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Listen: Bitter Taste by Billy Idol
Musically Inspired Photo
Hello, goodbye
I was staring in the devil's eyes
Should've left me way back
Should've left me way back
By the roadside
© 2023 Vic Bonilla All Rights Reserved.
Do not reproduce this image without expressed permission from the photographer.
Flickr Group Roulette: Silhouette's Galore!
The Rogue Players:♫ Musically Inspired ♫
It's Badder Large and on Black
Strobist: AlienBee 800 with HOBD-W, behind grey fleece directed at camera. Triggered by Cybersync.
Alt title: Brokeback Tapper
_______
for the weekly song in Musically Challenged
---
"In the Sun," by Joseph Arthur
I pictured you in the sun wondering what went wrong
And falling down on your knees asking for sympathy
And being caught in between all you wish for and all you seen
And trying to find anything you can feel that you can believe in
---
(B/W outtake in comments!)
Musically, they had kind of an Ike and Tina going. Some of my favorite music has that male-female harmonizing or call-and-response thing going. A set of pipes on both of them, for sure.
Musically, they had kind of an Ike and Tina going. Some of my favorite music has that male-female harmonizing or call-and-response thing going. A set of pipes on both of them, for sure
An aging photo ance of a musically inspired Maisie at Molly's Theater before her perform of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata."*
*I couldn't choose between this and the color photo of Maise so I'm posting both
Fuel~Bad Day
Had a bad day again
She said I would not understand
She left a note and said "I'm sorry, I had a bad day again.
She spilled her coffee, broke her shoelace.
Smeared the lipstick on her face.
Slammed the door and said "I'm sorry, I had a bad day again."
And she swears there's nothing wrong
I hear her playing that same old song
She puts me off and puts me on
And had a bad day again
She said I would not understand
She left a note that said, "I'm sorry, I had a bad day again."
*as the title suggests, this is a musically inspired painting from a old revolutionary ballad of the late 60's titled "Clandestino" which I recently encountered on YouTube, beautifully rearranged and brought up to date by Manu, for those wishing to hear this so modern version go to You-tube: "Manu Chao-Clandestino /live/ www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNzafK1HIro
Two weeks in NOLA for the mardi gras 2017
Founded in 1993, the Krewe of Orpheus takes its name from the musically-inclined son of Zeus and Calliope. Founding members included Harry Connick, both the junior and senior.
In New Orleans, the krewe established themselves as a superkrewe with their first parade in 1994, which rolled with 700 riders. They were the first super Krewe to allow both male and female riders.
The Krewe's throws include a number of popular items including emblem beads, stuffed animals, signature beads, light-up Orpheus medallion beads, cups, three different types of doubloons, and 4-foot-long stuffed dragons.
They have a number of notable floats including the Dolly Trolley, the horse-drawn bus that was used in the opening of Hello Dolly with Barbra Streisand, the Smoking Mary which is a six unit float that looks like a steam locomotive, a Trojan horse and the Orpheus Leviathan Float, which is a three unit, 139-foot float, and the first Carnival float to use extensive fiber optic lighting.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Fats Domino wass the honorary grand marshall for 2014. His eldest son, Antoine Domino III, rode in the parade and perform his 85 year old father's music.
In addition to Fats Domino, Quentin Tarantino reigned as the krewe's celebrity monarch.
Two weeks in NOLA for the mardi gras 2017
Founded in 1993, the Krewe of Orpheus takes its name from the musically-inclined son of Zeus and Calliope. Founding members included Harry Connick, both the junior and senior.
In New Orleans, the krewe established themselves as a superkrewe with their first parade in 1994, which rolled with 700 riders. They were the first super Krewe to allow both male and female riders.
The Krewe's throws include a number of popular items including emblem beads, stuffed animals, signature beads, light-up Orpheus medallion beads, cups, three different types of doubloons, and 4-foot-long stuffed dragons.
They have a number of notable floats including the Dolly Trolley, the horse-drawn bus that was used in the opening of Hello Dolly with Barbra Streisand, the Smoking Mary which is a six unit float that looks like a steam locomotive, a Trojan horse and the Orpheus Leviathan Float, which is a three unit, 139-foot float, and the first Carnival float to use extensive fiber optic lighting.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Fats Domino wass the honorary grand marshall for 2014. His eldest son, Antoine Domino III, rode in the parade and perform his 85 year old father's music.
In addition to Fats Domino, Quentin Tarantino reigned as the krewe's celebrity monarch.
Seeing things from a
Clearer side than most can dream
On a better road I feel
So you could say she's safe
Whatever tears at her
Whatever holds her down
And if nothing can be done
She'll make the best of what's around
- Dave Matthews Band, The Best of What's Around
Having a really good day today. And I'm determined never to take those for granted again. Sometimes you have to kick off your shoes and feel the ground beneath your feet.
And dance.
Musically Challenged: DMB - The Best of What's Around
Inside my head there lives a dream that I want to see in the sun
Behind my eyes there lives a me that I've been hiding for much too long
Cause I've been too afraid to let it show
Cause I'm scared of the judgment that may follow
Always putting off my living for tomorrow
It's time to step out on faith, I've gotta show my face
It's been elusive for so long, but freedom is mine today
I've gotta step out on faith, It's time to show my face
Procrastination had me down but look what I have found, I found
Strength, courage, and wisdom
And it's been inside of me all along,
Strength, courage, and wisdom
Inside of me
- India Arie, Strength, Courage and Wisdom
Had a really good day. My mom and I had lunch with my best friend, and then we stopped by my grandparents' house to visit. And I spent some time drooling over my grandpa's old camera (seen in this shot) and my great-great-grandpa's even older camera (seen on my instagram stream). I wish these babies lived at my house.
Just waiting for the call from the groomer now so that I can go pick up my fresh and clean pupper. He got his hair cut today and I get mine cut tomorrow. SO excited! :)
Musically Challenged: India Arie - Strength, Courage, and Wisdom
Two weeks in NOLA for the mardi gras 2017
Founded in 1993, the Krewe of Orpheus takes its name from the musically-inclined son of Zeus and Calliope. Founding members included Harry Connick, both the junior and senior.
In New Orleans, the krewe established themselves as a superkrewe with their first parade in 1994, which rolled with 700 riders. They were the first super Krewe to allow both male and female riders.
The Krewe's throws include a number of popular items including emblem beads, stuffed animals, signature beads, light-up Orpheus medallion beads, cups, three different types of doubloons, and 4-foot-long stuffed dragons.
They have a number of notable floats including the Dolly Trolley, the horse-drawn bus that was used in the opening of Hello Dolly with Barbra Streisand, the Smoking Mary which is a six unit float that looks like a steam locomotive, a Trojan horse and the Orpheus Leviathan Float, which is a three unit, 139-foot float, and the first Carnival float to use extensive fiber optic lighting.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Fats Domino wass the honorary grand marshall for 2014. His eldest son, Antoine Domino III, rode in the parade and perform his 85 year old father's music.
In addition to Fats Domino, Quentin Tarantino reigned as the krewe's celebrity monarch.
Two weeks in NOLA for the mardi gras 2017
Founded in 1993, the Krewe of Orpheus takes its name from the musically-inclined son of Zeus and Calliope. Founding members included Harry Connick, both the junior and senior.
In New Orleans, the krewe established themselves as a superkrewe with their first parade in 1994, which rolled with 700 riders. They were the first super Krewe to allow both male and female riders.
The Krewe's throws include a number of popular items including emblem beads, stuffed animals, signature beads, light-up Orpheus medallion beads, cups, three different types of doubloons, and 4-foot-long stuffed dragons.
They have a number of notable floats including the Dolly Trolley, the horse-drawn bus that was used in the opening of Hello Dolly with Barbra Streisand, the Smoking Mary which is a six unit float that looks like a steam locomotive, a Trojan horse and the Orpheus Leviathan Float, which is a three unit, 139-foot float, and the first Carnival float to use extensive fiber optic lighting.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Fats Domino wass the honorary grand marshall for 2014. His eldest son, Antoine Domino III, rode in the parade and perform his 85 year old father's music.
In addition to Fats Domino, Quentin Tarantino reigned as the krewe's celebrity monarch.
Two weeks in NOLA for the mardi gras 2017
Founded in 1993, the Krewe of Orpheus takes its name from the musically-inclined son of Zeus and Calliope. Founding members included Harry Connick, both the junior and senior.
In New Orleans, the krewe established themselves as a superkrewe with their first parade in 1994, which rolled with 700 riders. They were the first super Krewe to allow both male and female riders.
The Krewe's throws include a number of popular items including emblem beads, stuffed animals, signature beads, light-up Orpheus medallion beads, cups, three different types of doubloons, and 4-foot-long stuffed dragons.
They have a number of notable floats including the Dolly Trolley, the horse-drawn bus that was used in the opening of Hello Dolly with Barbra Streisand, the Smoking Mary which is a six unit float that looks like a steam locomotive, a Trojan horse and the Orpheus Leviathan Float, which is a three unit, 139-foot float, and the first Carnival float to use extensive fiber optic lighting.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Fats Domino wass the honorary grand marshall for 2014. His eldest son, Antoine Domino III, rode in the parade and perform his 85 year old father's music.
In addition to Fats Domino, Quentin Tarantino reigned as the krewe's celebrity monarch.
Happy Low Key Lame Ass Thursday ;-)
I think it's time for a shave.
