Early years , Leipzig|alt=A building with four main storeys with an open shop to one side of an arched entrance and garret windows in the roof. A sculpted figure of an animal is above the arch. Richard Wagner was born on 22 May 1813 to an
ethnic German family in
Leipzig, then part of the
Confederation of the Rhine. His family lived at No 3, the
Brühl (
The House of the Red and White Lions) in Leipzig's
Jewish quarter. He was baptised at
St. Thomas Church. He was the ninth, and youngest, child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the Leipzig police service, and his wife,
Johanna Rosine Wagner, 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 family moved to Geyer's residence in
Dresden. Until he was fourteen, Wagner was known 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 part in his performances. In his autobiography
Mein Leben Wagner recalled once playing the part of an angel. In late 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 standard 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 allow him music lessons. By 1827, the family had returned to Leipzig. Wagner's first lessons in
harmony were taken during 1828–1831 with . 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, who 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 impression it produced 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 member 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 dedicated 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.
Early career and marriage (1833–1842) (1835), by Alexander von Otterstedt|alt=The head and upper torso of a young white woman with dark hair done in an elaborate style. She wears a small hat, a cloak and dress that expose her shoulders and pearl earrings. On her left hand that holds the edge of the cloak, two rings are visible. In 1833, Wagner's brother Albert managed to obtain for him a position as choirmaster at the
Theatre Würzburg. In the same year, at the age of 20, Wagner composed his first complete 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 before the second performance; this, together with the financial collapse of the theatre company employing him, left the composer in bankruptcy. Wagner had fallen for one of the leading 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 get 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 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 large debts that they fled Riga on the run from creditors. Debts plagued Wagner for most of his life. Initially the pair 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. During these years, Wagner is believed to have attended
François Delsarte's "Cours d'esthétique appliquée," which arguably influenced his aesthetic writings and compositional style. Wagner made 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.
Dresden (1842–1849) Wagner had completed
Rienzi in 1840. With the strong support of
Giacomo Meyerbeer, it was accepted for performance by the Dresden
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
left-wing politics abruptly ended his welcome in Dresden. Wagner was active among
socialist German nationalists there, regularly receiving such guests as the conductor and radical editor
August Röckel and the Russian
anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. He was also influenced by the ideas of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and
Ludwig Feuerbach. Widespread discontent came to a head in 1849, when the unsuccessful
May Uprising in Dresden broke out, in which Wagner played a
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.
In exile: Switzerland (1849–1858) Wagner was to spend the next twelve years in exile from Germany. He had completed
Lohengrin, the last of his middle-period operas, before 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 maintained until 1859. With help 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 difficult for him to continue 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 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 asserted—often with vulgar, abusive language—that Jews lived as "outsiders" amid European societies and were disconnected from the national spirit (
Volksgeist) of these countries, thus capable of producing only shallow and artificial imitations of European art music, despite having achieved technical proficiency in its study. According to Wagner, Jews such as Meyerbeer commercialised music catered to the masses in order to achieve fame and financial success, rather than creating genuine works of art. In "
Opera and Drama" (1851), Wagner described the
aesthetics of music drama that he was using to create the
Ring cycle. Before leaving Dresden, Wagner had drafted a scenario that eventually became
Der Ring des Nibelungen. He initially
wrote the libretto for a single opera, ''
(Siegfried's Death
), in 1848. After arriving in Zürich, he expanded the story with 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 conform to his new concept, completing them in 1852. The concept of opera expressed in "Opera and Drama" and in other essays effectively renounced all the operas he had previously written through
Lohengrin. Partly in an attempt to explain his change of views, Wagner published in 1851 the autobiographical "
A Communication to My Friends". This included 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 ... I propose to produce my myth in three complete 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, following it immediately with
Die Walküre (written between June 1854 and March 1856). He began work on the third
Ring drama, 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 put the work aside to concentrate on a new idea:
Tristan und Isolde, based on the
Arthurian love story
Tristan and Iseult. (1850) by
Karl Ferdinand Sohn|alt=A three-quarter length portrait of a young white woman in the open air. She wears a shawl over an elaborate long-sleeved dress that exposes her shoulders and has a hat on over her centrally parted dark hair. One source 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, sometimes categorised as "
philosophical pessimism". 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 . 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 put 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 settings 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 in her diary that Wagner was "short, very quiet, wears spectacles & has a very finely-developed forehead, a hooked nose & projecting chin."
