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The greatest composer of German opera, Richard
Wagner, b. Leipzig, May 22, 1813, was the youngest of nine
children of Friedrich and Johanna Wagner. His father, a police
registrar, died 6 months after Wagner was born, and his mother
was remarried the following year to Ludwig Geyer, an actor
and portrait painter, who moved the family to Dresden. Geyer
died in 1821, and in 1827 the family returned to Leipzig.
Life
Wagner was attracted to the theater at an early age. His first
creative effort was a spoken tragedy, Leubald and Adelaide
(1828), which was heavily influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe.
He decided at once, however, that he must also write music,
and he proceeded to teach himself the rudiments of composition,
supplementing them with the study of scores. His formal training
was brief--about 6 months in 1831-32 with the Leipzig cantor
C. T. Weinlig. During the 1830s, Wagner held a series of conducting
posts with small theatrical companies, and he wrote two operas,
Die Feen (The Fairies, 1834) and Das Liebesverbot (Forbidden
Love; after Shakespeare's Measure for Measure); the latter
was performed without much success in 1836 in Magdeburg. His
third opera, Rienzi, was conceived on a larger scale, and
Wagner traveled to Paris in 1839 with the futile hope of having
it performed there.
Rienzi was finally accepted for performance in Dresden in
1842. Its success, coupled with that of Der fliegende Hollander
(The Flying Dutchman) the following year, led to Wagner's
appointment to an official conducting post in Dresden. There
he completed Tannhauser (1845) and Lohengrin (1848). This
period of success ended in 1849, however, when his participation
in revolutionary political activities forced him to flee to
Switzerland.
Wagner's exile from Germany, which lasted until 1860, marks
the start of a new period in his career. For a few years he
devoted himself almost entirely to speculation about the nature
of opera. This took the form of several treatises, the most
important of which (The Artwork of the Future and Opera and
Drama) laid the foundation for his most ambitious work, Der
Ring des Nibelungen (THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG), a cycle of
four operas--Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), Die Walkure (The
Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the
Gods)--that he began to compose in 1853 and did not finish
until 1874. Halfway through Siegfried, work on the project
was interrupted for 12 years while Wagner composed (1857-59)
TRISTAN AND ISOLDE and Die Meistersinger (1862-67).
Wagner and Bayreuth
The last great turning point in Wagner's fortunes occurred
in 1864 when he was called to Munich by the eccentric young
king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, an ardent admirer of his works
and theories. Ludwig's patronage continued for the last 20
years of Wagner's life, making possible the performance of
all his mature works and eventually the construction in Bayreuth
of a theater of Wagner's own design. It was opened in 1876
with the first complete production of the Ring. Bayreuth soon
became the center for the promotion of Wagner's works and
ideology. His last opera, Parsifal, was performed in 1882,
with the ceremony normally accorded only to a religious event.
Following Wagner's death on Feb. 13, 1883, control of the
Bayreuth festival passed to his second wife, Cosima (a daughter
of Franz LISZT), and later to their children and grandchildren,
a succession that has continued to the present.
Works and Influence
Although Wagner's early training was slight by the standards
of most major composers, he had an uncanny ability to copy
the various styles he encountered in the music of his time.
The basic gestures and the orchestral sound (although not
the large-scale architecture) of Beethoven are reflected in
early instrumental works such as the Symphony in C, which
Wagner completed in 1832. When he turned to opera he moved
easily from the German romantic style of Weber and Marschner
(in Die Feen) to the Italian style of Rossini and Bellini
(in Das Liebesverbot) to the grand opera style of Spontini
and Meyerbeer (in Rienzi). In the three works of the 1840s,
however--The Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, and Lohengrin--a
more distinctive personal style emerged.
The use of legendary sources and the gradual reduction in
contrast between aria and recitative in these operas anticipate
the new music drama that Wagner was to propose in the treatises
written about 1850. The guiding principles of his theory were
naturalism and dramatic truth, which he felt had been compromised
by the musical conventions of contemporary opera. He advocated
a new synthesis of music, verse, and staging--what he called
a Gesamtkunstwerk. The verse, which Wagner always wrote himself,
was to be compressed, metrically free, and alliterative, dispensing
with the end-rhyme that led to closed musical structures.
The open-ended melody of the vocal line was to be supported
by a symphonic accompaniment, continuously fluctuating with
the sense of the text and unified by a web of motifs associated
more or less directly with characters, things, ideas, or events.
Wagner called these motifs Grundthemen, but they have become
better known as leitmotifs ("leading motifs"). Ensemble
singing was to be avoided. This theoretical music drama was
exemplified in its purest form in Der Ring des Nibelungen,
the text of which took shape as Wagner was writing the treatises.
Later works adhered less strictly to the theories: ensemble
singing returns in Tristan und Isolde, and Die Meistersinger
makes use of end-rhyme, closed musical forms, and a plot set
in historical rather than mythological times. Even the later
portions of the Ring include scenes in which naturalism is
sacrificed for musical effect.
In turning to myth and legend for his dramatic materials,
Wagner was seeking themes of lasting symbolic value. In this
respect he was pursuing a direction already established by
Carl Maria von Weber and Heinrich Marschner, both of whom
had treated themes involving supernatural forces. Particularly
Wagnerian was the theme of fall and redemption, which recurs
in all of the mature works except the comic Die Meistersinger.
Although Wagner varied his treatment in each opera, the means
of redemption is typically some combination of increased awareness
on the part of the flawed male protagonist and the love and
instinctive vision of his female counterpart. Death is celebrated
as a step to transfiguration. An equally important theme is
the futility of opposing social (or artistic) change. Influenced
in part by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, which sought renunciation
of worldly desires, Wagner repeatedly portrayed noble older
characters in the process of accepting their own displacement
by a new generation. The philosophical overtones of such themes,
together with the symbolic nature of much of the dialogue
and action, have made Wagner's operas a favorite subject for
modern psychological analysis and experimental productions.
The extreme position formulated by Wagner made him the center
of controversy even in his own lifetime. Such contemporaries
as Berlioz, Brahms, and Verdi were impressed by his works
but did not fully understand them. The next generation reacted
in various ways: some followed, some sought alternatives,
and others adapted aspects of Wagner's musical style to traditional
methods. His influence on the mainstream of musical development
was above all through Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. Extreme
chromaticism, irregular resolution of dissonance, and continuously
shifting key centers make Tristan a pivotal work in a progression
leading ultimately to the atonality of Arnold Schoenberg and
his followers. Although the impressionists, led by Debussy,
favored other expressive goals and found other ways of weakening
tonality, they, too, were influenced by Wagner's treatment
of orchestral color (especially in Parsifal), his rich chords,
and his subtle relation of motif to large-scale structure.
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