This Week in Classical Music: August 17, 2026.  Bayreuth after Wagner.  Richard Wagner was a genius and an antisemite, but there was nothing explicitly antisemitic about the festival or even Wagner’s operas, with the possible exception of the character of Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Wagner expressed his bigotry in writings).  And King Ludwig, Wagner’s main benefactor, was unusually open-minded for his age; he was actively opposed to antisemitism and even rebuked Wagner when the composer wanted to remove Hermann Levi, a Jew and Ludwig’s court conductor, from leading the premiere of Parsifal (Wagner had to submit).  Things changed after Wagner’s death in 1883, when his wife Cosima took over management of the Bayreuth Festival.   

Cosima was Wagner’s muse and adviser.  She also shared his antisemitism.  With Cosima in charge, the staging of Wagner’s opera continued; apparently, they were of high quality but fixed on what she considered the best examples, with hardly any changes.  Cosima and her children, Isolda, Eva, and Siegfried, lived in Villa Wahnfried, which Wagner, with King Ludwig’s help, built next to Festspielhaus on festival grounds.  Under her leadership, Bayreuth became a shrine to Wagner and Villa Wahnfried - a center of Pan-Germanic, antisemitic thought.  In 1908, Cosima’s daughter Eva married Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English philosopher who moved to Germany and became a Wagnerite and a leading European ideologue of racism and antisemitism (he was not related to the future British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, though both met Adolf Hitler).  Chamberlain provided “theoretical” underpinnings to the “organic” antisemitism and Arianism of Wahnfried.  The place became so influential that it gave name to a deeply nationalist, romantic, antisemitic ideology, which inspired several right-wing German parties.   

Also in 1908, Cosima’s son Siegfried took over the reins.   He was a composer, conductor, and bisexual.  In 1913, under pressure from Cosima, he married Winifred Klindworth, a 17-year-old Englishwoman.  Young and impressionable, she immediately accepted the family ideology.  In 1923, Winifred met and soon after invited Adolf Hitler, the leader of the nascent National Socialist German Workers' Party and admirer of Wagner’s music.  Hitler came to Bayreuth in October, and one month later organized a putsch against the Weimar Republic, the so-called Beer Putsch, which failed and for which he was jailed.  From prison, he wrote to Siegfried how impressed he was with the place and Chamberlain.  He would visit Bayreuth and stay at Wahnfried many times; it became his favorite retreat.  In 1930, Siegfried died, and Winifred took over.  She was so close to Hitler personally that there were rumors she might marry him.  Under Winifred, Bayreuth became a center of German national art.  Three years later, the Nazis came to power and elevated the Festspiel even further.  Hitler would visit it annually, his arrival choreographed by Goebbels, Nazi’s propaganda minister.  Thousands of people cheered him on the way, and documentaries of the event were shown in movie theaters.  While attending the festival, Hitler stayed with the Wagners in Villa Wahnfried. 

While the Nazis turned the festival into a cultish symbol of their version of German culture, the musical level it reached was very high.  Winifred hired Heinz Tietjen, the artistic director of the Berlin State Opera, to perform the same duties at Bayreuth.  Wilhelm Furtwängler and Richard Strauss were among the conductors (Arturo Toscanini also worked there till 1933).  Kirsten Flagstad, Max Lorenz, and Rudolf Bockelmann were among the lead singers.  Tietjen made the operas visually exciting.  Many of these pre-war performances were recorded and broadcast on German radio, but very few of them survive.  Here’s an excerpt from the August 18, 1931 performance of Tristan und Isolde.  Nanny Larsén-Todsen, the famous Swedish soprano of the generation before Flagstad, is Isolde; Wilhelm Furtwängler conducts the Bayreuth Festspiel Orchestra.  And here is a scene from the 1936 staging of Seifried.  Max Lorenz is the wonderful Siegfried, with Heinz Tietjen conducting the Festspiel Orchestra.  Despite the low quality of the recording, it’s very enjoyable. 

