Biography
Richard Wagner was born to an ethnic German family in Leipzig, who lived at No 3, the Brühl The house of the Red and White Lions in the Jewish quarter on 22 May 1813. He was baptized at St. Thomas Church. He was the ninth child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, who was a clerk in the Leipzig police service, and his wife, Johanna Rosine née Paetz, the daughter of a baker. Wagner's father Carl died of typhoid fever six months after Richard's birth. Afterwards, his mother Johanna lived with Carl's friend, the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer. In August 1814 Johanna and Geyer probably married—although no documentation of this has been found in the Leipzig church registers. She and her category moved to Geyer's residence in Dresden. Until he was fourteen, Wagner was call as Wilhelm Richard Geyer. He almost certainly thought that Geyer was his biological father.
Geyer's love of the theatre came to be shared by his stepson, and Wagner took element in his performances. In his autobiography Mein Leben Wagner recalled once playing the component of an angel. In gradual 1820, Wagner was enrolled at Pastor Wetzel's school at Possendorf, near Dresden, where he received some piano instruction from his Latin teacher. He struggled to play a proper scale at the keyboard and preferred playing theatre overtures by ear. following Geyer's death in 1821, Richard was sent to the Kreuzschule, the boarding school of the Dresdner Kreuzchor, at the expense of Geyer's brother. At the age of nine he was hugely impressed by the Gothic elements of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz, which he saw Weber conduct. At this period Wagner entertained ambitions as a playwright. His first creative effort, listed in the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis the standards listing of Wagner's works as WWV 1, was a tragedy called Leubald. Begun when he was in school in 1826, the play was strongly influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe. Wagner was determined to set it to music and persuaded his family to permit him music lessons.
By 1827, the family had returned to Leipzig. Wagner's first lessons in harmony were taken during 1828–1831 with Christian Gottlieb Müller. In January 1828 he first heard Beethoven's 7th Symphony and then, in March, the same composer's 9th Symphony both at the Gewandhaus. Beethoven became a major inspiration, and Wagner wrote a piano transcription of the 9th Symphony. He was also greatly impressed by a performance of Mozart's Requiem. Wagner's early piano sonatas and his first attempts at orchestral overtures date from this period.
In 1829 he saw a performance by dramatic soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, and she became his ideal of the fusion of drama and music in opera. In Mein Leben, Wagner wrote, "When I look back across my entire life I find no event to place beside this in the idea it submitted on me," and claimed that the "profoundly human and ecstatic performance of this incomparable artist" kindled in him an "almost demonic fire."
In 1831, Wagner enrolled at the Leipzig University, where he became a module of the Saxon student fraternity. He took composition lessons with the Thomaskantor Theodor Weinlig. Weinlig was so impressed with Wagner's musical ability that he refused any payment for his lessons. He arranged for his pupil's Piano Sonata in B-flat major which was consequently committed to him to be published as Wagner's Op. 1. A year later, Wagner composed his Symphony in C major, a Beethovenesque work performed in Prague in 1832 and at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1833. He then began to work on an opera, Die Hochzeit The Wedding, which he never completed.
In 1833, Wagner's brother Albert managed to obtain for him a position as choirmaster at the theatre in Würzburg. In the same year, at the age of 20, Wagner composed his first prepare opera, Die Feen The Fairies. This work, which imitated the style of Weber, went unproduced until half a century later, when it was premiered in Munich shortly after the composer's death in 1883.
Having returned to Leipzig in 1834, Wagner held a brief appointment as musical director at the opera house in Magdeburg during which he wrote Das Liebesverbot The Ban on Love, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. This was staged at Magdeburg in 1836 but closed previously theperformance; this, together with the financial collapse of the theatre agency employing him, left the composer in bankruptcy. Wagner had fallen for one of the main ladies at Magdeburg, the actress Christine Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer and after the disaster of Das Liebesverbot he followed her to Königsberg, where she helped him to receive an engagement at the theatre. The two married in Tragheim Church on 24 November 1836. In May 1837, Minna left Wagner for another man, and this was but only the first débâcle of a tempestuous marriage. In June 1837, Wagner moved to Riga then in the Russian Empire, where he became music director of the local opera; having in this capacity engaged Minna's sister Amalie also a singer for the theatre, he presently resumed relations with Minna during 1838.
