Read on for an introduction into the life and work of the composer Richard Wagner, whose operas – including the epic Ring cycle – brought hitherto undreamed-of musical and emotional drama into the form.
Who was Wagner?
Richard Wagner revolutionised opera during the 19th century with his theory of Gesamtkunstwerk – a music drama in which the music, poetry, and dramatic elements were completely inseparable. He popularised the use of leitmotifs – musical phrases which represented specific characters – wanting a listener to be able to hear the physical dramatic action in the orchestral score.
Which are Wagner’s best and most famous operas?
What are Wagner’s most famous works?
The composer’s most renowned works include, of course, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring Cycle). Completed in 1876, this was an epic story of a magic ring told in four full-length operas. These are Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), Die Walküre (The Valkyries), Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods).
Other famous Wagner works include Tristan und Isolde (1865). This was based on the classic tale of two lovers. Then there’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), a consummately beautiful comic opera explores the heart of the human soul.
Three of these works – Die Walküre (The Valkyries), Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – featured in our list of the 20 greatest operas ever written.
When and where was Wagner born?
Wagner was born in 1813 in Leipzig, Germany. He was the ninth child of Johanna Rosine, the daughter of a baker, and Carl Friedrich Wagner, a police actuary.
When did he move to Dresden?
In 1822 the family moved to Dresden and Wagner started school. He showed little interest in academic study, preferring poetry and music. He began taking harmony lessons (initially in secret) at around age fifteen.
In 1831, Wagner enrolled at Leipzig University to study music. He also began private tuition with Christian Theodor Weinlig (Kantor of the Thomaskirche) for a short time.
When did Wagner get married?
In 1834 Wagner met and fell in love with Christine Wilhemine ‘Minna’ Planer, a much in demand stage actress, while working with Heinrich Bethmann’s travelling theatre company. They married two years later. Though both had affairs, the couple’s marriage lasted 30 years until Minna’s death in 1866.
In 1836, a new post took him to Riga in Latvia. Here, he shared a tiny apartment with Minna, her sister and a wolf cub! Then, in 1839, in debt and without passports, Wagner and Minna made their way to Paris, the home of grand opera. Unfortunately, their two and a half years there were not terribly successful. The composer was forced to make a living by way of uninspiring arrangements and music journalism.
When did Wagner start composing The Ring?
In 1848 Wagner started work on the text for what would become ‘The Ring’, an epic opera cycle of unprecedented scale and grandeur. He envisioned a music-drama linking that intrinsically links the libretto with the music.
Who was Wagner’s second wife?
In 1864, he began a romantic involvement with Cosima von Burlow, daughter of Franz Lizst and wife of conductor Hans von Bülow. Their first child, Isolde, is born the following year. After Minna’s death in 1870 Cosima divorced her husband and married Wagner.
1868 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg premieres at Königliches Hof- und National-Theater in Munich to considerable audience acclaim.
1872 The foundation stone is laid at the theatre for what will become the Bayreuth Festival, Wagner’s own opera gala. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is played and the first official festival is announced for the following year.
1882 After the second Bayreuth Festival and a major heart attack, the composer and his family relocate to the Palazzo Vendramin, Venice.
When and how did Wagner die?
In 1883 a further heart attack proves fatal for Wagner and he died on the 13 February. His body was taken by gondola to the train station and back to Bayreuth where he was buried in a private ceremony in the grounds of his home.
We named Wagner one of the greatest composers of all time and, of course, one of the greatest opera composers ever.
Wagner: a style analysis
by Bayan Northcott
In a letter to his father-in-law Franz Liszt, Wagner once remarked: ‘Whatever my passions demand of me, I become for the time being – musician, poet, director, author, lecturer or anything else.’ And that ‘anything else’ ranged from journalist, theatrical reformer and cultural ideologue to vegetarian, revolutionary activist and anti-Semite – a range of concerns which, under the guise of Wagnerism, exerted a vast influence over the cultural life of Europe for decades after his death.
Wagner’s standing among composers depends upon no more than 12 scores. Granted, ten of them, including the four comprising Der Ring des Nibelungen, are evening-length music-dramas: while the Wesendonck Lieder (1857) are studies for Tristan und Isolde and the Siegfried Idyll is a spin-off from Act III of Siegfried. Yet this simply underlines the fact that all that really matters to us in Wagner comes out of his involvement with a specific form of theatre.
What is Wagner’s style?
