(II) Choral.

Between 1834 and 1836 Wagner was attached to a theatrical troupe in Magdeburg. The troupe’s stage director, Wilhelm Schmale, wrote a festival play to celebrate the new year, and Wagner was required, in a short space of time, to contribute incidental music. The five numbers he wrote were an overture (incorporating music from the slow movement of the C major Symphony), choruses and ‘allegorical music’. In 1837, during his period in Riga, Wagner was commissioned to write a Volks-Hymne (national anthem) for the birthday celebrations of Tsar Nicholas. Giving the music ‘as despotic and patriarchal a colouring as possible’, he achieved a popular success that was performed on the same day in subsequent years.

Demonstrating further a pragmatic but impressive stylistic flexibility in these early years, the chorus ‘Descendons gaiment la courtille’ was written to be interpolated in the two-scene vaudeville La descente de la courtille, which had its first performance at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris on 20 January 1841. The light French style, popularized subsequently by Offenbachian operetta, could hardly be more alien to the weighty Teutonic idiom soon to be embraced by Wagner.

Four choral pieces date from Wagner’s years as Kapellmeister in Dresden. Der Tag erscheint for male chorus (1843) was composed for the unveiling of a memorial to King Friedrich August I of Saxony. The chorus was sung a cappella on that occasion, but Wagner also made a version, probably at about the same time, for male chorus and brass instruments. The most substantial work of the group is Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (1843), a ‘Biblical scene’ on the subject of the first Pentecost, written for a gala performance given by all the male choral societies in Saxony. At the first performance, in the Dresden Frauenkirche, there were some 1200 singers and 100 orchestral players. The male chorus Gruss seiner Treuen an Friedrich August den Geliebten (1844) was composed to celebrate the return of King Friedrich August II of Saxony from England. Its refrain combines two melodic ideas shortly to be used in Act 2 of Tannhäuser. Another male chorus, An Webers Grabe (1844), was written for the occasion of the reinterment of Weber’s remains in Dresden. A torchlit procession on 14 December 1844 was accompanied by Wagner’s Trauermusik (based on three themes from Euryanthe) for wind band (including 20 clarinets, 10 bassoons and 14 horns) and muffled drums; on the following morning, by the side of the grave in the Friedrichstadt cemetery, Wagner gave an oration and conducted his chorus.

With the exception of the nine-bar Wahlspruch für die deutsche Feuerwehr (‘Motto for the German Fire Brigade’) of 1869, Wagner wrote no more choral pieces until the small group, all for children’s voices, celebrating marital bliss (and more specifically Cosima’s birthdays), dating from the last decade. The Kinder-Katechismus (1873), for which Wagner’s verse was in question-and-answer form, exists in two versions, the second with an accompaniment for a small orchestra. The eight-bar chorus Willkommen in Wahnfried, du heil’ger Christ (1877) was performed in Wahnfried for Cosima by the children, as was Ihr Kinder, geschwinde, geschwinde three years later.