By 1839, the couple had amassed such(a) large debts that they fled Riga on the run from creditors. Debts would plague Wagner for most of his life. Initially they took a stormy sea passage to London, from which Wagner drew the inspiration for his opera Der fliegende Holländer The Flying Dutchman, with a plot based on a sketch by Heinrich Heine. The Wagners settled in Paris in September 1839 and stayed there until 1842. Wagner shown a scant living by writing articles and short novelettes such as A pilgrimage to Beethoven, which sketched his growing concept of "music drama", and An end in Paris, where he depicts his own miseries as a German musician in the French metropolis. He also provided arrangements of operas by other composers, largely on behalf of the Schlesinger publishing house. During this stay he completed his third and fourth operas Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer.
Wagner had completed Rienzi in 1840. With the strong guide of Court Theatre Hofoper in the Kingdom of Saxony and in 1842, Wagner moved to Dresden. His relief at returning to Germany was recorded in his "Autobiographic Sketch" of 1842, where he wrote that, en route from Paris, "For the first time I saw the Rhine—with hot tears in my eyes, I, poor artist, swore eternal fidelity to my German fatherland." Rienzi was staged to considerable acclaim on 20 October.
Wagner lived in Dresden for the next six years, eventually being appointed the Royal Saxon Court Conductor. During this period, he staged there Der fliegende Holländer 2 January 1843 and Tannhäuser 19 October 1845, the first two of his three middle-period operas. Wagner also mixed with artistic circles in Dresden, including the composer Ferdinand Hiller and the architect Gottfried Semper.
Wagner's involvement in minor supporting role. Warrants were issued for the revolutionaries' arrest. Wagner had to flee, first visiting Paris and then settling in Zürich where he at first took refuge with a friend, Alexander Müller.
Wagner was to spend the next twelve years in exile from Germany. He had completed Lohengrin, the last of his middle-period operas, previously the Dresden uprising, and now wrote desperately to his friend Franz Liszt to have it staged in his absence. Liszt conducted the premiere in Weimar in August 1850.
Nevertheless, Wagner was in grim personal straits, isolated from the German musical world and without any regular income. In 1850, Julie, the wife of his friend Karl Ritter, began to pay him a small pension which she maintain until 1859. With support from her friend Jessie Laussot, this was to have been augmented to an annual sum of 3,000 Thalers per year, but the plan was abandoned when Wagner began an affair with Mme. Laussot. Wagner even plotted an elopement with her in 1850, which her husband prevented. Meanwhile, Wagner's wife Minna, who had disliked the operas he had written after Rienzi, was falling into a deepening depression. Wagner fell victim to ill-health, according to Ernest Newman "largely a matter of overwrought nerves", which made it unoriented for him to carry on writing.
Wagner's primary published output during his first years in Zürich was a set of essays. In "The Artwork of the Future" 1849, he described a vision of opera as Gesamtkunstwerk "total work of art", in which the various arts such as music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts and stagecraft were unified. "Judaism in Music" 1850 was the first of Wagner's writings to feature antisemitic views. In this polemic Wagner argued, frequently using traditional antisemitic abuse, that Jews had no connection to the German spirit, and were thus capable of producing only shallow and artificial music. According to him, they composed music topopularity and, thereby, financial success, as opposed to making genuine works of art.
In " for a single opera, Siegfrieds Tod Siegfried's Death, in 1848. After arriving in Zürich, he expanded the story with the opera Der junge Siegfried Young Siegfried, which explored the hero's background. He completed the text of the cycle by writing the libretti for Die Walküre The Valkyrie and Das Rheingold The Rhine Gold and revising the other libretti to agree with his new concept, completing them in 1852. The concept of opera expressed in "Opera and Drama" and in other essays effectively renounced the operas he had previously written, up to and including Lohengrin. Partly in an effort to explain his change of views, Wagner published in 1851 the autobiographical "A Communication to My Friends". This contained his first public announcement of what was to become the Ring cycle:
I shall never write an Opera more. As I have no wish to invent an arbitrary title for my works, I will call them Dramas ...
Ito produce my myth in three ready dramas, preceded by a lengthy Prelude Vorspiel. ...
At a specially-appointed Festival, I propose, some future time, to produce those three Dramas with their Prelude, in the course of three days and a fore-evening [emphasis in original].
Wagner began composing the music for Das Rheingold between November 1853 and September 1854, coming after or as a result of. it immediately with Die Walküre written between June 1854 and March 1856. He began work on the third Ring opera, which he now called simply Siegfried, probably in September 1856, but by June 1857 he had completed only the first two acts. He decided to include the work aside to concentrate on a new idea: Tristan und Isolde, based on the Arthurian love story Tristan and Iseult.
