Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig on 22 May 1813, a few months before the great Battle of the Nations between Napoleon and the Allies around the city. His father died soon after, and his mother married the actor and painter Ludwig Geyer. Richard grew up in a theatrical milieu: several of his sisters became actresses or singers. At first he was passionate about literature and theatre, Shakespeare and Greek tragedy, and at fifteen wrote an enormous tragedy. It was on discovering Beethoven, especially Fidelio and the Ninth Symphony, that he decided to become a composer.

He learned music largely on his own, then studied composition in Leipzig with Christian Theodor Weinlig. From 1833 he was chorus master and then conductor in small German theatres: Würzburg, Magdeburg, Königsberg, Riga. In 1836 he married the actress Minna Planer. Riddled with debt, he fled Riga in 1839 with Minna and their dog. The crossing to London on a small sailing ship, caught in a violent storm, later inspired The Flying Dutchman. He then spent three years of poverty in Paris.

In 1842 his opera Rienzi was a great success in Dresden, and the following year Wagner was appointed Kapellmeister to the Saxon court. There he premiered The Flying Dutchman (1843) and Tannhäuser (1845) and composed Lohengrin. But in 1849 he took an active part in the revolutionary uprising in Dresden alongside the Russian anarchist Bakunin. Wanted by the police, he had to flee into exile in Zurich, Switzerland. It was his friend Liszt who premiered Lohengrin in Weimar in 1850, in the composer’s absence.

In exile Wagner wrote many essays on art, developing his idea of the “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk), uniting poetry, music, drama and stage design. He wanted to replace traditional opera, with its separate arias, with a continuous “music drama” in which the orchestra plays an essential role. He used the leitmotif, a short musical motif associated with a character, object or idea, which returns and is transformed throughout the work. In 1853 he began the music of The Ring of the Nibelung, a cycle of four operas inspired by Germanic and Norse myths.

He interrupted this work to compose Tristan und Isolde, inspired partly by his love for Mathilde Wesendonck, wife of a wealthy patron. The work, with its chromatic harmonies that seem never to resolve, overturned musical language. But Wagner, always in debt, was on the brink of ruin. In 1864 the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria, aged eighteen and passionate about his music, summoned him to Munich, paid his debts and became his patron. Tristan was premiered in Munich in 1865, followed by Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 1868.

Wagner then had an affair with Cosima, Liszt’s daughter and wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow, his most loyal interpreter. The scandal forced him to leave Munich. He settled at Tribschen in Switzerland, where he married Cosima in 1870; for her birthday he composed the Siegfried Idyll, played as a surprise one morning on the staircase of their house. He dreamed of a theatre built specially for his works. With the support of Ludwig II and subscribers, he had the Festspielhaus built at Bayreuth in Bavaria, with the orchestra hidden beneath the stage.

The theatre opened in August 1876 with the first complete performance of The Ring of the Nibelung, about fifteen hours of music over four evenings, before the German emperor and musicians from all over the world. Wagner then composed Parsifal, premiered at Bayreuth in 1882. He died of a heart attack in Venice on 13 February 1883. His work profoundly transformed music, but his antisemitic writings, and later the Nazi regime’s use of his music, make him a highly controversial figure. The Bayreuth Festival still takes place today.