We’ll stop here, before the catastrophe of WWII was unleashed by Hitler in 1939, and finish the story of “Bayreuth after Wagner” next week. 

This Week in Classical Music: August 10, 2026.  Bayreuth Festspielhaus.  There are several historical opera theaters: the venerable La Scala, La Fenice and San Carlo in Italy; Covent Garden in London; a much younger Palais Garnier in Paris; and the younger yet but very important Metropolitan Opera House in New York, but none of them has the unique history of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.  No other opera house has ever been built to perform operas of one, and only one, composer, or on the devotion of a King to the music of that composer.  But that’s what the Bayreuth Festspielhaus is, and it was opened 150 years ago, on August 13^th of 1876. 

The composer who willed the opera house into existence was Richard Wagner, and his devoted patron – King Ludwig II, the Mad King of Bavaria.  Wagner, prone to grandiosity, came to the idea of building a special opera house after the completion of Der Ring des Nibelungen and, in his view, the inadequacy of existing theaters to stage this massive production.  This is how he described the ideal theater in 1863: situated in a smaller town that doesn’t already have a large theater but can accommodate numerous guests; simple, built of wood, amphitheater-shaped, and, importantly, with orchestra hidden from the audience.  There, he imagined, the outstanding German singers would be summoned each spring to rehearse, uninterrupted, and then perform Der Ring, three times, each cycle on four successive nights, an opera a night.  Bayreuth was an ideal place: the local mayor loved Wagner’s operas, and so did one of the bankers there, but most importantly, Bayreuth was in Bavaria, and the King was an unusually ardent admirer. 

Ludwig, born in 1845, fell in love with Wagner’s operas at the age of 15, when he first saw Lohengrin and Tannhäuser.  He was also gay, and, though younger than Wagner by 32 years, had, it seems, feelings toward him.  In 1864, Wagner was granted a long audience with the King, which changed his whole life.  The King paid Wagner’s debts (Wagner had been running from his creditors for years) and helped stage several operas at the Royal Court Theater in Munich (now the Bavarian State Opera).  During that time, Wagner was conducting an affair with Cosima, Franz Liszt’s daughter and the wife of Hans von Bülow, his friend and conductor of many of Wagner’s premieres.  The affair was in the open; in April of 1865 Cosima gave birth to a child, Wagner’s, not von Bülow’s.  The conservative burgers of Munich didn’t approve, and Wagner had to move out (Ludwig was so distraught that he considered abdicating).  Wagner stayed in Switzerland for a while, then bought a house in Bayreuth (both times with the King’s help) on a plot next to the proposed theater, and settled there, with Cosima and their daughter. 

Even though Ludwig provided Wagner with 100,000 thalers, a very large sum, coming up with the rest of the funds wasn’t easy, and the theater was built on the cheap (Wagner expected monumental upgrades in the future).  It seated 1440, with all seats on one fan-shaped descending level and boxes at the back (the royal box was in the middle).  It had a large stage and unusually large orchestra pit.  The pit, an important feature, went under the stage and was partly covered with a hood, making it invisible so as not to distract the public, all according to Wagner’s wishes.  Wagner also requested unusual orchestra seating; for example, the violins are on the right-hand side.  It made it difficult for conductors, but acoustically it worked very well. 

The first performance of the Ring, in 1876, was attended by Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany; King Ludwig, a very private man, saw the third cycle (ideally, he preferred to listen alone, and attended the dress rehearsal).  The season was a financial disaster, and the next one was staged only six years later, in 1882; only Parsifal was performed, sixteen times.  Wagner conducted the last scene of the last performance.  He died a year later. 

Even though there are many important opera theaters in Germany, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus played an unusually important role in German history.  We’ll return to it next week. 

