Stairwell to Heaven

A case for the Siegfried Idyll as Wagner's best work.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The house in Tribschen (Lucerne) Switzerland where Richard and Cosima Wagner lived in 1870.
It is now the Richard Wagner Museum and you can visit its official site here.

You won't hear it in an opera house. In fact you very rarely hear it performed in a concert hall. The Siegfried Idyll, Wagner's 1869 work for chamber orchestra written as a birthday/Christmas present for his second wife is neither fish nor flesh. It is an orchestral poem that built from the same leitmotivs as the score of Der Ring des Nibelungen, and it very well might be the best thing that Wagner ever wrote.