Richard Wagner

1813–1883, GERMAN

An opera composer and librettist, Wagner was a controversial figure and a radical force in 19th-century culture. His idea of the “total work of art” found its fullest expression in the four operas of the Ring cycle.

RICHARD WAGNER, 1868
Despite a life of profligacy, philandering, controversy, and exile, Wagner had a profound influence on Western music. This portrait by Franz von Lenbach shows the composer in his mid-fifties.

ON TECHNIQUE

The leitmotif

Richard Wagner sought to create operas that were unified dramas, rather than broken up into arias, choruses, and recitatives. Starting with The Flying Dutchman, which was composed in the early 1840s, he employed leitmotifs—recurring musical themes that are associated with specific characters or other elements of the drama.

This technique was fully developed by the time Wagner wrote the first operas of his Ring cycle in the 1850s. Leitmotifs such as the horn call representing the heroic Siegfried constantly recur and transform, weaving a continuous musical web that underlies the work’s dramatic action.

JEAN DE RESZKE IN THE ROLE OF SIEGFRIED FROM THE RING CYCLE

The youngest of nine children, Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813. His father died when he was a baby, after which his mother lived with actor and painter Ludwig Geyer, who may have been Richard’s biological father. Originally attracted to writing drama, around the age of 15 Wagner discovered his musical vocation, inspired by hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Studying composition in Leipzig, he wrote a juvenile symphony and various keyboard works, but his ambitions soon focused exclusively on opera. From the outset he wrote his own libretti, regarding himself as a dramatist as well as a composer.

TANNHÄUSER POSTER
This poster announces the premiere of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Opéra de Paris in 1861. The opera touches on the conflict between sexual and spiritual love.

Turmoil and instability

Wagner had completed two unsuccessful operas, Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot, by 1836, when he married Minna Planer, an actress. She left him, briefly, for another man. Although they were reconciled, it was not an easy marriage. Wagner became music director at the opera house in Riga on the Baltic, but could not live on the income. In 1839, he and Minna fled to escape creditors—the stormy sea voyage inspired his ghost-ship opera The Flying Dutchman. Then came another two years of poverty and overspending in Paris, where he was again threatened with debtors’ prison. Wagner’s breakthrough work was Rienzi, a conventional grand opera in the style of established composers such as Vincenzo Bellini and Giacomo Meyerbeer. It was rejected in Paris but, with Meyerbeer’s backing, accepted for performance at the Dresden opera house in Wagner’s native Saxony. The success of this production in 1842, and of The Flying Dutchman in 1843, led to his appointment as director of music at Saxony’s royal court. There he wrote Tannhäuser, performed in Dresden in 1845, and Lohengrin, completed in 1848. Drawing on Germanic myth, these mature works established Wagner’s originality as an operatic composer.

Revolution and escape

Political upheaval prevented Lohengrin from being premiered in Dresden. In 1848, the German kingdoms, including Saxony, faced uprisings and demands for a unified German nation-state. Wagner sided with the revolutionaries, advocating a German national theater and embracing republicanism. In May 1849, after street fighting, the rebels in Dresden were suppressed. Known for his revolutionary sympathies, Wagner fled to Switzerland to escape arrest, becoming a political exile banned from all German states.

IN PROFILE

Ludwig II

Born in 1845, “Mad” King Ludwig inherited the throne of Bavaria in 1864, aged 18. From 1871, Bavaria was subsumed within the German Empire, but the king retained his title, limited powers, and a substantial revenue. Ludwig was eccentric and homosexual; his enemies claimed he was mad. He became notorious for his lavish spending on spectacular palaces such as Neuschwanstein Castle and on Wagner’s operatic projects. In 1886, his political opponents hatched a plot to replace him with a regent. Declared insane by a panel of doctors, he was deposed and drowned himself in a lake.

LUDWIG II (OR LOUIS II), KING OF BAVARIA, WILHELM TAUBNER, 1864

A total work of art

He produced a series of polemical writings—Art and Revolution, The Art of the Future, Opera and Drama—that expressed a program for a post-revolutionary culture. With capitalism overthrown, a “total work of art,” unifying music, poetry, drama, and dance, would provide the focus for the German community, the Volk (people). There was no place for “alien” Jews, whose influence on German music he decried. While pursuing these ideas, he supported himself by borrowing large sums from adoring women.

