• Born: 22 May 1813
• Birthplace: Leipzig, Germany
• Died: 13 February 1883
• Best Known As: German composer of Der Ring des Nibelungen

Name at birth: Wilhelm Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner is a 19th century German composer and poet famous for taking opera to new dramatic heights in such works as Der Fliegende Holländer (1841) and Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876). Wagner began his career as a music director, and by the 1840s was gaining recognition for his musical compositions and operas. During the 1850s he lived in exile in Zürich, unwelcome in Germany because of his associations with revolutionaries in Dresden. Although he was composing what would become some of the most famous pieces in music history, Wagner struggled financially until the 1860s, when Ludwig II of Bavaria began supporting him. In 1871 Wagner settled in Bayreuth, Germany and founded a theater. A critical success, he was nonetheless forced to travel as a guest conductor and raise funds for his theater. A key figure in classical music, Wagner is known for his powerful dramatic operas based on medieval legends and for his influential writings on music and drama. He is also a controversial figure because of his hostile, anti-semitic writings and because some of his music and dramatic themes were appropriated by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. His musical works include Tristan and Isolde (1857-59), Siegfried Idyll (1870) and Parsifal (1878-82).

Wagner's second wife, Cosima, was the daughter of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt... Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung's Ring) is a fifteen-hour cycle made up of Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).

• Period: Romantic (1820-1869)
• Country: Germany
• Genres: Keyboard, Opera, Band, Choral, Orchestral, Vocal, Symphonic

Biography

Richard Wagner was one of the most revolutionary figures in the history of music, a composer who made pivotal contributions to the development of harmony and musical drama that reverberate even today. Indeed, though Wagner occasionally produced successful music written on a relatively modest scale, opera -- the bigger, the better -- was clearly his milieu, and his aesthetic is perhaps the most grandiose that Western music has ever known. Early in his career, Wagner learned both the elements and the practical, political realities of his craft by writing a handful of operas which were unenthusiastically, even angrily, received. Beginning with Rienzi (1838-40) and The Flying Dutchman (1841), however, he enjoyed a string of successes that propelled him to immortality and changed the face of music. His monumental Ring cycle of four operas -- Das Rheingold (1853-54), Die Walküre (1854-56), Siegfried (1856-71) and Götterdämmerung (1869-74) -- remains the most ambitious and influential contribution by any composer to the opera literature. Tristan and Isolde (1857-59) is perhaps the most representative example of Wagner's musical style, which is characterized by a high degree of chromaticism, a restless, searching tonal instability, lush harmonies, and the association of specific musical elements (known as leitmotifs, the flexible manipulation of which is one of the glories of Wagner's music) with certain characters and plot points. Wagner wrote text as well as music for all his operas, which he preferred to call "music dramas."

Wagner's life matched his music for sheer drama. Born in Leipzig on May 22, 1813, he began in the early 1830s to write prolifically on music and the arts in general; over his whole career, his music would to some degree serve to demonstrate his aesthetic theories. He often worked as a conductor in his early years; a conducting engagement took him to Riga, Latvia, in 1837, but he fled the country in the middle of the night two years later to elude creditors. Wagner as a young man had some sympathy with the revolutionary movements of the middle nineteenth century (and even the Ring cycle contains a distinct anti-materialist and vaguely socialist drift); in the Dresden uprisings of 1849 he apparently took up arms, and he had to leave Germany when the police restored order. Settling in Zurich, Switzerland, he wrote little for some years but evolved the intellectual framework for his towering mature masterpieces. Wagner returned to Germany in 1864 under the protection and patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria; it was in Bayreuth, near Munich, that he undertook the construction of an opera house (completed in 1876) built to his personal specifications and suited to the massive fusion of music, staging, text, and scene design that his later operas entailed. Bayreuth became something of a shrine for the fanatical Wagnerites who carried the torch after his death; it remains the goal of many a pilgrimage today. His attitude toward Jews was deeply ambivalent (he believed, mistakenly, that his stepfather was Jewish), but some of his writings contain anti-Semitic elements that have aroused considerable controversy among opera lovers, especially in view of Adolf Hitler's apparent predilection for the composer's music. ~ AMG, All Music Guide

Discography

Dis Meistersinger Von Nürnberg Buy this CD

• Born: May 22, 1813
• Died: Feb 13, 1883
• Active: '30s, '50s-2000s
• Major Genres: Music, Theater
• Career Highlights: Dracula, Parsifal, Hitler - ein Film aus Deutschland
• First Major Screen Credit: Der Meister von Nurenberg (1929)

Biography

The music of this controversial composer has been quoted in approximately 215 films, discounting numerous newsreels and documentaries. Wagner's music has been appreciated for its transcendentally romantic and noble textures, its innovative orchestration, harmonic and melodic originality, and the Gesamtkunstwerk concept (an artistic effort coordinating all the arts, the very definition of a motion picture), yet his opera plots have been criticized for "paganism," absurdity, and proto-Fascist tendencies.