In exile: Venice and Paris (1858–1862) 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, except 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 maintained 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. This final act!!!—I fear the opera will be banned ... only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad." In November 1859, Wagner once again moved to Paris to oversee production of a new revision of
Tannhäuser, staged thanks to the efforts of Princess
Pauline von Metternich, whose husband,
Richard von Metternich, was the Austrian ambassador in Paris. The performances of the Paris
Tannhäuser in 1861 were
a notable fiasco. This was partly a consequence of the conservative tastes of the
Jockey Club, which organised demonstrations in the theatre to protest at the presentation of the ballet feature in Act 1 (instead of its traditional location in the second act); but the opportunity was also exploited by those who wanted to use the occasion as a veiled political protest 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 each other when Wagner left.
Return and resurgence (1862–1871) The political ban that had been placed on Wagner in the
North German Confederation 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 give financial support to her while she lived in Dresden until her death in 1866. about the time when he first met Wagner, by , 1865|alt=A young man in a dark military jacket, jodhpurs, long boots, and a voluminous ermine robe. He wears a sword at his side, a sash, a chain and a large star. Mainly hidden by his robe is a throne and behind that is a curtain with a crest with Ludwig's name and title in Latin. To one side a cushion holding a crown sits on a table. 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 develop it during a visit he had made to Venice with the Wesendoncks in 1860, where he was inspired by
Titian's painting
The Assumption 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. Wagner's fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864, when
King Ludwig II succeeded to the throne of
Bavaria at the age of 18. The young king, an ardent admirer of Wagner's operas, had the composer brought to Munich. The King, who was homosexual, expressed in his correspondence a passionate personal adoration for Wagner, and Wagner in his responses had no scruples about feigning reciprocal feelings. Ludwig settled Wagner's considerable debts and proposed to stage
Tristan,
Die Meistersinger, the
Ring, and the other operas Wagner planned. Wagner also began to dictate his autobiography,
Mein Leben, at the King's request. Wagner noted that his rescue by Ludwig coincided with news of the death of his earlier mentor (but later supposed enemy)
Giacomo Meyerbeer, and regretted that "this operatic master, who had done me so much harm, should not have lived to see this day." After grave difficulties in rehearsal,
Tristan und Isolde premiered at the
National Theatre Munich on 10 June 1865, the first Wagner opera premiere in almost 15 years. (The premiere had been scheduled for 15 May, but was delayed by bailiffs acting for Wagner's creditors, and also because the Isolde,
Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, was hoarse and needed time to recover.) The conductor of this premiere was
Hans von Bülow, whose wife,
Cosima, had given birth in April that year to a daughter, named
Isolde, a child not of Bülow but of Wagner. Cosima was 24 years younger than Wagner and was herself illegitimate, the daughter of the Countess
Marie d'Agoult, who had left her husband for
Franz Liszt. Liszt initially disapproved of his daughter's involvement with Wagner, though nevertheless the two men were friends. The indiscreet affair scandalised Munich, and Wagner also fell into disfavour with many leading members of the court, who were suspicious of his influence on the King. In December 1865, Ludwig was finally forced to ask the composer to leave Munich. He apparently also toyed with the idea of abdicating to follow his hero into exile, but Wagner quickly dissuaded him. Ludwig installed Wagner at the
Villa Tribschen, beside Switzerland's
Lake Lucerne.
Die Meistersinger was completed at Tribschen in 1867, and premiered in Munich on 21 June the following year. At Ludwig's insistence, "special previews" of the first two works of the
Ring,
Das Rheingold and
Die Walküre, were performed at Munich in 1869 and 1870, but Wagner retained his dream, first expressed in "A Communication to My Friends", to present the first complete cycle at a special festival with a new, dedicated,
opera house. Minna died of a heart attack on 25 January 1866 in Dresden. Wagner did not attend the funeral. Following Minna's death Cosima wrote to Hans von Bülow several times asking him to grant her a divorce, but Bülow refused to concede this. He consented only after she had two more children with Wagner: another daughter, named
Eva, after the heroine of
Meistersinger, and a son
Siegfried, named after the hero of the
Ring. The divorce was finally sanctioned, after delays in the legal process, by a Berlin court on 18 July 1870. Richard and Cosima's wedding took place on 25 August 1870. On Christmas Day 1870, Wagner arranged a surprise performance (its premiere) of the
Siegfried Idyll for Cosima's birthday. The marriage to Cosima lasted to the end of Wagner's life. Wagner, settled into his new-found domesticity, turned his energies towards completing the
Ring cycle. He had not abandoned polemics: he republished his 1850 pamphlet "Judaism in Music", originally issued under a pseudonym, under his own name in 1869, extending the introduction and adding a lengthy final section. The publication led to several public protests at early performances of
Die Meistersinger in Vienna and Mannheim.
