Composer, born in Leipzig, EC Germany. His early efforts at composition were unsuccessful, and in Paris (183942) he made a living by journalism and hack operatic arrangements. His Rienzi (1842) was a great success at Dresden, and he was appointed Kapellmeister, but his next operas, including Tannhäuser (1845), were failures. Deeply implicated in the revolutionary movement, he fled from Saxony (1848), moving to Paris and Zürich. The poem of the Ring cycle was finished in 1852, and in 1853 he began to write Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), followed by Die Walküre (1856, The Valkyries) and the first two acts of Siegfried (1857).
In 1861 he was allowed to return to Germany, but still lacked recognition and support, and had to flee from Vienna to avoid imprisonment for debt. In 1864 he was saved from ruin by the eccentric young King of Bavaria, Ludwig II, who became a fanatical admirer of his work, and offered him every facility at Munich. His first wife, Minna, having died in 1866, Wagner then married Cosima von Bülow, the wife of his musical director, after her divorce. Die Meistersinger was completed in 1867, and Götterdämmerung in 1874. To fulfil his ambition to give a complete performance of the Ring (Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, with Das Rheingold as introduction), he started the now famous theatre at Bayreuth, which opened in 1876. Parsifal, his last opera, was staged in 1882, a year before his sudden death from a heart attack, in Venice.
His son Siegfried Wagner (18691930) was director of the Bayreuth theatre from 1909. His grandson Wieland Wagner (191766) took over the directorship in 1951, and revolutionized the production of the operas, stressing their universality as opposed to their purely German significance. Wieland's brother Wolfgang Wagner (1919 ) became artistic director at Bayreuth in 1966.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner (May 22, 1813 – February 13, 1883) was an influential German composer, conductor, music theorist, and essayist, primarily known for his operas (or "music dramas" as he later came to call them).
Wagner's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their contrapuntal texture, rich chromaticism, harmonies and orchestration, and elaborate use of leitmotifs: themes associated with specific characters, locales, or plot elements. Wagner's chromatic musical language prefigured later developments in European classical music, including extreme chromaticism and atonality.
Biography
Early life
Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany, on May 22, 1813, the ninth child of his father, Carl Friedrich Wagner, who was a clerk in the Leipzig police service . Wagner's father died of typhus six months after Richard's birth, by which time Wagner's mother, Johanna Rosine Wagner, was living with the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer. For the first 14 years of his life, Wagner was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer. Wagner in his later years may have suspected that Geyer was in fact his biological father, and furthermore speculated (wrongly) that Geyer was Jewish.
Geyer's love of the theatre was shared by his step-son, and Wagner even took part in performances. In his autobiography Wagner recalled on one occasion playing the part of an angel. At the end of 1820, Wagner was enrolled at Pastor Wetzel's school at Possendorf, near Dresden, where he received some piano instruction from his Latin teacher, but could not manage a proper scale and mostly preferred playing theater overtures by ear. Following this, Wagner was sent to the Kreuz Grammar School in Dresden, paid for by Geyer's brother. The young Wagner entertained ambitions as a playwright, his first creative effort being a gruesome tragedy, Leubald und Adelaide begun at school in 1826, which was strongly influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe. Wagner determined to set this to music and persuaded his family to allow him music lessons. Wagner's first lessons in composition were taken between 1828-31 with Christian Gottlieb Müller, but it was Beethoven who would first inspire him. Beethoven became his muse, and Wagner wrote a piano transcription of the 9th Symphony as well as piano sonatas and orchestral overtures. In his autobiography, Wagner wrote:
Wagner claimed to have seen Schröder-Devrient in the title role of Fidelio, however it seems more likely that he saw her performance as Romeo in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi. He enrolled at the University of Leipzig in 1831, however his formal music training was brief, comprising a few months with Christian Theodor Weinlig, the music director at the Leipzig Kreuzkirke. Weinlig was so impressed with Wagner's musical ability that he refused any payment for his lessons, and arranged for one of Wagner's piano works to be published. A year later, Wagner composed his Symphony in C major, a Beethovenian work which gave him his first opportunity as a conductor in 1832.
