In the past, we have chosen the five minutes or so that we play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st century composers, violin, baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas, Bach, organ, mezzo-sopranos and dance music.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the music of Richard Wagner, with very short tastes of his very long operas. We hope you will find plenty to discover and enjoy here; leave your favorites in the comments.

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Rian Johnson, filmmaker

The problem with isolating a piece from any of Wagner’s operas is insidiously twofold: you’ll miss (for my money) the true source of its power, and you won’t realize you’re missing it because the music is so good. Take the prelude to “Das Rheingold”. Put on good headphones, close your eyes, and it will transport you, I guarantee it.

But it wasn’t meant to live in a vacuum. Wagner is a storyteller, and when the piece finds its place in the darkness before the curtain, birthing you from a sting of light in the blinding sun of elemental harmony whose flight will launch an epic saga and tragedy of gods, betrayal and love – well, that’s the real thing.

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Katharina Wagner, artistic director of the Bayreuth Wagner Festival

I grew up with my great-grandfather’s music, but until today the “Liebestod” is my favorite part of “Tristan und Isolde”. Isolde expresses her deepest feelings and sings the most beatific passage with great euphoria. Birgit Nilsson, in the recording under Karl Böhm of the 1966 Bayreuth Festival, testifies to the dramatic power and passion of her performance, the size and fullness of her voice, the beauty and purity of her intonation and his brilliant stage play. She is rightly considered one of the most important musical personalities of her time.

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Michael Cooper, Editor of The Times

It was the five minutes (well, the scene) that made me fall in love with Wagner. When I first heard him in a college music survey class, I was already an opera fan, but I didn’t know much about Wagner other than his anti-Semitism, his reputation for boredom, and emphasis, and, of course, Bugs Bunny and “Apocalypse Now”.

It wasn’t what I expected: the sheer beauty of the orchestra and the unexpected tenderness of a father’s loving, lulling farewell to his daughter was a revelation. I became obsessed that year, investing in an entire “Ring” cycle (not cheap in the pre-streaming era); buy Ernest Newman’s book “The Wagner Operas” to guide me; and score a seat in the second-to-last row of the Metropolitan Opera’s upper level. It was the gateway drug to what has become a not too unhealthy addiction.

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Simon Callow, actor, director and author of “Being Wagner”

The death of Siegfried, the hero of the “Ring” who was to save the world, snatches from Wagner an astonishing panoply of orchestral sonorities of infinite majesty and splendor. It also represents the pinnacle of the system of leitmotifs – melodic and rhythmic fragments associated with particular aspects of the characters and their emotional story. Wagner weaves them into the texture with cumulative power so that it’s as if all of Siegfried’s past is playing before our ears – his energy, his idealism, his passion, so that one feels an entire lifetime is commemorated. . At the same time, we mourn what could have been. The feeling that we won’t look at him like him anymore is deeply moving.

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David Allen, Times writer

You might think of Richard Wagner as the composer of gods and myths, the end of the world and a love that destroys – and you would be right. But if his sheer ambition made him repulsive and breathtaking, in not quite equal proportions, he was also capable of the most touching tenderness. His “Siegfried Idyll”, originally a private birthday present for his second wife, Cosima, was first performed by a small ensemble at their home on Christmas morning in 1870; in the later, expanded orchestration we hear more often now, his ending is a touching depiction of blissful contentment – ​​the warmest, most human music he ever wrote.

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Alex Ross, New York critic and author of “Wagnerism”

Wagner’s “Ring” is, quite simply, a study in the futility of power, with the god Wotan as its main piece. The crux of his downfall comes at the start of his epic monologue in Act II of “Die Walküre”, after his wife, Fricka, demolishes his delusions. He shouts: “O heilige Schmach! “: “O just shame! O shameful pain! … Infinite Fury! Eternal sorrow! Wagner’s orchestra delivers the sound of crashing power, with monstrous dissonances building up on a humming C. In Joseph Keilberth’s great 1955 “Ring” from Bayreuth, Hans Hotter is a mainstay howling, magnificent in its collapse.

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Patti Smith, performer

I chose Waltraud Meier’s exquisite rendition of the “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde”. I had the privilege of attending the premiere of the opera in December 2007 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Directed by Daniel Barenboim and directed by Patrice Chéreau, it was the most beautiful and moving production of the great Wagnerian romance that I have experienced.

