Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard (1813–1883)

This portrait of German opera composer Richard Wagner is by an unknown artist. Of Wagner's few purely instrumental compositions, only the Siegfried Idyll is of note.

German opera composer. He revolutionized the 19th-century idea of opera, seeing it as a wholly new art form in which musical, poetic, and scenic elements should come together through such devices as the leitmotif. His operas include Tannhäuser (1845) Lohengrin (1850), and Tristan und Isolde (1865). In 1872 he founded the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth; his masterpiece Der Ring des Nibelungen/The Ring of the Nibelung, a sequence of four operas, was first performed there in 1876. His last work, Parsifal, was produced in 1882.

Wagner's early career was as director of the Magdeburg Theatre, where he unsuccessfully produced his first opera Das Liebesverbot/Forbidden Love (1836). He lived in Paris in 1839–42 and conducted the Dresden Opera House in 1842–48. He fled Germany to escape arrest for his part in the 1848 revolution, but in 1861 was allowed to return. He won the favour of Ludwig II of Bavaria in 1864 and was thus able to set up the Festival Theatre. The Bayreuth tradition was continued by his wife Cosima (1837–1930 (Franz Liszt's daughter), whom he married after her divorce from Hans von Bülow); by his son Siegfried Wagner (1869–1930), a composer of operas such as Der Bärenhäuter; and by later descendants.

Wagner's father was a clerk to the Leipzig city police; he died six months after Wagner's birth. Wagner's mother moved to Dresden and married the actor and painter Ludwig Geyer in 1815, who in turn died in 1821. Wagner learnt the piano but tried to read vocal scores of operas instead of practising and also learnt about opera from two elder sisters who were both stage singers. He wrote poems and a tragedy at the age of about 13, and at 14 went to school at Leipzig, to where the family had returned. There he heard Beethoven's works and tried to imitate them in compositions of his own.

In 1830 Heinrich Dorn conducted Wagner's overture Columbus in the theatre, but it was received with scorn as a very crude work. He then studied harmony and counterpoint with Christian Weinlig at St Thomas's School and entered the university in 1831. He became chorus master at the theatre of Würzburg in 1833 and gained much valuable theatrical experience. He wrote two more operas and held a series of posts at Magdeburg, Königsberg, and Riga.

In November 1836 Wagner married Minna Planer (1809–1866), who was an actress. In 1839 he decided to go to Paris by sea. The very stormy voyage took Wagner and his wife three and a half weeks, and was the inspiration for Der fliegende Holländer/The Flying Dutchman (1843). Until April 1842 their time in Paris was spent in wretched poverty, but Wagner, in such time as he could spare from hack work, had managed to finish both Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer, the former of which had been accepted by Dresden and was produced there in October 1842. Rienzi finds Wagner attempting the contemporary grand opera of Giacomo Meyerbeer, a composer he affected to despise. The opera was Wagner's first major success with the public and was followed a few months later by Der fliegende Holländer. Although less immediately popular it shows for the first time Wagner's individual voice as a composer; the evocation of stormy seas and the sense of impending doom are particularly effective.

In 1843 Wagner was appointed second conductor at the court opera. Tannhäuser was finished in April 1845 and produced in October. The lifelong theme of the conflict between sacred and profane love is used very powerfully in this opera. The spiritual side of the issue was portrayed in Lohengrin (1845–48). Wagner showed sympathy with the liberal ideas of the French Revolution, and gradually became a political agitator. A warrant for his arrest was issued in 1849. He fled to Franz Liszt in Weimar and then on to Switzerland. Liszt performed Lohengrin in Weimar in 1850, and began a Wagner movement in Germany. Wagner was unable to attend performances because of the threat of being arrested. He worked in Zürich on the libretti and music for the Ring des Nibelungen cycle. The text was completed by 1853 and Wagner began composing the prologue Das Rheingold in the same year. The music of the first scene, set at the bottom of the Rhine River, shows the composer's genius for creating convincing sound worlds.

