Inspired by Wagner

For a quarter of a century, my life has been inextricably linked to the work of the great composer Richard Wagner.  I was in my early twenties the first time I ever heard his mystery Parsifal. I have been trying for a long time to find an epithet for my feelings: the music simply struck me — this will be, probably, the most accurate one. I was also struck by the fact how close it was to me: music had captivated me completely and did not let me go, made my brain search for the reasons of its fantastic appeal and power, and reflect on its philosophical significance.  Listening to this music, gives me the feeling of eternity.

As my knowledge of Wagner's masterpieces increased, my desire to understand why he chose a particular plot for a particular opera and what exactly he sought to express with them also grew. I began to share my thoughts with friends in short notes about opera performances, and as soon as I met like-minded people among the creative community my inspiration began to take on more substantial form, grow and develop.

The artist Viktor Vasilyev is undoubtedly one of the brightest interpreters of the Wagnerian heritage in the fine arts. I well remember my first impressions of Viktor's paintings presented in 2017 at an exhibition in St. Petersburg.  The paintings were not just the images of the heroes of Wagner’s operas that I knew well. They reflected the immersion in the world of their feelings and experiences: Erda’s concern for the fate of her daughter, the Valkyrie Brunnhilde, Waltraute’s sadness about the deplorable fate of her father, the supreme god Wotan, Brunnhilde’s happiness with the chance to save the world from the curse of the Nibelung’s ring, the unbridled passion of Tristan and Isolde. It was amazing: Viktor depicted on canvas exactly the feelings that I wrote about in my notes! Two like-minded people could not help but get to know each other.

Since then, our strong "Wagnerian friendship", conversations and correspondence about Wagner's works have helped us with Viktor Vasilyev to complement each other creatively. Over the past years, I have written stories about Wagner's life in Riga, St. Petersburg and Venice, and Viktor has put these stories down onto canvas. Completing the set of canvases based on The Nibelung’s Ring and Parsifal, Viktor explained his emotional bonds with Wagner's music as follows: “The specific feature of Wagner's music, in my opinion, is its emotionality, for all its severity. I visualize it in cold colors: blue, gray, black and certainly gold. Wagner’s music is congenial to me in terms of its’ sound of color”, if I can put it that way... My teacher, the St. Petersburg artist V. Lukka, describing my "color palette" once said that mine was a "Baltic-German" one, and, as I understand, this unites me with Wagner, or he is close to me. We see and feel the world in the same way…”