Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner (Reek-ard Vog-ner) was born in Leipzig, Saxony (Germany) in 1813. He was the youngest of nine children. His father died when Wagner was only six months old and soon after his mother married a family friend. Wagner’s new stepfather was an actor and playwright who often took young Richard to performances, exposing him to the stage at a young age. He began taking piano lessons when he started at the local school but preferred to play what he heard rather than learning the proper scales. At nine he was sent away to boarding school near Dresden, Saxony (Germany), there he saw the opera Der Freischütz (The Marksman) by Carl Maria von Weber. Wagner’s interest in the stage continued to grow; he hoped to become a playwright when he grew up. He finished his first play, Leubald, which he was determined to set to music. He moved back home to Leipzig at age fourteen and began music lessons there. Around the same time, Wagner attended concerts featuring Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and Symphony No. 9 and a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem. These works deeply moved and inspired Wagner to write his own music. After attending an opera performance two years later, Wagner had his first ideas about how drama and music could be combined to create one unified piece of art.  

In 1831, Wagner enrolled in Leipzig University. He joined a fraternity and began composition lessons. His teacher, Theodor Weinlig was so impressed with Wagner’s abilities that he refused to let Wagner pay for the lessons. Weinlig helped Wagner publish his first work, a piano sonata. The next year, Wagner’s Symphony in C Major was performed in Prague, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) and he began work on his first opera, which he did not complete. Wagner did complete an opera in 1833 when he was twenty years old. Called Die Feen (The Fairies) it was not publicly performed until after he died. Wagner worked in several different theaters in Germany and Russia over the next few years. At a theater in Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt (Germany) Wagner met and fell in love with one of the singers, Minna. The two were married in 1836 but did not always get along well. Wagner also had financial problems. When he and Minna lived in Riga in the Russian Empire (now Latvia) they owed so much money that they ran away to London. Their boat voyage to England was very treacherous over stormy seas. This trip inspired one of Wagner’s operas, Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) about a ghostly ship cursed to sail the ocean forever. After a few years in Paris, the Wagners moved to Dresden, Saxony (Germany) where he got a job as the Royal Saxon Court Conductor and had several of his operas performed. However, Wagner got involved in politics and eventually played a minor part in an attempt force the King of Saxony to have less power and provide the people with a constitution. The uprising failed and many of the people involved were either arrested or exiled. Wagner left Dresden first for Paris before settling in Zürich, Switzerland, where he lived for the next twelve years. Wagner’s time in exile was very difficult; he didn’t have a job, so money was again an issue. He and his wife were not getting along again, and he was sick a lot of the time. However, it was during this period that Wagner solidified his ideas about how he could turn opera into a new artwork by making sure that the combination of story, music, costumes, sets, choreography, and even the building worked together to create one cohesive art form. Wagner used these ideas to begin his biggest and most famous work, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), often referred to as the Ring cycle. Initially, Wagner intended it to be only one opera, but as he started writing the story, it grew and grew, eventually becoming four operas. He began work on the music for these new works, but also worked on another opera at the same time and took a trip to England to conduct. Wagner spent the next few years living and working in various European cities, including Paris and Venice. His relationship with his wife got even worse and she eventually moved back home without him. They saw each other only one more time before her death.  

Wagner was able to return home in 1862. He worked on the Ring operas as well as a new comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Master Singer of Nuremberg). Once again, Wagner did not have enough money. His creditors even held up his opera productions to make sure Wagner would pay his bills. Eventually, Wagner, along with his new wife, Cosima, moved to the city of Bayreuth (buy-roit). There he planned to finish the Ring cycle and build a new theater which would allow his operas to be performed in his ideal setting to fit in with his ideas about total artwork. Several of Wagner’s ideas about performance are used to this day. Wagner was the first to dim the lights in the theater before the performance and to put the orchestra in a pit below the stage, so they were out of view. In 1876, twenty-two years after his initial idea, Wagner conducted the entire cycle for the first time. Wagner spent the last few years of his life at Bayreuth working on his final opera, Parsifal, and writing articles on art and politics. He conducted his final opera in August 1882 after sneaking into the pit and taking the baton from the conductor. During a trip to Venice with his family, he died of a heart attack at age 69. He was buried on the grounds of his theater in Bayreuth. 

Wagner’s music was new and different. The melody lines are often very long. He used chords in new and unexpected ways that people had never heard before. He combined different instruments together and created interesting new sounds in the orchestra. Most important was his idea of leitmotif. A leitmotif is a small melody or chord that represented a specific character, object, or idea. Wagner would use certain music when a character entered the stage. Then later, he could use that same music to remind the audience about that character, perhaps to foreshadow what was to come or to give a hint about the character. This idea has been used over and over since Wagner came up with the idea. In the music for Star Wars, John Williams uses music for Luke, Leia, and Darth Vader, often in combination to give us a hint as to their true identities. These musical cues can tell us about the character before the story does. Lin-Manuel Miranda used some of these same ideas in Hamilton as well, the same notes and rhythms are used every time characters such as Hamilton, Eliza, and Peggy say their names. Wagner’s ideas and musical language greatly influenced later musicians, however during World War II the Nazi regime used a lot of Wagner’s music giving him a complicated legacy.