In 1833, Wagner's older brother Karl Albert managed to obtain Richard a position as chorusmaster in Würzburg. In the same year, at the age of 20, Wagner composed his first complete opera, Die Feen (The Fairies).
Meanwhile, Wagner held brief appointments as musical director at opera houses in Magdeburg and Königsberg, during which he wrote Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), based on William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.
On November 24, 1836, Wagner married actress Christine Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer. They moved to the city of Riga, then in the Russian Empire, where Wagner became music director of the local opera.
By 1839, the couple had amassed such large debts that they fled Riga to escape from creditors (debt would plague Wagner for most of his life). During their flight, they and their Newfoundland dog, Robber, took a stormy sea passage to London, from which Wagner drew the inspiration for Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman).
Dresden
Wagner completed writing his third opera, Rienzi, in 1840. Wagner lived in Dresden for the next six years, eventually being appointed the Royal Saxon Court Conductor. Richard Wagner played an enthusiastic role in this movement, receiving guests at his house that included his colleague August Röckel, who was editing the radical left-wing paper Volksblätter, and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. The May Uprising broke out, in which Wagner played a minor supporting role.
Exile, Schopenhauer, and Mathilde Wesendonck
Wagner spent the next twelve years in exile.
Nevertheless, Wagner found himself in grim personal straits, isolated from the German musical world and without any income to speak of.
Wagner's primary output during his first years in Zürich was a set of notable essays: "The Art-Work of the Future" (1849), in which he described a vision of opera as Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total artwork", in which the various arts such as music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts, and stagecraft were unified;
In the following years, Wagner came upon two independent sources of inspiration, leading to the creation of his celebrated Tristan und Isolde. Wagner would later call this the most important event of his life. Wagner quickly embraced this claim, which must have resonated strongly despite its direct contradiction with his own arguments, in "Opera and Drama", that music in opera had to be subservient to the cause of drama. Wagner scholars have since argued that this Schopenhauerian influence caused Wagner to assign a more commanding role to music in his later operas, including the latter half of the Ring cycle which he had yet to compose. For example, the self-renouncing cobbler-poet Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger, generally considered Wagner's most sympathetic character, is a quintessentially Schopenhauerian creation (despite being based on a real person).
Wagner's second source of inspiration was the poet-writer Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the silk merchant Otto von Wesendonck. Otto, a fan of Wagner's music, placed a cottage on his estate at Wagner's disposal.
Though Mathilde seems to have returned some of his affections, she had no intention of jeopardising her marriage, and kept her husband informed of her contacts with Wagner. Nevertheless, the affair inspired Wagner to put aside his work on the Ring cycle (which would not be resumed for the next twelve years) and begin work on Tristan und Isolde, based on the Arthurian love story of the knight Tristan and the (already-married) Lady Isolde.
The uneasy affair collapsed in 1858, when Minna intercepted a letter from Wagner to Mathilde. After the resulting confrontation, Wagner left Zürich alone, bound for Venice. Further performances were cancelled, and Wagner hurriedly left the city.
In 1861, the political ban against Wagner was lifted, and the composer settled in Biebrich, Prussia, where he began work on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. (His second wife Cosima would later write: "when future generations seek refreshment in this unique work, may they spare a thought for the tears from which the smiles arose.") In 1862, Wagner finally parted with Minna, though he (or at least his creditors) continued to support her financially until her death in 1866.
Patronage of King Ludwig II
Wagner's fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864, when King Ludwig II assumed the throne of Bavaria at the age of 18. The young King, an ardent admirer of Wagner's operas since childhood, had the composer brought to Munich. He settled Wagner's considerable debts, and made plans to have his new opera produced.