He may have aspired to unite Gluck’s reformist drive for opera as drama with the symphonic impetus of Beethoven; aspired even to establish at Bayreuth a musical theatre which would become the conscience of the German nation. Yet the dramatic themes, and musical imagery of his stage works derive mainly from the world of early 19th-century Romantic opera, with its chivalry and evocations of Nature, its omens, talismans and potions, its dramas of black magic and love unto death.
What’s remarkable is the way in which Wagner transformed his Romantic themes and materials. Take the device of the fatal ring.
In Weber’s Euryanthe, this is a mere cog in the plot. By the end of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, it has become a psycho-economic power-symbol of the most complex significance for the later 19th-century world of Marx and Freud.
And when WH Auden joked that the beginning of the second act of Die Walküre resembles ‘a Victorian breakfast scene, Wotan meekly cracking his morning egg behind The Times while Fricka furiously rattles the teacups’, he was hinting at how closely, beneath the mythological surface, Wagner approaches the bourgeois realism of Flaubert and Ibsen.
What else did Wagner compose besides the Ring Cycle?
Wagner was, after all, an artist who developed tremendously over his creative life. Only the first three mature music-dramas stand directly in the early Romantic tradition.
Of these, Die fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman; 1840-41, rev. 1846-60) concerns the redemption of an unquiet spirit by love. Tannhäuser (Dresden version 1843-45; Paris version 1860-75) tackles the conflict between love sacred and profane. Lohengrin (1846-48), meanwhile, with its pageantry and swan-knight is about… well, exactly what?
Already, one has a sense of plot and symbolism coming slightly apart, acquiring a looseness and latency that opens them to a variety of interpretations. That sense of ambiguity that would culminate in his last music drama, Parsifal (1877-82).
Meanwhile, armed with the epic theatre doctrines of his manifesto Opera and Drama (1851), he had embarked upon the Ring in 1853, only to break off after Act II of Siegfried in 1857 to compose Tristan und Isolde (1857-59) and Die Meistersinger (1862-67).
If the treatment of the theme of the fulfilment of love in death in Tristan attains an obsessive intensity far beyond anything in early Romantic opera, the leisurely comedy of Die Meistersinger might seem exceptional in Wagner’s work. Until, that us, one notices that (like Parsifal) it concerns the renewal of a community by an unlikely outsider.
And when he resumed work on the Ring in 1869, the enriched tonality of Die Meistersinger flowed into the jubilant final scene of Siegfried, just as a post-Tristan chromaticism compounded the glooms of Götterdämmerung, written in 1874.
Which other composers does he resemble?
How, then, to summarise? As a youth, Wagner aspired to be a playwright even before a composer, and he evidently had a feeling for large-scale dramatic timing long before he developed musical skills to match. He certainly always started from the dramatic idea, first making a prose sketch, then writing his libretto, or ‘dramatic poem’. The music was supposed, as far as possible, to flow directly from the words, symbolism and structure of the libretto.
In this he evolved a new and opposite principle of music drama to his greatest contemporary, Verdi, who inherited a range of traditional operatic forms and formulae which he gradually adapted and combined to his own purposes. But this meant where Verdi always had a background form to guide his musical invention, Wagner – at least after Lohengrin – had to depend from moment to moment on spinning out whatever musical idea the text suggested.
Wagner’s leitmotifs?
His system of so-called leitmotifs – brief musical ideas associated with particular characters, events or symbols in the drama – is often described as a subtle means of commenting on the dramatic predicaments or motivation of his characters. However, his reuse of motifs and harmonies may have originated as a means of filling his vast timespans.
If a character mentioned the curse on the ring, and Wagner had already invented a curse-motif some way back, then he had a bunch of notes or harmonies to help him fill the next few bars. The most radical outcome of his approach, first attained in Tristan, was what Wagner called ‘musical composition as the art of transition’ – the idea of a ceaselessly changeable flow reaching stability, if at all, only at the end.
What is Wagner’s legacy?
Of course, other composers have sought a union of words and music by writing their own librettos. Yet Wagner’s achievement remains unique in its daring, mastery and completeness.
For true Wagnerians, his worlds of concept and drama, expression and sound, add up to something so vast, it dwarfs the achievements of other composers. Anti-Wagnerians tend to resist this very power and bigness as coercive; as seeking to influence its audience not as individuals but in the mass. Hence his appeal to certain totalitarian tendencies. But wherever you stand Wagner, he stands among the greats.
Six of the best… productions of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde