Richard Wagner

Wagner (center) in Elmo's Musical Monsterpiece

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a German composer best remembered for writing a number of operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his works, making him the sole creator of the characters and stories found within.

References

• "Ride of the Valkyries" is perhaps Wagner's best known composition and has been performed or referenced by the Muppets over half a dozen times. When an abbreviated version occurs in The Muppet Show episode 223, John Cleese complains specifically about "Wagnerian opera."

• The fictional composer Giuseppe Wagner, mentioned in The Muppet Show episode 213, is an amalgamation of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner.

• Wagner's Die Walküre is referenced in "Pigoletto" when Miss Piggy and Beverly Sills engage in a vocal battle at the end of The Muppet Show episode 409.

• In the same episode, dialogue references two other Wagner operas. A goat cites "Goaterdämmerung" (Götterdämmerung) as an opera for goats, and Robin the Frog says "There's an opera for little frogs like me, too. 'Low 'n Green' (Lohengrin)."

• Zubin Beckmesser takes his name from Sixtus Beckmesser, a character from Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg).

• Statler and Waldorf booked the Berlin National Opera Company to perform the first act finale from Wagner's Siegfried in The Muppet Show episode 517, but they sent the Salzburg Sauerkraut Singers instead.

• The 1983 sheet music book Rowlf's Very First Book of Classic Themes included "To the Evening Star" from Wagner's opera Tannhauser.

• The horns-up side of the Two-Headed Monster pretends to be Herbert von Karajan in a 1985 sketch where he conducts Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with a pencil.

• The "Prelude to Act III" from Lohengrin underscores the Muppet Babies infiltration of an opera house in "Sing a Song of Superheroes".

• "Liebestod," the death song finale of Tristan and Isolde, underscores Barkley's dream sequence in Episode 1503 of Sesame Street.

• As the Moya crew prepares to be boarded in the Farscape novel Ship of Ghosts, they hear loud echoing throughout the ship, which Crichton compares to "the rumblings of cymbals prefacing a Wagnerian opera."

• In Elmo's Musical Monsterpiece, the game "Pop Goes the Honker" is set in a classroom. On the wall are Muppet caricature portraits of Ludwig van Beethoven, Wagner, and Johann Sebastian Bach.