Concerts and Controls

After leaving Riga in 1839, Wagner did not return to Livonia or to any part of northern or eastern Europe. The Baltic world was not to re-enter his life until 1863, when he was invited to give concerts in St. Petersburg and Moscow. This episode requires particular attention, as it marked a turning point in the Russian reception of Wagner. The influence of this visit was reflected in neighboring areas, including Finland.

It was this visit, specifically, that, in Finland and the Baltic provinces, invigorated the reception of Wagner that had begun in the 1850s. That decade had been an extremely lively and productive period, for Wagner had been given the opportunity to travel and conduct concerts in London, Brussels, Paris, Vienna, and Venice. Shortly after the Dresden Uprising, Wagner, now in Zurich, wrote his most significant art-theoretical works. Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer, and Tannhäuser were premiered in the 1840s and were followed by Lohengrin in 1850. Tristan und Isolde was completed during the same decade, but it was not to be premiered until 1865. The most obvious setback to Wagner's career was the Paris premiere of Tannhäuser on 13 March 1861, an event that motivated Baudelaire to write his famous essay, “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris”: a volley of whistling began when the Parisian jeunesse dorée (members of the Jockey Club), who had attended the opera only to witness the ballet scene in the second act, were disappointed at the omission of the ballet in its entirety. The rest of the audience remained calm, but—according to the testimony of the Finnish spectator Severin Falkman—the German members of the audience joined in the vocal derision, perhaps in cognizance of the strength of emotion that Tannhäuser had evoked at its German premiere. On the other hand, the same opera had been presented in many different localities: in 1849 in Weimar; in 1852 in Schwerin, Breslau (Wroclaw), and Wiesbaden; in 1853, for example, in Riga, Leipzig, Tallinn, Frankfurt am Main, Kassel and Posen (Poznan); in 1854 in Graz; in 1855 in Hanover, Karlsruhe, and Zürich; in 1856 in Munich; and in the following year in Vienna.