happy birthday von wagner

I have been aware that this year is Richard Wagner's 200th anniversary. I just didn't know which day. Today I watched DW Journal and found out today is his 200th anniversary birthday.

Warning: the post contains link to explicit material

My first exposure to Wagner's work was when I was in college. I lived on campus at the time. Being a college in a smaller city there is not a lot of places to go. I enrolled in a few non-credit night classes and one was The Enjoyment of Music. It was where I first exposed to terms like sonata, cantata, fugue, and leitmotif. The course used the text book "The Enjoyment of Music", which has two album  sets of companion LP records. The sets of LP records have an assortment of excerpts from the significant work throughout the development of Western music from the Medieval Gregorian chant, through Renaissance, Baroque, 18th century classicism, 19th century romanticism, 20th century, to the jazz and new music. It was from this course that I begun to really like classical music and jazz and learnt a bit about the development of Western music.

the enjoyment of music text and one of the two companion album sets

In the album sets there is the Prelude from Tristan und Isolde and the love duet. It was the first time I was exposed to Wagner. The prelude was what struck me the most. It would be a long time later, however, that I really developed a liking of his operas. I used to think Wagner's operas are very inaccessible but by investing the time to read and follow the libretto even with the language barrier they are not as hard as I once thought, especially with his extensive use of leitmotif.

Here are some screen shot of Metropolitan Opera's Der Ring Des Nibelungen.

Coincidentally I found out in the DW Journal Ai Weiwei just released his first work in music called Dumbass. It is already been censored inside China.