The Ride of the Valkyrie from Die Walküre has occurred in at least 27 films, one of the earliest being D.W. Griffith's controversial The Birth of a Nation (1915) (aka The Clansman), admired for its epic brilliance and innovative techniques, and infamous for its racism. This music underscores other breast-beating heroism (pro and con) in Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), and Education for Death (1943). The theme comically chimes in as the Chicago police force racing after bluesmen Jake and Elwood are joined by local neo-Nazis in a hilarious car chase in The Blues Brothers (1980). In the cartoon What's Opera, Doc? (1957), Ride of the Valkyrie appears at the onset as Elmer Fudd, in Viking outfit, casts a huge shadow while conducting a storm scene. He finds a rabbit hole and stabs at it with his spear singing, "Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!" Bugs Bunny inquires, to the tune of Siegfried's Horn Call, "Oh mighty warrior of great fighting stock, might I inquire to ask, eh, what's up, doc?" Bugs later appears as dashing blonde Brunhilde riding a white horse to the tune of the Pilgrim's Chorus from Tannhäuser.

The thrilling overture to The Flying Dutchman has accompanied television's Young Indiana Jones and the Attack of the Hawkmen (1995), Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949), The Lone Ranger (1949), and the background of a Navy recruitment commercial. The subtle and lovely Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde has graced 18 films (including Romeo and Juliet [1996] and L'Age d'Or [1930]), and the complete opera has received several television productions. The Bridal Chorus (Here Comes the Bride) from Act III of Lohengrin are found in almost any wedding scene, for example, in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) and Andy Hardy's Dilemma (1938).

Wagner's last and most controversial opera, Parsifal, a Grail story mixed with eroticism, was brilliantly interpreted in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's insightful 1982 production that introduces extra historical and psychological imagery through background and magic lantern-type projections, puppets, scale models, otherworldly lighting, a cavernous set (eventually seen to be a giant death mask of Wagner), alternate male and female Parsifals (with the same voice), and militaristic Christian knights. Wagner's lines concerning the cessation of time and space that Parsifal experiences could describe the viewer's sensations during the film's hypnotic stronghold.

Wagner's opera Tannhaüser is heard in The Gold Rush (1925) and Warhol's Flesh for Frankenstein (1974); Rienzi and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Riefenstahl's notorious Triumph of the Will (1934); Götterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods) in Le Bassin de J.W. (John Wayne's Pelvis, 1997); Das Rheingold and Siegfried have also received many full television and film treatments. Visconti's Ludwig (1972), The Architecture of Doom (1989), The Scarlet Empress (1934), Buñuel's Cet obscur objet du désir (1977), Ken Russell's Lisztomania (1975) depicting Wagner as a satanic revolutionary, Markoupoulos' Ming Green (1966), and The Testament of Orpheus (1960) are but a few significant films employing this influential genius' inspirations. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Movie Guide

Parsifal Buy this Movie	Tannhäuser Buy this Movie	Lohengrin Buy this Movie	Meeting Venus Buy this Movie
Siegfried Buy this Movie	Das Rheingold Buy this Movie	Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Buy this Movie	Aria Buy this Movie

Show More Movies Show Fewer Movies

(b Leipzig, 22 May 1813; d Venice, 13 Feb 1883). German composer. He was the son either of the police actuary Friedrich Wagner, who died soon after his birth, or of his mother's friend the painter, actor and poet Ludwig Geyer, whom she married in August 1814. He went to school in Dresden and then Leipzig; at 15 he wrote a play, at 16 his first compositions. In 1831 he went to Leipzig University, also studying music with the Thomaskantor, C.T. Weinlig; a symphony was written and successfully performed in 1832. In 1833 he became chorus master at the Würzburg theatre and wrote the text and music of his first opera, Die Feen; this remained unheard, but his next, Das Liebesverbot, written in 1833, was staged in 1836. By then he had made his début as an opera conductor with a small company which however went bankrupt soon after performing his opera. He married the singer Minna Planer in 1836 and went with her to Königsberg where he became musical director at the theatre, but he soon left and took a similar post in Riga where he began his next opera, Rienzi, and did much conducting, especially of Beethoven.

In 1839 they slipped away from creditors in Riga, by ship to London and then to Paris, where he was befriended by Meyerbeer and did hack-work for publishers and theatres. He also worked on the text and music of an opera on the ‘Flying Dutchman’ legend; but in 1842 Rienzi, a large-scale opera with a political theme set in imperial Rome, was accepted for Dresden and Wagner went there for its highly successful première. Its theme reflects something of Wagner's own politics (he was involved in the semi-revolutionary, intellectual ‘Young Germany’ movement). Die fliegende Holländer (‘The Flying Dutchman’), given the next year, was less well received, though a much tauter musical drama, beginning to move away from the ‘number opera’ tradition and strong in its evocation of atmosphere, especially the supernatural and the raging seas (inspired by the stormy trip from Riga). Wagner was now appointed joint Kapellmeister at the Dresden court.

