Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, essayist, and conductor, best known for his operas, although his mature works are often referred to as music dramas. Unlike most composers, Wagner wrote both the libretti and the music for all of his stage works. He first achieved recognition with works in the Romantic tradition of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, but revolutionised the genre through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which sought to unite poetic, musical, visual, and dramatic elements. In this approach, the drama unfolds as a continuously sung narrative, with the music evolving organically from the text rather than alternating between arias and recitatives. Wagner outlined these ideas in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852, most fully realising them in the first half of his four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Wagner's compositions, particularly in his later period, have complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration, and elaborate leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas, or plot elements. His advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly influenced the development of classical music; his Tristan und Isolde is regarded as an important precursor to modernist music. Later in life, he softened his ideological stance against traditional operatic forms, reintroducing them into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Parsifal.
To fully realise his artistic vision, Wagner had his own opera house built to his specifications: the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which featured many innovations designed to immerse the audience in the drama. It hosted the premieres of The Ring and Parsifal, and remains entirely devoted to staging his mature works at the annual Bayreuth Festival. After Wagner’s death, his wife Cosima assumed leadership; it has since remained under the management of their descendants.
Wagner's unorthodox operas, provocative essays, and contentious personal conduct engendered considerable controversy during his lifetime, and continue to do so. Declared a "genius" by some and a "disease" by others, his views on religion, politics, and society remain debated—most notably the extent to which his antisemitism finds expression in his stage and prose works. Despite this, his operas and music remain central to the repertoire of major opera houses and concert halls worldwide. His ideas can be traced across many art forms throughout the 20th century; his influence extended beyond composition into conducting, philosophy, literature, the visual arts, and theatre.
Biography
Early years
Richard Wagner was born on 22 May 1813 to an ethnic German family in Leipzig, then part of the Confederation of the Rhine. His family lived at No 3, the Brühl in Leipzig's Jewish quarter. He was baptised at St. Thomas Church. He was the ninth, and youngest, child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the Leipzig police service, and his wife, Johanna Rosine Wagner, the daughter of a baker. Wagner's father Carl died of typhoid fever six months after Richard's birth. Afterwards, his mother Johanna lived with Carl's friend, the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer. In August 1814 Johanna and Geyer probably married, although no documentation of this has been found in the Leipzig church registers. She and her family moved to Geyer's residence in Dresden. Until he was fourteen, Wagner was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer. He almost certainly thought that Geyer was his biological father.Geyer's love of the theatre came to be shared by his stepson, and Wagner took part in his performances. In his autobiography Mein Leben Wagner recalled once playing the part of an angel. In late 1820, Wagner was enrolled at Pastor Wetzel's school at Possendorf, near Dresden, where he received some piano instruction from his Latin teacher. He struggled to play a proper scale at the keyboard and preferred playing theatre overtures by ear. Following Geyer's death in 1821, Richard was sent to the Kreuzschule, the boarding school of the Dresdner Kreuzchor, at the expense of Geyer's brother. At the age of nine he was hugely impressed by the Gothic elements of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz, which he saw Weber conduct. At this period Wagner entertained ambitions as a playwright. His first creative effort, listed in the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis as WWV 1, was a tragedy called Leubald. Begun when he was in school in 1826, the play was strongly influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe. Wagner was determined to set it to music and persuaded his family to allow him music lessons.
By 1827, the family had returned to Leipzig. Wagner's first lessons in harmony were taken during 1828–1831 with. In January 1828 he first heard Beethoven's 7th Symphony and then, in March, the same composer's 9th Symphony, both at the Gewandhaus. Beethoven became a major inspiration, and Wagner wrote a piano transcription of the 9th Symphony. He was also greatly impressed by a performance of Mozart's Requiem. Wagner's early piano sonatas and his first attempts at orchestral overtures date from this period.
In 1829 he saw a performance by dramatic soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who became his ideal of the fusion of drama and music in opera. In Mein Leben Wagner wrote, "When I look back across my entire life I find no event to place beside this in the impression it produced on me," and claimed that the "profoundly human and ecstatic performance of this incomparable artist" kindled in him an "almost demonic fire".
