My Life Volume II Author:Richard Wagner Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MUSIC OE 'WALKUEE' 619 trouble and rehearsing. I wrote some analytical annotations for the better appreciation of this extraordinary work, and had them pr... more »inted on the programme. Whether I made any impression on the audience, or whether they liked the performance, I was never able to find out. When I say that I completed the sketch of the whole of the music to the Walkure by the 30th of December of that year, it will suffice to prove my strenuous and active life at that time, as well as to show that I did not allow any outside distraction to disturb my rigorous plan of work. In January, 1855,1 began the instrumentation of the Walkure, but I was compelled to interrupt it, owing to a promise I made to some of my friends to give them a chance of hearing the overture to Faust, which I had written in Paris fifteen years before. I had another look at this composition, which had been the means of so important a change in my musical ideas. Liszt had produced the work in Weimar a little while before, and had written to me in very favourable terms about it, at the same time expressing his wish that I should rewrite more elaborately some parts that were only faintly indicated. So I immediately set to work to rewrite the overture, conscientiously adopting my dear friend's delicate suggestions, and I finished it as it was afterwards published by H artel. I taught our orchestra this overture, and did not think the performance at all bad. My wife, however, did not like it; she said it seemed to her ' as if nothing good could be made out of it,' and she begged me not to have it produced in London when I went there that year. At this time I had an extraordinary application, such as I have never received again. In January the London Philharmonic Society wrote asking me if I would be willin...« less