Wilhelm Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (May 22, 1813 February 13, 1883) was an influential German composer, music theorist, and essayist, primarily known for his operas. His music is still widely performed, the best known pieces being the 'Ride of the Valkyries' from Die Walkre and the 'Bridal Chorus' from Lohengrin. He is also an extremely controversial figure, both because of his musical and dramatic innovations, and because he was a very public exponent of anti-semitic ideas. Wagner's primary artistic legacy is the operas that he wrote. These can be roughly divided into three groups: The early-stage operas are Die Feen (The Fairies), Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), and Rienzi. These works are seldom performed today. His middle-stage output, which is considered to be of remarkably higher quality, began with Der fliegende Hollnder (The Flying Dutchman), followed by Tannhuser and Lohengrin. The first of Wagner's mature operas is Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde), often considered his masterpiece. Next is Die Meistersinger von Nrnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg), the only comedy in his oeuvre apart from Das Liebesverbot, and one of the longest operas still performed. This is followed by Der Ring des Nibelungen, commonly referred to as the Ring cycle, a set of four operas based on German and Scandinavian mythology. Spanning roughly 14 hours in performance, the Ring cycle has been called the most ambitious artistic work ever made. Wagner's final opera, Parsifal, is a contemplative work based on the Christian legend of the Holy Grail. Through his operas and theoretical essays, Wagner exerted a strong influence on the operatic medium. He was an advocate of a new form of opera which he called 'music drama', in which all the musical and dramatic elements were fused together. To this end, he developed a compositional style in which the orchestra has at least as great a dramatic role as the singers themselves. The expressiveness of the orchestra is aided by the use of leitmotifs, musical sequences standing for a particular character or plot element, whose complex interleaving and evolution illuminates the progression of the drama. Unlike other opera composers, who generally delegated the task of writing the libretto (the text and lyrics) to others, Wagner wrote his own libretti, which he referred to as 'poems'. Most of his plots were based on European myths and legends. Wagner's musical style is often considered the epitome of classical music's Romantic period, due to its unprecedented exploration of emotional expression. He introduced new ideas in harmony and form, including extremes of chromaticism. In Tristan und Isolde, he explored the limits of the traditional tonal system that gave keys and chords their identity, pointing the way to the rise of atonality in the 20th century. Certain historians of music have even placed the beginning of modern classical music at the first notes of Tristan (the so-called Tristan chord.)