Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a German opera composer. He revolutionized the 19th-century conception of opera, envisaging it as a wholly new art form in which musical, poetic, and scenic elements should be unified through such devices as the leitmotif, a recurring phrase indicating, say, a particular character.

His operas include Tannhdusex (1845), Lohengrin (1850), and Tristan und Isolde (1865). In 1872 he founded the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth; his masterpiece Der Ring des Nibelungen/The Ring of the Nibelung, a sequence of four operas, was first performed there in 1876. His last work, Parsifal, was produced in 1882.

Wagner's early career was as director of the Magdeburg Theatre, where he unsuccessfully produced his first opera Das Liebesverbot/Forbidden Love in 1836. He lived i n Paris 1839-1842 and conducted at the Dresden Opera House 1842-1848. He fled Germany to escape arrest for his pan in the 1848 revolution, but in 1861 he was allowed to return.

He won the favour of Ludwig II of Bavaria in 1864 and was thus able to set up the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth. The Bayreuth tradition was continued by his wife Cosima (Liszt's daughter, whom he married after her divorce from Hans von Biilow) by his son Siegfried Wagner (1869-1930), a composer of operas such as Der Barenhauter; and by later descendants.

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Tags: composer, opera, career, revolution

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Category: Others  - ( Others Archive)

Date Added: 04 July '12

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