In the meantime, Wagner became embroiled in another affair, this time with Cosima von Bülow, the wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow, one of Wagner's most ardent supporters and the conductor of the Tristan premiere. Cosima was the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and the famous Countess Marie d'Agoult, and 24 years younger than Wagner. Their indiscreet affair scandalized Munich, and to make matters worse, Wagner fell into disfavor amongst members of the court, who were suspicious of his influence on the King. He apparently also toyed with the idea of abdicating in order to follow his hero into exile, but Wagner quickly dissuaded him.
Ludwig installed Wagner at the villa Tribschen, beside Switzerland's Lake Lucerne. (Liszt would not speak to his new son-in-law for years to come.) On Christmas Day of that year, Wagner presented the Siegfried Idyll for Cosima's birthday. The marriage to Cosima lasted to the end of Wagner's life.
It was at Tribschen, in 1869, that Wagner first met the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Wagner's ideas were a major influence on Nietzsche, who was 31 years his junior. The relationship eventually soured, as Nietzsche became increasingly disillusioned with various aspects of Wagner's thought, especially his appropriation of Christianity in Parsifal and his anti-Semitism, and with the blind devotion of Wagner's followers. Wagner", 1889), he obsessively criticized Wagner's music while conceding its power, and condemned Wagner as decadent and corrupt, even criticizing his earlier adulatory views of the composer.
Bayreuth
Wagner, settled into his newfound domesticity, turned his energies toward completing the Ring cycle. At Ludwig's insistence, "special previews" of the first two works of the cycle, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were performed at Munich, but Wagner wanted the complete cycle to be performed in a new, specially-designed opera house. In order to raise funds for the construction, "Wagner societies" were formed in several cities, and Wagner himself began touring Germany conducting concerts.
Final years
In 1877, Wagner moved to Acireale in Italy where he began work on Parsifal, his final opera.
Wagner completed Parsifal in January 1882, and a second Bayreuth Festival was held for the new opera.
After the Festival, the Wagner family journeyed to Venice for the winter. On February 13, 1883, Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal.
Franz Liszt's memorable piece for pianoforte solo, La lugubre gondola, evokes the passing of a black-shrouded funerary gondola bearing Richard Wagner's mortal remains over the Grand Canal.
Works
Opera
Wagner's music dramas are his primary artistic legacy.
Wagner's early stage began at age 19 with his first attempt at an opera, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), which Wagner abandoned at an early stage of composition in 1832. Wagner's three completed early-stage operas are Die Feen (The Fairies), Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), and Rienzi. Their compositional style was conventional, and did not exhibit the innovations that marked Wagner's place in musical history. Later in life, Wagner said that he did not consider these immature works to be part of his oeuvre;
Wagner's middle stage output is considered to be of remarkably higher quality, and begins to show the deepening of his powers as a dramatist and composer.
Wagner's late stage operas are his masterpieces that advanced the art of opera. Some are of the opinion that Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Iseult) is Wagner's greatest single opera. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) is Wagner's only comedy (apart from his early and forgotten Das Liebesverbot) and one of the lengthiest operas still performed. Wagner's final opera, Parsifal, which was written especially for the opening of Wagner's Festspielhaus in Bayreuth and which is described in the score as a "Bühnenweihfestspiel" (festival play for the consecration of the stage), is a contemplative work based on the Christian legend of the Holy Grail.
Through his operas and theoretical essays, Wagner exerted a strong influence on the operatic medium. Unlike other opera composers, who generally left the task of writing the libretto (the text and lyrics) to others, Wagner wrote his own libretti, which he referred to as "poems".
Wagner's musical style is often considered the epitome of classical music's Romantic period, due to its unprecedented exploration of emotional expression.
Early stage
(1832) Die Hochzeit (The Wedding) (abandoned before completion) (1833) Die Feen (The Fairies) (1836) Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love) (1837) Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes)Middle stage
(1843) Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) (1845) Tannhäuser (1848) LohengrinLate stage
(1859) Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde) (1867) Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), consisting of: (1854) Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold) (1856) Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) (1871) Siegfried (previously entitled Jung-Siegfried or Young Siegfried, and Der junge Siegfried or The young Siegfried) (1874) Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) (originally entitled Siegfrieds Tod or The Death of Siegfried) (1882) ParsifalNon-operatic music
Apart from his operas, Wagner composed relatively few pieces of music. The next most popular are the Wesendonck Lieder, properly known as Five Songs for a Female Voice, which were composed for Mathilde Wesendonck while Wagner was working on Tristan.
After completing Parsifal, Wagner apparently intended to turn to the writing of symphonies.
The overtures and orchestral passages from Wagner's middle and late-stage operas are commonly played as concert pieces. For most of these, Wagner wrote short passages to conclude the excerpt so that it does not end abruptly.
Writings
Wagner was an extremely prolific writer, authoring hundreds of books, poems, and articles, as well as a massive amount of correspondence, throughout his life.
Theatre Design and Operation
Wagner was responsible for several theatrical innovations developed at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, an opera house specially constructed for the performance of his operas (for the design of which he appropriated many of the ideas of his former colleague, Gottfried Semper, which he had solicited for a proposed new opera house at Munich). The Bayreuth Festspielhaus is the venue of the annual Richard Wagner Festival, which draws thousands of opera fans to Bayreuth each summer.
Wagner's influence and legacy
Wagner made highly significant, if controversial, contributions to art and culture. In his lifetime, and for some years after, Wagner inspired fanatical devotion amongst his followers, and was occasionally considered by them to have a near god-like status. For years afterward, many composers felt compelled to align themselves with or against Wagner. The Italian form of operatic realism known as verismo owes much to Wagnerian reconstruction of musical form. It was Wagner who first demanded that the lights be dimmed during dramatic performances, and it was his theatre at Bayreuth which first made use of the sunken orchestra pit, which at Bayreuth entirely conceals the orchestra from the audience.
Wagner's theory of musical drama has shaped even completely new art forms, including film scores such as John Williams' music for Star Wars. American producer Phil Spector with his "wall of sound" was strongly influenced by Wagner's music. Wagner also heavily influenced rock composer Jim Steinman and led him to create what he called Wagnerian Rock. The rock subgenre of heavy metal music also shows a Wagnerian influence with its strong paganistic stamp. In Germany Rammstein and Joachim Witt (his most famous albums are called Bayreuth for that reason) are both strongly influenced by Wagner's music. The movie "The Ring of the Nibelungs" drew both from historical sources as well as Wagner's work, and set a ratings record when aired as a two-part mini-series on German television.
Wagner's influence on literature and philosophy is also significant. Friedrich Nietzsche was part of Wagner's inner circle during the early 1870s, and his first published work The Birth of Tragedy proposed Wagner's music as the Dionysian rebirth of European culture in opposition to Apollonian rationalist decadence. Nietzsche broke with Wagner following the first Bayreuth Festival, believing that Wagner's final phase represented a pandering to Christian pieties and a surrender to the new demagogic German Reich. Auden once called Wagner "perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived", while Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust were heavily influenced by him and discussed Wagner in their novels.
Not all reaction to Wagner was positive. For a time, German musical life divided into two factions, Wagner's supporters and those of Johannes Brahms; Even those who, like Debussy, opposed him ("that old poisoner"), could not deny Wagner's influence. Indeed, Debussy was one of many composers, including Tchaikovsky, who felt the need to break with Wagner precisely because his influence was so unmistakable and overwhelming. Others who resisted Wagner's influence included Rossini ("Wagner has wonderful moments, and dreadful quarters of an hour"), though his own "Guillaume Tell," at over four hours, is comparable to Wagner's operas in length.