Guess who doesn't work tomorrow.....yup, ME!
Hell in a Bucket by Grateful Dead
(34 of 52)²
Harvesting the inner song.
This photo was taken by a Hasselblad 500C with a Carl Zeiss S-Planar 1:5.6 f=120mm lens mounted on a Hasselblad 10mm extension tube using Kodak Portra 400 film, the negative scanned by an Epson Perfection V600 and digitalized with Photoshop.
Now I sit on the rooftop's edge
The muddy street beneath my swollen head
Trying to forget you
To believe we've never met
And the sky is wrecked, full of rotting clouds
From chimney mouths spewing smoke around
And I can't stop coughing
My lungs just won't calm down
But still I keep grinning
As the blood from my face stains the ground
- Radical Face, Glory
Slightly different take on this than the folks who were shooting her straight on. I've got a thing for walls from this angle. I love how small Bethy looks up there on the edge. If I'd done this, I would have leaned back and plummeted to my death. Which is why you won't see any pictures of me sitting on ledges.
Musically Challenged: Radical Face - Glory
265/365
This is my grandmother's bassment (I know it is spelled basement, but I like to say bass...) And this is actually the bassment of the house I live in :) My parents let me move in over here a little over a year ago when they finally began to trust me again after I had my poop in a group for about 3 years. Anyway when I moved in someone had forgotten to clean out the fridge...for 2 years!! Yeah, I know. It was quite the process...It is a great house, and it is full of awesome beads, jewelry, books, and other cool ass random shit. I thoroughly enjoy it :) and am always lucky and grateful to be living here :)
I'm glad this was a song for Musically Challenged this week, because it got to me to re-read some awesome lyrics of some sweet songs! So thanks for that forty-one!
I'm going to be a photog at an event tomorrow night, so I will upload late, I promise! But it will be a busy night with lotsa photo takin' so don't expect anything fantastic! Oh, unless I get some time during the day...hmmm...
<3 Happy weekend!
(and as slow as I have been in this 365, 100 more chances to create doesn't sound like many... :(
If you want more of this
We can push out, sell out, die out
So you'll shut up
And stay sleeping
With my screaming in your itching ears
I'm so sick,
Infected with where I live
Let me live without this
Empty bliss,
Selfishness
I'm so sick
for Musically Challenged
I'm using an older shot to play in this week's Musically Challenged. When I shot this, I actually had Flyleaf's album playing again on my iPod b/c I just love her and the band's sound a bunch, and had wanted to find a way to cover this song, and when I saw it was on this week's list, I played along. That was a long sentence. Haha.
Two weeks in NOLA for the mardi gras 2017
Founded in 1993, the Krewe of Orpheus takes its name from the musically-inclined son of Zeus and Calliope. Founding members included Harry Connick, both the junior and senior.
In New Orleans, the krewe established themselves as a superkrewe with their first parade in 1994, which rolled with 700 riders. They were the first super Krewe to allow both male and female riders.
The Krewe's throws include a number of popular items including emblem beads, stuffed animals, signature beads, light-up Orpheus medallion beads, cups, three different types of doubloons, and 4-foot-long stuffed dragons.
They have a number of notable floats including the Dolly Trolley, the horse-drawn bus that was used in the opening of Hello Dolly with Barbra Streisand, the Smoking Mary which is a six unit float that looks like a steam locomotive, a Trojan horse and the Orpheus Leviathan Float, which is a three unit, 139-foot float, and the first Carnival float to use extensive fiber optic lighting.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Fats Domino wass the honorary grand marshall for 2014. His eldest son, Antoine Domino III, rode in the parade and perform his 85 year old father's music.
In addition to Fats Domino, Quentin Tarantino reigned as the krewe's celebrity monarch.
dare i give in to this thing gripping my skin?
"Gimme Symphonies" by Dan Black
___
i couldn't resist. that lyric just fits so well! in a very odd, puts a questionable visual in your head sort of way, but still...! (it's for Musically Challenged)
i'm feeling playful and happy. all sorts of happiness. today is a good day.
your turn now.
why is your day good today? find a reason or three and then tell me below, por favor.
- Sage Francis, Hopeless
Am I obsessed with necks right now because I'm addicted to True Blood? I think so. I bought season one of the series last Friday and had watched all twelve episodes by midday Saturday. Then I was crushed when I found out season two hadn't been released yet. Then they posted season two to OnDemand and I started watching in hopes of catching up so I could watch season three in real time. Except OnDemand only has the first half of season two posted. Ugh. So I'm halfway through season two and stuck waiting again. I'm not very patient.
Also, I want to thank everybody who reached out yesterday, many without even knowing the recipient, and gave with open hearts. You may never fully know how much of an impact you had, but trust me when I say you will be rewarded one day for your giving spirit. Thank you.
Musically Challenged: Sage Francis - Hopeless
I spotted this photo-opportunity while on the ferry coming off Vancouver Island. The forested hillsides on Vancouver Island faded in layers of blue into the mist. I must give credit to the song by Dorothy Moore for the title, although not really my bag musically speaking.
I have been wanting to a do series of rather dark images again. Those new to my stream may not be familiar with some of my darker images from the past.
Lavina from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus still freaks out my family who, to this day, refuse to look at it.
www.flickr.com/photos/77466302@N00/2507626517/in/photostr...
So if you plan to stick around throughout September and October it may get a tad gruesome from time to time. Just be warned.
This does not mean I'm depressed or sad or suddenly losing my mind....well, no more than normal anyway.
- The Shins, New Slang
Look at me! I finally did a Musically Challenged weekly challenge! It's sad that I'm an admin and I didn't even do a challenge last week. Well, I guess I did a few direct challenges, just not the weekly. Whatever. Tara can spank me. :)
This is also my shot for the Week 7 Emulation Challenge in My Face is My Canvas. Fun, colorful inspiration shot this week. :)
I want to thank everybody for the wonderful messages of support yesterday for Auggie. I stayed home from work today to keep an eye on him and make sure he was getting his drops when he was supposed to get them. He seems to be doing better. He's keeping both eyes open, even the one with the ulcer. It's still gooky and he closes it a lot because it hurts, but it's better than it was last night. But really, it was comforting to see everybody's posts and know you guys were sending love and support. Thank you. :)
365 Days (self portraits): Day 218
My Face is My Canvas: Week 7 Emulation
Musically Challenged - The Shins: New Slang
I am holding half an acre
torn from the map of Michigan
and folded in this scrap of paper
is a land I grew in
Think of every town you've lived in
every room you lay your head
and what is it that you remember?
Do you carry every sadness with you
every hour your heart was broken
every night the fear and darkness
lay down with you
- Hem, Half Acre
Bethy was pretty much custom made for modeling in urban decay. And I mean that in the best way possible. She just fit so perfectly into every scene we threw her into on Saturday. I think this pose was Vic's brainchild.
Musically Challenged: Hem - Half Acre
The Postcard
A postally unused postkarte that was published by Ottmar Zieher of Munich. The card has a divided back.
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner, who was born on the 22nd. May 1813, was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works.
Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to the drama.
He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Richard's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration. He also used leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas, or plot elements.
His advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly influenced the development of classical music.
Richard's Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music.
Wagner had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which embodied many novel design features. Bayreuth is a town on the Red Main river in Bavaria. At its center is the Richard Wagner Museum in the composer's former home, Villa Wahnfried.
The Ring and Parsifal were premiered at the Festspielhaus, and Wagner's most important stage works continue to be performed at the annual Bayreuth Festival, run by his descendants.
Richard's thoughts on the relative contributions of music and drama in opera were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
Until his final years, Wagner's life was characterised by political exile, turbulent love affairs, poverty and repeated flight from his creditors.
His controversial writings on music, drama and politics have attracted extensive comment – particularly since the late 20th. century, where they express antisemitic sentiments.
The effect of his ideas can be traced in many of the arts throughout the 20th. century; his influence spread beyond composition into conducting, philosophy, literature, the visual arts and theatre.
Richard Wagner - The Early Years
Richard Wagner was born to an ethnic German family in Leipzig, who lived at No 3, the Brühl (The House of the Red and White Lions) in the Jewish quarter on the 22nd. May 1813.
He was baptized at St. Thomas Church. He was the ninth child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, who was a clerk in the Leipzig police service, and his wife, Johanna Rosine (née Paetz), the daughter of a baker.
Wagner's father Carl died of typhoid fever six months after Richard's birth. Afterwards, his mother Johanna lived with Carl's friend, the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer. In August 1814 Johanna and Geyer probably married—although no documentation of this has been found in the Leipzig church registers.
Johanna and her family moved to Geyer's residence in Dresden, and until he was fourteen, Wagner was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer. He almost certainly thought that Geyer was his biological father.
Geyer's love of the theatre came to be shared by his stepson, and Wagner took part in his performances. In his autobiography Mein Leben, Wagner recalled once playing the part of an angel.
In late 1820, Wagner was enrolled at Pastor Wetzel's school at Possendorf, near Dresden, where he received piano instruction from his Latin teacher. However Richard struggled to play a proper scale at the keyboard, and preferred playing theatre overtures by ear.
Following Geyer's death in 1821, Richard was sent to the Kreuzschule, the boarding school of the Dresdner Kreuzchor, at the expense of Geyer's brother.