By 1853, Wagner had written the text for Der Ring des Nibelungen, a cycle of four operas based on Nordic sagas. The music for the first two, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, was completed by 1856. These works were aligned with his theoretical writing, which saw music as subordinate to the poetic text. But in the mid-1850s, he discovered the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer—Buddhist-influenced, and positing music as the highest of the arts. He also discovered Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck. Otto was a silk merchant who became another of Wagner’s admiring benefactors; his wife, a poet, became the composer’s muse and possibly his lover. He played her the singular compliment of setting her verse, rather than his own, in his Wesendonck-Lieder (1858). Above all, she was the inspiration for Tristan und Isolde, his opera of love and death, completed during spells in Venice and Lucerne in 1858–1859. In Tristan, the passionate music dominates the drama. Its unresolved yearning harmonies, failing to establish a clear tonality, are often seen as the starting point of musical Modernism.

DIE WALKÜRE
Shown here is a scene in Act III from an 1899 production of Wagner’s Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second opera in his Ring cycle, featuring eight female warriors, or Valkyries (from the old Norse, meaning “chooser of the slain”).

Desperation and salvation

By the 1860s, Wagner’s relationship with the Wesendoncks had broken up and the ban on his return to German territories had been lifted. After the staging of a revised version of Tannhäuser in Paris in 1861 proved a fiasco, his finances remained in a desperate state, his luxurious tastes far outreaching his income. Salvation arrived in 1864 in the person of Ludwig II, the 18-year-old ruler of Bavaria (see box). A star-struck admirer of the composer, Ludwig cleared Wagner’s debts and gave him a lavish annual income. At the same time, the composer’s more intimate needs were met by Cosima von Bülow, Liszt’s daughter and the wife of Hans von Bülow, a conductor who premiered several Wagner operas. She became Wagner’s mistress and had three children before she obtained a divorce and married him in 1870 (Wagner’s first wife died in 1866). Wagner wrote his Siegfried Idyll for Cosima’s first birthday as his spouse and after the birth of their son Siegfried.

Wagner rode the wave of assertive German nationalism that came with the creation of the German Empire, under Prussian rule, between 1866 and 1871. His comic opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was a triumph from its first performance in 1868, hailed as representing the true spirit of the resurgent German people. He resumed composition of the Ring cycle, abandoned since the 1850s, finishing the third opera, Siegfried, in 1871 and the final work in the sequence, Götterdämmerung, in 1874. With Ludwig II’s backing, he built a theater at Bayreuth in northern Bavaria to stage his masterpiece. The first complete performance of the Ring cycle in 1876 was a major cultural event with a celebrity audience. The cycle has maintained its fascination ever since, its symbolism attracting diverse interpretations ranging from Marxist anti-capitalism to Freudian psychodrama.

Later years

Wagner lived for the rest of his life at Wahnfried, the villa he had built by the Bayreuth theater. His final creative project was Parsifal, an operatic version of the legend of the Holy Grail, completed in 1882. He regarded it as a sacred work, to be performed exclusively at Bayreuth so it would not degenerate into an “entertainment.” His apparent embrace of a mystical Christianity alienated some of his previous admirers, including the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Other critics have viewed the opera as an expression of Wagner’s racial theories and anti-Semitism.

Wagner’s habits of a lifetime never changed. He still ran into debt and he was unfaithful to his wife. It was after a marital fight that he died of a heart attack in Venice in 1883. His body was brought back to Bayreuth for burial. Cosima Wagner became the self-appointed guardian of the purity of performances of Wagner’s operas at the annual Bayreuth Festival, a role she maintained into the 20th century.

BAYREUTH FESTIVAL, 1892
Held annually since 1876, and with initial funding by Ludwig II, the festival and its theater (built 1871–1876) are devoted to the showcasing of Wagner’s stage works. This late-19th-century painting is entitled The Arrival of the Guests.

RICHARD AND COSIMA WAGNER
Cosima (shown here c. 1875), illegitimate daughter of Liszt, divorced the conductor Hans von Bülow to marry Wagner, who was not faithful to her.