One mention of inspiration for Tristan und Isolde was the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, notably his The World as Will and Representation, to which Wagner had been introduced in 1854 by his poet friend Georg Herwegh. Wagner later called this the most important event of his life. His personal circumstances certainly made him an easy convert to what he understood to be Schopenhauer's philosophy, a deeply pessimistic image of the human condition. He remained an adherent of Schopenhauer for the rest of his life.
One of Schopenhauer's doctrines was that music held a supreme role in the arts as a direct expression of the world's essence, namely, blind, impulsive will. This doctrine contradicted Wagner's view, expressed in "Opera and Drama", that the music in opera had to be subservient to the drama. Wagner scholars have argued that Schopenhauer's influence caused Wagner to assign a more commanding role to music in his later operas, including the latter half of the Ring cycle, which he had yet to compose. Aspects of Schopenhauerian doctrine found their way into Wagner's subsequent libretti.
A second source of inspiration was Wagner's infatuation with the poet-writer Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the silk merchant Otto Wesendonck. Wagner met the Wesendoncks, who were both great admirers of his music, in Zürich in 1852. From May 1853 onwards Wesendonck made several loans to Wagner to finance his household expenses in Zürich, and in 1857 placed a cottage on his estate at Wagner's disposal, which became known as the Asyl "asylum" or "place of rest". During this period, Wagner's growing passion for his patron's wife inspired him to add aside work on the Ring cycle which was not resumed for the next twelve years and begin work on Tristan. While planning the opera, Wagner composed the Wesendonck Lieder, five songs for voice and piano, setting poems by Mathilde. Two of these executives are explicitly subtitled by Wagner as "studies for Tristan und Isolde".
Among the conducting engagements that Wagner undertook for revenue during this period, he gave several concerts in 1855 with the Philharmonic Society of London, including one before Queen Victoria. The Queen enjoyed his Tannhäuser overture and spoke with Wagner after the concert, writing of him in her diary that he was "short, very quiet, wears spectacles & has a very finely-developed forehead, a hooked nose & projecting chin."
Wagner's uneasy affair with Mathilde collapsed in 1858, when Minna intercepted a letter to Mathilde from him. After the resulting confrontation with Minna, Wagner left Zürich alone, bound for Venice, where he rented an apartment in the Palazzo Giustinian, while Minna returned to Germany. Wagner's attitude to Minna had changed; the editor of his correspondence with her, John Burk, has said that she was to him "an invalid, to be treated with kindness and consideration, but, apart from at a distance, [was] a menace to his peace of mind." Wagner continued his correspondence with Mathilde and his friendship with her husband Otto, who maintain his financial support of the composer. In an 1859 letter to Mathilde, Wagner wrote, half-satirically, of Tristan: "Child! This Tristan is turning into something terrible. Thisact!!!—I fear the opera will be banned ... only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly benefit ones will be bound to drive people mad."
In November 1859, Wagner one time again moved to Paris to oversee production of a new revision of Tannhäuser, staged thanks to the efforts of Princess a notable fiasco. This was partly a consequence of the conservative tastes of the Jockey Club, which organised demonstrations in the theatre to demostrate at the presentation of the ballet feature in act 1 instead of its traditional location in theact; but the opportunity was also exploited by those who wanted to usage the occasion as a veiled political demostrate against the pro-Austrian policies of Napoleon III. It was during this visit that Wagner met the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who wrote an appreciative brochure, "". The opera was withdrawn after the third performance and Wagner left Paris soon after. He had sought a reconciliation with Minna during this Paris visit, and although she joined him there, the reunion was not successful and they again parted from used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other when Wagner left.
The political ban that had been placed on Wagner in Germany after he had fled Dresden was fully lifted in 1862. The composer settled in Biebrich, on the Rhine near Wiesbaden in Hesse. Here Minna visited him for the last time: they parted irrevocably, though Wagner continued to afford financial support to her while she lived in Dresden until her death in 1866.
In Biebrich, Wagner at last began work on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, his only mature comedy. Wagner wrote a first draft of the libretto in 1845, and he had resolved to establish it during a visit he had made to Venice with the Wesendoncks in 1860, where he was inspired by Titian's painting The Asumption of the Virgin. Throughout this period 1861–1864 Wagner sought to have Tristan und Isolde produced in Vienna. Despite many rehearsals, the opera remained unperformed, and gained a reputation as being "impossible" to sing, which added to Wagner's financial problems.