At the age of nine he was hugely impressed by the Gothic elements of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz, which he saw Weber conduct.
During this period, Wagner entertained ambitions as a playwright. His first creative effort was a tragedy called Leubald. Begun when he was at school in 1826, the play was strongly influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe.
Wagner was determined to set it to music, and persuaded his family to allow him music lessons.
By 1827, the family had returned to Leipzig. Wagner's first lessons in harmony were taken during 1828–1831 with Christian Gottlieb Müller.
In January 1828 he first heard Beethoven's 7th. Symphony and then, in March, the same composer's 9th. Symphony. Beethoven became a major inspiration, and Wagner wrote a piano transcription of the 9th. Symphony.
Richard was also greatly impressed by a performance of Mozart's Requiem.
Wagner's early piano sonatas and his first attempts at orchestral overtures date from this period.
In 1829 Richard saw a performance by dramatic soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, and she became his ideal of the fusion of drama and music in opera. In Mein Leben, Wagner wrote:
"When I look back across my entire life
I find no event to place beside this in
the impression it produced on me.
The profoundly human and ecstatic
performance of this incomparable artist
kindled in me an almost demonic fire."
In 1831, Wagner enrolled at Leipzig University, where he became a member of the Saxon student fraternity. He took composition lessons with the Thomaskantor Theodor Weinlig.
Weinlig was so impressed with Wagner's musical ability that he refused any payment for his lessons. He arranged for his pupil's Piano Sonata in B-flat major (which was consequently dedicated to him) to be published as Wagner's Op. 1.
A year later, Wagner composed his Symphony in C major, a Beethovenesque work performed in Prague in 1832 and at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1833.
He then began to work on an opera, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), which he never completed.
Richard Wagner's Early Career and Marriage (1833–1842)
In 1833, Wagner's brother Albert managed to obtain for him a position as choirmaster at the theatre in Würzburg. In the same year, at the age of 20, Wagner composed his first complete opera, Die Feen (The Fairies).
This work, which imitated the style of Weber, went unproduced until half a century later, when it premiered in Munich shortly after the composer's death in 1883.
Having returned to Leipzig in 1834, Wagner held a brief appointment as musical director at the opera house in Magdeburg during which he wrote Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.
The work was staged at Magdeburg in 1836, but closed before the second performance. This, together with the financial collapse of the theatre company employing him, left Richard bankrupt.
Wagner had fallen for one of the leading ladies at Magdeburg, the actress Christine Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer, and after the disaster of Das Liebesverbot he followed her to Königsberg, where she helped him to get an engagement at the theatre.
They married in Tragheim Church on the 24th. November 1836, although In May 1837, Minna left Wagner for another man. This was however only the first débâcle of a tempestuous marriage.
In June 1837, Wagner moved to Riga (then part of the Russian Empire), where he became music director of the local opera; having in this capacity engaged Minna's sister Amalie (also a singer) for the theatre, he resumed relations with Minna during 1838.
By 1839, the couple had amassed such large debts that they fled Riga on the run from creditors. In fact, debts plagued Wagner for most of his life.
Initially they took a stormy sea passage to London, from which Wagner drew the inspiration for his opera Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), with a plot based on a sketch by Heinrich Heine.
The Wagners settled in Paris in September 1839 and stayed there until 1842. Wagner made a scant living by writing articles and short novelettes such as A pilgrimage to Beethoven, which sketched his growing concept of "music drama", and An end in Paris, where he depicts his own miseries as a German musician in the French metropolis.
Richard also provided arrangements of operas by other composers, largely on behalf of the Schlesinger publishing house. During this stay he completed his third and fourth operas Rienzi and Der Fliegende Holländer.
Richard Wagner in Dresden (1842–1849)
Wagner had completed Rienzi in 1840. With the strong support of Giacomo Meyerbeer, it was accepted for performance by the Dresden Court Theatre (Hofoper) in the Kingdom of Saxony.
In 1842, Wagner moved to Dresden. His relief at returning to Germany was recorded in his "Autobiographic Sketch" of 1842, where he wrote that, en route from Paris:
"For the first time I saw the Rhine—
with hot tears in my eyes, I, poor
artist, swore eternal fidelity to my
German fatherland."
Rienzi was staged to considerable acclaim on the 20th. October 1842.
Wagner lived in Dresden for the next six years, eventually being appointed the Royal Saxon Court Conductor. During this period, he staged there Der Fliegende Holländer (2nd. January 1843) and Tannhäuser (19th. October 1845), the first two of his three middle-period operas.
Wagner also mixed with artistic circles in Dresden, including the composer Ferdinand Hiller and the architect Gottfried Semper.
Wagner's involvement in left-wing politics abruptly ended his welcome in Dresden. Wagner was active among socialist German nationalists there, regularly receiving such guests as the conductor and radical editor August Röckel and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.
Richard was also influenced by the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Ludwig Feuerbach. Widespread discontent came to a head in 1849, when the unsuccessful May Uprising in Dresden broke out, in which Wagner played a minor supporting role.
A warrant for the arrest of Richard Wagner was issued on the 16th. May 1849, along with warrants for other revolutionaries.
Wagner had to flee, first visiting Paris and then settling in Zürich where he at first took refuge with a friend, Alexander Müller.
Richard Wagner In Exile: Switzerland (1849–1858)
Wagner spent the next twelve years in exile from Germany. He had completed Lohengrin, the last of his middle-period operas, before the Dresden uprising, and now wrote desperately to his friend Franz Liszt to have it staged in his absence. Liszt conducted the premiere in Weimar in August 1850.
Wagner was in grim personal straits, isolated from the German musical world and without any regular income. In 1850, Julie, the wife of his friend Karl Ritter, began to pay him a small pension which she maintained until 1859.
With help from her friend Jessie Laussot, this was to have been augmented to an annual sum of 3,000 thalers per year, but the plan was abandoned when Wagner began an affair with Mme. Laussot.
Wagner even plotted an elopement with her in 1850, which her husband prevented. Meanwhile, Wagner's wife Minna, who had disliked the operas he had written after Rienzi, was falling into a deepening depression. Wagner fell victim to ill-health, according to Ernest Newman "Largely a matter of overwrought nerves", which made it difficult for him to continue writing.
Wagner's primary published output during his first years in Zürich was a set of essays. In "The Artwork of the Future" (1849), he described a vision of opera as Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), in which music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts and stagecraft were unified.
"Judaism in Music" (1850) was the first of Wagner's writings to feature antisemitic views. In this polemic Wagner argued, frequently using traditional antisemitic abuse, that Jews had no connection to the German spirit, and were thus capable of producing only shallow and artificial music.
According to him, they composed music to achieve popularity and, thereby, financial success, as opposed to creating genuine works of art.
In "Opera and Drama" (1851), Wagner described the aesthetics of music drama that he was using to create the Ring cycle. Before leaving Dresden, Wagner had drafted a scenario that eventually became Der Ring des Nibelungen.
He initially wrote the libretto for a single opera, Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried's Death), in 1848. After arriving in Zürich, he expanded the story with Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried), which explored the hero's background.
He completed the text of the cycle by writing the libretti for Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) and Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold) and revising the other libretti to conform to his new concept, completing them in 1852.
The concept of opera expressed in "Opera and Drama" and in other essays effectively renounced all the operas he had previously written through Lohengrin. Partly in an attempt to explain his change of views, Wagner published in 1851 the autobiographical "A Communication to My Friends".
This included his first public announcement of what was to become the Ring cycle:
"I shall never write an Opera more. As I have
no wish to invent an arbitrary title for my works,
I will call them Dramas ... I propose to produce
my myth in three complete dramas, preceded
by a lengthy Prelude (Vorspiel).
At a specially-appointed Festival, I propose,
at some future time, to produce those three
Dramas with their Prelude, in the course of
three days and a fore-evening."
Wagner began composing the music for Das Rheingold between November 1853 and September 1854, following it immediately with Die Walküre (written between June 1854 and March 1856).
He began work on the third Ring drama, which he now called simply Siegfried, probably in September 1856, but by June 1857 he had completed only the first two acts.
He decided to put the work aside in order to concentrate on a new idea: Tristan und Isolde, based on the Arthurian love story Tristan and Iseult.
One source of inspiration for Tristan und Isolde was the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, notably his The World as Will and Representation, to which Wagner had been introduced in 1854 by his poet friend Georg Herwegh.
Wagner later called this the most important event of his life. His personal circumstances certainly made him an easy convert to what he understood to be Schopenhauer's philosophy, a deeply pessimistic view of the human condition. He remained an adherent of Schopenhauer for the rest of his life.
One of Schopenhauer's doctrines was that music held a supreme role in the arts as a direct expression of the world's essence, namely, blind, impulsive will.
This doctrine contradicted Wagner's view, expressed in "Opera and Drama", that the music in opera had to be subservient to the drama. Wagner scholars have argued that Schopenhauer's influence caused Wagner to assign a more commanding role to music in his later operas, including the latter half of the Ring cycle, which he had yet to compose.
Aspects of Schopenhauerian doctrine found their way into Wagner's subsequent libretti.
A second source of inspiration was Wagner's infatuation with the poet-writer Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the silk merchant Otto Wesendonck. Wagner met the Wesendoncks, who were both great admirers of his music, in Zürich in 1852.
From May 1853 onwards Wesendonck made several loans to Wagner to finance his household expenses in Zürich, and in 1857 placed a cottage on his estate at Wagner's disposal, which became known as the Asyl ("asylum" or "place of rest").