Composition of the Ring was interrupted by work on Tristan und Isolde, written under the influence of Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a friend and benefactor, with whom he fell deeply in love. In 1858 Minna confronted Wagner and Mathilde; the latter decided to stay with her husband, and Wagner went to Venice and later to Lucerne, where Tristan was finished in August 1859. In 1860 a revised version of Tannhäuser, with a ballet, was commissioned by the Paris Opéra. Wagner complied so far as his artistic conscience would let him. It was not enough for the patrons, and they made sure the work failed disastrously. Wagner next went to Vienna, where Lohengrin and Der fliegende Holländer were successfully performed. He returned to Paris and began work on Die Meistersinger von Nürmberg/The Mastersingers of Nürmberg. He moved again to Vienna and stayed there until March 1864, when he was pursued by his creditors and threatened with imprisonment. At the critical moment he was invited by Ludwig II of Bavaria to join his court at Munich as friend and artistic adviser, and he made sure that Hans von Bülow was appointed conductor. Bülow's wife, Cosima and Wagner soon fell deeply in love. This created a scandal that was fully exploited by his enemies, the courtiers and officials who feared his influence on the youthful and idealistic king. Soon after the production of Tristan in June 1865, Wagner had to go into exile once more. Tristan was an immensely influential work, and an enduringly great piece of music in its own right. Wagner extended chromaticism and modulatory devices to new heights in this opera in order to portray the love of his leading characters, a love that transcends all human passion by its awareness of mortality: the belief that fulfilment can be found only in death.

Tristan's opposite is found in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (first performed in 1868), a partly autobiographical comedy in which a romantic hero and a profound poet combine to confound their enemies. While composing Meistersinger, Wagner moved to Tribschen on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, where Cosima joined him in March 1866. Bülow divorced her in 1870 and she married Wagner, whose first wife, Minna, had died in January 1866. After the production of Die Meistersinger on 21 June 1868 at Munich, Wagner quietly continued work on the Ring cycle, dropped so many years before, and planned a festival theatre to be erected by subscription at Bayreuth in Bavaria. The family took a house there in 1874; rehearsals began the following year, and the four works were performed in August 1876. (Das Rheingold and Die Walküre had already been given in Munich, against Wagner's wishes, in 1869–70.) Although Wagner was dissatisfied with some aspects of the Bayreuth Ring, his genius as a composer and dramatist was justified. The immensely complex musical and moral strands of the Ring are brought together in the final opera, Götterdämmerung (1876); drama on a vast scale is matched by a constantly allusive orchestral accompaniment through the use of leitmotifs. Wagner's creative testament came with Parsifal in which his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (‘complete art work’), was further refined. Wagner was heavily influenced by the ideas expounded in the book The World as Will and Idea by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

By the time of his death in 1883 Wagner's influence had already spread throughout the musical world and far beyond; his belief in music drama as a combination of all the arts represents his idea of Romantic philosophy. In recent times, his influence can particularly be seen in film.

Works Opera Die Hochzeit (unfinished), Die Feen (composed 1833; produced 1888), Das Liebesverbot (1836), Rienzi (1842), Der fliegende Holländer/The Flying Dutchman (1843), Tannhäuser (1845), Lohengrin (1850), Tristan und Isolde (1865), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg/The Mastersingers of Nürnberg (1868), Der Ring des Nibelungen/The Ring of the Nibelung, comprising Das Rheingold (1853–54), Die Walküre (1870), Siegfried (1876) and Götterdämmerung (1876), Parsifal (1882).

Orchestral symphonies, nine concert overtures (two unpublished), including Eine Faust Ouvertüre (after Goethe), three marches for orchestra, Siegfried Idyll for small orchestra (1870); several choral works.

Songs seven from Goethe's Faust, five poems by Mathilde Wesendonck (1857–58) and six settings of French poems.