Richard Wagner

German composer

• Born: May 22, 1813
• Birthplace: Leipzig, Saxony (now in Germany)
• Died: February 13, 1883
• Place of death: Venice, Italy

Wagner wrote the librettos and scores of some of the world’s greatest operas, such as Tristan und Isolde and Der Ring des Nibelungen. A conductor, musical director, and writer as well as a composer, he raised standards for musical performances and developed the aesthetic of the Gesamkunstwerk(total work of art), using compositional techniques based on chromaticism, variable meter, the leitmotif, and an “infinite melody” of continuous expressiveness and significance.

Early Life

Richard Wagner (VAHG-ner) was born in the German cultural and commercial center of Leipzig. Legally the son of policeactuary Friedrich Wagner and his wife, Johanna, the young Wagner was never certain whether his father was actually Ludwig Geyer, the painter, actor, and poet whom his mother wed nine months after the death of Friedrich in November, 1813. Geyer died when Wagner was eight years old, but the child was called Richard Geyer until his middle teens.

Although Wagner never mastered score-reading or an instrument, he was an autodidact with ever-expanding interests in music, theater, and culture. His initial schooling took place during his family’s stay in Dresden, where he took piano lessons and explored ancient Greek mythology. He spent his late adolescence in Leipzig, beginning lessons in harmonic theory in 1828 and briefly studying violin with a member of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1830. The following year, he dabbled in musical studies at the University of Leipzig and became a pupil of Christian Theodor Weinlig.

A survey of Wagner’s earliest successes and failures during the ensuing years indicates the wide range of his ambitions. By the end of 1833, he had composed his Polonaise in D for Piano (1832), conducted his Concert Symphony in C Major (1832) in Prague and Leipzig, started and abandoned work on an opera, and secured employment at the Würzburg city theater. In 1834, he became music director of Heinrich Bethmann’s theatrical company in Magdeburg, completed his opera Die Feen (the fairies), published an essay for Robert Schumann’s Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, made his debut as an opera conductor in Lauchstadt, and completed a libretto for Das Liebesverbot (1836; the ban on love). After first attempting to have this opera presented in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris, Wagner conducted one performance of it in 1836 in Magdeburg, before the company there disbanded.

Also in 1836, Wagner wed Christine Wilhelmina (“Minna”) Planer, an actor whom he first met in Lauchstadt. During the first years of this troubled marriage, Wagner experienced a decline in productivity. In 1837, he wrote an overture based on Rule, Britannia! (originally by Thomas Arne) and soon afterward assumed the post of music director of the city theater in Riga, where he sparked controversy (as he had in Magdeburg) by proposing numerous reforms, including plans for a subscription series.

When his contract in Riga was not renewed, Wagner traveled with Minna to Paris via the Norwegian coast, arriving in September, 1839. There he intensified his literary activity, received the support of Giacomo Meyerbeer, and became exposed to the work of Hector Berlioz. Initially occupying himself with such piecemeal work as composition for vaudevilles, he soon completed the first versions of the Faust Overture (1840), the grand tragic opera Rienzi (1840), and the Romantic opera Der fliegende Holländer (1841; the flying Dutchman). By early 1843, the premieres of the latter two works had established Wagner as a composer and conductor of note.

Life’s Work

In February, 1843, Wagner assumed the position of royal Kapellmeister left vacant after the death of Francesco Morlacchi. During his stay in Dresden, Wagner again antagonized his colleagues. Rigorous rehearsal schedules, a rearrangement of the traditional seating arrangement, and the eradication of the seniority system were among the improvements suggested by Wagner, who rarely succeeded in having his ideas enacted.

Wagner’s brilliant but unorthodox approach to conducting, eliciting an impressive range of dynamic nuance, called upon orchestra and audience members to follow an idiosyncratic series of tempo changes that fully indulged the maestro’s subjectivism. To retain his office, Wagner was forced to promise to interpret only new operas in this manner and to conform to tradition in conducting the old ones.

Wagner’s talent as a creative administrator enabled him to mount spectacles such as the 1843 choral festival, for which he hastily composed Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (1843; the love feast of the apostles) for more than thirteen hundred performers. He was, however, dissatisfied with this performance as well as with the premiere two years later of his grand Romantic opera Tannhäuser (1845), which he revised extensively over the years.

