Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor and essayist who transformed opera in the 19th century. Writing both words and music, he developed the idea of a total work of art uniting drama, poetry, music and staging, and in works such as Tristan und Isolde and the four-part Ring of the Nibelung he pushed harmony and orchestration in directions that shaped modern music. He built his own theatre at Bayreuth, where his works are still performed each summer. His antisemitic writings and later use by the Nazis have made him one of the most contested figures in Western culture.

Wagner was born in Leipzig on 22 May 1813, the son of a police clerk who died six months later. His mother soon set up home with the actor Ludwig Geyer, and the family moved to Dresden, where the boy grew up around the theatre. Back in Leipzig, hearing Beethoven's symphonies in 1828 confirmed his musical ambitions.

From 1833 Wagner held a string of theatre posts, at Würzburg, Magdeburg, Königsberg and then Riga in the Russian Empire. In 1836 he married the actress Minna Planer, beginning a stormy marriage. Fleeing creditors in 1839, the couple made a stormy sea crossing that inspired The Flying Dutchman, then lived in poverty in Paris until 1842.

In 1842 his opera Rienzi was a success in Dresden, capital of the Kingdom of Saxony, and Wagner became royal court conductor there. The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser followed, and he completed Lohengrin. He also mixed with radicals such as the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. When the May Uprising of 1849, part of the Revolutions of 1848, failed, a warrant was issued for his arrest and he fled.

Wagner spent most of the next twelve years in exile, chiefly in Zurich. There he set out his theory of music drama in essays. In 1850 he also published Judaism in Music, an attack on Jewish musicians and the first of his writings to express antisemitic views, which he reissued under his own name in 1869. He wrote the text of the Ring and composed Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, then broke off to write Tristan und Isolde, inspired partly by Schopenhauer's philosophy and by his love for Mathilde Wesendonck, a patron's wife. In 1858 he moved to Venice, and in 1861 a revised Tannhäuser failed in Paris.

A political ban on Wagner in the German states was fully lifted in 1862. In 1864 the new young king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, an ardent admirer, paid his debts and brought him to Munich. Tristan und Isolde premiered there in 1865, conducted by Hans von Bülow, whose wife Cosima, a daughter of Franz Liszt, had just borne Wagner a daughter. Scandal forced Wagner out of Munich that December, and Ludwig housed him at Tribschen on Lake Lucerne, where he completed Die Meistersinger. Minna died in 1866, and Wagner married Cosima in 1870.

In 1871 Wagner chose the Bavarian town of Bayreuth for a festival theatre of his own. After a long struggle for money, rescued by a loan from Ludwig, the Festspielhaus opened on 13 August 1876 with the first complete performance of the Ring. Its darkened auditorium and hidden orchestra pit were innovations. Wagner's last opera, Parsifal, premiered there in 1882. Suffering from heart disease, he went to Venice for the winter and died there of a heart attack on 13 February 1883. He was buried in the garden of his Bayreuth home, Wahnfried.

Wagner's chromatic harmony, from the opening of Tristan onwards, pointed towards the breakdown of traditional tonality, and composers from Bruckner and Mahler to Richard Strauss and Schoenberg built on his work. His family has run the Bayreuth Festival ever since. Adolf Hitler admired his music and visited Bayreuth often, and how far Wagner's ideas fed Nazi thinking is still debated.

Our 1815 map shows the patchwork of German states into which Wagner was born, and the 1878 map shows the new German Empire in the years of the first Bayreuth Festival.