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RICHARD WAGNER

22nd May 1813 --- 13th February 1883

Richard Wagner(born 1813, Leipzig--died 1883, Venice), German dramatic composer and theorist whose operas and music
had a revolutionary  influence on the course  of Western music,  either by  extension of  his discoveries  or reaction against
them. Among his major works are The Flying Dutchman (1843),  Tannhäuser (1845), Lohengrin (1850),  Tristan und Isolde
(1865), Parsifal (1882), and his great tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelung (1869-76)

The artistic  and theatrical  background of Wagner's  early years  (several elder sisters became  opera singers or actresses)
was a main  formative influence.  Impulsive and self-willed,  he was a negligent scholar  at the Kreuzschule, Dresden,  and
the Nicholaischule,  Leipzig.  He frequented concerts,  however,  taught  himself the  piano and  composition,  and read the
plays of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller. Wagner, attracted by the glamour of student life, enrolled at Leipzig University
but as an adjunct  with inferior privileges,  since he had not completed his preparatory schooling.  Although he lived wildly
he applied himself earnestly to composition.  Because of his impatience with all academic techniques,  he spent a mere six
months  acquiring  a groundwork  with Theodor Weinlig,  cantor of  the Thomasschule,  but his  real schooling  was a close
personal study  of the scores of the masters,  notably the quartets  and symphonies of Beethoven.  His own Symphony in C
Major was performed at the  Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts in 1833.  He left the university that year,  he spent the summer
as operatic coach at the Würzburg,  where he composed his first opera, Die Feen (The Fairies),  based on a fantastic tale by
Carlo Gozzi.  He failed  to get the  opera produced  at Leipzig  and became conductor to a provincial  theatrical troupe  from
Magdeburg,  having fallen in love with one of the actresses of the troupe,  Wilhelmine (Minna) Planer,  whom he married in
1836.  The single performance of his  second opera,  Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love),  after Shakespeare's  Measure for
Measure, was a disaster.

In 1839, fleeing from his creditors,  he decided to put into operation his long-cherished plan to win renown in Paris, but his
three years in Paris were calamitous.  Despite a recommendation from the influential gallicized German composer Giacomo
Meyerbeer, Wagner could not break into the closed circle at the Opéra. Living with a colony of poor German artists,  he had
staved off starvation by  means of musical journalism and hackwork. Nevertheless,  1840 he completed Rienzi after Bulwer
Lytton's novel, and in 1841 he then composed his first representative opera, Der fliegende Holländer, The Flying Dutchman
based on the legend about a ship's captain condemned to sail forever.

In 1842, aged 29, he gladly returned to Dresden,  where Rienzi was triumphantly performed on October 20.  The next year
The Flying Dutchman (produced at Dresden,  Jan. 2, 1843) was less successful,  since the audience  expected a work in the
French-Italian tradition similar to Rienzi,  and was puzzled by the innovative way the new opera integrated the music with
the dramatic content. But Wagner was appointed conductor of the court opera a post that he held until 1849. On Oct. 19th
1845,  Tannhäuser (based,  like all his  future works,  on Germanic legends)  was coolly received  but soon proved a steady
attraction, after this, each new work achieved public popularity despite persistent hostility from many critics.

The refusal of the court opera authorities in Dresden to stage his next opera, Lohengrin,  was not based on artistic reasons
rather,  they were alienated  by Wagner's  projected administrative  and artistic reforms.  His proposals  would have taken
control of the opera away from the court and created a national theatre whose productions would be chosen by a union of
dramatists and composers.  Preoccupied with ideas  of social  Steveneneration,  he then  became embroiled in  the German
revolution of 1848-49.  Wagner wrote  a number  of articles  advocating revolution and  took an active part  in the Dresden
uprising of 1849. When the uprising failed, a warrant was issued for his arrest and he fled from Germany,  unable to attend
the first performance of Lohengrin at Weimar, given by his friend Franz Liszt on Aug. 28, 1850.

