Background

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813, in Leipzig, Germany, to a baker's daughter, Johanna Rosine and her husband Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the police service.

His father, who was a minor municipal official, died six months after Richard's birth. In August 1814, his mother married the actor Ludwig Geyer and moved with her family to his residence in Dresden. Geyer, who, it has been claimed, may have been the boy's actual father, died when Richard was eight. Wagner was largely brought up by a single mother.

Education

At the end of 1822, at the age of nine, he was enrolled in the Kreuzschule, Dresden, (under the name Wilhelm Richard Geyer), where he received some small amount of piano instruction from his Latin teacher, but could not manage a proper scale and mostly preferred playing theater overtures by ear.

Young Richard Wagner entertained ambitions to be a playwright and first became interested in music as a means of enhancing the dramas that he wanted to write and stage. He soon turned toward studying music, for which he enrolled at the University of Leipzig in 1831.

Career

Richard Wagner began his career in 1833 as a choral director in Würzburg and composed his early works in imitation of German romantic compositions. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was his major idol at this time.

Wagner wrote his first opera, Die Feen (The Fairies), in 1833, but it was not produced until after the composer's death. He was the music director of the theater in Magdeburg from 1834 to 1836, where his next work, Das Liebesverbot (Forbidden Love), loosely based on William Shakespeare's (1564-1616) Measure for Measure was performed in 1836.

In 1837 Wagner became the first music director of the theater in Riga, Russia (now the capital of Latvia), where he remained until 1839. He then set out for Paris, France, where he hoped to make his fortune. While in Paris, he developed an intense hatred for French musical culture that lasted the remainder of his life, regardless of how often he attempted to have a Parisian success. It was at this time that Wagner, in financial desperation, sold the scenario for Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) to the Paris Opéra for use by another composer. Wagner later set to music another version of this tale.

Wagner returned to Germany, settling in Dresden in 1842, where he was in charge of the music for the court chapel. Rienzi, a grand opera in imitation of the French style, enjoyed a modest success. In 1845 Tannhäuser premiered in Dresden and proved the first undoubted success of Wagner's career. In November of the same year, he finished the poem for Lohengrin and began composition early in 1846. While at work on Lohengrin he also made plans for his tetralogy (a series of four dramas), Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungen), being captivated by Norse sagas. In 1845 he prepared the scenario for the first drama of the tetralogy to be written, Siegfried's Tod (Siegfried's Death), which later became Die Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods).

Wagner had to flee Dresden in 1849 in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848, which resulted in an unsuccessful uprising against the German monarchy or king. He settled in Switzerland, first in Zurich and then near Lucerne. He remained in Switzerland for the most part for the next fifteen years without steady employment, banished from Germany, and forbidden access to German theatrical life. During this time he worked on the Ring - this dominated his creative life over the next two decades.

The first production of Lohengrin took place in Weimar under Franz Liszt's (1881-1886) direction in 1850 (Wagner was not to see Lohengrin until 1861). The year 1850 also saw the publication of one of Wagner's most vulgar tracts, The Jew in Music, in which he viciously attacked the very existence of Jewish composers and musicians, particularly in German society.

In 1853 Wagner formally began composition on the Rheingold; he completed the scoring the following year and then began serious work on the Walküre, which was finished in 1856. At this time he was toying with the notion of writing the drama Tristan and Isolde. In 1857 he finished the composition of Act II of Siegfried and gave himself over entirely to Tristan. This work was completed in 1859, but it was mounted in Munich only in 1865.

In 1860 Wagner received permission to reenter Germany except for Saxony, an area in eastern Germany. He was granted full amnesty (political freedom) in 1862. That year he began the music for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg), which he had first thought of in 1845. The Meistersinger was completed in 1867; the first performance took place in Munich the following year. Only then did he pick up the threads of the Ring and resume work on Act III of Siegfried, which was finished in September 1869, a month that also saw the first performance of the Rheingold. He wrote the music for Götterdämmerung from 1869 to 1874.

