Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany, he led a turbulent life in Europe, falling in and out of favour with the German authorities, until he settled there to work on his national theatre at Bayreuth, eventually completed in 1876, His vision of opera as a 'music drama', or total art form, cause wide controversy, as did his development of new operaic forms and his use of recurrng Leitmotivs. He worked ceaselessly to achive to achieve his aims, producing operas such as Lohengrin 1846-1848, Tristan and Isodole 1865 and the massive four opera work The Ring of the Nibelung 1876. His last work was Parsifal 1882.