Conductor, B. WALTON O'DONNELL
ARCHIBALD WINTER (Tenor)
BESIDES his operas and music dramas, Wagner left some twenty orchestral and choral works, overtures, cantatas and a symphony among them, only one or two of which, like the Siegfried Idyll and tho Faust Overture, are at all well known to tho present generation. This Festival March belongs to 1876, the year which saw the first complete performances of tho Nibelung's Ring in his own theatre at Bayreuth, the year, too, in which ho produced Tristan in Berlin for the first time. The March was commissioned from him by the organizers of tho Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, and wns first played there on May 10, 1876. Wagner had sketched it out at Bayreuth in the beginning (if the year, and finished it at Berlin in March, in the midst of the rehearsals for Tristan.