The theme of redemption through a woman's love, in the Dutchman, recurs in Wagner's operas (and perhaps his life). In 1845 Tannhäuser was completed and performed and Lohengrin begun. In both Wagner moves towards a more continuous texture with semi-melodic narrative and a supporting orchestral fabric helping convey its sense. In 1848 he was caught up in the revolutionary fervour and the next year fled to Weimar (where Liszt helped him) and then Switzerland (there was also a spell in France); politically suspect, he was unable to enter Germany for 11 years. In Zürich, he wrote in 1850-51 his ferociously anti-semitic Jewishness in Music (some of it an attack on Meyerbeer) and his basic statement on musical theatre, Opera and Drama; he also began sketching the text and music of a series of operas on the Nordic and Germanic sagas. By 1853 the text for this four-night cycle (to be The Nibelung's Ring) was written, printed and read to friends - who included a generous patron Otto Wesendonck, and his wife Mathilde, who loved him, wrote poems that he set, and inspired Tristan und Isolde - conceived in 1854 and completed five years later, by which time more than half of The Ring was written. In 1855 he conducted in London; tension with Minna led to his going to Paris in 1858-9. 1860 saw them both in Paris, where the next year he revived Tannhäuser in revised form for French taste, but it was literally shouted down, partly for political reasons. In 1862 he was allowed freely into Germany; that year he and the ill and childless Minna parted (she died in 1866). In 1863 he gave concerts in Vienna, Russia etc; the next year King Ludwig II invited him to settle in Bavaria, near Munich, discharging his debts and providing him with money.

Wagner did not stay long in Bavaria, because of opposition at Ludwig's court, especially when it was known that he was having an affair with Cosima, the wife of the conductor Hans van Bülow (she was Liszt's daughter); Bülow (who condoned it) directed the Tristan première in 1865. Here Wagner, in depicting every shade of sexual love, developed a style richer and more chromatic than anyone had previously attempted, using dissonance and its urge for resolution in a continuing pattern to build up tension and a sense of profound yearning; Act 2 is virtually a continuous love duet, touching every emotion from the tenderest to the most passionately erotic. Before returning to the Ring, Wagner wrote, during the mid-1860s, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg: this is in a quite different vein, a comedy set in 16th-century Nuremberg, in which a noble poet-musician wins, through his victory in a music contest - a victory over pedants who stick to the foolish old rules - the hand of his beloved, fame and riches. (The analogy with Wagner's view of himself is obvious.) The music is less chromatic than that of Tristan, warm and good-humoured, often contrapuntal; unlike the mythological figures of his other operas the characters here have real humanity.

The opera was given, under Bülow, in 1868; Wagner had been living at Tribschen, near Lucerne, since 1866, and that year Cosima formally joined him; they had two children when in 1870 they married. The first two Ring operas, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were given in Munich, on Ludwig's insistence, in 1869 and 1870; Wagner however was anxious to have a special festival opera house for the complete cycle and spent much energy trying to raise money for it. Eventually, when he had almost despaired, Ludwig came to the rescue and in 1874 - the year the fourth opera, Götterdämmerung, was finished - provided the necessary support. The house was built at Bayreuth, designed by Wagner as the home for his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total art work’- an alliance of music, poetry, the visual arts, dance etc). The first festival, an artistic triumph but a financial disaster - was held there in 1876, when the complete Ring was given. The Ring is about 18 hours music, held together by an immensely detailed network of themes, or leitmotifs, each of which has some allusive meaning: a character, a concept, an object etc. They change and develop as the ideas within the opera develop. They are heard in the orchestra, not merely as ‘labels’ but carrying the action, sometimes informing the listener of connections of ideas or the thoughts of those on the stage. There are no ‘numbers’ in the Ring; the musical texture is made up of narrative and dialogue, in which the orchestra partakes. The work is not merely a story about gods, humans and dwarfs but embodies reflections on every aspect of the human condition. It has been interpreted as socialist, fascist, Jungian, prophetic, as a parable about industrial society, and much more.

In 1877 Wagner conducted in London, hoping to recoup Bayreuth losses; later in the year he began a new opera, Parsifal. He continued his musical and polemic writings, concentrating on ‘racial purity’. He spent most of 1880 in Italy. Parsifal, a sacred festival drama, again treating redemption but through the acts of communion and renunciation on the stage, was given at the Bayreuth Festival in 1882. He went to Venice for the winter, and died there in February of the heart trouble that had been with him for some years. His body was returned by gondola and train for burial at Bayreuth. Wagner did more than any other composer to change music, and indeed to change art and thinking about it. His life and his music arouse passions like no other composer s. His works are hated as much as they are worshipped; but no-one denies their greatness.

works:
Dramatic music

• Die Feen (1833, perf. 1888)
• Das Liebesverbot (1836)
• Rienzi (1842)
• Der fliegende Holländer (1843)
• Tannhäuser (1845)
• Lohengrin (1850)
• Tristan und Isolde (1865)
• Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868)
• Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876): Das Rheingold (1869), Die Walküre (1870), Siegfried (1876), Götterdämmerung (1876)
• Parsifal (1882)
• incidental music

Orchestral music

• Sym., C (1832)
• Siegfried Idyll (1870)
• ovs., marches

Piano music

• 3 sonatas
• Fantasia (1831)
• other pieces

Vocal music

• Das Liebesmahl der Apostel, biblical scene (1843)
• other choral pieces
• 5 songs to texts by Mathilde Wesendonck (1858)
• songs, arias

---

The German operatic composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was undoubtedly the most important seminal figure in 19th-century music, Beethoven notwithstanding. Wagner was also a crucial figure in 19th-century cultural history for both his criticism and polemical writing.

Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813, in Leipzig into an unassuming family. His father died shortly after Richard's birth, and within the year his mother married Ludwig Geyer. There is still some controversy as to whether or not Geyer, an itinerant actor, was Wagner's real father. Wagner's musical training was largely left to chance until he was 18, when he studied with Theodor Weinlig in Leipzig for a year. He began his career in 1833 as choral director in Würzburg and composed his early works in imitation of German romantic compositions. Beethoven was his major idol at this time.

