Composer
Richard Wagner
Opera stretched to its most ambitious, continuous, and influential extreme.
Richard Wagner treated opera as something closer to total, continuous musical drama than a sequence of separate arias and recitatives, and pursued that vision at an almost unmatched scale - his four-opera Ring Cycle runs roughly fifteen hours across four full evenings, telling a single continuous mythological story.
Life in brief
Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813 and was largely self-taught as a composer. His early career was a struggle: he worked as a conductor in provincial theaters, ran up debts, and in 1839 fled his creditors in Riga on a storm-tossed sea voyage that helped inspire The Flying Dutchman. His opera Rienzi (1842) finally brought success, and he became a court conductor in Dresden.
In 1849 he took part in a failed revolutionary uprising in Dresden and had to flee to Switzerland, where he spent more than a decade in exile. His friend Liszt premiered Lohengrin in Weimar in 1850 while Wagner was still banned from Germany. In exile he wrote essays setting out his ideas - including the Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art," uniting music, poetry, and stagecraft - and began the Ring.
In 1864 the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria, an ardent admirer, paid off his debts and became his patron. Wagner's personal life remained turbulent: he began an affair with Cosima von Bülow, Liszt's daughter and the wife of the conductor who premiered Tristan und Isolde, and married her in 1870. With Ludwig's support he built his own festival theater in Bayreuth, which opened in 1876 with the first complete Ring. He died in Venice in 1883. The Bayreuth Festival, still run by his descendants, performs only his operas.
Music and style
His most consequential technical contribution is the leitmotif: a short musical theme tied to a specific character, object, or idea, woven throughout a score and transformed as the story develops. That technique traveled directly into 20th-century film scoring - composers like John Williams use it constantly, in a direct, traceable line back to Wagner's operas.
Wagner's music flows continuously rather than stopping for applause, with the orchestra carrying much of the drama. His opera Tristan und Isolde opens with a famously unresolved chord (the "Tristan chord") that many historians treat as a pivotal moment in the slow erosion of traditional tonal harmony, opening a path that would eventually lead to Schoenberg's break from tonality altogether decades later.
Key works
- The Flying Dutchman (1843) - a ghost ship and a cursed captain.
- Lohengrin (1850) - home of the Bridal Chorus ("Here Comes the Bride").
- Tristan und Isolde (1865) - an opera of overwhelming love and longing.
- Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868) - his one mature comedy.
- Der Ring des Nibelungen - four operas: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre (with the "Ride of the Valkyries"), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.
- Parsifal (1882) - his final, spiritual music drama.
- Siegfried Idyll (1870) - a tender orchestral piece written as a birthday present for Cosima.
A troubling legacy
Wagner's influence on later music is almost impossible to overstate: Mahler, Richard Strauss, and generations of opera and film composers built on his harmony, orchestration, and dramatic methods, while others, such as Debussy, defined themselves against him. But he was also a virulent antisemite who published hateful essays, and decades after his death his music and his family's festival were embraced by Hitler and the Nazi regime. Many listeners and performers still wrestle with how to separate the music from the man; in Israel, his music is still rarely performed in public.
Where to start listening: the "Ride of the Valkyries" from the Ring Cycle is Wagner's most recognizable excerpt; the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde rewards a slower, more patient listen. The Siegfried Idyll shows his gentlest side.