Waltraud Meier is an excellent actress in addition to being one of our great singers. In this piece, she projects the full gamut of Isolde’s devotion, desire, madness and loss. She brought humility and expertise to her performance, fully understanding the meaning of transcendent love.

Backstage, I saw her in the shadows. She was still spattered with Tristan’s blood and still had something of Isolde in her face.

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Seth Colter Walls, Times writer

Do Wagner’s operas have almost endless melodies? Certainly. But he also knew how to write conflict – sometimes even in short bursts. Take this climactic scene from Act II of “Lohengrin.” The plot is complex, but even if you don’t know what is being said, you can feel the action: the witch Ortrud, near the entrance of a church, barring the arrival of Elsa, there as bride-to-be. The townspeople in the chorus gasp as these Real Housewives of Antwerp lashed out at the comparative status of their companions; you might feel in perfect league with these assembled voyeurs listening to mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig and soprano Elisabeth Grümmer.

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Celia Applegate, historian

Compassion is at the heart of ‘Parsifal’, Wagner’s last and, for many, greatest opera. The music of the prelude connects all living beings in its embrace. This is not heavenly music. It is the music of this world, expressing suffering, struggle, the inevitability of death and the peace of understanding and acceptance. Its slow tempo and beautiful sounds almost drag you into a trance. But somehow you also feel the presence of all things on this earth – and our responsibility to care for and care for them.

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Morris Robinson, bass

“Das Rheingold” continues, with ebbs and flows, when suddenly, without warning, this incredibly loud, overbearing and majestic musical theme “debos” makes its way into the score. Everyone – in the story and in the audience – realizes that something massive and potentially destructive is about to appear.

I’m thinking Incredible Hulk vibes, except Wagner created a pair of Hulks, the giant brothers Fasolt and Fafner. Having played Fasolt several times, I can assure you that the theme music emphasizes the moment and also inspires the singers to come out and mentally invest in their characterization. I set myself the goal of ensuring that my vocal quality immediately after this fabulous introduction matches the intensity and volume of Wagner’s fabulous orchestration, which consists of extremely heavy brass and throbbing, beating timpani.

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Times Editor Joshua Barone

A word associated with Wagner is “cinematic”, in part because of his innovations at the Bayreuth Festival Theater – where the stage, shrouded in darkness, is set at the center of a silver screen, and the sound of the orchestra hidden fills the auditorium like a Dolby System. But I also see the film in its patient moments of diegetic music, like when Tannhäuser returns from the orgiastic Venusberg, freshly earthbound. The orchestra fades away, first to a clarinet solo, then gently to an English horn, replacing the pipe of a shepherd, who sings an a cappella ode until the pilgrims pass by with a hymn. Wagner weaves in the pipe and chorus, beautifully but with a sense of naturalism: The orchestra doesn’t even return until Tannhäuser, overwhelmed by what he sees, exclaims, “Praise be to you, God all- powerful !

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Javier C. Hernández, classical music and dance reporter for The Times

“Der Fliegende Holländer” is the opera that launched Wagner’s career. It was 29 when it premiered in Dresden, and it is generally regarded as his greatest early achievement, with hints throughout of the dramatic intensity and musical flow that would characterize his later works. Act three’s uplifting ‘Sailor’s Chorus’ shows his precocious mastery of great orchestral and choral sound.

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Stephen Fry, actor in “Wagner and me”

Who would present a single block of a pyramid to give a picture of all of Egypt? Wagner’s epic scale is surely his signature quality. But here it is: the last five minutes of “Tristan und Isolde” offer one of the most astonishing moments in all of art. Echoing the great pounding of the sea beside which she stands, Isolde sings herself to death by means of an overwhelming musical climax. The orgasmic passage is known as “Liebestod”: love-death. His ravishing and terrifying rise and fall always amaze. Finally, it levels through the sand in an exquisite release.

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Zachary Woolfe, Times Classical Music Editor

Five minutes to make you love Wagner, and hate him. At the end of his sprawling comedy “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg”, a speech by the gentle cobbler protagonist, Hans Sachs, takes a dark turn as Sachs warns of foreign invaders who seek to contaminate “German sacred art”, whose praises are taken up by a fervent crowd – a communal feast turned nationalist rally. This moving choral melody was perhaps the first piece of Wagner that I liked. But it’s one of the moments in his work that for me now mixes shivers and nausea. Here it is directed in Vienna in 1944 by Karl Böhm, whose complicity with the Nazis was deep.