"Few composers have had so powerful an impact on their time as Richard Wagner (1813-1883). His operas and artistic philosophy influenced not only musicians but also poets, painters, and playwright. Such was his preeminence that an opera house of his own design was built in Bayreuth, Germany, solely for performances of his music dramas.
"Wagner was born in Leipzig into a theatrical family. His boyhood dream was to be a poet and playwright, but at fifteen he was overwhelmed by Beethoven's music and decided to become a composer. He taught himself by studying scores and had almost three years of formal training in music theory, but he never mastered an instrument. As a student at Leipzig University he dueled, drank, and gambled; and a similar pattern persisted later--he always lived shamelessly off other people and ran up debts he could not repay.
"During his early twenties, Wagner conducted in small German theaters and wrote several operas. In 1839, he decided to try his luck in Paris, then the center of grand opera; he and his wife spent two miserable years there, during which he was unable to get an opera performed and was reduced to musical hackwork. But he returned to Germany in 1842 for the production of his opera Rienzi in Dresden; the work was immensely successful, and he was appointed conductor of the Dresden Opera. Wagner spent six years at this post, becoming famous as both an opera composer and a conductor. When the revolutions of 1848 were sweeping across Europe, Wagner's life in Dresden had become difficult because of accumulated debts. Hoping that a new society would wipe these out and produce conditions favorable to his art, he participated in an insurrection and then had to flee to Switzerland. For several years he did no composing; instead, he worked out his theories of art in several essays and completed the libretto to Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Niberlung), a set of four operas based on Nordic myth which would occupy him for twenty-five years. He interrupted his work on the music for the The Ring to compose Tristian and Isolde (1857-1859).
"Wagner had several bad years after finishing Tristian. His opera Tannhauser was a failure at the Paris Opera; Tristan was abandoned by the Vienna Opera; and he was hounded by creditors. In 1864, however, he was rescued by King Ludwig of Bavaria, and eighteen-year-old fanatical Wagnerite who put all the resources of the Munich Opera at his disposal. At this time, Wagner fell in love with Cosima von Bulow, who was Liszt's daughter and the wife of Hans von Bulow, Wagner's close friend and favorite conductor; she gave birth to two of Wagner's children while still married to von Bulow. Shortly after Wagner's first wife died, he married Cosima.
"In Wagner, musical genius was allied with selfishness, ruthlessness, rabid German nationalism, and absolute self-conviction. He forged an audience for his complex music dramas from a public accustomed to conventional opera. The performance of the Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876 was perhaps the single most important musical event of the century; and --though some critics still found his music too dissonant, heavily orchestrated, and long-winded--he generally acclaimed the greatest composer of his time. A year after completing Parsifal (1877-1882), his last opera, he died in Venice at age sixty-nine.
Wagner's Music
"For Wagner, an opera house was a temple in which the spectator was to be overwhelmed by music and drama. He wrote his own librettos, based on medieval Germanic legends and myths and with characters that are usually larger than life--heroes, gods, demigods. He called his works music dramas rather than operas, but today many people find his music more exciting than his rather static drama.
"Within each act there is a continuous musical flow (Wagner called this 'unending melody') instead of traditional arias, recitatives, and ensembles, and there are no breaks where applause can interrupt. His vocal line, which he conceived as 'speech song,' is inspired by the rhythms and pitches of the German text. Wagner revolutionized opera by shifting the focus from voice to orchestra and treating the orchestra symphonically. His expanded and colorful orchestration expresses the drama and constantly develops, transforms, and intertwines musical ideas. (And the orchestral sound is so full that only very powerful voices can cut through it.) In the orchestra--called leitmotifs (leading motives). A leitmotif is a short musical idea associated with a person, an object, or a thought in the drama.
"The tension of Wagner's music is heightened by chromatic and dissonant harmonies--ultimately, these led to the breakdown of tonality and to the new musical language of the twentieth century."
The above is from Music an Appreciation by Roger Kamien, Brief Edition, McGraw Hill Companies, Inc. Pages 272-273.
In the book, Building A Classical Music Library, Bill Parker writes,
"Wagner became not just a composer, but a phenomenon. One of the great self-promoters of history, he was the barker, ringmaster, and center attraction of his own one-man circus. By sheer force of personality, if not character, he dominated the musical headlines in the late nineteenth century and beyond. He was a driven man who could not stand to not get his way.
"People didn't like his operas? He would rename them 'music dramas' and write books denouncing his detractors. Theaters wouldn't put them on? He would build his own theater and orchestra and create a cult of musicians performing his works. He literally established a religion with himself as the savior of music; it was called Wagnerism, and his devotees were known as Wagnerites. People wouldn't join the religion? They must be evil Jews.
"The parallels with a vicious Austrian paperhanger were obvious to the architects of the Third Reich, who adopted Wagner as their composer laureate, further complicating history's assessment of an already complex issue. The music of Wagner was not heard in Israel until great Jewish musicians such as Leonard Bernstein and Daniel Bareboim pleaded for it, holding that he music itself should not be condemned for the sins of the man who wrote it.
"In all fairness, Wagner's notorious anti-Semitism was nothing near the doctrinaire system espoused by the Nazism, and he was likely to forget all about it if someone he needed to play or conduct his music was Jewish. Everything in his life had to subservient to his artistic goals, and if anti-Semitism got in the way, it went out the window like anything else. Ironically, it has been fairly well established that Wagner was not the son of his putative father Carl Wagner, but the natural child of his mother's lover and later second husband, a Jewish actor named Ludwig Geyer."
Building A Classical Music Library by Bill Parker, Jormax Publications, Minneapolis, Minnesota, page 7151-152.
Richard Wagner Archive: This is a monster web-based resource to information on Wagner. This is one of the best Wagner sites available, and should answer most questions.