Wagner wrote his first opera, Die Feen (The Fairies), in 1833, but it was not produced until after the composer's death. He was music director of the theater in Magdeburg from 1834 to 1836, where his next work, Das Liebesverbot (Forbidden Love), loosely based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure was performed in 1836. That year he married Minna Planner, a singer-actress active in provincial theatrical life.

In 1837 Wagner became the first music director of the theater in Riga, where he remained until 1839. He then set out for Paris, where he hoped to make his fortune. While in Paris, he developed an intense hatred for French musical culture that lasted the remainder of his life, regardless of how often he attempted to have a Parisian success. It was at this time that Wagner, in financial desperation, sold the scenario for Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) to the Paris Opéra for use by another composer. Wagner later set another version of this tale.

Disillusioned by his lack of success, Wagner returned to Germany, settling in Dresden in 1842, where he was in charge of the music for the court chapel. Rienzi, a grand opera in imitation of the French style, enjoyed a modest success; the Overture is still popular. In 1845 Tannhäuser was premiered in Dresden; this proved the first undoubted success of Wagner's career. In November of the same year he finished the poem for Lohengrin and began composition early in 1846. While at work on Lohengrin he also made plans for his tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungen), being captivated by Norse sagas. In 1845 he prepared the scenario for the first drama of the tetralogy to be written, Siegfried's Tod (Siegfried's Death), which later became Die Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods).

Years of Exile

Wagner had to flee Dresden in 1849 in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848. He settled in Switzerland, first in Zurich and then near Lucerne. He remained in Switzerland for the most part for the next 15 years without steady employment, banished from Germany and forbidden access to German theatrical life. During this time he worked on the Ring, which dominated his creative life over the next 2 decades.

The first production of Lohengrin took place in Weimar under Franz Liszt's direction in 1850 (Wagner was not to see Lohengrin until 1861). By this time Wagner was moderately notorious as a polemicist, and his most fundamental work of theory, Opera and Drama, dates from 1850-1851. In it he discusses the significance of legend for the theater and how to write singable poetry, and he presents his ideas with regard to the realization of the "total work of art" which would effectively change the course of theatrical life in Germany if not the world.

The year 1850 also saw publication of one of Wagner's most scurrilous tracts, The Jew in Music, in which he viciously attacked the very existence of the Jewish composer and musician, particularly in German society. Anti-Semitism remained a hallmark of Wagner's philosophy the rest of his life.

Between 1850 and 1865 Wagner fashioned most of the material to which he owes his reputation. He purposefully turned aside from actual composition to plan an epic cycle of such grandeur and proportion as had never been created before. In 1851 he wrote the poem for Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried), the work now known as Siegfried, to prepare the way for Götterdämmerung. He realized he would need not only this drama to clarify his other work but two additional dramas as well, and he sketched the remaining poems for the Ring by the end of 1851. He completed Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold) in 1852 after he had revised the poem for Die Walküre (The Valkyrie).

In 1853 Wagner formally commenced composition on the Rheingold; he completed the scoring the following year and then began serious work on the Walküre, which was finished in 1856. At this time he was toying with the notion of writing the drama Tristan and Isolde. In 1857 he finished the composition of Act II of Siegfried and gave himself over entirely to Tristan. This work was completed in 1859, but it was mounted in Munich only in 1865.

Last Years

In 1860 Wagner received permission to reenter Germany except for Saxony. He was granted full amnesty in 1862. That year he began the music for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremburg), which he had first thought of in 1845. He resumed composition on Siegfried in 1865 and began sketching what would eventually become Parsifal, also a vague possibility since the mid-1840s. He began Parsifal at the urging of the Bavarian monarch, Ludwig II, then Wagner's patron. The Meistersinger was completed in 1867; the first performance took place in Munich the following year. Only then did he pick up the threads of the Ring and resume work on Act III of Siegfried, which was finished in September 1869, a month that also saw the first performance of the Rheingold. He wrote the music for Götterdämmerung from 1869 to 1874.

The first entire Ring cycle (Rheingold, Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung) was given at the Festspielhaus, the shrine Wagner built for himself at Bayreuth, in 1876, over 30 years after the idea for it had first come to mind. He finished Parsifal, his final drama, in 1882. Wagner died on Feb. 13, 1883, in Venice and was buried at Bayreuth.

Philosophy of the Ring

The Ring is central to Wagner's career. Here he wished to present new ideas of morality and human activity that would completely alter the course of history. He envisioned a world made entirely free from subservience to supernatural bondage, which he believed had adversely affected Western civilization from ancient Greece to the present. Wagner also held that at the source of all human activity was fear, which must be purged so that man can live the perfect life. In the Ring he attempted to set forth the standards for superior humans, those beings who would dominate individuals less fortunate; in turn, such lesser mortals would recognize their own inferior status and yield to the radiance offered by the perfect hero. The implications inherent in a quest for moral and racial purity are vital to Wagner's intentions in the Ring.

It is interesting to note that Wagner believed it was only by submitting completely to the sensuous experience that man could be liberated from the restraints imposed by rationality. However valuable the intellect might be, the rational life was regarded as a hindrance to achieving the fullest development of human awareness. Only when perfect man and perfect woman came together could a transcendental heroic image be created. Siegfried and Brünnhilde together are invincible after each has submitted to the other; apart they are imperfect.

