Composed: 1870
Premiered: 1870, Triebscen, Switzerland
Duration: 18 minutes

Wagner’s enormous influence on the music of his own and later times is almost entirely the result of his operas, or as he preferred to call them, music-dramas, with their unique merging of music, poetry, acting, and scenography, all under Wagner’s personal control. The relatively small amount of “pure” music by Wagner is seldom heard, and for the most part justifiably obscure.

The great exception is the Siegfried Idyll. This lovely, intimate work was composed and rehearsed in secret for Wagner’s wife, Cosima, on her birthday, Christmas morning, 1870. This remarkable woman was the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt; she had been married to Hans von Bülow, the famous conductor and champion of Wagner’s music. She was divorced in 1870, and married Wagner very soon after. They had been living together since 1864 and had three children. The only son, the youngest of the three, Siegfried, was born in 1869. Wagner’s happiness and love shine out of the Idyll.

Cosima recorded the event as follows in a letter to a friend: “As I awoke in the light of dawn, my mind passed from one dream to another. Familiar sounds from Siegfried, though now transformed and, it seemed to me, transfigured, stole on my ears; it was as if the house, or better still our whole existence, was rising up in music and ascending to heaven; sacred memories, birdsong and sunrise, woven into the music of Siegfried, settled like a balm on my heart, and slowly, gradually I began to realize that I was not dreaming and yet was experiencing the most blissful of all dreams … I was in tears, but so, too, was the whole household.”

Wagner and Cosima regarded this music as their very own, and were saddened when, in 1877, from financial necessity, the score was sent to a publisher. Cosima wrote in her diary, “The secret treasure is to become public property.”

Program note by the late Dr. C.W. Helleiner.