During this period, Wagner's growing passion for his patron's wife inspired him to put aside work on the Ring cycle (which was not resumed for the next twelve years) and begin work on Tristan.
While planning the opera, Wagner composed the Wesendonck Lieder, five songs for voice and piano, setting poems by Mathilde. Two of these settings are explicitly subtitled by Wagner as "Studies for Tristan und Isolde".
Among the conducting engagements that Wagner undertook for revenue during this period, he gave several concerts in 1855 with the Philharmonic Society of London, including one before Queen Victoria. The Queen enjoyed his Tannhäuser overture and spoke with Wagner after the concert, writing in her diary that:
"Wagner was short, very quiet, wears
spectacles & has a very finely-developed
forehead, a hooked nose & projecting
chin."
Richard Wagner in Exile: Venice and Paris (1858–1862)
Wagner's uneasy affair with Mathilde collapsed in 1858, when Minna intercepted a letter to Mathilde from him. After the resulting confrontation with Minna, Wagner left Zürich alone, bound for Venice, where he rented an apartment in the Palazzo Giustinian, while Minna returned to Germany.
Wagner's attitude to Minna had changed; the editor of his correspondence with her, John Burk, has said that:
"She was to him an invalid, to be treated
with kindness and consideration, but,
except at a distance, was a menace to
his peace of mind."
Wagner continued his correspondence with Mathilde and his friendship with her husband Otto, who maintained his financial support. In an 1859 letter to Mathilde, Wagner wrote, half-satirically, of Tristan:
"Child! This Tristan is turning into something
terrible. This final act!!!—I fear the opera will
be banned ... only mediocre performances
can save me!
Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive
people mad."
In November 1859, Wagner once again moved to Paris to oversee production of a new revision of Tannhäuser, staged thanks to the efforts of Princess Pauline von Metternich, whose husband was the Austrian ambassador in Paris.
The performances of the Paris Tannhäuser in 1861 were a notable fiasco. This was partly a consequence of the conservative tastes of the Jockey Club, which organised demonstrations in the theatre to protest at the presentation of the ballet feature in act 1 (instead of its traditional location in the second act).
The opportunity was also exploited by those who wanted to use the occasion as a veiled political protest against the pro-Austrian policies of Napoleon III. It was during this visit that Wagner met the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who wrote an appreciative brochure, "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris".
The opera was withdrawn after the third performance, and Wagner left Paris soon after. He had sought a reconciliation with Minna during this Paris visit, and although she joined him there, the reunion was not successful, and they again parted from each other when Wagner left.
Richard Wagner's Return and Resurgence (1862–1871)
The political ban that had been placed on Wagner in Germany after he had fled Dresden was fully lifted in 1862. The composer settled in Biebrich, on the Rhine near Wiesbaden.
Here Minna visited him for the last time: they parted irrevocably, though Wagner continued to give financial support to her while she lived in Dresden until her death in 1866.
In Biebrich, Wagner at last began work on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, his only mature comedy. Wagner wrote a first draft of the libretto in 1845, and he had resolved to develop it during a visit he had made to Venice with the Wesendoncks in 1860, where he was inspired by Titian's painting The Assumption of the Virgin.
Throughout this period (1862–1864) Wagner sought to have Tristan und Isolde produced in Vienna. Despite many rehearsals, the opera remained unperformed, and gained a reputation as being "impossible" to sing, which added to Wagner's financial problems.
Wagner's fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864, when King Ludwig II succeeded to the throne of Bavaria at the age of 18. The young king, an ardent admirer of Wagner's operas, had the composer brought to Munich.
The King, who was homosexual, expressed in his correspondence a passionate personal adoration for the composer, and Wagner in his responses had no scruples about feigning reciprocal feelings.
Ludwig settled Wagner's considerable debts, and proposed to stage Tristan, Die Meistersinger, the Ring, and the other operas Wagner planned.
Wagner also began to dictate his autobiography, Mein Leben, at the King's request. Wagner noted that his rescue by Ludwig coincided with news of the death of his earlier mentor (but later supposed enemy) Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wagner wrote:
"I regretted that this operatic master,
who had done me so much harm,
should not have lived to see this day."
After grave difficulties in rehearsal, Tristan und Isolde premiered at the National Theatre Munich on the 10th. June 1865, the first Wagner opera premiere in almost 15 years. (The premiere had been scheduled for the 15th. May, but was delayed by bailiffs acting for Wagner's creditors, and also because the Isolde, Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, was hoarse and needed time to recover.)
The conductor of this premiere was Hans von Bülow, whose wife, Cosima, had given birth in April that year to a daughter, named Isolde, a child not of Bülow but of Wagner.
Cosima was 24 years younger than Wagner and was herself illegitimate, the daughter of the Countess Marie d'Agoult, who had left her husband for Franz Liszt.
Liszt initially disapproved of his daughter's involvement with Wagner, though nevertheless, the two men were friends. The indiscreet affair scandalised Munich, and Wagner also fell into disfavour with many leading members of the court, who were suspicious of his influence on the King.
In December 1865, Ludwig was finally forced to ask the composer to leave Munich. He apparently also toyed with the idea of abdicating to follow his hero into exile, but Wagner quickly dissuaded him.
Ludwig installed Wagner at the Villa Tribschen, beside Switzerland's Lake Lucerne. Die Meistersinger was completed at Tribschen in 1867, and premiered in Munich on the 21st. June the following year.
At Ludwig's insistence, "special previews" of the first two works of the Ring, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were performed at Munich in 1869 and 1870. However Wagner retained his dream, first expressed in "A Communication to My Friends", of presenting the first complete cycle at a special festival in a new, dedicated, opera house.
Not everyone was impressed by Wagner's work at the time; on the cover of the 18th. April 1869 edition of L'Éclipse, André Gill suggested that Wagner's music was ear-splitting. He produced a cartoon showing a misshapen figure of a man with a tiny body below a head with prominent nose and chin standing on the lobe of a human ear. The figure is hammering the sharp end of a crochet symbol into the inner part of the ear as blood pours out.
Minna died of a heart attack on the 25th. January 1866 in Dresden. Wagner did not attend the funeral. Following Minna's death Cosima wrote to Hans von Bülow several times asking him to grant her a divorce, but Bülow refused to concede this.
He consented only after she had two more children with Wagner; another daughter, named Eva, after the heroine of Meistersinger, and a son Siegfried, named for the hero of the Ring.
The divorce was finally sanctioned, after delays in the legal process, by a Berlin court on the 18th. July 1870. Richard and Cosima's wedding took place on the 25th. August 1870.
On Christmas Day of that year, Wagner arranged a surprise performance (its premiere) of the Siegfried Idyll for Cosima's birthday. The marriage to Cosima lasted to the end of Wagner's life.
Wagner, settled into his new-found domesticity, turned his energies towards completing the Ring cycle. However he had not abandoned polemics: he republished his 1850 pamphlet "Judaism in Music", originally issued under a pseudonym, under his own name in 1869.
He extended the introduction, and wrote a lengthy additional final section. The publication led to several public protests at early performances of Die Meistersinger in Vienna and Mannheim.
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1871–1876)
In 1871, Wagner decided to move to Bayreuth, which was to be the location of his new opera house. The town council donated a large plot of land—the "Green Hill"—as a site for the theatre.
The Wagners moved to the town the following year, and the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus ("Festival Theatre") was laid.
Wagner initially announced the first Bayreuth Festival, at which for the first time the Ring cycle would be presented complete, for 1873, but since Ludwig had declined to finance the project, the start of building was delayed, and the proposed date for the festival was deferred.
To raise funds for the construction, "Wagner societies" were formed in several cities, and Wagner began touring Germany conducting concerts. By the spring of 1873, only a third of the required funds had been raised; further pleas to Ludwig were initially ignored, but early in 1874, with the project on the verge of collapse, the King relented and provided a loan.
The full building programme included the family home, "Wahnfried", into which Wagner, with Cosima and the children, moved from their temporary accommodation on the 18th. April 1874. Wagner was ultimately laid to rest in the Wahnfried garden; in 1977 Cosima's ashes were placed alongside Wagner's body. The grave is shown in the photograph.
The theatre was completed in 1875, and the festival scheduled for the following year. Commenting on the struggle to finish the building, Wagner remarked to Cosima:
"Each stone is red with
my blood and yours".
For the design of the Festspielhaus, Wagner appropriated some of the ideas of his former colleague, Gottfried Semper, which he had previously solicited for a proposed new opera house at Munich.
Wagner was responsible for several theatrical innovations at Bayreuth; these included darkening the auditorium during performances, and placing the orchestra in a pit out of view of the audience.
The Festspielhaus finally opened on the 13th. August 1876 with Das Rheingold, at last taking its place as the first evening of the complete Ring cycle. The 1876 Bayreuth Festival therefore saw the premiere of the complete cycle, performed as a sequence as the composer had intended.
The 1876 Festival consisted of three full Ring cycles (under the baton of Hans Richter). At the end, critical reactions ranged between that of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who thought the work "divinely composed", and that of the French newspaper Le Figaro, which called the music "The dream of a lunatic".
The disillusioned included Wagner's friend and disciple Friedrich Nietzsche, who, having published his eulogistic essay "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" before the festival as part of his Untimely Meditations, was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as Wagner's pandering to increasingly exclusivist German nationalism; his breach with Wagner began at this time.