This Week in Classical Music: August 3, 2026.  Summer.  We are exactly one month into the dog days of summer, and classical music is not high on most people's priority list.  And, clearly, it’s also not at Ravinia Festival, the country's oldest outdoor music festival.  It used to be a summer venue for the Chicago Symphony, dedicated almost solely to classical music, with a small addition of jazz, usually at the end of the season.  James Levine was the music director for twenty years, followed by Christoph Eschenbach and James Conlon.  Marin Alsop is now in charge.  There’s still some classical music being performed, and the Chicago Symphony is still there.  For example, in ten days they’ll be performing the music of Quincy Jones.  We didn’t make this up: for one evening, one of the world's best symphony orchestras will perform music by Quincy Jones.  Don’t take us wrong: we understand that Mr. Jones was a very talented person, a great producer, a jazzman, and composer of many popular tunes.  But somehow the idea of the Chicago Symphony being employed to play this feels wrong.  Maybe Ms. Alsop could explain it better. 

Guillaume Dufay was born on August 5^th of 1397 (or at least that’s how his date of birth was reconstructed by musicologists).  He’s one of the greatest composers of the early French-Flemish musical Renaissance, and one of the earliest composers who could be included in what we generally accept as “European musical canon.”  The “canon” is, of course, a tenuous notion.  We understand it in purely aural terms: Dufay’s music is difficult, its idiom sounds somewhat strange to a modern (especially untrained) ear, but still, it can be enjoyed, or at least appreciated.  This is different from the reconstructed music of, say, Léonin and Pérotin, composers of the so-called Notre Dame school who worked at the end of the 12^th - early 13^th centuries.  We think their music lacks some of the fundamental qualities of rhythm, pitch, overall complexity, and development that could be enjoyed today.  On the other hand, we can imagine that for Dufay, their music belonged to his canon.  To illustrate, here’s Dufay’s motet Nuper rosarum flores (The Rose Blossoms Recently), which Dufay composed in 1436 to celebrate the consecration of the Florence Duomo, officially known as Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower; therefore, the rose in Dufay’s motet).  Dufay’s polyphony sounds exotic but is musically understandable and enjoyable.  And here is Viderunt omnes, Pérotin’s setting of a Gregorian chant, written sometime around the year 1200.  It sounds (at least to our ear) as an auditory curiosity, a bit in the style of modern Minimalists, but outside the “canon.”  We hasten to add that many listeners would argue that the music of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and their brethren, composers of twelve-tone and serial music, is also outside of the classical “canon.”  That’s an interesting topic to consider. 

The American composer William Schuman and three French composers, Cecile Chaminade, Reynaldo Hahn, and André Jolivet, were also born this week (Hahn was born in Caracas, but his family moved to Paris when he was a child, and he spent the rest of his life there). 

This Week in Classical Music: July 27, 2026.  Two Tenors.  Two weeks ago, when we celebrated Carlo Bergonzi, we also mentioned three great Italian singers of his time: Franco Corelli, Mario del Monaco, and Giuseppe Di Stefano.  It so happens that Di Stefano’s birthday was three days ago, and Del Monaco’s is today. 

Giuseppe Di Stefano was born on July 24^th of 1921 in a small village near Catania, Sicily, but spent his youth in Milan.  For many people, including Luciano Pavarotti, Di Stefano’s voice was of the utmost beauty, probably the most beautiful since the time of Beniamino Gigli.  During WWII, the young Di Stefano was conscripted into the Italian (Mussolini’s) army.  A medical doctor decided that he would be more useful as a singer than a soldier, which saved him from being sent to the Eastern Front and a likely death.  He was eventually dismissed and allowed to sing professionally, first in local opera houses and then, after the war, internationally.  Early in his career, he was a lyric tenor and sang lighter roles, such as Nemorino in L'Elisir d'Amore and Alfredo in La Traviata, adding heavier roles, such as Radames in Aida or Canio in Pagliacci only later.  Many felt that heavier roles didn’t suit his voice as well.  Di Stefano debuted at La Scala in 1948, and the same year he joined the Metropolitan Opera.  In the 1950s, he often sang with Maria Callas at La Scala.  Their Lucia di Lammermoor, Carmen, and La Traviata, with Karajan conducting, are legendary (he also sang with Callas’s great competitor, Renata Tebaldi).  At that time, he made several recordings, also with Maria Callas.  Their 1953 Tosca, with Victor de Sabata conducting, is considered one of the greatest ever made (the wonderful baritone Titto Gobbi was also in the recording in the role of Scarpia).  Here is Di Stefano singing Ella mi fu rapita (She was stolen from me) followed by Parmi veder le lagrime (I seem to see tears), from Rigoletto.  Parmi veder starts at 2:50 (see below).