There is no charity or idealism present in the Wagnerian myth world. The perfect ones exult only in each other. All men must recognize the superiority of certain creatures and then bow to their will. Man may quest for his destiny, but he must submit to the will of the superior one if the two come into conflict. In the Ring Wagner wanted to turn his back upon the civility inherent in the Hellenic-Judeo-Christian world. He preferred a realm dominated by the strength and savagery exemplified in the Norse sagas. The implications for the future of Germany were immense.

Philosophy of Other Operas

In Tristan Wagner rejected the affirmative way he developed in the Ring. Instead, he explored the dark side of love in order to plunge to the depths of negative experience. Tristan and Isolde, liberated and not doomed by a love potion they drink, willingly destroy a kingdom in order to love and to live; the sensual power of love is seen here as a destructive force, and the musical style of devious chromaticism and overwhelming orchestral pulsation is perfect for the messages of the drama.

Wagner's egomania, never tolerable to anyone save those who could blind themselves totally to his flaws, came to the fore in the Meistersinger. The tale of the young hero-singer who conquers the old order and forces a new, sensually more exciting style upon the tradition-bound Nuremburg society is the tale of the Ring in a slightly different guise. (Wagner openly claimed Tristan to be the Ring in microcosm.) It is obvious in the Meistersinger that Wagner identifies himself with the messianic figure of a young German poet and singer who wins the prize and is finally accepted as the leader of a new society.

In Parsifal Wagner identified himself even more intensely with the hero as the savior, the world's redeemer. The mysteries celebrated in Parsifal are those prepared for the glory of Wagner himself and not for any god.

Musical Language

The scope of Wagner's vision is as breathtaking as his ideas and metaphysics are repugnant. Without the music his dramas would still be milestones in the history of Western thought. With the music, however, Wagner's importance is greatly magnified. He conceived a musical language that would most effectively present his philosophies. He intended to batter down the resistant forces of reason by means of the music. Ideally, there would be an unending melody in which the voice and text are but part of the fabric, united with a magnificent orchestral web which becomes the action at a distinctly musical pace. The verbal language, often very obscure and tortured in syntax, is acceptable only through the music.

For Wagner, music was in no sense additive, tacked onto the dramas after completion, anymore than it was an exercise in formal rhetoric, mere "art for art's sake." Music could bind all life, art, reality, and illusion together into one symbiotic union that would then work its own unique magic upon an audience. It is no accident that Wagner's musical language is intended to dethrone reason and to ask for unquestioning acceptance of the composer's beliefs. In Wagner's reading of Schopenhauer, the musical ideal in his dramas would be not a reflection of the world but would be that very world itself.

Personal Characteristics

Such a summary of Wagner's creative life hardly hints at the extraordinary complications of his personal life which, in turn, affected his dramas. Wagner was that rare individual - a truly charismatic figure who overcame all adversities. During the years in Switzerland he managed to live for the most part on charity by means of the most amazing conniving and manipulation of people conceivable. The Wesendonck family in particular contributed to his well-being, and Mathilde Wesendonck, one of Wagner's many mistresses, was credited with partially inspiring Tristan.

Wagner's life after leaving Saxony was a constant series of intrigues, harangues, and struggles to overcome the indifference of the world, to find the ideal woman worthy of his love, and to be the worthy recipient of the benefits offered by the perfect patron. Cosima Liszt von Bülow was the answer to his quest for the ideal female, subservient and fanatically devoted to his well-being. Although Wagner and Minna had lived apart for some time, Wagner did not marry Cosima until 1870, almost a decade after Minna's death. Over 30 years her husband's junior, Cosima was to be the dominating, guiding spirit in the Wagnerian shrine at Bayreuth until her death in 1930.

The perfect patron proved to be Ludwig II, who literally rescued Wagner from debtors' prison and brought the composer to Munich with a near carte blanche for life and creativity. Once salvaged, however, Wagner was so offensive to all save the blindly adoring young monarch that he was forced to flee within 2 years. Ludwig, despite eventually disillusionment, remained a loyal supporter of Wagner. It was his generosity that made possible the first festival performances of the Ring in Bayreuth in 1876.

Never one of amenable disposition, Wagner held convictions of his own superiority that developed monomaniacal proportions as he grew older. He was intolerant of any questioning, of any failure to accept him and his creation. His household revolved completely in his orbit, and his demands upon wives, mistresses, friends, musicians, and benefactors were legion. Those who ran afoul of him were pilloried unmercifully, often unscrupulously, such as Eduard Hanslick, the distinguished Viennese music critic who became the model for Beckmesser in the Meistersinger.

When the young philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche first met Wagner, he thought he had found his way into the presence of a god, so radiant and powerful did Wagner seem to him. Later Nietzsche realized that the composer was something less than the perfection of the superman incarnate he had imagined him to be and turned away in disgust. Wagner never forgave Nietzsche for his desertion.

Place in History

In retrospect, Wagner's accomplishments outweigh both his personal behavior and his legacy for the 20th century. He has even managed to survive the predictable rejection by later generations of composers. Wagner created such an effective, unique musical language, especially in Tristan and Parsifal, that the beginnings of modern music are often dated from these scores.