The festival firmly established Wagner as an artist of European, and indeed world, importance: attendees included Kaiser Wilhelm I, the Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, Anton Bruckner, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Wagner was far from satisfied with the Festival; Cosima recorded that months later, his attitude towards the productions was:
"Never again, never again!"
Moreover, the festival finished with a deficit of about 150,000 marks. The expenses of Bayreuth and of Wahnfried meant that Wagner still sought further sources of income by conducting or taking on commissions such as the Centennial March for America, for which he received $5000.
Richard Wagner - The Final Years (1876–1883)
Following the first Bayreuth Festival, Wagner began work on Parsifal, his final opera. The composition took four years, much of which Wagner spent in Italy for health reasons.
From 1876 to 1878 Wagner also embarked on the last of his documented emotional liaisons, this time with Judith Gautier, whom he had met at the 1876 Festival.
Wagner was also much troubled by problems of financing Parsifal, and by the prospect of the work being performed by other theatres than Bayreuth. He was once again assisted by the liberality of King Ludwig, but was still forced by his personal financial situation in 1877 to sell the rights of several of his unpublished works (including the Siegfried Idyll) to the publisher Schott.
Wagner wrote several articles in his later years, often on political topics, and often reactionary in tone, repudiating some of his earlier, more liberal, views.
These include "Religion and Art" (1880) and "Heroism and Christianity" (1881), which were printed in the journal Bayreuther Blätter, published by his supporter Hans von Wolzogen.
Wagner's sudden interest in Christianity at this period, which infuses Parsifal, was contemporary with his increasing alignment with German nationalism, and required on his part, and the part of his associates, "the rewriting of some recent Wagnerian history", so as to represent, for example, the Ring as a work reflecting Christian ideals.
Many of these later articles, including "What is German?" (1878, but based on a draft written in the 1860's), repeated Wagner's antisemitic preoccupations.
Wagner completed Parsifal in January 1882, and a second Bayreuth Festival was held for the new opera, which premiered on the 26th. May.
Wagner was by this time extremely ill, having suffered a series of increasingly severe angina attacks.
During the sixteenth and final performance of Parsifal on the 29th. August, he entered the pit unseen during act 3, took the baton from conductor Hermann Levi, and led the performance to its conclusion.
After the festival, the Wagner family journeyed to Venice for the winter. Wagner died of a heart attack at the age of 69 on the 13th. February 1883 at Ca' Vendramin Calergi, a 16th.-century palazzo on the Grand Canal.
The legend that the attack was prompted by argument with Cosima over Wagner's supposedly amorous interest in the singer Carrie Pringle, who had been a Flower-maiden in Parsifal at Bayreuth, is without credible evidence.
After a funerary gondola bore Wagner's remains across the Grand Canal, his body was taken to Germany where it was buried in the garden of the Villa Wahnfried.
Richard Wagner's Works
Wagner's musical output is listed by the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis (WWV) as comprising 113 works, including fragments and projects.
The first complete scholarly edition of his musical works in print was commenced in 1970 under the aegis of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur of Mainz, and is presently (2023) under the editorship of Egon Voss.
It will consist of 21 volumes (57 books) of music and 10 volumes (13 books) of relevant documents and texts.
Richard Wagner's Early Works (to 1842)
Wagner's earliest attempts at opera were often uncompleted. Abandoned works include a pastoral opera based on Goethe's Die Laune des Verliebten (The Infatuated Lover's Caprice), written at the age of 17, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), on which Wagner worked in 1832, and the singspiel Männerlist Größer als Frauenlist (Men are More Cunning than Women, 1837–1838).
Die Feen (The Fairies, 1833) was not performed in the composer's lifetime and Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love, 1836) was withdrawn after its first performance.
Rienzi (1842) was Wagner's first opera to be successfully staged.
The compositional style of these early works was conventional— the relatively more sophisticated Rienzi showing the clear influence of Grand Opera à la Spontini and Meyerbeer — and did not exhibit the innovations that would mark Wagner's place in musical history.
Later in life, Wagner said that he did not consider these works to be part of his oeuvre; and they have been performed only rarely in the last hundred years, although the overture to Rienzi is an occasional concert-hall piece.
Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot, and Rienzi were performed at both Leipzig and Bayreuth in 2013 to mark the composer's bicentenary.
Richard Wagner's Romantic Operas (1843–1851)
Wagner's middle stage output began with Der Fliegende Holländer (1843), followed by Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1850).
These three operas are referred to as Wagner's "romantic operas". They reinforced the reputation, among the public in Germany and beyond, that Wagner had begun to establish with Rienzi.
Although distancing himself from the style of these operas from 1849 onwards, he nevertheless reworked both Der Fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser on several occasions.
The three operas are considered to represent a significant developmental stage in Wagner's musical and operatic maturity as regards thematic handling, portrayal of emotions and orchestration.
They are the earliest works included in the Bayreuth canon, the mature operas that Cosima staged at the Bayreuth Festival after Wagner's death in accordance with his wishes.
All three (including the differing versions of Der Fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser) continue to be regularly performed throughout the world, and have been frequently recorded.
They were also the operas by which his fame spread during his lifetime.
Richard Wagner's Music Dramas (1851–1882)
Wagner's late dramas are considered his masterpieces. Der Ring des Nibelungen, commonly referred to as the Ring or "Ring Cycle", is a set of four operas based loosely on figures and elements of Germanic mythology—particularly from the later Norse mythology—notably the Old Norse Poetic Edda and Volsunga Saga, and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied.
Wagner specifically developed the libretti for these operas according to his interpretation of Stabreim, highly alliterative rhyming verse-pairs used in old Germanic poetry.
They were also influenced by Wagner's concepts of ancient Greek drama, in which tetralogies were a component of Athenian festivals, and which he had amply discussed in his essay "Oper und Drama".
The first two components of the Ring cycle were Das Rheingold, which was completed in 1854, and Die Walküre, which was finished in 1856.
In Das Rheingold, with its "relentlessly talky 'realism' and the absence of lyrical 'numbers'", Wagner came very close to the musical ideals of his 1849–1851 essays.
Die Walküre, which contains what is virtually a traditional aria (Siegmund's Winterstürme in the first act), and the quasi-choral appearance of the Valkyries themselves, shows more "operatic" traits, but has been assessed by Barry Millington as:
"The music drama that most satisfactorily
embodies the theoretical principles of
'Oper und Drama'... A thoroughgoing
synthesis of poetry and music is achieved
without any notable sacrifice in musical
expression."
While composing the opera Siegfried, the third part of the Ring cycle, Wagner interrupted work on it, and between 1857 and 1864 wrote the tragic love story Tristan und Isolde and his only mature comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, two works that are also part of the regular operatic canon.
Tristan is often granted a special place in musical history; many see it as the beginning of the move away from conventional harmony and tonality, and consider that it lays the groundwork for the direction of classical music in the 20th. century.
Wagner felt that his musico-dramatical theories were most perfectly realised in this work with its use of "the art of transition" between dramatic elements and the balance achieved between vocal and orchestral lines. Completed in 1859, the work was given its first performance in Munich, conducted by Bülow, in June 1865.
Die Meistersinger was originally conceived by Wagner in 1845 as a sort of comic pendant to Tannhäuser. Like Tristan, it was premiered in Munich under the baton of Bülow, on the 21st. June 1868, and became an immediate success.
Millington describes Meistersinger as:
"A rich, perceptive music drama
widely admired for its warm
humanity."
However its strong German nationalist overtones have led some to cite it as an example of Wagner's reactionary politics and antisemitism.
Completing the Ring
When Wagner returned to writing the music for the last act of Siegfried and for Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), as the final part of the Ring, his style had changed once more to something more recognisable as "operatic" than the aural world of Rheingold and Walküre, though it was still thoroughly stamped with his own originality as a composer and suffused with leitmotifs.
This was in part because the libretti of the four Ring operas had been written in reverse order, so that the book for Götterdämmerung was conceived more "traditionally" than that of Rheingold; still, the self-imposed strictures of the Gesamtkunstwerk had become relaxed.
The differences also result from Wagner's development as a composer during the period in which he wrote Tristan, Meistersinger and the Paris version of Tannhäuser. From act 3 of Siegfried onwards, the Ring becomes more chromatic melodically, more complex harmonically, and more developmental in its treatment of leitmotifs.
Wagner took 26 years from writing the first draft of a libretto in 1848 until he completed Götterdämmerung in 1874.
The Ring takes about 15 hours to perform, and is the only undertaking of such size to be regularly presented on the world's stages.
Parsifal
Wagner's final opera, Parsifal (1882), which was his only work written especially for his Bayreuth Festspielhaus and which is described in the score as a "Bühnenweihfestspiel" ("Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage"), has a storyline suggested by elements of the legend of the Holy Grail.
It also carries elements of Buddhist renunciation suggested by Wagner's readings of Schopenhauer. Wagner described it to Cosima as his "last card".
Parsifal remains controversial because of its treatment of Christianity, its eroticism, and its expression, as perceived by some commentators, of German nationalism and antisemitism.
Despite the composer's own description of the opera to King Ludwig as "this most Christian of works", Ulrike Kienzle has commented that:
"Wagner's turn to Christian mythology,
upon which the imagery and spiritual
contents of Parsifal rest, is idiosyncratic,
and contradicts Christian dogma in
many ways."
