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Richard Wagner
1813 – 1883
The greatest musical visionary of the 19th century, or an insatiable megalomaniac who didn't know when to stop?
Life and Music
- As a young boy, he showed so little aptitude for music that he was the only child in his family not to receive piano lessons - he taught himself in order to play through his beloved Weber's Der Freischutz.
- Wagner created some of the most sublime passages in all music. His vision of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk - a miraculous fusion of all the arts - was to resonate down the years, as was his use of leitmotifs, whereby certain characters and emotional states are characterised by specific musical ideas.
- Wagner's desire to create an uninterrupted flow of music necessitated a symphonic coherence previously considered alien to the opera house.
- If not for the intervention of King Ludwig II of Bavaria - then an admiring 18-year-old in awe of the composer who was 33 years his senior - Wagner may have floundered.
- Following an 1891 performance of Parsifal, the writer Mark Twain reflected: "The entire overture...was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightaway thereafter came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts."
- No other composer has divided 20th-century musical opinion to quite the same degree.
- Wagner has inspired a body of literature unparalleled in the history of music - his followers were busy producing volumes of the stuff even during his own lifetime.
- Wagner's followers continue to flock to the Festival Theatre at Bayreuth every year and his musical ideology has been embraced by many of the avant-garde as representing the true forward-looking spirit of his age.
- Even more contentious than Wagner's music were his beliefs - he held lofty ideals such as the unification of the nation through popular art while at the same time delighting in nationalism as a weapon of subjugation.
- Most extreme are Wagner's anti-Semitic declarations, found most famously in his article Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music), which do him no credit and, notoriously, led directly to Hitler's passionate espousal of his music - yet he enjoyed close friendships with colleagues of Jewish origin.
- Wagner was one of the most influential composers of all time. Whatever Wagner's limitations, it is difficult to take issue with the writer W.H. Hadow's assessment that "in the whole range of opera, there will be found no greater name than that of Wagner."
Did you know?
Wagner's masterpiece remains the Ring Cycle, which is made up of four different operas, which, if you sang all four of them back to back, would take you more than fifteen hours to complete.