Wagner demonstrated that music was not restricted to being pure formalism and abstract theoretical exploration but was a living, vibrant force capable of changing men's lives. He also proved that the music theater is a proper forum for ideas as opposed to being an arena for only escape and entertainment. And he demonstrated that a composer could rightfully take his place among the great revolutionary thinkers of Western civilization, questioning and attacking what seemed intolerable in traditional modes of behavior, experience, learning, and creation. Together with Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, Wagner must be given his rightful due as one of the greatest forces in 19th-century cultural history.

Further Reading

A representative sampling of Wagner's important prose writings is in Wagner on Music and Drama, edited by Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn (1964). The standard biography in English is that of the great English Wagnerian, Ernest Newman, The Life of Wagner (4 vols., 1933-1946). See also Newman's other important studies, The Wagner Operas (1959) and Wagner as Man and Artist (1960). Recommended to bring Newman's work up to date are Robert Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music (1968), and Chappel White, An Introduction to the Life and Works of Richard Wagner (1970). Also valuable are the specific studies, such as Jack Stein, Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts (1960); Robert Donington, Wagner's Ring and Its Symbols: The Music and the Myth (1963); and Elliot Zuckerman, Tristan: The First Hundred Years (1964).

For more information on Wilhelm Richard Wagner, visit Britannica.com.

Wagner, Richard (b Leipzig, 22 May 1813, d Venice, 13 Feb. 1883). German composer. He wrote no ballet scores but some of his music (often in extracted form) has been used for dance: Tannhäuser (chor. Massine in Bacchanale, New York, 1939, also Béjart in Bacchanale de Tannhäuser, a dance initially performed within the opera at Bayreuth, 1961, then as a separate ballet, Brussels, (1963); Tristan and Isolde (chor. Massine in Mad Tristan, New York, 1944, and H. Ross in Tristan, New York, 1955); Siegfried Idyll (chor. Sparemblek, Brussels, 1965), Wesendonck Lieder (chor. Joffrey in Remembrances, New York, 1973, and Spoerli in Dreams, Stuttgart, 1980); and extracts from the Ring Cycle (chor. Béjart in Ring around the Ring, Berlin, 1990, and More Powerful Than Gold and Death, chor. M. Lavrovsky, Moscow, 1996). P. Schaufuss combined extracts of Wagner's music with the songs of Elvis Presley in The King, Holstebro (1999).

Wagner, Richard (1813–83), German opera composer and music theorist who wrote the texts of his musical dramas and who remains as highly controversial as he has been extremely influential. He studied music in Leipzig and held brief appointments at theatres in Würzburg, Magdeburg, and Riga in the 1830s while writing and composing several early operas. It was with one of these, Rienzi (1840), in the style of grand opera of the 1830s, that he achieved his first notable stage success and appointment in 1843 as court Kapellmeister in Dresden. His fame rests, though, on the operas that followed: Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman, 1841); Tannhäuser (1845); Lohengrin (1847); the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), comprising Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold, 1854), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie, 1856), Siegfried (1870), and Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods, 1874); Tristan und Isolde (1859); Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, 1867); and Parsifal (1882)—all of which continue to be performed regularly. With the exception of Die Meistersinger, these operas that followed Rienzi drew heavily on myth, legend, folk beliefs, and medieval epic. Even Die Meistersinger prominently employs the biblical story of the Fall and Christian imagery and folk traditions, notably that surrounding St John's Eve. Wagner's very first opera, Die Feen (The Fairies, 1833), was based on a fairy‐tale play by Carlo Gozzi; and fairy‐tale motifs are evident in several of the later operas, particularly the borrowing of the motif of the youth who yearns to experience goose flesh (the fourth story in the Grimms' Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen) for Siegfried and, less obviously, the motif of a sister's magically transformed brother—as found in a number of Grimm tales, notably ‘Die zwölf Brüder’ (‘The Twelve Brothers’), ‘Brüderchen und Schwesterchen’ (‘Little Brother and Little Sister’), and ‘Die sechs Schwäne’ (‘The Six Swans’)—in Lohengrin. The legends of the Flying Dutchman, who is cursed with sailing the seas until he finds salvation through love, and of Tannhäuser's sojourn with the love goddess Venus—legends well‐known in Wagner's day as popularized by the poet Heinrich Heine—formed the basis for those two operas. The Wagner operas from Der fliegende Holländer to Parsifal invariably include such elements of magic, marvel, or miracle, employing it to provide a transcendent or metaphysical dimension to the action and its psychological motivation. His Musikdramen (music dramas) represent both a culmination of German romantic opera and a development beyond it towards realism and modernism.

Bibliography

• Cooke, Deryck, I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner's ‘Ring’ (1979).
• Donington, Robert, Wagner's ‘Ring’ and its Symbols: The Music and the Myth (1963, repr. 1974).
• McCreless, Patrick, Wagner's Siegfried: Its Drama, History, and Music (1982).
• McGlathery, James M., Wagner's Operas and Desire (1998).
• Rank, Otto, Die Lohengrinsage: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Motivgestaltung und Deutung (1911).