Musically, the opera has been held to represent a continuing development of the composer's style, and Millington describes it as:
"A diaphanous score of unearthly
beauty and refinement".
Richard Wagner's Non-Operatic Music
Apart from his operas, Wagner composed relatively few pieces of music. These include a symphony in C major (written at the age of 19), the Faust Overture (the only completed part of an intended symphony on the subject), some concert overtures, and choral and piano pieces.
Richard's most commonly performed work that is not an extract from an opera is the Siegfried Idyll for chamber orchestra, which has several motifs in common with the Ring cycle.
The Wesendonck Lieder are also often performed, either in the original piano version, or with orchestral accompaniment.
More rarely performed are the American Centennial March (1876), and Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (The Love Feast of the Apostles), a piece for male choruses and orchestra composed in 1843 for the city of Dresden.
After completing Parsifal, Wagner expressed his intention to turn to the writing of symphonies, and several sketches dating from the late 1870's and early 1880's have been identified as work towards this end.
The overtures and certain orchestral passages from Wagner's middle and late-stage operas are commonly played as concert pieces. For most of these, Wagner wrote or re-wrote short passages to ensure musical coherence.
The "Bridal Chorus" from Lohengrin is frequently played as the bride's processional wedding march in English-speaking countries.
Richard Wagner's Prose Writings
Wagner was an extremely prolific writer, authoring many books, poems, and articles, as well as voluminous correspondence. His writings covered a wide range of topics, including autobiography, politics, philosophy, and detailed analyses of his own operas.
Wagner planned for a collected edition of his publications as early as 1865; he believed that such a work would help the world to understand his intellectual development and artistic aims.
The first such edition was published between 1871 and 1883, but was doctored to suppress or alter articles that were an embarrassment to him (e.g. those praising Meyerbeer), or by altering dates on some articles to reinforce Wagner's own account of his progress.
Wagner's autobiography Mein Leben was originally published for close friends only in a very small edition (15–18 copies per volume) in four volumes between 1870 and 1880.
The first public edition (with many passages suppressed by Cosima) appeared in 1911; the first attempt at a full edition (in German) appeared in 1963.
There have been modern complete or partial editions of Wagner's writings, including a centennial edition in German edited by Dieter Borchmeyer (which, however, omitted the essay "Das Judenthum in der Musik" and Mein Leben).
The English translations of Wagner's prose in eight volumes by William Ashton Ellis (1892–1899) are still in print, and commonly used, despite their deficiencies.
The first complete historical and critical edition of Wagner's prose works was launched in 2013 at the Institute for Music Research at the University of Würzburg; this will result in at least eight volumes of text and several volumes of commentary, totalling over 5,000 pages.
It was originally anticipated that the Würzburg project will be completed by 2030, although this time frame may need to be extended.
A complete edition of Wagner's correspondence, estimated to amount to between 10,000 and 12,000 items, is under way under the supervision of the University of Würzburg. As of January 2021, 25 volumes have appeared, covering the period up to 1873.
Richard Wagner's Influence on Music
Wagner's later musical style introduced new ideas in harmony, melodic process (leitmotif) and operatic structure.
Notably from Tristan und Isolde onwards, he explored the limits of the traditional tonal system, which gave keys and chords their identity, pointing the way to atonality in the 20th. century.
Some music historians date the beginning of modern classical music to the first notes of Tristan, which include the so-called Tristan chord.
Wagner inspired great devotion. For a long period, many composers were inclined to align themselves with or against Wagner's music. Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf were greatly indebted to him, as were César Franck, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, Jules Massenet, Richard Strauss, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Pfitzner and many others.
Gustav Mahler was devoted to Wagner and his music; at the age of 15, he sought Wagner out on his 1875 visit to Vienna. Mahler became a renowned Wagner conductor, and Richard Taruskin has claimed that:
"Mahler's compositions extend
Wagner's maximalization of the
temporal and the sonorous in
music to the world of the
symphony."
The harmonic revolutions of Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg (both of whose oeuvres contain examples of tonal and atonal modernism) have often been traced back to Tristan and Parsifal.
The Italian form of operatic realism known as verismo owed much to the Wagnerian concept of musical form.
Wagner also made a major contribution to the principles and practice of conducting. His essay "About Conducting" (1869) advanced Hector Berlioz's technique of conducting, and claimed that conducting was a means by which a musical work could be re-interpreted, rather than simply a mechanism for achieving orchestral unison.
He exemplified this approach in his own conducting, which was significantly more flexible than the disciplined approach of Felix Mendelssohn; in Wagner's view this also justified practices that would today be frowned upon, such as the rewriting of scores.
Wilhelm Furtwängler felt that Wagner and Bülow, through their interpretative approach, inspired a whole new generation of conductors (including Furtwängler himself).
Among those claiming inspiration from Wagner's music are the German band Rammstein, Jim Steinman, who wrote songs for Meat Loaf, Bonnie Tyler, Air Supply, Celine Dion and others.
Wagner also influenced the electronic composer Klaus Schulze, whose 1975 album Timewind consists of two 30-minute tracks, Bayreuth Return and Wahnfried 1883.
Joey DeMaio of the band Manowar has described Wagner as:
"The father of heavy metal".
The Slovenian group Laibach created the 2009 suite VolksWagner, using material from Wagner's operas.
Phil Spector's Wall of Sound recording technique was, it has been claimed, heavily influenced by Wagner.
Richard Wagner's Influence on Literature, Philosophy and the Visual Arts
Wagner's influence on literature and philosophy is significant. Millington has commented:
"Wagner's protean abundance meant that
he could inspire the use of literary motif in
many a novel employing interior monologue;
the Symbolists saw him as a mystic hierophant;
the Decadents found many a frisson in his work."
Friedrich Nietzsche was a member of Wagner's inner circle during the early 1870's, and his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, proposed Wagner's music as the Dionysian "rebirth" of European culture in opposition to Apollonian rationalist "decadence".
Nietzsche however broke with Wagner following the first Bayreuth Festival, believing that Wagner's final phase represented a pandering to Christian pieties, and a surrender to the new German Reich.
Nietzsche expressed his displeasure with the later Wagner in "The Case of Wagner" and "Nietzsche Contra Wagner".
The poets Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine worshipped Wagner.
Édouard Dujardin, whose influential novel Les Lauriers Sont Coupés is in the form of an interior monologue inspired by Wagnerian music, founded a journal dedicated to Wagner, La Revue Wagnérienne.
In a list of major cultural figures influenced by Wagner, Bryan Magee includes D. H. Lawrence, Aubrey Beardsley, Romain Rolland, Gérard de Nerval, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Rainer Maria Rilke and several others.
In the 20th century, W. H. Auden once called Wagner:
"Perhaps the greatest
genius that ever lived."
Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust were heavily influenced by him, and discussed Wagner in their novels. He is also discussed in some of the works of James Joyce, as well as W. E. B. Du Bois, who featured Lohengrin in The Souls of Black Folk.
Wagnerian themes inhabit T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which contains lines from Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung, and Verlaine's poem on Parsifal.
Many of Wagner's concepts, including his speculation about dreams, predated their investigation by Sigmund Freud. Wagner had publicly analysed the Oedipus myth before Freud was born in terms of its psychological significance, insisting that incestuous desires are natural and normal, and perceptively exhibiting the relationship between sexuality and anxiety. Georg Groddeck considered the Ring as the first manual of psychoanalysis.
Richard Wagner's Influence on the Cinema
Wagner's concept of the use of leitmotifs and the integrated musical expression which they can enable has influenced many 20th. and 21st. century film scores.
The critic Theodor Adorno has noted that:
"The Wagnerian leitmotif leads directly to
cinema music where the sole function of
the leitmotif is to announce heroes or
situations so as to allow the audience to
orient itself more easily".
Film scores citing Wagnerian themes include Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which features a version of the Ride of the Valkyries, Trevor Jones's soundtrack to John Boorman's film Excalibur, and the 2011 films A Dangerous Method (dir. David Cronenberg) and Melancholia (dir. Lars von Trier).
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's 1977 film Hitler has a visual style and set design that are strongly inspired by Der Ring des Nibelungen, musical excerpts from which are frequently used in the film's soundtrack.
Richard Wagner's Opponents and Supporters
Not all reaction to Wagner was positive. For a time, German musical life divided into two factions, supporters of Wagner and supporters of Johannes Brahms; the latter, with the support of the powerful critic Eduard Hanslick (of whom Beckmesser in Meistersinger is in part a caricature) championed traditional forms, and led the conservative front against Wagnerian innovations.
They were supported by the conservative leanings of some German music schools, including the conservatories at Leipzig under Ignaz Moscheles and at Cologne under the direction of Ferdinand Hiller.
Another Wagner detractor was the French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, who wrote to Hiller after attending Wagner's Paris concert on the 25th. January 1860. At this concert Wagner conducted the overtures to Der Fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser, the preludes to Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde, and six other extracts from Tannhäuser and Lohengrin.
Alkan noted:
"I had imagined that I was going
to meet music of an innovative
kind, but was astonished to find
a pale imitation of Berlioz.
I do not like all the music of Berlioz
while appreciating his marvellous
understanding of certain instrumental
effects ... but here he was imitated
and caricatured ... Wagner is not a
musician, he is a disease."
