Follow the Baton: The Story of the Wagner Siegfried Idyll Baton

calendar icon22 Mar 2018    

Many music-lovers know the famous story of Richard Wagner's birthday present to his beloved wife, Cosima – the performance of a new composition in the stairwell outside her bedroom on Christmas morning, 1870. Those scholars who have read Cosima's diary might also know that the baton Wagner used to conduct the ensemble was engraved by a local artisan to memorialize the event: the date of the performance inscribed along one face and the title of the work, Tribschener Idyll, along the opposite side. Modern listeners all know this exquisitely intimate piece as the Siegfried Idyll, but only a handful of people know the fate of the treasured baton. Found by an American soldier in the rubble of the bombed-out Wagner home in Bayreuth in April of 1945, this legendary artifact is just now coming out of the shadows and into the spotlight. Local musician-scholars (and baton-guardians) Hannah Jo Smith and Anita Breckbill invite you to join the exclusive “baton circle.” Learn what happened to the little wooden stick after the war, how it found its way to Lincoln, Nebraska and how it will find its way home to Bayreuth again.

Join us on at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 29 in the Glenn Korff School of Music’s Westbrook Music Building (Room 130, UPDATE: Moved to Room 119, Westbrook Recital Hall) on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus to learn more. There are rumors of a pick-up orchestra of Glenn Korff School of Music faculty playing Siegfried Idyll.