— James M. McGlathery

Wagner, Richard (Leipzig, 1813-83, Venice), was the youngest of nine children. His father died when he was a few months old and his stepfather when he was still a child; the theme of the lost father was to become a recurrent one in his works. His musical studies at Leipzig University proved abortive and in 1833 he took a post as assistant choirmaster at Würzburg, where he wrote his first opera, Die Feen (first performed in 1888). His next post was as conductor at Magdeburg, where he wrote a comic opera, Das Liebesverbot, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and influenced by the hedonistic ideas of Heinse and by the Junges Deutschland movement. In this otherwise unimportant opera Wagner first made significant use of the Leitmotiv, the most familiar feature of his work. Towards the end of 1836 he followed his fiancée, the actress Minna Planer (1809-66), to Königsberg, where he married her and for a few months obtained work at the theatre.

In 1837 Wagner moved to Riga, again as conductor, but finding himself in financial difficulties in 1839, he slipped away to London and thence to Paris, where he remained for three hard years, completing Rienzi (1840), begun in Riga, and writing Eine Faust-Ouvertüre (1840) as well as Der fliegende Holländer. The success of Rienzi in Dresden on 20 October 1842 was soon followed by that of the first night of Der fliegende Holländer, which led to his being appointed musical director (Hofkapellmeister) at Dresden in 1843. All this time he was reading avidly, delving into Germanic myth and legend and writing the text of Siegfrieds Tod, the first stage in the genesis of Der Ring des Nibelungen, as well as his innovative Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg and Lohengrin.

In May 1849, having taken part in the revolt in Saxony, with whose cause he at the time identified (see Revolutionen 1848-9), Wagner had to flee abroad, settling in Zurich until 1859. In 1855 he made a successful visit to London, where he conducted concerts. While in Zurich he published various theoretical writings, and developed his theory of opera as a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ in which the perfect synthesis of the musical, dramatic, and visual elements is all-important. He introduced his new ideas in his tract Die Kunst und die Revolution (1849) and expounded them in the essays Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1850) and Oper und Drama (1851-2), his principal theoretical work, which also includes a historical survey of opera; he particularly admired the view of Gluck (1714-87) that music should be brought into direct rapport with action. But already in his creative work of the 1850s his intuitive grasp of the autonomy of music begins to prevail; this he expressed in his Beethoven essay of 1870. While working on the Ring cycle, Wagner had fallen in love with Mathilde Wesendonck, the gifted wife of a wealthy patron, and shifted his interest to a new subject, the love tragedy Tristan und Isolde. In an untenable situation he moved first to Venice, then to Lucerne. The composition of five poems by Frau Wesendonck was a further outcome of his passion. In 1861 he was in Paris for a carefully prepared and lavish production of Tannhäuser, which, however, met with organized opposition in the opera house.

A political amnesty made it possible for Wagner to return to the territories of the German Confederation. After a stay in Vienna he was invited by the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a passionate admirer of his works, to establish himself in Munich. However, local opposition obliged him to leave the city in 1865, and he set up house at Triebschen (or Tribschen) near Lucerne, where he completed Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wagner's wife Minna died in 1866 and in 1868 Cosima von Bülow, the wife of Wagner's friend the conductor Hans von Bülow (1830-94), and daughter of the composer Liszt, a loyal supporter, settled with him in Triebschen, where they were married in 1870. The Siegfried Idyll (1870) was written in celebration of their son Siegfried (b. 1869). A new opera house specially for Wagner's works was projected at Bayreuth, and Wagner himself laid the foundation-stone in 1872, when he moved to Bayreuth, living from 1874 in the Villa Wahnfried, which he had built for himself. In 1876 the Festspielhaus was opened with the first performance of the Ring cycle, at which the German Emperor was present. The philosophy of Schopenhauer was a major influence; a friendship with Nietzsche, begun in 1869, ended in 1878 in a complete breach. In 1882 Wagner completed his last work, Parsifal.

Wagner's reputation was nurtured and the Bayreuth Festival perpetuated by his gifted family, for the first 25 years by his widow Cosima (1837-1930), and from 1909 until his death in 1930 by their son Siegfried. From then until 1945 Siegfried's English-born widow Winifred, known for her close association with Hitler and his regime, succeeded him as Festival director. In 1951 Siegfried's son Wieland (1917-66), assisted by his brother Wolfgang, opened a new era at Bayreuth with his innovative modern style of production and stage design.

The originality of Wagner's music aroused widespread controversy and opposition which have persisted into the 20th c. and are linked with his German nationalism and the exaltation of strength; these features, together with his anti-Semitism (shared by his wife Cosima), first expressed in his virulent pamphlet Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850), were to be much used by the National Socialists. Among critics hostile to Wagner was the notable Viennese musicologist Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904), an influential contributor to the Neue Freie Presse and the author of important works on musical aesthetics. He is satirized by Wagner in the figure of Beckmesser (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg). Wagner pursued his own far-reaching ideas on the role and character of music drama with an intransigence bordering on megalomania. With his self-indulgent personality he could also be outspoken and intolerant towards his supporters, including his most loyal friends. His dramatic texts revive Old High German and Middle High German metres and affect archaic vocabulary; when read on their own they may now sometimes appear derivative or pretentious, but when carried on his eloquent and persuasive music their defects disappear and even his detractors are obliged to admit their extraordinary power.

His influence not only on music but on literature and the visual arts radiated far beyond Germany, but is most prominent in the work of Th. Mann.