Wagner, who met the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in 1848, supported the Dresden Revolution of 1849. He fled Germany in the wake of its failure, staying briefly in Weimar, the home of his friend Franz Liszt, before settling in Zurich. Following a discouraging January, 1850, excursion to Paris, Wagner wrote the anti-Semitic essay “Das Judentum in der Musik” (1850; Jewishness and music). Wagner was also frustrated with circumstances surrounding the 1850 premiere of Lohengrin, directed by Liszt. In this Romantic opera, Elsa of Brabant loses the mysterious knight Lohengrin after the machinations of her enemies and her own curiosity compel her to ask him forbidden questions about his origin. Wagner’s distance from the production (he did not hear a complete performance of the work until 1861) prompted him to ponder the creation of a theater designed to showcase his own works.

While in exile, Wagner completed his aesthetic treatise Oper und Drama (1852; Opera and Drama , 1913) and finished Das Rheingold (1854; the Rhine gold) and Die Walküre (1856; the Valkyrie), the first half of Der Ring des Nibelungen (1874; the ring of the Nibelungs) cycle. Among his financial supporters in Zurich was his neighbor Otto Wesendonck, whose wife, Mathilde, was an object of Wagner’s romantic interest; his settings of her poems are known as the Wesendonck Lieder (1858). When the tension between the Wesendoncks and the Wagners reached a point of crisis, Wagner left Zurich for Venice, where he finished the full score of the second act to Tristan und Isolde in 1859. Intervention of the Saxon police forced him to complete the work in Lucerne.

By the end of the year, Wagner had returned to Paris, where successful concerts in 1860 resulted in an order from Napoleon III for a production of Tannhäuser at the Opéra; this support from the French government helped Wagner secure a partial amnesty, allowing travel through any part of Germany except Saxony. The 1861 Opéra performances occasioned the famous anti-Austrian Jockey Club protests that forced Tannhäuser to close.

In 1862, a sickly Minna visited her husband in Biebrich before retiring to Dresden, where she died in 1866. Wagner, who soon received a full amnesty, dabbled in romantic affairs and conducted his own music throughout Europe, offering a profitable series of concerts in St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1863. Final relief from financial woes came in 1864 in the person of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who provided the artist with generous political as well as monetary support. The mid-1860’s also saw the intensification of Wagner’s relationship with Cosima, the daughter of Liszt and the wife of conductor/pianist Hans von Bülow, for a time one of Wagner’s staunchest supporters.

Supported by Ludwig, Wagner established a luxurious home in Munich, where Tristan und Isolde was first performed in 1865. A tragic love story colored by Wagner’s relationship with Mathilde as well as his readings of Schopenhauerian and Buddhist philosophy, this opera is perhaps his most successful attempt at creating the sustained music drama that he proposed in his writings. Opening with the ambiguous “Tristan chord” (F-B-D-sharp-G-sharp), his score is characterized by an extreme chromaticism of melody and harmony that borders on atonality, and his verse is characterized by the deft employment of alliteration, rhyme, and assonance. Together with his sensuous phrasing and evocative manipulation of leitmotifs (musical phrases with dramatic import), these elements effectively evoke an atmosphere of intensifying yearning. The strenuous title roles were performed by Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld (whose death three weeks after the fourth performance fueled rumors that the vocal parts were unperformable) and his wife, Malvina.

Later in 1865, local hostility toward Wagner led to his departure to Switzerland, where he and Cosima established their home, Tribschen. For the next two years, the two strenuously tried to hide their relationship from King Ludwig, who slowly awakened to what their enemies—including an unbalanced Malvina—were as strenuously trying to point out to him. Cosima and Bülow finally dissolved their marriage in July, 1870; Cosima married Wagner the following month, by which time she was already the mother of Wagner’s children Isolde, Eva, and Siegfried.

In 1868, Wagner saw the successful premiere of his most comic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1867; the mastersingers of Nuremberg). The story of an untrained singer who wins his beloved by outsinging members of a conservative songster’s guild was in part a scarcely concealed attack on Eduard Hanslick, one of the composer’s harshest critics. At the end of the year, Wagner met Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, whose move from fervid support to chilly hostility can be traced through his writings.

Dominating Wagner’s musical activities through the 1860’s and the 1870’s was his vision of mounting a full Ring cycle in a festival theater dedicated to his works. After plans to build such a house in Munich were abandoned in 1868, Wagner’s discouragement turned to outrage when Ludwig commanded that performances of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre be given in 1869 and 1870, respectively; Wagner went so far as to deceive the king to forestall a similarly decreed performance of Siegfried (1871), the third part of the tetralogy.

By 1872, Wagner had chosen the town of Bayreuth as the site of his festival. Leaving Tribschen, he spent the next four years supervising the construction of the Festspielhaus and engaging in fund-raising and the recruiting of personnel. He also completed the cycle’s final installment, Götterdämmerung (1874; the twilight of the gods), and arranged the tetralogy’s publication for performance.