Controversies
"I sometimes think there are two Wagners in our culture, almost unrecognizably different from one another: the Wagner possessed by those who know his work, and the Wagner imagined by those who know him only by name and reputation." (Bryan Magee, "Wagner and Philosophy", 2002)Wagner's operas, writings, his politics, beliefs and unorthodox lifestyle made him a controversial figure during his lifetime. Following Wagner's death, the debate about and appropriation of his beliefs, particularly in Germany during the 20th Century, made him controversial to a precedential degree among the great composers. Wagnerian scholar Dieter Borchmeyer has written: "The merest glance at writings on Wagner, including the most recent ones on the composer's life and works, is enough to convince the most casual reader that he or she has wandered into a madhouse. Even serious scholars take leave of their senses when writing about Wagner and start to rant.". There are three main areas of ongoing debate: Wagner's religious beliefs, his beliefs on racial supremacy, and his anti-semitism.
Religious Beliefs
Wagner's own religious views were idiosyncratic. Like many German Romantics, Schopenhauer above all, Wagner was also fascinated by Buddhism, and for many years contemplated composing a Buddhist opera, to be titled Die Sieger ("The Victors"), based on Sârdûla Karnavadanaan, an avadana of the Buddha's last journey. As occult historian Joscelyn Godwin stated, "it was Buddhism that inspired the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through him, attracted Richard Wagner.
Aryanism
Some biographers have asserted that Wagner in his final years came to believe in the Aryanist philosophy of Arthur de Gobineau. However the influence of Gobineau on Wagner's thought is debated. The two did not cross paths again until 1880, well after Wagner had completed the libretto for Parsifal, his opera most often accused of containing racist ideology, seemingly dispelling the notion of any strong influence of Gobineau on the opera. Although Gobineau's "Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines" was written 25 years earlier, it seems that Wagner did not read it until October 1880. There is evidence to suggest that Wagner was very interested in Gobineau's idea that Western society was doomed because of miscegenation between "superior" and "inferior" races.
Records state that Wagner's conversations with Gobineau during the philosopher's 5-week stay at Wahnfried in 1881 were punctuated with frequent arguments. Cosima Wagner's diary entry for June 3rd recounts one exchange in which Wagner "positively exploded in favour of Christianity as compared to racial theory." Gobineau also believed, unlike Wagner, that the Irish (whom he considered a "degenerate" race) should be ruled by the English (a Nordic race), and that in order to have musical ability, one must have black ancestry.
Wagner subsequently wrote three essays in response to Gobineau's ideas: "Introduction to a Work of Count Gobineau", "Know Thyself", and "Heroism and Christianity" (all 1881). The "Introduction" is a short piece written for the "Bayreuth Blätter" in which Wagner praises the Count's book:
"We asked Count Gobineau, returned from weary, knowledge-laden wanderings among far distant lands and peoples, what he thought of the present aspect of the world;In "Know Thyself" Wagner deals with the German people, whom Gobineau believes are the "superior" Aryan race. Wagner rejects the notion that the Germans are a race at all, and further proposes that we should look past the notion of race to focus on the human qualities ("das Reinmenschliche") common to all of us. In "Heroism and Christianity", Wagner's proposes that Christianity could function to provide a moral harmonization of all races, and that it could be a unifying force in the world preferable to the physical unification of races by miscegenation:
"Whilst yellow races have viewed themselves as sprung from monkeys, the white traced back their origin to gods, and deemed themselves marked out for rulership.Gobineau stayed at Wahnfried again during May 1882, but did not engage in such extensive or heated debate with Wagner as on the previous occasion, as Wagner was largely occupied by the preparations for the premiere of Parsifal. Wagner's concerns over miscegenation occupied him until the very end of his life, and he was in the process of writing another essay, "On the Womanly in the Human Race" (1883), at the time of his death.