Mario Del Monaco’s voice, a dramatic tenor, could not have been more different from Di Stefano’s: it was of enormous power, much heavier, darker, not at all sweet but absolutely thrilling.  Del Monaco’s most famous role was the one Di Stefano never attempted: Verdi’s Otello.  Mario Del Monaco was born on July 27^th of 1915 in Florence.  He studied at the Conservatory in Pesaro and made his debut in 1939.  He didn’t sing much during the war, but in 1945 his career took off when he sang Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at La Scala (this became one of his signature roles).  While his home stage was La Scala, he sang Aida in Arena di Verona, Tosca in London, Carmen in Rome, and then, famously, Otello in Buenos Aires.  In 1959, he came to Moscow and became a sensation with the public and the authorities: Khrushchev gave him the Order of Lenin.  During the 1950s, Del Monaco sang at the Metropolitan.  He was in a car accident in 1963, which slowed him down.  While Otello is Del Monaco's most famous role, we’ll hear him in more lyrical roles.  Here’s an excerpt from Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, with Renata Tebaldi.  And here is Parmi veder le lagrime, from Rigoletto.  How different is his voice from Di Stefano’s, and how beautiful in its own way!

This Week in Classical Music: July 20, 2026.  Francesco Corteccia.  To think of it, it’s rather strange that Florence was never a musical center of Renaissance Italy.  It’s no surprise that Rome was the most important city, musically and in almost every other way.  But Ferrara was also very important, as were Mantua and Milan.  And so was Venice, of course.  Florence, on the other hand, which was uniquely rich in practically every other way – its painters, sculptors, architects, poets, writers, philosophers were the best, or among the best, in Italy – didn’t have a comparable music culture.  Things got better at the end of the 16^th century, between the Renaissance and the Baroque, when opera was invented, and composers such as Jacopo Peri and Emilio de' Cavalieri worked on creating new musical idioms, but until that time, it was Francesco Corteccia who stood alone as the significant Florentine composer of the Renaissance.  He was born in Florence on July 27^th of 1502.  He lived all his rather uneventful life in Florence.  All his work was dedicated to Duke (later, Grand Duke) Cosimo I de’ Medici, under whose patronage he worked most of his life.  Corteccia was a choirboy at the Baptistry (the one next to the Duomo), where he eventually became the chaplain.  He studied the organ at the Duomo and later worked there as maestro di capella.  He also held the same position at the Medici family’s church of San Lorenzo.

Corteccia published three volumes of madrigals, his main secular output.  He also wrote several intermedi, the sung interludes between the acts of plays; these intermedi eventually evolved into opera.  The ones staged at the court were lavish, and the music was appropriately elaborate.  As all composers of the time, he also wrote church music: motets, two Passions (St. John and St. Matthew, as Bach did two centuries later), hymns, and other pieces.  We can hear two of Corteccia’s madrigals, Fammi pur guerr' amor (Make war on me, Love), here, and Io vorrei pur fuggir, crudel amore (I would truly want to flee, cruel love), here.  And from Corteccia’s church music, Tenebrae factae sunt (Darkness fell) (here), followed by Caligaverunt oculi mei (My eyes are darkened), here.  Corteccia died in Florence in 1571.  We don’t have Corteccia’s portrait, but show instead the famous portrait of his patron, Duke Cosimo I, which was painted by the Italian Mannerist painter Bronzino sometime around 1545.  Bronzino was born one year after Corteccia, in 1503, and died one year later, in 1572.  Mannerism isn’t in vogue these days, but Bronzino was a great painter.

