Lohengrin, WWV 75 (1850)
Swan knight opera, premiered at Weimar under Liszt; contains the Bridal Chorus ("Here Comes the Bride")
Recording: Musopen · CC0, Wikimedia Commons
Music
Richard Wagner
1813–1883 · German
Romantic
Wagner transformed opera into the "music drama", writing his own librettos and weaving scores from recurring leitmotifs. His epic Ring cycle, the harmonic daring of Tristan und Isolde and the festival theatre he built at Bayreuth made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in music.
How to spot them
- ▸Vast, surging orchestral sound with heavy brass, Wagner tubas and long unresolved harmonic tension
- ▸Recurring leitmotifs tied to characters, objects and ideas; continuous music rather than set numbers
- ▸Germanic and Norse myth: gods, dwarves, a cursed ring, Valkyries, the Holy Grail, knights and swans
- ▸Clues about Bayreuth, Ludwig II of Bavaria, the Gesamtkunstwerk or the Tristan chord
Key works — listen
Tristan und Isolde, WWV 90 (1865)
Its Prelude opens with the ambiguous "Tristan chord"; ends with Isolde's Liebestod
Recording: user:OldakQuill · EEF OAL-1, Wikimedia Commons
Die Walküre, WWV 86B (1870)
Second Ring opera; Act 3 opens with the Ride of the Valkyries
Recording: Richard Wagner (1813–1883) · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, WWV 96 (1868)
His only mature comedy, about a song contest among Nuremberg's mastersingers
Der Ring des Nibelungen, WWV 86 (1876)
Four-opera cycle (Rheingold, Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung), first staged complete at Bayreuth
Parsifal, WWV 111 (1882)
His final work, a Grail drama written for the acoustics of Bayreuth
Quick-fire facts
- •He was born in Leipzig in 1813 and died in Venice in 1883.
- •The Ring's four operas in order: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung; he worked on it from 1848 to 1874.
- •His Bayreuth Festspielhaus opened in August 1876 with the first complete Ring cycle.
- •King Ludwig II of Bavaria became his patron in 1864 and paid off his debts.
- •He married Cosima, Liszt's daughter, in 1870; the Siegfried Idyll was a birthday present for her.
- •He called his ideal of uniting music, poetry and stage spectacle the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art").
- •The Ride of the Valkyries accompanies the helicopter attack in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (1979).
- •His works are catalogued with WWV numbers (Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis); his essay Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850) is notoriously antisemitic.
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Sources
- Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press) — Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Richard Wagner