Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll
With Siegfried Idyll, I’m hard-pressed to find another example in all of music quite like it! It was written as a birthday present not only to his wife, Cosima (born on December 24), but it was also written in honor of their son’s birth, Siegfried, and it was premiered on Christmas Day, 1870 — a triple treat! It was played on the stairs of their lovely Swiss villa in the village of Triebschen, now a district of Lucerne.