In 1831, Wagner enrolled at the Leipzig University, where he became a member of the Saxon student fraternity. He took composition lessons with the Thomaskantor Theodor Weinlig. Weinlig was so impressed with Wagner's musical ability that he refused any payment for his lessons. He arranged for his pupil's Piano Sonata in B-flat major to be published as Wagner's Op. 1. A year later, Wagner composed his Symphony in C major, a Beethovenesque work performed in Prague in 1832 and at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1833. He then began to work on an opera, Die Hochzeit, which he never completed.
Early career and marriage (1833–1842)
In 1833, Wagner's brother Albert managed to obtain for him a position as choirmaster at the Theatre Würzburg. In the same year, at the age of 20, Wagner composed his first complete opera, Die Feen. This work, which imitated the style of Weber, went unproduced until half a century later, when it was premiered in Munich shortly after the composer's death in 1883.Having returned to Leipzig in 1834, Wagner held a brief appointment as musical director at the opera house in Magdeburg during which he wrote Das Liebesverbot, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. This was staged at Magdeburg in 1836 but closed before the second performance; this, together with the financial collapse of the theatre company employing him, left the composer in bankruptcy. Wagner had fallen for one of the leading ladies at Magdeburg, the actress Christine Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer, and after the disaster of Das Liebesverbot he followed her to Königsberg, where she helped him to get an engagement at the theatre.
The two married in Tragheim Church on 24 November 1836. In May 1837, Minna left Wagner for another man, and this was only the first débâcle of a tempestuous marriage. In June 1837, Wagner moved to Riga, where he became music director of the local opera; having in this capacity engaged Minna's sister Amalie for the theatre, he presently resumed relations with Minna during 1838.
By 1839, the couple had amassed such large debts that they fled Riga on the run from creditors. Debts plagued Wagner for most of his life. Initially the pair took a stormy sea passage to London, from which Wagner drew the inspiration for his opera Der fliegende Holländer, with a plot based on a sketch by Heinrich Heine.
The Wagners settled in Paris in September 1839 and stayed there until 1842. During these years, Wagner is believed to have attended François Delsarte's "Cours d'esthétique appliquée," which arguably influenced his aesthetic writings and compositional style. Wagner made a scant living by writing articles and short novelettes such as A pilgrimage to Beethoven, which sketched his growing concept of "music drama", and An end in Paris, where he depicts his own miseries as a German musician in the French metropolis. He also provided arrangements of operas by other composers, largely on behalf of the Schlesinger publishing house. During this stay he completed his third and fourth operas Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer.
Dresden (1842–1849)
Wagner had completed Rienzi in 1840. With the strong support of Giacomo Meyerbeer, it was accepted for performance by the Dresden Court Theatre in the Kingdom of Saxony, and in 1842 Wagner moved to Dresden. His relief at returning to Germany was recorded in his "Autobiographic Sketch" of 1842, where he wrote that, en route from Paris, "For the first time I saw the Rhine—with hot tears in my eyes, I, poor artist, swore eternal fidelity to my German fatherland." Rienzi was staged to considerable acclaim on 20 October.Wagner lived in Dresden for the next six years, eventually being appointed the Royal Saxon Court Conductor. During this period, he staged there Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser, the first two of his three middle-period operas. Wagner also mixed with artistic circles in Dresden, including the composer Ferdinand Hiller and the architect Gottfried Semper.
Wagner's involvement in left-wing politics abruptly ended his welcome in Dresden. Wagner was active among socialist German nationalists there, regularly receiving such guests as the conductor and radical editor August Röckel and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. He was also influenced by the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Ludwig Feuerbach. Widespread discontent came to a head in 1849, when the unsuccessful May Uprising in Dresden broke out, in which Wagner played a minor supporting role. Warrants were issued for the revolutionaries' arrest. Wagner had to flee, first visiting Paris and then settling in Zürich where he at first took refuge with a friend, Alexander Müller.