Richard Wagner

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Wagner was born on the 22nd of May 1813 in Leipzig, in the Jewish quarter of the city, at a house known as the House of the Red and White Lions. His father died of typhoid fever just six months after his birth. His mother then moved in with an actor and playwright named Ludwig Geyer, and Wagner grew up believing Geyer was his biological father. Until the age of fourteen, he was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer.

  Geyer brought the theatre into the household, and the boy performed in his stepfather's productions. At nine years old, Wagner was so struck by Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz that he watched Weber himself conduct it. By his early teens, he had drafted a tragedy called Leubald, influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe, and he persuaded his family to fund music lessons so he could set it to music.

  What followed was a life of extraordinary creative ambition and extraordinary personal turbulence. Wagner would go on to compose operas unlike anything written before, design his own opera house to his own specifications, fall in and out of exile, accumulate debts that haunted him across three decades, and generate ideas about music, drama, and German identity that artists and thinkers are still arguing about today. Why did he insist on writing both the words and the music for every stage work? What did he mean by a "total work of art"? And how did a composer declared a genius by some and a disease by others come to cast such a long shadow over the 20th century?

• 2. The Debt-Haunted Early Years

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  Wagner's earliest complete opera, Die Feen, was written in 1833 when he was twenty years old, but it went unperformed until after his death, premiering in Munich in 1883. His next substantial work, Das Liebesverbot, was staged in Magdeburg in 1836 and closed before a second performance could take place, leaving the company that employed him in financial ruin and Wagner himself in bankruptcy.

  It was in Magdeburg that he fell for Christine Wilhelmine Planer, a leading actress known as Minna, and he followed her to Königsberg when the theatre collapsed. They married in Tragheim Church on the 24th of November 1836. Within months, Minna left him for another man. Wagner followed her again, took a job as music director in Riga, and the two eventually reconciled.

  By 1839 the debts had grown so large that they fled Riga to escape creditors. The sea voyage to London was so stormy that Wagner drew on its drama for his opera Der fliegende Holländer. When the couple settled in Paris in September 1839, Wagner scraped by writing articles and short prose pieces, including A Pilgrimage to Beethoven, a sketch that outlined his emerging idea of music drama. He also arranged other composers' operas for the Schlesinger publishing house. Debts, he would later note, plagued him for most of his life.

  His fortunes shifted in 1842 when Rienzi, his fourth opera and his first to be successfully staged, was accepted by the Dresden Court Theatre with the strong backing of Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wagner's relief at leaving Paris was raw: in his "Autobiographic Sketch" of that year, he wrote that on seeing the Rhine for the first time, he wept and swore fidelity to his German homeland. Rienzi opened on the 20th of October 1842 to considerable acclaim, and Wagner was appointed Royal Saxon Court Conductor in Dresden.

• 3. Revolution and Exile

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  Dresden gave Wagner stability but not complacency. He mixed in political circles, receiving the conductor and radical editor August Röckel and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin at his home. He was also drawn to the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Ludwig Feuerbach. When the May Uprising of 1849 broke out in Dresden, Wagner played a minor supporting role. Warrants were issued for the arrest of the revolutionaries, and he had to flee.

  He spent the next twelve years in exile, first in Zürich. The isolation was extreme. His opera Lohengrin, completed before the uprising, was staged by Franz Liszt in Weimar in August 1850, while Wagner remained banned from Germany. A small pension from Julie Ritter, wife of his friend Karl Ritter, kept him afloat from 1850 until 1859.

  Exile turned out to be the most intellectually productive period of his career. Between 1849 and 1852, he published a series of essays that redefined what opera could be. "The Artwork of the Future" (1849) laid out his vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art in which music, poetry, dance, and visual staging would be fused into one. "Opera and Drama" (1851) described the new aesthetic he was using to construct Der Ring des Nibelungen. He published "Judaism in Music" (1850), the first of his writings to express explicitly antisemitic views, arguing that Jewish composers were incapable of producing genuine art and could only produce shallow imitations.