Wagner's writings on race would probably be considered unimportant were it not for the influence of his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who expanded on Wagner and Gobineau's ideas in his 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a racist work extolling the Aryan ideal which later strongly influenced Adolf Hitler's ideas on race.
Antisemitism
Wagner's views
Wagner frequently accused Jews, particularly Jewish musicians, of being a harmful alien element in German culture. The essay purported to explain popular dislike of Jewish composers, such as Wagner's contemporaries (and rivals) Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wagner wrote that the German people were repelled by Jews due to their alien appearance and behavior — "with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them." Wagner advises Jews to follow the example of Ludwig Börne by abandoning Judaism. Wagner was therefore calling for the assimilation of Jews into mainstream German culture and society - although there can be little doubt, from the words he uses in the essay, that this call was prompted at least as much by old-fashioned Jew-hatred as by a desire for social amelioration. The initial publication of the article attracted little attention, but Wagner republished it as a pamphlet under his own name in 1869, leading to several public protests at performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wagner repeated similar views in several later articles, such as "What is German?"
Some biographers, such as Robert Gutman have advanced the claim that Wagner's opposition to Jewry was not limited to his articles, and that the operas contained such messages. Wagner was not above putting digs and insults to specific individuals into his work, and it was usually obvious when he did. Wagner, over the course of his life, produced a huge amount of written material analyzing every aspect of himself, including his operas and his views on Jews (as well as practically every other topic under the sun);
Despite his very public views concerning Jewry, Wagner had several Jewish friends and colleagues. One of the most notable of these was Hermann Levi, a practising Jew and son of a Rabbi, whose talent was freely acknowledged by Wagner. Levi's position as Kapellmeister at Munich meant that he was to conduct the premiere of Parsifal, Wagner's last opera.
Nazi appropriation
About the time of Wagner's death, European nationalist movements were losing the Romantic, idealistic egalitarianism of 1848, and acquiring tints of militarism and aggression, due in no small part to Bismarck's takeover and unification of Germany in 1871. After Wagner's death in 1883, Bayreuth increasingly became a focus for German nationalists attracted by the mythos of the operas, who came to be known as the Bayreuth circle. After the deaths of Cosima and Siegfried Wagner in 1930, the operation of the Festival fell to Siegfried's widow, English-born Winifred, who was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a fanatical student and admirer of Wagner's ideology and music, and sought to incorporate it into his heroic mythology of the German nation (a nation that had no formal identity prior to 1871). Hitler held many of Wagner's original scores in his Berlin bunker during World War II, despite the pleadings of Wieland Wagner to have these important documents put in his care;
Many scholars have argued that Wagner's views, particularly his anti-Semitism and purported Aryan-Germanic racism, influenced the Nazis. Evans suggests there is no evidence that Hitler even read any of Wagner's writings and further argues that Wagner's works do not inherently support Nazi notions of heroism. For example, Siegfried, the ostensible "hero" of the Ring cycle, may appear (and often does so in modern productions) a shallow and unappealing lout—although this is certainly not how Wagner himself conceived him; Many aspects of Wagner's personal philosophy would certainly have been unappealing to Nazis, such as his quietist mysticism and support for Jewish assimilation.
For the most part, the Nazi fascination with Wagner was limited to Hitler, sometimes to the dismay of other high-ranking Nazi officials, including Goebbels.
In general, while Wagner's music was often performed during the Third Reich, his popularity actually declined in favor of Italian composers such as Verdi and Puccini. By the 1938-1939 season, Wagner had only one opera in the list of fifteen most popular operas of the season, with the list headed by Italian composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci.
Nevertheless, Wagner's operas have never been staged in the modern state of Israel, and the few instrumental performances that have occurred have provoked much controversy. One of the many ironies reflecting the complexities of Wagner and the responses his music provokes is that, like many German-speaking Jews of the pre-Hitler epoch, Theodore Herzl, a founder of modern Zionism, was an avid admirer of Wagner's work.
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