The Spanish composer Enrique Granados was born on July 27^th of 1867; the Hungarian composer, pianist and conductor, Ernst von Dohnányi, exactly 10 years later.  We have to admit that Dohnányi isn’t one of our favorite composers, but recently, for the first time, we heard his Sextet for Clarinet, Horn, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano and liked it a lot.  You can listen to it here.

Of the performers, Leon Fleisher, one of the greatest among the American pianists, was born on July 23 of 1928, in San Francisco.  He lost the use of his right hand to focal dystonia in 1964, but the recordings he made in the previous 15 years are priceless.  Also, Isaac Stern, whom we mentioned in connection with Pinchas Zukerman’s birthday last week, was born on July 21^st of 1920.

This Week in Classical Music: July 13, 2026.  Henze at 100, Part II.  We interrupted our story of Hans Werner Henze to celebrate America’s 250^th anniversary, Mahler’s birthday, and some other events, so now we’ll get back to the German composer, who, we admit, repulses and fascinates us at the same time.   

In our first post, we stopped at the revolutionary year of 1968, when Henze was living in Italy and joined the Communist Party, then the largest in Western Europe; we also wrote about the scandal surrounding the premiere of his oratorio Das Floß der Medusa, dedicated to Che Guevara.  Much of his music written during that period, even the instrumental pieces, were openly political, and the vocal music was much more so.  His Sixth Symphony, which Henze composed while in Havana and premiered there, incorporates tunes from many leftist songs and marches, but if you listen to it, musically it’s a thoroughly modernist piece; one wonders how the Cuban communist authorities reacted to it: it’s no Socialist Realism.  Still in Cuba, Henze followed up with El Cimarrón (The Runaway Slave), a long work for baritone, the guitar, flute and percussion, based on a highly politicized text by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a fellow German.  Again, politically it’s akin to Soviet agitprop, but again, musically an interesting piece. Some years later, when he was back in Italy, Henze wrote Voices, a cycle of 22 songs set to texts by Bertolt Brecht, the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and others.  Probably his most political work was the opera We Come to the River, based on an awfully violent libretto by the English playwright Edward Bond. 

Henze’s work mellowed somewhat in the late 1970s, while remaining political.  He wrote a Requiem in 1990, several operas and symphonies (his Ninth was choral, like the more famous one, and set to the text of Anna Seghers, a German communist writer who lived in East Germany).  Henze also worked on promoting contemporary music: he founded festivals of new music in Montepulciano and Munich, taught composition in Cologne and at a workshop in Austria.  Later in his life, he received many prizes and honors.  Henze died in 2012, aged 86. 

Here’s the second movement from Henze’s Symphony no 6, Lento.  The Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Marek Janowski. 

We’d also like to note several birthdays that happen this week.  Pinchas Zukerman will turn 78 on July 16^th.  He was born in Tel Aviv, went to music school there, and in 1961 was heard by Isaac Stern and Pablo Casals.  Stern suggested that he go to Juilliard, and Zukerman moved to the US in 1962, with Stern serving as his legal guardian.  While Zukerman was one of the best violinists of the last 60 years, he was also a great violist; he played this instrument in duos with Stern on several occasions.  He often performed with his friends Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline du Pré, Itzhak Perlman, and Zubin Mehta.  Here’s Zukerman and Perlman joining Stern in Vivaldi’s Concerto for Three Violins celebrating Stern’s 60th anniversary.  Zubin Mehta conducts the New York Philharmonic. 

The Italian tenor Carlo Bergonzi was born on July 13^th of 1924 near Cremona.  He started as a baritone but eventually found his real voice, the tenor.  He sang at La Scala, the Met (for 30 years), and at practically all other major opera houses.  He performed at the same time as Franco Corelli, Mario del Monaco and Giuseppe Di Stefano during the golden age of Italian singing.  His top notes may not have been as thrilling, but he was an excellent musician, and at his best, Bergonzi was on par with the greatest.  Here’s his Celest Aida, recorded in 1975.  The New Philharmonia Orchestra is conducted by Nello Santi.