  In a 1851 essay titled "A Communication to My Friends", Wagner publicly announced his ambition to present the Ring cycle across three evenings and a prelude at a specially appointed festival. It would take him over twenty years to bring that plan to life.

• 4. The Gesamtkunstwerk in Practice

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  Wagner did not simply theorise about the total work of art. He built it, opera by opera, across a span of decades. The Ring cycle took 26 years from the first libretto draft in 1848 to the completion of Götterdämmerung in 1874. It runs approximately 15 hours in performance and is the only work of that scale regularly staged on opera house programmes worldwide.

  His compositional method was unusual from the start. Unlike most opera composers, who handed the writing of the libretto to a specialist, Wagner wrote his own texts for every stage work, calling them "poems" rather than libretti. The drama in his mature works unfolds as a continuous sung narrative, with the music growing organically from the words rather than alternating between separate arias and recitatives.

  The leitmotif was his central tool. These were musical phrases tied to specific characters, places, ideas, or plot developments; they could be developed, combined, and transformed as the drama evolved. Harold C. Schonberg wrote that Wagner "made the orchestra an equal partner in the drama" and that psychological shifts in character, motivation, love, and hatred are all explained in the orchestral writing rather than in the sung text alone.

  Tristan und Isolde, composed between 1857 and 1859, pushed this language further than any of his predecessors had attempted. Schonberg observed that its opening chords were to the last half of the 19th century what Beethoven's Eroica and Ninth Symphonies had been to the first half: a breakaway, a new concept. Harmonic relations in Tristan are pushed, as Schonberg put it, to their breaking point, and 20th-century scholars traced in the opera the beginnings of atonality. The so-called Tristan chord, in the first bars of the prelude, is cited by some music historians as the opening moment of modern classical music.

  Philosophy fed the music. In 1854, his poet friend Georg Herwegh introduced Wagner to Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. Wagner later called this the most important event of his life. Schopenhauer held that music was the supreme art form, a direct expression of the world's blind impulsive will. Wagner scholars have argued this shifted his thinking: in his later operas, music commands the drama rather than serving it.

• 5. King Ludwig and Munich

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  Wagner's fortunes were transformed in 1864 when King Ludwig II succeeded to the throne of Bavaria at eighteen. The young king, who had grown up devoted to Wagner's operas, summoned the composer to Munich and settled his considerable debts. Ludwig proposed to stage Tristan, Die Meistersinger, the Ring, and all the other works Wagner had planned. At Ludwig's request, Wagner also began dictating his autobiography, Mein Leben.

  Tristan und Isolde had spent years developing a reputation as impossible to sing. It premiered at the National Theatre Munich on the 10th of June 1865, the first Wagner opera premiere in almost fifteen years. The premiere had been delayed from its scheduled date in May by bailiffs acting for Wagner's creditors, and also because the soprano singing Isolde, Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, was hoarse and needed time to recover. Hans von Bülow conducted.

  Bülow's wife, Cosima, had by that time given birth to a daughter Wagner had fathered, a child named Isolde. Cosima was 24 years younger than Wagner. She was herself the illegitimate daughter of the Countess Marie d'Agoult, who had left her husband for Franz Liszt. Liszt initially disapproved of his daughter's involvement with Wagner, though the two men remained friends.

  The affair scandalised Munich. Wagner also fell out of favour with court members suspicious of his influence over the king. In December 1865, Ludwig was forced to ask the composer to leave. Wagner was later installed at the Villa Tribschen, beside Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Minna died of a heart attack on the 25th of January 1866 in Dresden. Wagner did not attend the funeral. Cosima and Bülow's divorce was finalised by a Berlin court on the 18th of July 1870. Wagner and Cosima married on the 25th of August 1870. On Christmas Day of that year, Wagner arranged the premiere of the Siegfried Idyll as a surprise for Cosima's birthday.

• 6. Bayreuth

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  In 1871, Wagner chose Bayreuth as the site for his own dedicated opera house. The town council donated a large plot of land known as the Green Hill. The foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus was laid after the Wagners moved to the town the following year. Wagner had initially announced the first festival for 1873, but King Ludwig declined to finance the project and the building was delayed. By the spring of 1873, Wagner societies formed in several German cities had raised only a third of the required funds. Early in 1874, with the project on the verge of collapse, Ludwig relented and provided a loan.

  The family home, Wahnfried, was completed in time for them to move in on the 18th of April 1874. Commenting on the struggle to build the theatre, Wagner told Cosima: "Each stone is red with my blood and yours."

  For the Festspielhaus design, Wagner drew on ideas from Gottfried Semper, his former colleague from Dresden who had also been consulted on an earlier Munich proposal. Among Wagner's theatrical innovations at Bayreuth were darkening the auditorium during performances, and lowering the orchestra into a pit hidden from the audience, to immerse the listener in the drama rather than remind them of its machinery.

  The theatre opened on the 13th of August 1876 with Das Rheingold, and the 1876 Bayreuth Festival presented the first complete Ring cycle as Wagner had intended, in three full cycles conducted by Hans Richter. Attendees included Kaiser Wilhelm I, the Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, Anton Bruckner, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg thought the work divinely composed; the French newspaper Le Figaro called it the dream of a lunatic.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, who had been part of Wagner's inner circle and had published a eulogistic essay on Wagner before the festival, was bitterly disappointed. He believed Wagner had surrendered to exclusivist German nationalism. Their breach began that year. The festival closed with a deficit of about 150,000 marks.

• 7. Controversy and Legacy

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  Wagner republished his 1850 pamphlet "Judaism in Music" under his own name in 1869, extending it with new material. Public protests broke out at early performances of Die Meistersinger in Vienna and Mannheim in response. Late in his life, in the early 1880s, he developed a friendship with the racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, though the two disagreed; Gobineau saw humanity's decline as irreversible, while Wagner maintained in his 1881 essay "Know Thyself" that humanity could be united through self-knowledge and cultural renewal beyond biological racial distinctions.

  Adolf Hitler visited Bayreuth frequently from 1923 onwards. In a 1922 speech he described Wagner's works as glorifying the heroic Teutonic nature. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married Wagner's daughter Eva in 1908, wrote The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a text approved by the Nazi movement. Research has indicated it is possible that Wagner's music was used at Dachau in 1933-1934 to "reeducate" political prisoners. There is no credible evidence it was played at Nazi death camps, and one scholar, Pamela Potter, has noted that Wagner's music was explicitly off-limits in the camps. Because of these associations, the performance of his music in the State of Israel has been a source of ongoing controversy.

  Yet the range of artists shaped by Wagner runs far beyond any single tradition. Anton Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, César Franck, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, and Arnold Schoenberg all reckoned with his work. The harmonic revolutions of Debussy and Schoenberg have often been traced back to Tristan and Parsifal. Among literary figures, the poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé worshipped Wagner. Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust were heavily influenced by him. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land contains lines from Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung. W. H. Auden once called Wagner perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived.

  His leitmotif technique passed directly into film scoring. The critic Theodor Adorno noted that the Wagnerian leitmotif leads directly to cinema music, where it allows an audience to orient itself around characters and situations. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Looney Tunes short What's Opera, Doc? both use the Ride of the Valkyries. Even Joey DeMaio of the band Manowar has described Wagner as the father of heavy metal.

  Wagner completed Parsifal in January 1882 and conducted the final performance of its premiere run on the 29th of August, stepping into the pit unseen and taking the baton from Hermann Levi. He died of a heart attack on the 13th of February 1883 at Ca' Vendramin Calergi, a 16th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice. A funerary gondola carried his remains over the canal before his body was transported to Germany and buried in the garden of Wahnfried in Bayreuth, the city he had built to house his life's work.