Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th ...

The introduction of Richard Wagner’s music dramas in Stockholm
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the correct impression. For the listener who understood this, the muchdecried
infinite melody will not appear as a sloping plain of non-melodiousness.
The negative critics considered the passages that reminded them of traditional
opera the most successful in Die Meistersinger, and above all they
praised the third act. On the other hand, the SvD (9/4 1887) critic claimed
that the first act was the most characteristic and perhaps the most brilliant,
even if it was not the most beautiful from a purely musical perspective.
However, he also found merits in the second act, and singled out Sachs’s
Flieder monologue:
“This scene in its entirety, with the old poet-shoemaker who sits dreaming
by his work in the light of the summer evening, and the music, which
conveys his changing thoughts before finally ending in an elevated rejoicing
of poetry, is magnificently captivating.”
Furthermore, he considered the third act prelude the “noblest gem in the
opera”:
“It is a characterisation of Hans Sachs in music, an analysis of the spiritual
mind of this peculiar poet of the people […] In the strings you first
hear a heavy, sad motif – the same motif that accompanied Hans Sachs at
his working table in the second act – it depicts the inner, troubled brooding
of the poet, which no one notices in the happy shoemaker.”
These quotations show that the SvD critic, unlike his negative fellow critics,
understood the new, more profound narrative function of the orchestra
in Wagner’s later works.
The Reception of Die Walküre
The Swedish premiere of Die Walküre took place on 7 November 1895. As
Die Walküre is the second part of a tetralogy (or the first part of a trilogy
if Das Rheingold is considered a “Vorabend”), many critics provided background
information about the Ring in its entirety. The greater part of this
information concerned the action, but Adolf Lindgren also wrote about how
the work related to Wagner’s “world view” (AB A9/11 1895).
After the Die Meistersinger premiere eight years earlier, as mentioned
above, the critics were clearly divided into two opposing camps: for and
against Wagner. Die Walküre did not cause the same kind of polarised press