Siegfried Idyll in E Major

Wagner wrote very few mature works that were not intended for the stage, and the Siegfried Idyll was never meant to be heard in public at all. In June 1869, Wagner's lover Cosima von Bulow had given birth to their youngest son, Siegfried, and the following year they were finally married. Their first Christmas as a family was spent at Wagner's Villa Tribschen on Lake Lucerne, and it so happened that Christmas Eve was also Cosima's birthday. Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll in secret as a birthday gift, and then—at dawn on Christmas morning 1870—quietly assembled a small orchestra outside Cosima’s bedroom so that she would awaken to the sound of the music. “I dissolved in tears,” she wrote years later. Originally written for just 15 musicians (all that could fit on the staircase and landing), the Siegfried Idyll (or, as Wagner called it, his “symphonic birthday greeting”) isn't merely a tender love letter or a gentle aubade (although it is both of those things). Each of its melodies had a personal meaning—an old German cradle song, flurries of birdsong and (naturally) themes borrowed from Wagner's then-uncompleted opera Siegfried. Lyrical, luminous, and (in a great performance) almost unbearably intimate, it’s one of the most heartfelt and poetic gifts ever created by a great artist for the woman he loved.