Wagner gets a Ride in New York

Synopsis

In 1871, one year after the premiere in Munich of Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre,” a German-born American conductor named Theodore Thomas wrote to Wagner asking if he might perform some excerpts of this new work in the United States. Wagner turned him down, probably worried that loose American copyright laws might not be able to protect his new music.

Undeterred, Thomas turned for advice to the famous German conductor Hans von Bulow, who suggested Thomas try to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Wagner to plead his case. After all, Bulow told Thomas, Wagner was actually quite interested in America. That meeting never took place, but somehow Thomas secured a manuscript of what would become the most popular orchestral excerpt from “Die Walküre,” its famous “Ride of the Valkyries.”

To this day, no one knows for sure how Thomas managed this. Some speculate von Bulow himself provided the music, others suggest the American conductor got his copy from Franz Liszt.

In any case, on today’s date in 1872, this music was performed for the first time in America at one of Theodore Thomas’s concerts in Central Park, an all-Wagner evening, in fact.

The “Ride of the Valkyries” proved to be a smash hit with Manhattanites. As Thomas recounted in his memoirs, “the people jumped on the chairs and shouted.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883) Ride of the Valkyries, fr Die Walkuere Berlin Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado, cond. DG 471 627

On This Day

Births

• 1795 - Baptismal date of Italian opera composer Saverio Mercadante, in Altamura, near Bari;

• 1884 - American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes, in Elmira, New York;

• 1917 - Korean-born German composer Isang Yun, in Tong Young (now Chung Mu);

Deaths

• 1179 - German mystic, writer and composer Hildegard von Bingen, age c. 81, in Rupertsburg (near Bingen);

• 1762 - Italian violinist and composer Francesco Geminiani, age 74, in Dublin;

• 1803 - Austrian composer Franz Xaver Sussmayr, who studied with Salieri and Mozart; Sussmayr completed Mozart's unfinished "Requiem";

Premieres

• 1872 - American premiere of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" at a Central Park concert given by the Theodore Thomas orchestra;

• 1931 - Delius: "A Song of Summer," in London;

• 1957 - Cowell: "Persian Set," at the Gulestan Palace in Tehran, Iran, by the Minneapolis Symphony, Antal Dorati conducting;

• 1982 - Steve Reich: "Tehillim" (orchestral version), by New York Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta;

Others

• 1966 - German tenor Fritz Wunderlich dies, age 35, from a fall in his home in Heidelberg.