Even those who, like Debussy, opposed Wagner ("this old poisoner") could not deny his influence. Indeed, Debussy was one of many composers, including Tchaikovsky, who felt the need to break with Wagner precisely because his influence was so unmistakable and overwhelming.
"Golliwogg's Cakewalk" from Debussy's Children's Corner piano suite contains a deliberately tongue-in-cheek quotation from the opening bars of Tristan.
Others who proved resistant to Wagner's operas included Gioachino Rossini, who said:
"Wagner has wonderful moments,
and dreadful quarters of an hour."
In the 20th. century Wagner's music was parodied by Paul Hindemith and Hanns Eisler, among others.
Wagner's followers (known as Wagnerians or Wagnerites) have formed many societies dedicated to Wagner's life and work.
Film and Stage Portrayals of Richard Wagner
Wagner has been the subject of many biographical films. The earliest was a silent film made by Carl Froelich in 1913. It featured in the title role the composer Giuseppe Becce, who also wrote the score for the film (as Wagner's music, still in copyright, was not available).
Other film portrayals of Wagner include:
-- Richard Burton in Wagner (1983).
-- Paul Nicholas in Lisztomania (1975)
-- Trevor Howard in Ludwig (1972)
-- Lyndon Brook in Song Without End (1960)
-- Alan Badel in Magic Fire (1955)
Jonathan Harvey's opera Wagner Dream (2007) intertwines the events surrounding Wagner's death with the story of Wagner's uncompleted opera outline Die Sieger (The Victors).
The Bayreuth Festival
Since Wagner's death, the Bayreuth Festival, which has become an annual event, has been successively directed by his widow, his son Siegfried, the latter's widow Winifred Wagner, their two sons Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, and, presently, two of the composer's great-granddaughters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner.
Since 1973, the festival has been overseen by the Richard-Wagner-Stiftung (Richard Wagner Foundation), the members of which include some of Wagner's descendants.
Controversies Associated With Richard Wagner
Wagner's operas, writings, politics, beliefs and unorthodox lifestyle made him a controversial figure during his lifetime.
Following his death, debate about his ideas and their interpretation, particularly in Germany during the 20th. century, has continued.
Racism and Antisemitism
A caricature of Wagner by Karl Clic was published in 1873 in the Viennese satirical magazine, Humoristische Blätter. It shows a cartoon figure holding a baton, standing next to a music stand in front of some musicians.
The figure has a large nose and prominent forehead. His sideburns turn into a wispy beard under his chin. The exaggerated features refer to rumours of Wagner's Jewish ancestry.
Wagner's hostile writings on Jews, including Jewishness in Music, correspond to some existing trends of thought in Germany during the 19th century.
Despite his very public views on this topic, throughout his life Wagner had Jewish friends, colleagues and supporters. There have been frequent suggestions that antisemitic stereotypes are represented in Wagner's operas. The characters of Alberich and Mime in the Ring, Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, and Klingsor in Parsifal are sometimes claimed as Jewish representations, though they are not identified as such in the librettos of these operas.
The topic is further complicated by claims, which may have been credited by Wagner, that he himself was of Jewish ancestry, via his supposed father Geyer. However, there is no evidence that Geyer had Jewish ancestors.
Some biographers have noted that Wagner in his final years developed interest in the racialist philosophy of Arthur de Gobineau, notably Gobineau's belief that Western society was doomed because of miscegenation between "superior" and "inferior" races.
According to Robert Gutman, this theme is reflected in the opera Parsifal.
Other biographers however (including Lucy Beckett) believe that this is not true, as the original drafts of the story date back to 1857 and Wagner had completed the libretto for Parsifal by 1877, but he displayed no significant interest in Gobineau until 1880.
Other Interpretations
Wagner's ideas are amenable to socialist interpretations; many of his ideas on art were being formulated at the time of his revolutionary inclinations in the 1840's. Thus, for example, George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Perfect Wagnerite (1883):
"Wagner's picture of Niblunghome under the
reign of Alberic is a poetic vision of unregulated
industrial capitalism as it was made known in
Germany in the middle of the 19th. century by
Engels's book 'The Condition of the Working
Class in England."
Left-wing interpretations of Wagner also inform the writings of Theodor Adorno among other Wagner critics.
Walter Benjamin gave Wagner as an example of "bourgeois false consciousness", alienating art from its social context.
György Lukács contended that the ideas of the early Wagner represented the ideology of the "true socialists" (wahre Sozialisten), a movement referenced in Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto" as belonging to the left-wing of German bourgeois radicalism.
Anatoly Lunacharsky said about the later Wagner:
"The circle is complete. The revolutionary
has become a reactionary. The rebellious
petty bourgeois now kisses the slipper of
the Pope, the keeper of order."
The writer Robert Donington has produced a detailed, if controversial, Jungian interpretation of the Ring cycle, described as "an approach to Wagner by way of his symbols", which, for example, sees the character of the goddess Fricka as part of her husband Wotan's "inner femininity".
Millington notes that Jean-Jacques Nattiez has also applied psychoanalytical techniques in an evaluation of Wagner's life and works.
Nazi Appropriation of Richard Wagner's Work
Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Wagner's music, and saw in his operas an embodiment of his own vision of the German nation; in a 1922 speech he claimed that:
"Wagner's works glorify the heroic
Teutonic nature ... Greatness lies in
the heroic."
Hitler visited Bayreuth frequently from 1923 onwards, and attended productions at the theatre.
There continues to be debate about the extent to which Wagner's views might have influenced Nazi thinking. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), who married Wagner's daughter Eva in 1908 but never met Wagner, was the author of the racist book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, approved by the Nazi movement.
Chamberlain met Hitler several times between 1923 and 1927 in Bayreuth, but cannot credibly be regarded as a conduit of Wagner's own views.
The Nazis used those parts of Wagner's thought that were useful for propaganda, and ignored or suppressed the rest.
While Bayreuth presented a useful front for Nazi culture, and Wagner's music was used at many Nazi events, the Nazi hierarchy as a whole did not share Hitler's enthusiasm for Wagner's operas, and resented attending these lengthy epics at Hitler's insistence.
Guido Fackler has researched evidence that indicates that it is possible that Wagner's music was used at the Dachau concentration camp in 1933–1934 to "re-educate" political prisoners by exposure to "national music".
There has been no evidence to support claims, sometimes made, that his music was played at Nazi death camps during the Second World War, and Pamela Potter has noted that Wagner's music was explicitly off-limits in the camps.
Because of the associations of Wagner with antisemitism and Nazism, the performance of his music in the State of Israel has been a source of controversy.
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March 25, 2010
I'm abandoning my music idea for right now. I may have a few more musically inspired songs here and there if I'm out of ideas or feel truly inspired by a song. But I was really hating the pictures I was creating during the music...and I'll be honest, I'm not a big big fan of this one either.
Lately I've been super bipolar in my mood. Sometimes I'll wake up and feel optimistic and happy while others I wake up depressed...and I just can't seem to shake it off. It's so easy of me to think of all my flaws, all my misfortunes, and all the things I don't have when I should be focusing on the good things in my life that I do have.
I just get so angry at myself and the world. Lately I've been feeling like there's a person inside of me ready to jump out at any second...but I keep holding that person back. I don't know why...sometimes I feel like I'm not even sure HOW to let the person out. I feel held back by the limited resources I have...and then I get angry at myself for being so shallow. Who I am isn't the clothes I wear or the color of my hair or the quality of my pictures...it's whoever is there on the inside. Yet at the same time this person on the inside wants to somehow express itself...and the only way I can do that right now is through photography and clothes and hair...it's so frustrating!
I came to the conclusion I need to write in my diary more. I haven't done it for quite some time and when I kept it up every day I felt so in tune with myself...so me. I didn't feel so lost and alone...
All while recording my life...I'd like to think that some day after I die I will have done something that makes someone interested in my life. The thought of my great grandchild finding my diaries and pictures and actually being interested in what I had to say and who I was is incredible to me...to live past the day I die. But while I so desperately want to be remembered after I die like Mozart or Edgar Allen Poe I have to be honest with myself. I'm nothing special...I'm no virtuoso in anything. Yeah I can crank out mediocre pictures and hold a tune but that's it...there's a huge chance I'm going to die and that will be the end of me...nobody will care.
Wow that sounded a lot more suicidal than I meant it to be lol I swear I'm not suicidal, just meant that when I die, whenever it may be (most likely in my 90s since my genetic make up is to last that long) I fear nobody will care after awhile (like when my immediate family dies off too).
I'm just ranting now...but these are the things that are inside me...and make me just want to cry.
I'm sorry if I come off cold and selfish, I really don't mean to. I just am working on some inner struggles right now...know I really do love and appreciate you all. I'll try to get around to commenting on your pics more...I'm just so exhausted all the time. I'll do better though
TRF: Went to ethics today...talked a LOT about sex and infidelity...that class always puts me in a bad bad mood. It's such a pessimistic way of viewing people and life...it's like, as if being in a LDR wasn't tough enough I'm sitting in a class where the teacher is going on about how 75% of men will have sex with a random woman if she walks up to him and requests it. I'm having difficulty coming to terms with the fact that I am a sexual being and we all are...that sex is natural and I shouldn't be ashamed of the fact that I want/have had/will have sex. ...I'm ranting again! gah
- The Who, Naked Eye
Hey! Look at me! Not only did I take some selfies today, but I spent all last night making this bedazzled mask! AND I'm playing in Musically Challenged for the first time in forever! Applause, please.