The August, 1876, premiere of the Ring cycle in Bayreuth represented the triumphant culmination of twenty-eight years of labor. Prominent figures from around the world flocked to this four-day forerunner of modern festivals, where they were immersed in an epic of gods, Valkyries, and giants told through Wagner’s alliterative Stabreim verse and massive orchestration. The only disappointments associated with the festival were its large deficit and Nietzsche’s departure before its conclusion.

Wagner, however, was now secure enough to spend his later years riding the crest of his popularity, his operas receiving performances throughout Europe. He dedicated much of his time to writing essays on sundry topics, completing the fourth volume of his unreliable but revealing autobiography Mein Leben (1911; My Life , 1911). Months prior to his death of a heart attack, his final opera, Parsifal (1882), received its premiere under the direction of Hermann Levi at Bayreuth. Considered by Wagner and his followers as a sacred work, this tale of miraculous redemption is traditionally offered during the Christian holiday of Easter.

Significance

Notwithstanding Richard Wagner’s tremendous talent as a composer, conductor, and artistic manager, his sheer force of will seems to have permitted him to emerge triumphant from a career haunted by scandal and indebtedness. A combination of creativity, charisma, and controversy attracted followers to him, the cultish phenomenon of Wagnerism testifying to the magnetism of his personality. In the decades after his death, Wagner’s stature as a musician mushroomed. Through the end of the nineteenth century, a significant portion of the creative world was influenced to some degree by his work, and composers past the turn of the century felt compelled to refer to his works in measuring the value of their own.

Considered in tandem with his musical achievements, Wagner’s nationalism and anti-Semitism made him a cultural hero of the fascist regime of Adolf Hitler, who closely identified Wagner’s thought with his own policies. As a result of this association, works by Wagner were not programmed in Israel until Zubin Mehta led the Israel Philharmonic in a 1974 concert that was disturbed by catcalls and fistfights.

Besides being performed regularly at the world’s principal opera houses (Bayreuth remains a shrine for present-day Wagnerians and music lovers in general), Wagner’s music has been preserved in numerous video and audio recordings. Outstanding among the latter is a 1965 recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen, a legendary performance by Sir Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, featuring vocalists Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Kirsten Flagstad, Christa Ludwig, and Birgit Nilsson. Wagner’s music has penetrated into many aspects of popular culture, most notably as the familiar melody “Here Comes the Bride,” which may be heard in act 3 of Lohengrin. Other settings in which excerpts from Wagner’s works are heard outside their original context include Bugs Bunny cartoons, films by surrealist Luis Buñuel, works by composer John Cage, and Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979).

Bibliography

Burbridge, Peter, and Richard Sutton, eds. The Wagner Companion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. This collection of essays covers a broad range of Wagner-related subjects.

Deathridge, John, and Carl Dahlhaus. The New Grove Wagner. Edited by Stanley Sadie. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. Highly recommended as a supplement for serious research, this concise scholarly treatment of Wagner’s life, thought, and music includes critical analyses of potentially misleading sources of information, particularly My Life.

Donington, Robert. Wagner’s “Ring” and Its Symbols. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974. An expert presents a thorough investigation of Wagner’s most complex work.

Köhler, Joachim. Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans. Translated by Stewart Spencer. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. A psychological study of Wagner, using his compositions to gain a better understanding of the man and his life.

May, Thomas. Decoding Wagner: An Invitation to His World of Music Drama. Pompton Plains, N.J.: Amadeus Press, 2004. May analyzes Wagner’s operas, maintaining they are richer and more artistically daring than commonly believed. Comes with two compact disc recordings of Wagner’s music.

Millington, Barry. Wagner. Reprint. New York: Vintage Books, 1987. A brief and well-organized biography including a useful chronology and bibliography. Also includes guides to Wagner’s musical compositions and a biographical listing of significant personalities in his life.

Newman, Ernest. The Life of Richard Wagner. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933-1946. This four-volume biography remains the most comprehensive English-language account of Wagner’s life.

Schonberg, Harold C. “Colossus of Germany.” In The Lives of the Great Composers. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. Schonberg , a major music critic of The New York Times, surveys Wagner’s life and most lasting contributions.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Richard Wagner.” In The Great Conductors. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967. Schonberg engagingly outlines Wagner’s contributions to the art of conducting.

Shaw, George Bernard. The Perfect Wagnerite. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1967. The witty dramatist discusses the Ring cycle and other aspects of Wagner’s legacy.

Shelton, Geoffrey. Richard and Cosima Wagner. London: Victor Gollanz, 1982. The translator of Cosima’s diaries explores the famous couple’s love affair and marriage.

Westernhagen, Curt von. Wagner: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. This major study supplements Newman’s biography with more recent scholarship.