For the next 15 years Wagner was not to present any further new works. Until 1858 he lived in Zürich, composing,  writing
treatises,  and conducting  (he directed the  London Philharmonic  concerts in 1855).  Having already  studied the Siegfried
legend and also the Norse myths as a possible basis for new opera's and having written an operatic "poem," Siegfrieds Tod
(Siegfried's Death),  in which  he conceived  of Siegfried  as  the new  type of man who  would emerge  after the successful
revolution he hoped for,  he now wrote a number of prose volumes on revolution, social and artistic.  From 1849 to 1852 he
produced his  basic prose works,  Die Kunst und die Revolution  (Art and Revolution),  Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft  (The Art
Work of the Future),  Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde (A Communication to My Friends), and Oper und Drama (Opera and
Drama). The latter outlined as a new and revolutionary type of musical stage work--the vast work, in fact, on which he was
engaged.  By 1852 he had added to the poem of Siegfrieds  Tod three others to precede it,  the whole being called  Der Ring
des Nibelungen  (The Ring of the Nibelung)  and providing the basis for  a tetralogy of  musical dramas,  Das Rheingold (The
Rhinegold),  Die Walküre (The Valkyrie),  Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried), later called simply Siegfried, and Siegfrieds
Tod (Siegfried's Death), later called Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods).

What the Ring reveals Wagner's mature style and method, to which he had found his way at last during the period when his
thought was  devoted to social questions.  Looking forward to the  imminent creation of a socialist state,  he prophesied the
disappearance of opera  as artificial entertainment for an elite,  the emergence of a new kind of  musical stage work  for the
people,  expressing the self-realization of free humanity.  A new work was later to be called "music drama,"  though Wagner
never used this term, preferring drama.

Wagner's new art  form would be a poetic  drama that  should find full  expression as a musical  drama when it  was set to a
continuous vocal-symphonic texture. This texture would be woven from basic thematic ideas,  which Wagner called motives
but which have come  to be also known by the term  invented by one of his disciples  "leading motives"  (German Leitmotive
singular Leitmotiv). These would arise naturally as expressive vocal phrases sung by characters  and would be developed by
the orchestra as "reminiscences" to express the dramatic and psychological development.

This conception found full embodiment in The Ring, except that the leading motives did not always arise as vocal utterances
but were  often introduced  by the  orchestra to  portray characters,  emotions,  or events in the drama.  With his  use of this
method,  Wagner rose immediately to his amazing full stature: his style became unified and deepened immeasurably, and he
was able to fill his works from  end to end with intensely characteristic music.  Except for moments in The Rhinegold,  his old
weaknesses, formal and stylistic, vanished altogether, and with them disappeared the last vestiges of the old opera. By 1857
his style had been  enriched by the stimulus of  Liszt's tone poems  and their new harmonic subtleties,  and he had composed
The Rhinegold,  The Valkyrie, and two acts of Siegfried.  He now suspended work on The Ring,  the impossibility  of mounting
this colossus within  the foreseeable  future was  enforcing a stalemate on his career  and led him to project a  "normal" work
capable of immediate production. Also with his optimistic social  philosophy had yielded to a metaphysical,  world renouncing
pessimism, nurtured by  his discovery of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.  The outcome was Tristan und Isolde  (1857
-1859) of which the  crystallizing agent was his hopeless  love for Mathilde Wesendonk (the wife of a rich patron),  which led
to separation from his wife, Minna.

Because of the Wesendonk affair,  life in Zürich had become too embarrassing, and Wagner completed  Tristan in Venice and
Lucerne, Switz. The work revealed a new subtlety in his use of leading motives,  which in The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie he
had used mainly to explain the action of the drama.  The impact of Schopenhauer's theory of the supremacy of music among
the arts led him  to tilt the expressive balance  of musical drama more  toward music,  the leading motives  ceased to remain
neatly  identifiable with their  dramatic sources but  worked  with greater  psychological  complexity,  in the  manner  of free
association.

In 1859 Wagner went to Paris, where,  the following year,  productions of a revised version of Tannhäuser were fiascoes, but
in 1861 an amnesty allowed him to return to Germany,  from there he went to Vienna, where he heard Lohengrin for the first
time. He remained in Vienna for about a year,  then travelled widely as a conductor and awaited a projected production of his
Tristan.  When this work was not produced because the then artists were bewildered by its revolutionary stylistic innovations
Wagner began a second "normal" work,  the comedy-opera  Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nürnberg)
for which he incorporated  into his new conception of music drama certain of the old "operatic" elements.  By 1864,  however
his expenditure on a grand scale and inveterate habit  of borrowing and living on others had brought him to financial disaster
he had to  flee from Vienna  to avoid imprisonment for debt.  He arrived  in Stuttgart without a penny,  a man of 51 without a
future, almost at the end of his tether.

