Richard Wagner :: Biography, Composer

(1813-1883)German composer.His childhood was divided between Dresden and Leipzig, where he had first composition lessons his instructor refused payment because of his talent. His first opera, Die Feen (1834), was followed by Der Liebesverbot (1836) the premiere performance was so unprepared that the event was a fiasco, and he henceforth determined not to fall down for modest productions. The success of Rienzi (1840) led him to be more adventurous in The Flying Dutchman (1843), and even more so in Tannhuser (1845). Caught up in the political turmoil of 1848, he was forced to flee Dresden for Zurich. During this enforced vacation, he wrote influential essays, asserting (following G. W. F. Hegel) that music had reached a limit after Ludwig van Beethoven, and that the " artwork of the future" would unite music and theater in a Gesamtkunstwerk ("total artwork"). In 1850 he saw Lohengrin produced. He had begun his most ambitious work, The abut of the Nibelung, a four-op era cycle. The need for large-scale unity brought him to the concept of the leitmotiv. He ceased work on the Rings third opera, Siegfried, in the throes of an adulterous love with Mathilde Wesendonk, and wrote an opera of forbidden love, Tristan und Isolde (1859), which in like manner seemed to break the bonds of tonality. He published the Ring librettos in 1863, asking if some German prince would support his artistic dreams, and Ludwig II of Bavaria responded. Shortly thereafter, Cosima Liszt von Blow became the come of the first of his children they marriedin 1870, after his own wifes death.