The first authentic edition of Wagner's autobiography Mein Leben, ed. M. Gregor-Dellin, appeared in 1963 (2nd edn. 1976), Sämtliche Briefe, ed. G. Strobel et al., 1967 ff., Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, supervised by Wagner himself, 1871-3 (9 vols.) and 1883 (vol. 10), numerous times reissued and extended to 16 vols. The critical edition, Sämtliche Werke (planned in 31 vols.), ed. C. Dahlhaus and E. Voss et al., began to appear in 1970. Cosima Wagner's diaries, Die Tagebücher 1869-1833, ed. M. Gregor-Dellin and D. Mack, appeared 1976-7 (reissued 1982).

1813–83, German composer, b. Leipzig.

Life and Work

Wagner was reared in a theatrical family, had a classical education, and began composing at 17. He studied harmony and the works of Beethoven and in 1833 became chorus master of the theater at Würzburg, the first of a series of theatrical positions. Die Feen (composed 1833), his first opera, was in the German romantic tradition begun by Weber; Das Liebesverbot (1835–36) demonstrated his assimilation of the Italian style. In Paris he completed Rienzi (1838–40) but was unable to have it performed there. Its production in Dresden in 1842 was highly successful, and in 1843 Wagner was made musical director of the Dresden theater.

Der Fliegende Holländer (1841) was less successful. It was based on Heine's version of the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a legendary phantom ship, and it foreshadows the idea, developed in Tannhäuser (1843–44) and prevalent in later works, of redemption by love. Tannhäuser, based in part on the actual life of Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin (1846–48) brought the German romantic opera to culmination. In Lohengrin, Wagner for the first time is more interested in his characters as symbols than as actual personages in a drama.

Wagner participated in the Revolution of 1848, fled Dresden, and with the help of Liszt escaped to Switzerland, where he stayed eight years. There he wrote essays, including Oper und Drama (1851), in which he began to articulate aesthetic principles that would guide his subsequent work.

Der Ring des Nibelungen (1853–74), his tetralogy based on the Nibelungenlied (see under Nibelungen), embodies the most complete adherence to his stated principles. In 1857, having completed the composition of the first two works of the cycle, Das Rheingold (1853–54) and Die Walküre (1854–56), and two acts of Siegfried (1856–69), Wagner laid the Ring aside without hope of ever seeing it performed and composed Tristan und Isolde (1857–59) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1862–67), his only comic opera. Tristan, based on the legend of Tristram and Isolde, was so utterly in opposition to the operatic conventions of the day that it required the intercession and support of Louis II of Bavaria to have it produced (1865) in Munich.

In 1872 Wagner moved to Bayreuth, where in 1874 he completed the third act of Siegfried and all of Götterdämmerung, the last work of the Ring cycle. There he was able to build a theater, Das Festspielhaus, adequate for the proper performance of his works, in which the complete Ring was presented in 1876. At Bayreuth, Wagner entertained the great musicians of his day. Parsifal (1877–82) was his last work.

Wagner indulged in much financial foolishness and in the end enjoyed considerable critical success. Although during his lifetime opposition to him and to his ideas went to fantastic lengths, Wagner's operas held a position of complete dominance in the next generation, retaining their enormous popularity in the 20th cent.

Assessment

Wagner's operas represent the fullest musical and theatrical expression of German romanticism. His ideas exerted a profound influence on the work of later composers. For the principle of sharply differentiated recitative and aria, Wagner substituted his “endless melody” and his Sprechgesang [sung speech], calling his operas music-dramas to signify the complete union of music and drama that he sought to achieve. He thought that music could not develop further with the resources it had employed since Beethoven's time, and he maintained that the music of the future must be part of a synthesis of the arts.

Adapting German mythology to his dramatic requirements, Wagner applied to it an increased emotional intensity, derived from the harmonic complexity and power of Beethoven's music, to produce what he termed a “complete art work.” He achieved a remarkable dramatic unity due in part to his development of the leitmotif, a brief passage or fragment of music used to characterize an episode or person and brought in at will to recall it to the audience. At the same time, Wagner greatly increased the flexibility and variety of his orchestral accompaniments. He was responsible for the productions of his works from libretti to details of sets and costumes.

Family Members

Wagner's second wife, Cosima Wagner, 1837–1930, was the daughter of Liszt and the comtesse d'Agoult. From 1857 to 1870 she was the wife of Hans von Bülow. In 1870 she married Wagner. After his death she was largely responsible for the continuing fame of the Bayreuth festivals.

Their son, Siegfried Wagner, 1869–1930, composed 11 operas, orchestral and chamber music, and some vocal pieces, but was known chiefly as a conductor. With his wife, Winifred Williams Klindworth, he directed the Bayreuth festivals, a tradition carried on by their two sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, after World War II.

Bibliography

See Wagner's prose works (8 vol., tr. 1892–99); his letters (ed. by J. N. Burk, 1950, repr. 1972); his autobiography, My Life (tr. 1911, repr. 1974); biography by E. Newman (4 vol., 1933–46); studies by G. Skelton (1976, repr. 1982) and B. Millington (rev. ed. 1992, repr. 1999). See also biographies of C. Wagner by R. M. F. du Moulin-Eckart (2 vol., tr. 1930) and A. H. Sokoloff (1969); W. Wagner, Acts (1994); G. Wagner, Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy (1999); N. Wagner, The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty (2001).

(vahg-nuhr)

A nineteenth-century German composer known for his operas, many of which dramatize myths and legends. The four-opera group The Ring of the Nibelung and the single opera Tristan und Isolde are among his best-known compositions.

Quotes:

"Joy is not in things, it is in us."