The first entire Ring cycle (Rheingold, Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung) was given at the Festspielhaus, the shrine Wagner built for himself at Bayreuth, in 1876, over thirty years after the idea for it had first come to mind. He finished Parsifal, his final drama, in 1882. Wagner died on February 13, 1883, in Venice, Italy, and was buried at Bayreuth.

Achievements

• Wagner made highly significant if controversial, contributions to art and culture. In his lifetime, and for some years after, Wagner inspired fanatical devotion amongst his followers and was occasionally considered by them to have a near god-like status. His compositions, in particular Tristan und Isolde, broke important new musical ground. For years afterward, many composers felt compelled to align themselves with or against Wagner. Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf are indebted to him especially, as are César Franck, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, Jules Massenet, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Pfitzner and dozens of others. Gustav Mahler said, "There was only Beethoven and Wagner." The twentieth-century harmonic revolutions of Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg (tonal and atonal modernism, respectively) have often been traced back to Tristan. The Italian form of operatic realism known as verismo owes much to Wagnerian reconstruction of musical form. It was Wagner who first demanded that the lights be dimmed during dramatic performances, and it was his theatre at Bayreuth which first made use of the sunken orchestra pit, which at Bayreuth entirely conceals the orchestra from the audience.
  
  Wagner's theory of musical drama has shaped even completely new art forms, including film scores such as John Williams' music for Star Wars. American producer Phil Spector with his "wall of sound" was strongly influenced by Wagner's music. The rock subgenre of heavy metal music also shows a Wagnerian influence with its strong paganistic stamp. In Germany Rammstein and Joachim Witt (his most famous albums are called Bayreuth for that reason) are both strongly influenced by Wagner's music. The movie "The Ring of the Nibelungs" drew both from historical sources as well as Wagner's work, and set a ratings record when aired as a two-part mini-series on German television. It was subsequently released in other countries under a variety of names, including "Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King" in the USA.
  
  Wagner's influence on literature and philosophy is also significant. Friedrich Nietzsche was part of Wagner's inner circle during the early 1870s, and his first published work The Birth of Tragedy proposed Wagner's music as the Dionysian rebirth of European culture in opposition to Apollonian rationalist decadence. Nietzsche broke with Wagner following the first Bayreuth Festival, believing that Wagner's final phase represented a pandering to Christian pieties and a surrender to the new demagogic German Reich. In the twentieth century, W. H. Auden once called Wagner "perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived," while Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust were heavily influenced by him and discussed Wagner in their novels. He is discussed in some of the works of James Joyce although Joyce was known to detest him. Wagner is one of the main subjects of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which contains lines from Tristan und Isolde and refers to The Ring and Parsifal. Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine worshipped Wagner. Many of the ideas his music brought up, such as the association between love and death (or Eros and Thanatos) in Tristan, predated their investigation by Sigmund Freud.

Works

More photos

• music

  • Wagner: Die Walkuere 2020
  • Best of Wagner 1994
  • Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen 2008
  • Twilight of the Gods: The Essential Wagner Collection 1998
  • Das Rheingold 2020

Religion

Wagner's own religious views were idiosyncratic. While he admired Jesus, Wagner insisted that Jesus was of Greek origin rather than Jewish. Like the Hellenistic Gnostics, he also argued that the Old Testament had nothing to do with the New Testament, that the God of Israel was not the same God as the father of Jesus, and that the Ten Commandments lacked the mercy and love of Christian teachings. Like many German Romantics, Schopenhauer above all, Wagner was also fascinated by Buddhism, and for many years contemplated composing a Buddhist opera, to be titled Die Sieger ("The Victors"), based on Sârdûla Karnavadanaan, an avadana of the Buddha's last journey.

Aspects of Die Sieger were finally absorbed into Parsifal, which depicts a peculiar, "Wagnerized" version of Christianity; for instance, the ritual of transubstantiation in the Communion is subtly reinterpreted, becoming something closer to a pagan ritual than a Christian one. As occult historian Joscelyn Godwin stated, "it was Buddhism that inspired the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through him, attracted Richard Wagner. This Orientalism reflected the struggle of the German Romantics, in the words of Leon Poliakov, to free themselves from Judeo-Christian fetters." In short, Wagner adhered to an unconventional ethnic interpretation of the Christian writings that conformed to his German-Romantic aesthetic standards and tastes.