Really, today has been a practice in avoiding the one thing I'm supposed to be doing, which is working on my evidentiary brief. But this was so much more fun.
I think I might pass along a few unprocessed shots from this shoot for folks in my new group to process for me! It'll be fun seeing how my face art shots turn out in the hands of others. What? You don't know about the coolest new group on flickr? Get on over to Me Through Your Eyes and join in on the fun! :)
Musically Challenged: Naked Eye - The Who
Animals, the second album by my musically-inclined alter ego Prichard Nixon, is slated for release next Tuesday, February 1st.
Just in time for my birthday.
Electronic press kits have been successfully disseminated to all radio stations, newspaper, magazine and media outlets in the Greater Coachella Valley.
The last few months were filled with soul-scraping depression and existential decay . . . but here I am. It feels good to look to the heavens and say, "Kiss my ass, Universe. You can't keep me down."
There will be more to come. I know I have some catching up to do. I appreciate your patience in hanging in there with me.
In the meantime, I have uploaded several remastered tracks from the forthcoming Animals album to the official Prichard Nixon website. Give 'em a spin at prichardnixon.bandcamp.com/.
That's all I have for now. Thank you again, everyone. Much love and until next time, take care of one another.
Sincerely,
- O . . . Phuck!™
Post Script: This wicked portrait was drawn by my good friend Alex Silber. Buy the man a beer!
I couldn't choose between these 3 photo's, so I'm putting them all on my stream.
I think there's a motorcycle-chick pushing to come out of me, so why not let it do so for my photo's until I got my motordriving licence?
Inspired by TOWT - Alter Ego
This one is also for Musically Challenged - Falling Slowly by Glen Hansard (Love him!)
~Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You'll make it now~
where am I now?
upside down
and I can't stop it now
it can't stop me now
ooooooh
I... I'll get by
I... I'll survive
when the world's crashin' down
when I fall and hit the ground
I will turn myself around
don't you try to stop me
I... I won't cry
- Avril Lavigne, Alice
The middle finger on my right hand is literally kinked out of place. When I hold my hand at rest and the other fingers naturally bend slightly towards my palm, my middle finger is sort of hyper-extended backwards. It's sick. And it's all from editing nonstop all day. I'm a glutton for punishment. And I'm absolutely fascinated by this finger thing. It doesn't feel good, let me tell you.
Three more days...tick tock, tick tock!
Musically Challenged: Avril Lavigne - Alice
please visit me also on :
I don't get many things right the first time
In fact, I am told that a lot
Now I know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls
Brought me here
And where was I before the day
That I first saw your lovely face?
Now I see it everyday
And I know
That I am
I am
I am
The luckiest
- Ben Folds, The Luckiest
Today is our first wedding anniversary. This was one of the songs that we danced to during our reception - not our first dance, but one that I made the DJ put on the list of "must plays" because for years I'd been dreaming of dancing with my husband to this song on the night of our wedding.
He doesn't often agree to help me with my photos, but seeing as it's our anniversary, he's been pretty agreeable today so I thought I'd seize my opportunity. :) We went over to my folks' house and ate the top tier of our wedding cake too. Well, not all of it, but a slice. So good. It was fun to see it again too. My mom has had it safely stored away in her freezer since our wedding. Delicious and a fun tradition.
In case you were wondering, the song we danced to for our first dance was Dream a Little Dream, and the other absolute "must play" that we danced to was Better Man by James Morrison. Quite possibly my three favorite love songs of all time.
Musically Challenged: Ben Folds - The Luckiest
French postcard by Editions P.I., Paris, offered by Corvisart, Epinal, no. 1080. Photo: Ektochrome Anders.
From 1961 until 1963 Helen Shapiro (1946) was England's teenage pop music queen, at one point selling 40,000 copies daily of her biggest single, 'Walkin' Back to Happiness', during a 19-week chart run. The singer and actress was only 14 when she was discovered. Shapiro had a rich, expressive voice properly sounding like the property of someone twice as old, and she matured into a seasoned professional very quickly.
Helen Kate Shapiro was born in Bethnal Green, London in 1946. She is the granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, and her parents, who were piece-workers in the garment industry, attended Lea Bridge Road Synagogue. They were too poor to own a record player but encouraged music in their home. At age 9, Helen performed with a ukulele in the school group Susie & the Hula Hoops, whose members included also a young Mark Feld aka Marc Bolan). Reportedly, they performed their own versions of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly songs. She subsequently sang with her brother Ron Shapiro's trad jazz turned skiffle outfit at local clubs before enrolling in classes at Maurice Burman's music school in London. Shapiro had a deep timbre to her voice, unusual in a girl not yet in her teens. School friends gave her the nickname ‘Foghorn’. Maurice Burman was so enamoured of Helen’s talent that he waived the fees to keep her as a student. He wrote to several record labels to promote interest in his students. EMI Records sent producer John Schroeder, who heard her at one of the classes and was impressed enough to record her and play it back for top EMI producer Norrie Paramor , who had signed Cliff Richard & the Shadows. Helen Shapiro's voice on the rape was so mature that Paramor refused to believe that it belonged to a 14-year-old girl. So, Helen came to his office in her school uniform and sang St. Louis Blues. Only a few weeks later, she cut her first single, Please Don't Treat Me Like a Child, composed by John Schroeder and Mike Hawker. It made number three in the UK charts in May 1961, and the record company’s publicity department made great play on the novelty value of her age. Shapiro’s second release, the ballad You don’t know, was issued three months later. In August 1961, it made 14-year-old Helen the youngest female artist to reach number one. The song stayed at the top of the charts for two weeks and eventually sold over a million copies. In September that year she turned 15 and left school to pursue her career in earnest. Live appearances showcased Helen’s assuredness as a performer. She even headlined at the legendary London Palladium, virtually unheard of for such a young, inexperienced entertainer.
Helen Shapiro had her second number one hit in the UK with Walkin' Back to Happiness. It is now her signature song. Her mature voice made her an overnight sensation. The song also became a hit in the rest of Europe and inspired an attempt to crack the American market. However, despite an appearance on the legendary Ed Sullivan Show, the record only reached # 100 in the US charts. In 1962 she made her debut feature film, It's Trad, Dad!/Ring-A-Ding Rhythm (1962, Richard Lester). This musical comedy was one of the first films put out by predominantly horror company Amicus Productions, and director Richard Lester's feature debut. Shapiro and singer Craig Douglas play two teenagers who, along with their friends enjoy the latest trend of traditional jazz. However, the mayor as well as a group of adults dislike the trend and move to have a coffee shop jukebox taken away. Helen and Craig decide to organize a music festival in their small town, and the film comprises musical numbers by Chubby Checker, Del Shannon, and Gene Vincent. Jeff Stafford at TCM: "Any Richard Lester fan can look at It's Trad, Dad and see the fresh and distinctive techniques that would fully emerge in Lester's A Hard Day's Night. For one thing, Lester's playful editing style keeps the viewer constantly engaged while also paying tribute to the musicians on display. (...) Douglas is a pleasant but unremarkable light pop vocalist but Shapiro is a little dynamo with a powerful voice comparable to Brenda Lee." Shapiro then starred in another teenage musical, Play It Cool (1962, Michael Winner) featuring Billy Fury and the Satellites and Bobby Vee. Before she was sixteen years old, Shapiro had been voted Britain's 'Top Female Singer', and when The Beatles had their first national tour (The Helen Shapiro Tour) in 1963, it was as her supporting act. During the tour The Beatles hit big and replaced Helen as top of the bill. Helen later found out that it was around this time that Lennon and McCartney penned Misery for her, but Paramor declined the offer without informing her. He preferred to release Queen for tonight, a firm fan favourite and a much-requested song, but slightly out of step with current trends. It reached a disappointing 33 in the UK charts. In early 1964, her cover of Fever proved her last top 40 hit.
By the time Helen Shapiro was in her late teens, her career as a pop singer was on the wane. Undaunted, she branched out as a performer in stage musicals, a jazz singer (jazz being her first love musically), and more recently a gospel singer. She also began to concentrate more on stage work. In the early 1980’s she played the role of Nancy in Lionel Bart's musical, Oliver! in London's West End. Various other musicals, pantomimes and revival concerts followed. She also continued to tour, especially in mainland Europe and the Far East, where she remained in demand. Throughout the 1980’s she made guest appearances on many TV variety shows, either singing her old songs or promoting the odd new release. Shapiro also appeared in British television soap operas; in particular Albion Market (1985) where she played one of the main characters up to the time it was taken off-air in August 1986. In August 1987 Shapiro became a committed Christian (Messianic believer). She has issued four Messianic albums since then, as well as appearing in a number of special Gospel Outreach evenings, singing and telling of how she found Jesus (Yeshua) as her Messiah. Shapiro retired from showbusiness at the end of 2002 to concentrate on her Gospel Outreach evenings. In 1993, she published her autobiography, Walking Back to Happiness. She was married three times: Duncan C. Weldon (1967-1971), Morris Gundlash (1972-1977) and John Judd (1988-), an actor with numerous roles in British television and cinema. The couple lives in Kent.
Sources: Jeff Stafford (TCM), Graham Welch (Ready Steady Girls), Bruce Eder (AllMusic), Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.