Something like a miracle saved him. He had always made loyal friends, owing to his own fascinating personality, his manifest
genius, and his artistic integrity,  and now a new friend of the highest influence came to his rescue. In 1864 Louis II,  a youth
of 18, had ascended the throne of Bavaria, he was a fanatical admirer of Wagner's art and,  having read the poem of The Ring
(published the year before with a plea for financial support), invited Wagner to complete the work in Munich.

The King had set him up in a villa, and during  the next six years there  were successful Munich productions  of all of Wagner's
representative works to date,  including the first  performances of Tristan  (1865),  The Mastersingers  (1868),  The Rhinegold
(1869),  and The Valkyrie (1870),  the first  two directed by  the great  Wagner  conductor Hans von Bülow.  Initially at  a new
theatre at Munich was projected for this purpose, also with a music school attached,  but this came to nothing  because of the
opposition aroused by Wagner's way of living. Not only did he constantly run into debt, despite his princely salary, but he also
attempted to interfere in the government of the kingdom,  in addition,  he became the lover of von Bülow's wife,  Cosima,  the
daughter of Liszt.  She had bore him three children Isolde,  Eva,  and Siegfried before her divorce in 1870 and  her marriage to
Wagner in the same year.  For all these reasons,  Wagner thought it advisable  to leave Munich as early as 1865,  but he never
forfeited the friendship of the King, who set him up at Triebschen on the Lake of Lucerne.

In 1869 Wagner had resumed work on The Ring which he now brought to its world-renouncing conclusion. It had been agreed
with the King  that the tetralogy  should be first performed in its entirety at Munich,  Wagner broke the agreement,  convinced
that a new type of  theatre must be built for the purpose.  Having discovered a suitable site at  the Bavarian town  of Bayreuth
he toured Germany, conducting concerts to raise funds and encouraging the formation of societies to support the plan,  and in
1872 the foundation stone was laid.  In 1874 Wagner  moved into  a house at Bayreuth that he called Wahnfried  ("Peace from
Illusion"). The whole vast project was eventually realized, that was in spite of enormous artistic, administrative,  and financial
difficulties. The King, who had provided Wahnfried for Wagner, contributed a substantial sum, and mortgages were raised that
were later paid off by the royalties.  The Ring received its triumphant  first complete performance in  the new  Festspielhaus at
Bayreuth on August. 13th, 14th, 16th, and 17th, 1876.

Wagner spent  the rest of his  life at Wahnfried,  making a visit to  London in 1877  to give  a successful series of  concerts and
then making several to Italy. During these years he composed his last work, the sacred festival drama Parsifal,  begun in 1877
and produced at Bayreuth in 1882,  he also  dictated to his wife  his autobiography,  Mein Leben (My Life),  begun in  1865.  He
died of heart failure at the  height of his fame,  and was buried  in the grounds  of Wahnfried in  the tomb he  himself prepared.
Since then, except for  interruptions caused by World Wars I and II,  the Festspielhaus has staged yearly  festivals of Wagner's
works.

Wagner's single-handed creation of his own type of musical  drama was a fantastic accomplishment,  considering the scale and
scope of his art. His method was to condense all the confused  mass of material at his disposal and the  innumerable conflicting
versions of the legend chosen as a basis into a taut dramatic scheme. In this scheme, as in his model, the Oresteia of Aeschylus
the stage events  are few but crucial,  the main part of the action being  devoted to working out of the  character's motivations.

In setting the poem he used his mastery of construction on the largest scale, which he had learned from studying Beethoven, to
keep the broad outlines very clear  while he consistently  developed the leading  motives to mirror  every shifting  nuance of the
psychological situation.  Criticism of these motives  as arbitrary,  factual labels  shows a misunderstanding of Wagner.  He called
them "carriers of the feeling,"  and,  owing to their  essentially emotional character,  their pliability,  and Wagner's  resource in a
alternating, transforming, and combining them, they function as subtle expressions of the changing feelings behind the dramatic
symbols.

