wonderful relationships with both the cultural elite and denizens of theatrical amphitheaters. It seems that Rossini was feted everywhere he went; his musical works were generally adored and one of his nicknames was “The Italian Mozart.”
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| Young Gioachino |
Our story centers on what transpired about twenty years before Wagner’s famous opera/ballet disaster.
In 1839 the twenty-six-ish Richard Wagner fled Riga, Russia, to escape his debts, and eventually ended up in Paris. Here he unsuccessfully attempted to make an artistic name for himself. Therefore, it should be no wonder that an impecunious, ambitious, egotistical young German fellow (who alone among the teeming Parisian population comprehended that he was destined for universal artistic superstardom next to Mozart and Beethoven) should be jealous of the many triumphs of a certain popular and wealthy Italian fellow, whose "superficial" music he loathed.
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| Richard Wagner, age 27 |
The leading musical publication in Germany of that period was composer Robert Schumann’s Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (The New Journal of Music). In the December 28, 1841 issue an article ran under the pseudonym “H. Valentino.” Herr Valentino was none other than a charmingly poison penned, sarcastic Richard Wagner. Within the space of 2,652 words Monsieur Wagner/Valentino took aim at a wide variety of targets; among them were:
- The nameless director of France’s Ministry of Public Affairs;
Music publishers; - Copyright lawyers for the above;
- The music of Donizetti, Bellini, and above all Rossini;
- A Spanish patron of the arts who adored Rossini’s music;
- The aesthetically vacuous high society of Paris, both noble and bourgeois, deridingly called “dilettanti”.
Wagner’s one true, but unappreciated, hero was Mozart and his sublime Requiem!
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| Gioachino Rossini |
Willingly sharing in this baseness of “mode” were the dilettanti. They accepted and adored inappropriate “pious” music from the genius of Rossini who, above all, loved to eat huge quantities of pastries. Wagner seemingly opined that Rossini could not master counterpoint due to his gustatory predilections! (But wait until you savor the monumental final fugue in the Stabat Mater before you decide!)
The date of December 15, 1840, looms large for Wagner. On this “mortal cold” day France celebrated the reburial of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to more appropriate accommodations “beneath the dome of the Invalides.” But what music would be suitable to celebrate such an august event? Wagner mockingly wrote:
“…the Ministry of Public Affairs had formed the wise resolve that this time, in lieu of Rossini’s Cenerentola (Cinderella), Mozart’s Requiem should be sung. And thus it came to pass, quite of itself, that our dilettantish duchesses and countesses were given something very different to hear, for once, from what they were accustomed to at the Italian Opera.”
Wagner had loved and revered the Mozart Requiem since his teens. He knew that this was appropriately “pious” music, unlike the “sonic flotsam” high society usually admired. But shortly following the performance of the Mozart Requiem there arose negative repercussions for the Minister of Public Affairs, surfacing soon after the highly perched dilettanti ordered copies of the Requiem and tried out the music at home.
“It has plenty of coloratura…but ‘Good Heavens! It tastes like a laxative! They’re fugues! Powers above! Where have we got to?’”
Things get worse…
Fast forward to sometime in 1841. A convoluted lawsuit broke out among music publishers over who had the real right to print, and offer performances of, Rossini’s newly revised and completed Stabat Mater (This is the version VoxAmaDeus will perform).The original Stabat Mater was first partially composed by Rossini in Spain during 1832-33. But Rossini became ill (too many bon-bons?), and the work was secretly completed by a composer-friend named Giovanni Tadolini. For nearly ten years the work lay incomplete and unperformed. But then, if Wagner is correct about the timing, the Stabat Mater was rewritten by Rossini sometime before Napoleon’s ghost found new lodgings at Les Invalides.During the lawsuit, one of the music publishers used this timing issue as proof positive that he was rightfully entitled to the newly revised, all-Rossini Stabat Mater. Wagner claimed this publisher testified that:
“…as long ago as the obsequies of the Emperor Napoleon on December 15, 1840, he had proposed this Stabat for performance in the chapel of the Invalides.”
In reaction to this shocking revelation, Wagner asserted that:
“A shriek of horror and indignation rose from every salon of high Paris… ‘What!’ cried everyone, ‘A composition of Rossini’s was in existence—it was offered you—and you, Minister of Public Affairs, you rejected it? You dared, instead, to foist on us that hopeless requiem by Mozart?’”
An act of “high treason” indeed!!!
Thus it is that Richard Wagner draws this direct connection between the two musical masterpieces VoxAmaDeus will perform on April 18. Who knew?
PS: Was Wagner an unbiased observer? In May 2007 program notes for the Sydney Symphony, annotator David Garrett notes these interesting tidbits about the January 7, 1842 debut performance of the revised Stabat Mater: “To German poet Heinrich Heine, an expatriate in Paris, the theater that night seemed like the vestibule of heaven. The only discordant note was struck by a young musical hack in the employ of the rival publisher Schlesinger—this was Richard Wagner, who derided the ‘Stabat Mater’ as a piece jotted down by Rossini in a moment of repentance for all the money of which he had cheated a gullible public. Of the music Wagner said nothing.”
PPS: What did Rossini think of Wagner? These quips, reputedly from the lips or pen of Rossini, sum up the issue:
“One can’t judge Wagner’s opera Lohengrin (1850) after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend to hear it a second time.”
“Wagner has lovely moments, but awful quarters of an hour.”
And in general, “Every kind of music is good … except the boring kind.”