Richard Wagner ranks among the most transformative composers in musical history, having reshaped both harmonic language and the architecture of musical theater in ways that continue to influence the art form. Although he occasionally achieved modest success with smaller-scale pieces, the domain of opera—particularly when conceived on the largest possible canvas—served as his true arena, and his vision produced the most monumental aesthetic Western music has witnessed.
At the outset of his professional life Wagner absorbed the technical and pragmatic dimensions of his medium by composing several operas that met with lukewarm or outright hostile reactions. From Rienzi (1838-40) and The Flying Dutchman (1841) onward, however, a sequence of triumphs elevated him to lasting prominence and altered the course of the genre. The four-opera Ring cycle—Das Rheingold (1853-54), Die Walküre (1854-56), Siegfried (1856-71), and Götterdämmerung (1869-74)—constitutes the most ambitious and far-reaching single contribution any composer has made to the operatic repertoire. Tristan and Isolde (1857-59) exemplifies the composer’s mature idiom, marked by intense chromaticism, continuous tonal flux, opulent harmonic textures, and the systematic linking of particular musical ideas, known as leitmotifs, to specific characters and dramatic situations; the supple handling of these motifs is among the defining traits of his work. For every opera he supplied both the libretto and the score, preferring to designate the resulting works as “music dramas.”
Wagner’s personal history was no less theatrical than his creations. Born in Leipzig on May 22, 1813, he began in the early 1830s to publish extensive writings on music and aesthetics; throughout his career his compositions served, to varying degrees, as practical demonstrations of those theories. In his early years he frequently earned his living as a conductor; one such engagement brought him to Riga, Latvia, in 1837, yet two years later he fled the city by night to escape his creditors. As a young man Wagner felt an affinity for the revolutionary currents of the mid-nineteenth century—an outlook reflected, at least obliquely, in the anti-materialist and faintly socialist tendencies of the Ring cycle. During the 1849 uprisings in Dresden he reportedly took up arms, after which he was forced to flee Germany once order was restored. While living in Zurich, Switzerland, he composed little for a time but developed the conceptual foundation for his later masterpieces. In 1864 he returned to Germany under the protection of King Ludwig II of Bavaria; it was in Bayreuth, near Munich, that he supervised construction of a theater (opened in 1876) expressly designed for the vast synthesis of music, staging, text, and scenic elements his mature operas demanded. The town subsequently became a focal point for devoted Wagnerites who sustained his legacy after his death and continues to attract pilgrims today. Wagner’s feelings toward Jews remained deeply conflicted—he erroneously believed his stepfather to have been Jewish—yet certain of his published statements contain anti-Semitic passages that have generated enduring debate among opera enthusiasts, particularly in light of Adolf Hitler’s documented admiration for the composer’s music.