The result of these methods  was a new art form,  of which the distinguishing  feature was a profound  and complex symbolism
working on  three indivisible planes  dramatic,  verbal,  and  musical.  The vital  significance  of this  symbolism  that  has  been
increasingly realized.  The common theme of all his  mature works,  except  The Mastersingers,  is the  romantic concept  of the
"redemption through love" but this element, used rather naively in the three early operas, became, in the later musical dramas
a mere catalyst for  much deeper complexes of ideas.  In The Ring there are at least five  interwoven strands of  overt meaning
concerned with German nationalism, international Socialism, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Buddhism,  and Christianity.  On
another level,  there is a prophetic treatment  of some  of the  themes of psychoanalysis,  a power complex  arising from sexual
inhibition, incest, mother fixation; and Oedipus complex.

Tristan stands in a  line of symbolism  extending from the themes of  "night"  and "death"  explored by such  German Romantic
poets as  Novalis (1772-1801),  through the Schopenhauerian  indictment of  life as an evil illusion and the  renunciation of the
will to live,  and the modern  psychological discovery of a  close connection between the erotic  desire and the death wish.  The
Mastersingers  stands apart  as a work in  which certain familiar  themes are treated  on a purely conscious  plane  with mellow
wisdom and humour,  the impulsiveness of  youth and the resignation of age,  the ecstasy of youthful  love,  the value  of music
itself as an art form.  In Wagner's last work,  Parsifal, the symbolism  returns on  a deeper level than before.  He has been much
criticized for this strongly personal treatment of a religious subject,  which mingles the concepts of sacred and profane love but
in the  light of later  explorations in  the field of  psychology with his insight into the  relationship between religious  and sexual
experience seems merely in advance of its time.  The themes of innocence and purity, sexual indulgence and suffering,  remorse
and the  sexual renunciation are  treated in Parsifal with a subtle  intensity and depth of compassion that probe  deeply into the
unconscious and make the opera in some ways the most visionary of all Wagner's works.

Wagner's influence,  as a  musical dramatist  and as a composer,  was a powerful one.  Although few operatic  composers have
been able to  follow him in  providing their  own librettos,  all have  profited from  his reform in  the matter  of giving  dramatic
depth, continuity, and cohesion to their works.

In the purely musical field,  Wagner's influence  was even more far reaching.  He developed  such a wide  expressive range that
he was able to make each of his works inhabit a unique emotional  world of its own, and, in doing so, he raised the melodic and
harmonic style of German music to what many regard as its highest emotional and sensuous intensity. Much of the subsequent
history, of music stems from him, either by extension of his discoveries or reaction against them.

Copyright 1994-1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated on 2020
By Steven Ritchie

And now for the Music

NEW (3044)"Spinning Song (from The Flying Dutchman)". Sequenced by R.Steven Ritchie.

(2537)"Tannhaeuser". Sequenced by R.Steven Ritchie.

NEW(3041)"Liebestod uit Tristan und Isolde". Sequenced by Robert Finley

NEW(3043)"Not sure of the name of this piece". Sequenced by Fabrizio Calzaretti

Thanks to Yu Nakajima for the music below. Email (GCD02321@nifty.ne.jp)

(2075)"Tannhaeuser Overture". Sequenced by Yu Nakajima

Thanks to Emily Gray for the music below. Email (HappyMusician@opendiary.com)

(1892)"Chorale from, Die Meistersinger". Sequenced by Emily Gray

NEW(3040)"Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla". Sequenced by Robert W. Losin

(756)"Siegfried's Funeral Music, Gotterdammerung Act.3". Sequenced by Robert W. Losin

(1491)"Siegfried's Rhine Journey". Sequenced by Robert W. Losin

(1490)"Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg". Sequenced by Dr.David Siu

(1493)"Traume". Sequenced by Ken Gilliland

(1492)"Overture to Tannhsuser und der Ssngerkrieg auf Wartburg". Sequenced by L.Roberts

(758)"Ride of the Valkyries". Sequenced by L.Roberts

NEW (3042)"Tristan und Isolde, Introduction". Sequencer Unknown

(1494)"Rienzi Overture (1840)". Sequencer Unknown

(759)"Meistersinger von Nürnberg". Sequencer Unknown

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