Siegfried Idyll

The 25th of December 1870 was a very special day in the Wagner villa at Tribschen on Lake Lucerne. It was not only Christmas Day and not only Cosima’s 33rd birthday but also the occasion on which the composer thanked her for the birth of their son Siegfried with an extraordinary musical event. He had written and rehearsed in secret a piece to be played by thirteen musicians at seven in the morning on the stairs outside Cosima’s bedroom. “As I awoke in the light of dawn,” she wrote of that first performance of the work we now know as the Siegfried Idyll, “my mind passed from one dream into another. Familiar sounds from Siegfried, though now transformed and, it seemed, transfigured, stole on my ears… and, slowly, gradually I began to realise that I was not dreaming and yet was experiencing the most blissful of all dreams.”

The music Cosima heard that morning had more personal associations than echoes of Siegfried, the opera Wagner was just finishing at the time. Some of the Siegfried material used here, like the tender opening theme on the strings actually originated at the beginning of their relationship six years earlier, while the solo oboe tune that emerges after the first climax is a nursery song Wagner had written for their older children four years after that. No wonder Cosima felt that “our whole existence was rising up in music.”

Nothing is simple where Wagner is concerned, not even the Siegfried Idyll. On the surface it is a very beautiful present from the composer to the mother of his children, the latest of whom was their son Siegfried. Though a little on the long side perhaps - that is if you take into account the comfort of the thirteen musicians who first performed it, standing on the narrow staircase of Wagner’s villa at Triebchen on Lake Lucerne - it is apparently quite un-complicated in its lyricism.

The first theme Cosima would have heard drifting up into her bedroom on Christmas morning 1870, which was also her 33rd birthday, is a clear allusion to Siegfried - the opera or the baby, it doesn’t matter which - and the second main theme, a traditional German lullaby introduced by a cheerful oboe, seems no less appropriate. On the other hand, as that theme is developed on the woodwind in combination with the first theme on the strings, it emerges that one is an inversion of the other. Cosima would also have known that the first theme originated not in the orchestral introduction to Brünnhilde’s Ewig war ich in the last act of Siegfried but in a string quartet Wagner had started to write for her six years earlier. The lullaby, moreover, is associated in Wagner’s diary with the birth of their second daughter, Eva, in 1868. The next main theme, which is presented as a wind septet, is ostensibly another allusion to the last act of Siegfried, but it too originated in the unfinished string quartet.

There is little room for speculation about the horn call which follows the central climax of the work - it has no other association than with the young Siegfried - and the echoes of the Woodbird are unambiguous. The recapitulation, however, in bringing all the allusions together, complicates the family symbolism still further. It is no wonder that Richard and Cosima were so unhappy about publishing these intimacies piece when financial circumstances finally forced them into it.

Gerald Larner