RICHARD WAGNER German Composer (1813-1883). Richard Wagner free midi download

RICHARD WAGNER
22^nd May 1813 --- 13^th 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 2021
By Steven Ritchie

And now for the Music

NEW (3466)"Die Meistersingers (Selection)". Sequenced by R.Steven Ritchie.

NEW (3450)"Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla". Sequenced by R.Steven Ritchie.

(3448)"Selection from Lohengrin". Sequenced by R.Steven Ritchie.

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

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

Thanks to Frank McCormick for the music below. Email (mcfrank @ interaccess com)

NEW (3447)"Descent to Nibelheim". Sequenced by Frank McCormick

Thanks to Reinhold Behringer for the music below.

NEW (3446)"Tristan, Siegfried, and Isolde". Sequenced by Reinhold Behringer

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

(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

Thanks to Robert W. Losin for the music below.

(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

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

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

(759)"Meistersinger von Nürnberg". Sequencer Unknown

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