Politics

With rising success, Wagner gradually became involved in politics. He supported the left wing with his socialist ideals that he shared with August Rockel and Mikhail Bakunin. He minutely supported the May Uprisings that occurred in Dresden on account of the new constitution declare by King Frederick Augustus II in 1849.

The uprisings ended with the defeat of the revolutionaries and warrants were issued in their names, thus Wagner absconded to Paris once again and then to Zurich spending the next twelve years in exile.

It was only in 1862 that the political ban on Wagner was lifted. He settled in Biebrich where he began working on Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, a comedy.

Views

Wagner frequently accused Jews, particularly Jewish musicians, of being a harmful alien element in German culture. His first and most controversial essay on the subject was "Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Jewry in Music"), originally published under the pen-name "K. Freigedank" ("K. Freethought") in 1850 in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The essay purported to explain popular dislike of Jewish composers, such as Wagner's contemporaries (and rivals) Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wagner wrote that the German people were repelled by Jews due to their alien appearance and behavior - "with all our speaking and writing in favor of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them." He argued that Jewish musicians were only capable of producing music that was shallow and artificial, because they had no connection to the genuine spirit of the German people.

In the conclusion to the essay, he wrote of the Jews that "only one thing can redeem you from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasuerus - going under!" Although this has been taken to mean actual physical annihilation, in the context of the essay it seems to refer only to the eradication of Jewish separateness and traditions. Wagner advises Jews to follow the example of Ludwig Börne by abandoning Judaism. In this way Jews will take part in "this regenerative work of deliverance through self-annulment; then are we one and un-dissevered!" Wagner was, therefore, calling for the assimilation of Jews into mainstream German culture and society - although there can be little doubt, from the words he uses in the essay, that this call was prompted at least as much by old-fashioned Jew-hatred as by a desire for social amelioration. (In the very first publication, the word here translated as "self-annulment" was represented by the phrase "self-annihilating, bloody struggle"). The initial publication of the article attracted little attention, but Wagner republished it as a pamphlet under his own name in 1869, leading to several public protests at performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wagner repeated similar views in several later articles, such as "What is German?" (1878).

Some biographers, such as Robert Gutman have advanced the claim that Wagner's opposition to Jewry was not limited to his articles, and that the operas contained such messages. For example, characters such as Mime in the Ring and Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger are supposedly Jewish stereotypes, though they are not explicitly identified as Jews. Such claims are disputed. The arguments supporting these purported "hidden messages" are often convoluted, and may be the result of biased over-interpretation. Wagner was not above putting digs and insults to specific individuals into his work, and it was usually obvious when he did. Wagner, over the course of his life, produced a huge amount of written material analyzing every aspect of himself, including his operas and his views on Jews (as well as practically every other topic under the sun); these purported messages are never mentioned.

Despite his very public views concerning Jewry, Wagner had several Jewish friends and colleagues. One of the most notable of these was Hermann Levi, a practicing Jew and son of a Rabbi, whose talent was freely acknowledged by Wagner. Levi's position as Kapellmeister at Munich meant that he was to conduct the premiere of Parsifal, Wagner's last opera. Wagner initially objected to this and was quoted as saying that Levi should be baptized before conducting Parsifal. Levi however held Wagner in adulation and was asked to be a pallbearer at the composer's funeral.

Quotations: "Joy is not in things; it is in us."

"I write music with an exclamation point!"

"I am convinced that there are universal currents of Divine Thought vibrating the ether everywhere and that any who can feel these vibrations is inspired."

"I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing."

"Achievements, seldom credited to their source, are the result of unspeakable drudgery and worries."

"I hate this fast-growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts - the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products."

"Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge."

"Imagination creates reality."

