Levy, © 2014/2017 David OttĬoncerto for Two Violoncellos and OrchestraĪmerican composer, pianist, and conductor, David Ott, was born in Crystal Falls, MI on July 5, 1947. Musical theorists sometimes refer to this, and similar passages in music, as “Meistersinger counterpoint.” A wonderful moment in the Prelude comes toward its end, when Wagner weaves a contrapuntal combination of the Walter’s tune with two of the Mastersingers’ melodies. In addition to three separate melodies that are associated with the Mastersingers, Wagner introduces the soaring theme of Walther von Stolzing’s “Prize Song” from Act III. None of this, however, may be heard in the Prelude to Die Meistersinger-a grand and imposing orchestral work whose several themes are closely linked by motivic figures. Many aspects of Schopenhauer’s influence are found in what many consider to be Wagner’s crowning achievement in musical tragedy, Tristan und Isolde, but also find their way into Die Meistersinger, especially in Hans Sachs’s famous “Madness” (Wahn) monologue in Act III.

A decade earler, Wagner became completely absorbed in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, a pessimistic writer whose philosophical point of view was most clearly expressed in his magisterial four-part treatise, The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vostellung). Wagner’s work on the Ring was incomplete in 1864, the year in which Wagner was rescued from exile and relieved of his debts by King Ludwig. Its first performance took place in Munich in 1868, by which time the mad King of Bavaria, Ludwig II, had brought the composer to his court, showering him with lavish financial support to enable the composer to bring his operatic projects, above all the Ring of the Nibelung, to fruition. For various reasons, not the least of which was Wagner’s involvement in revolutionary politics in Saxony leading to his flight from Dresden and his subsequent exile, Wagner did not complete Die Meistersinger until 1867.

In both operas, music itself stands as a representation of German culture. His plan would produce two operas based on figures from German history-the courtly medieval Minnesingers and the fifteenth and sixteenth-century bourgeois guild of Mastersingers. Wagner’s original conceptions for this, his only mature comic opera, stem from personal experiences in his private life as well as from his desire in 1845 to write a lighter counterpiece for the recently-completed Tannhäuser.

The overture (or Vorspiel) is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, harp, and strings. His only comic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) was first performed at the Royal Court and National Theater in Munich on June 21, 1868, conducted by Hans von Bülow.

His crowning achievement was the Ring of the Nibelung, a four-opera epic that occupied him from the late 1840s until its premiere in the summer of 1876 in an opera house in Bayreuth built to his own specifications. He was the most important composer of German opera in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany on and died in Venice on February 13, 1883. Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, WWV 96

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