Bayreuth (1871–1876) In 1871, Wagner decided to move to
Bayreuth, which was to be the location of his new opera house. The town council donated a large plot of land—the "Green Hill"—as a site for the theatre. The Wagners moved to the town the following year, and the foundation stone for the
Bayreuth Festspielhaus ("Festival Theatre") was laid. Wagner initially announced the first Bayreuth Festival, at which for the first time the
Ring cycle was presented complete, for 1873, but since Ludwig had declined to finance the project, the start of building was delayed and the proposed date for the festival was deferred. To raise funds for the construction, "
Wagner societies" were formed in several cities, and Wagner began touring Germany conducting concerts. By the spring of 1873, only a third of the required funds had been raised; further pleas to Ludwig were initially ignored, but early in 1874, with the project on the verge of collapse, the King relented and provided a loan. The full building programme included the family home, "
Wahnfried", into which Wagner, with Cosima and the children, moved from their temporary accommodation on 18 April 1874. The theatre was completed in 1875, and the festival was scheduled for the following year. Commenting on the struggle to finish the building, Wagner remarked to Cosima: "Each stone is red with my blood and yours." :
photochrom print of For the design of the Festspielhaus, Wagner appropriated some of the ideas of his former colleague, Gottfried Semper, which he had previously solicited for a proposed new opera house in Munich. Wagner was responsible for several theatrical innovations at Bayreuth; these include darkening the auditorium during performances, and placing the orchestra in a pit out of view of the audience. The Festspielhaus finally opened on 13 August 1876 with
Das Rheingold, at last taking its place as the first evening of the complete
Ring cycle; the 1876
Bayreuth Festival therefore saw the premiere of the complete cycle, performed as a sequence as the composer had intended. The 1876 Festival consisted of three full
Ring cycles (under the baton of
Hans Richter). At the end, critical reactions ranged between that of the Norwegian composer
Edvard Grieg, who thought the work "divinely composed", and that of the French newspaper , which called the music "the dream of a lunatic". The disillusioned included Wagner's (then) friend
Friedrich Nietzsche, who, having published his eulogistic essay "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" before the festival as part of his
Untimely Meditations, was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as Wagner's pandering to increasingly exclusivist German nationalism; his breach with Wagner began at this time. The festival firmly established Wagner as an artist of European, and indeed world, importance: attendees included
Kaiser Wilhelm I, the Emperor
Pedro II of Brazil,
Anton Bruckner,
Camille Saint-Saëns and
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Wagner was far from satisfied with the Festival; Cosima recorded that months later his attitude towards the productions was "Never again, never again!" Moreover, the festival finished with a deficit of about 150,000 marks. The expenses of Bayreuth and of Wahnfried meant that Wagner still sought further sources of income by conducting or taking on commissions such as the
Centennial March for America, for which he received $5,000.
Last years (1876–1883) Following the first Bayreuth Festival, Wagner began work on
Parsifal, his final opera. The composition took four years, much of which Wagner spent in Italy for health reasons. From 1876 to 1878 Wagner also embarked on the last of his documented emotional liaisons, this time with
Judith Gautier, whom he had met at the 1876 Festival. Wagner was also much troubled by problems of financing
Parsifal, and by the prospect of the work being performed by other theatres than Bayreuth. He was once again assisted by the liberality of King Ludwig, but was still forced by his personal financial situation in 1877 to sell the rights of several of his unpublished works (including the
Siegfried Idyll) to the publisher
Schott. Wagner wrote several articles in his later years, often on political topics, and often
reactionary in tone, repudiating some of his earlier, more liberal, views. These include (1880) and "Heroism and Christianity" (1881), which were printed in the journal
Bayreuther Blätter, published by his supporter
Hans von Wolzogen. Wagner's sudden interest in Christianity at this period, which infuses
Parsifal, was contemporary with his increasing alignment with
German nationalism, and required on his part, and the part of his associates, "the rewriting of some recent Wagnerian history", so as to represent, for example, the
Ring as a work reflecting Christian ideals. Many of these later articles, including "What is German?" (1878, but based on a draft written in the 1860s), repeated Wagner's antisemitic preoccupations. Wagner completed
Parsifal in January 1882, and a second Bayreuth Festival was held for the new opera, which premiered on 26 May. Wagner was by this time extremely ill, having suffered a series of increasingly severe
angina attacks. During the sixteenth and final performance of
Parsifal on 29 August, he entered the pit unseen during act 3, took the baton from conductor
Hermann Levi, and led the performance to its conclusion. After the festival, the Wagner family journeyed to
Venice for the winter. Wagner died of a heart attack at the age of 69 on 13 February 1883 at
Ca' Vendramin Calergi, a 16th-century
palazzo on the
Grand Canal. The legend that the attack was prompted by an argument with Cosima over Wagner's supposedly amorous interest in the singer
Carrie Pringle, who had been a Flower-maiden in
Parsifal at Bayreuth, is without credible evidence. After a funerary
gondola bore Wagner's remains over the Grand Canal, his body was taken to Germany where it was buried in the garden of the Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth. == Works ==