"I have long been convinced that my artistic ideal stands or falls with Germany. Only the Germany that we love and desire can help us achieve that ideal."

"I wish I could score everything for horns."

"Wherever the fish are, that's where we go."

"Divorce is one of the most financially traumatic things you can go through. Money spent on getting mad or getting even is money wasted."

"Everything lives and lasts by the inner necessity of its being, by its own nature's need."

"How absurd these critics must seem to me, who in their modern wantonness have become so ingenious. They want to interpret my Tannhauser as specifically Christian and impute to him a tendency to impotent glorification!"

"I was in a state of gnawing, sensuous agitation that excited continually both blood and nerves when I sketched out the music for 'Tannhauser' and brought it to completion."

"I can't distract myself enough here, for sketches to a new opera are constantly buzzing around in my head, to the extent that I need all my strength to wrest myself from them."

"Though German art can never be Bavarian, but simply German, yet Munich is the capital of this German Art; here, under shelter of a Prince who kindles my enthusiasm, to feel myself a native and member of the people was, to me, the homeless wanderer, a deep, a genuine need."

"I have only a mind to live, to enjoy - i.e., to work as an artist, and produce my works; but not for the muddy brains of the common herd."

"Here, everything is tragic through and through, and the will, that fain would shape a world according to its wish, at last can reach no greater satisfaction than the breaking of itself in dignified annulment."

"Life is earnest - and always has been."

"We find personal success and great, if not enduring, influence on the outer fashioning of the world allotted to the violent, the passionate individual who, unchaining the elemental principles of human impulse under favoring circumstances, points out to greed and self-indulgence the speedy pathways to their satisfaction."

"In no State is there a weightier law than that which centers its stability in the supreme hereditary power of one particular family, unconnected and un-commingling with any other lineage in that State."

"The patriot subordinates himself to his State in order to raise it above all other States and thus, as it were, to find his personal sacrifice repaid with ample interest through the might and greatness of his fatherland."

"The measures and acts which show us violently disposed towards the outer world can never stay without a violent reaction on ourselves."

"What manner of thing this 'public opinion' is, should be best known to those who have its name forever in their mouths and erect the regard for it into a positive article of religion. Its self-styled organ in our times is the 'Press.'"

Personality

Wagner was the livest of wires, larger than life in almost every respect. He was described by French writer Édouard Schuré as a "floodtide that nothing can stem," and by Franz Liszt as having "a great and overwhelming nature, a sort of Vesuvius." Even his nemesis, the critic Eduard Hanslick, conceded that he was "the most remarkable of phenomena, a marvel of energy and endowment."

A highly emotional man, Wagner possessed very little in the way of a self-censor mechanism; he was quick to anger, quick to tears, quick to laughter, quick to frenzy. If people caught him on good days, they recounted that "he bubbled with jokes, wild ideas, and comic remarks," was "utterly charming," and that he was "full of fun" with "childlike jollity."

Physical Characteristics: Richard Wagner was funny-looking, with an over-sized head perched on a fairly small body.

Here is an account of one woman's first impression: "Soon the young man appeared, strikingly elegant and, indeed, distinguished-looking, in spite of the fact that his legs were much too short with such an extraordinarily pretty woman on his arm that she alone would have sufficed to make the couple interesting, even if Wagner had not had so remarkable a head as to prove involuntarily eye-catching."

Interests

• Writing poetry

• Music & Bands

  Ludwig van Beethoven

Connections

On November 24, 1836, Wagner married actress Christine Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer. They moved to the city of Riga, then in the Russian Empire, where Wagner became a music director of the local opera. A few weeks afterward, Minna ran off with an army officer who then abandoned her, penniless. Wagner took Minna back, but this was but the first debâcle of a troubled marriage that would end in misery three decades later.

Father:

Carl Friedrich Wagner

Mother:

Johanna Rosine

stepfather:

Ludwig Geyer

ex-spouse:

Christine Wilhelmine Planer

colleague:

Franz Liszt

References

• Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived by Simon Callow
  2018