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Wilhelm Richard Wagner (

Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, and conductor in the 19th century who is best known for his operas. He revolutionized opera by developing the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, where he sought to synthesize poetry, visual arts, music, and drama with music being subsidiary to drama. His compositions were notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies, and use of leitmotifs associated with characters and ideas. He had his own opera house built in Bayreuth, Germany where his most famous works like The Ring of the Nibelung cycle and Parsifal premiered and continue to be performed annually. Throughout his life he wrote controversial essays on music, drama, and politics that

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176 views2 pages

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (

Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, and conductor in the 19th century who is best known for his operas. He revolutionized opera by developing the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, where he sought to synthesize poetry, visual arts, music, and drama with music being subsidiary to drama. His compositions were notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies, and use of leitmotifs associated with characters and ideas. He had his own opera house built in Bayreuth, Germany where his most famous works like The Ring of the Nibelung cycle and Parsifal premiered and continue to be performed annually. Throughout his life he wrote controversial essays on music, drama, and politics that

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Teodora Udrescu
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Richard Wagner

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"Wagner" redirects here. For others with the surname, see Wagner (surname). For other
uses, see Wagner (disambiguation) and Richard Wagner (disambiguation).

Richard Wagner in 1871

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (/ˈvɑːɡnər/, German: [ˈʁɪçaɐ̯t ˈvaːɡnɐ] ( listen);[1] 22 May 1813 –
13 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who
is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, "music
dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for
each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the
romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised
opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), by which he sought
to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama.
He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner
realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des
Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).

His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures,
rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs—musical phrases
associated with individual characters, places, ideas, or plot elements. His advances in
musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly
influenced the development of classical music. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes
described as marking the start of modern music.

Wagner had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which embodied many
novel design features. The Ring and Parsifal were premiered here and his most important
stage works continue to be performed at the annual Bayreuth Festival, run by his
descendants. His thoughts on the relative contributions of music and drama in opera were to
change again, and he reintroduced some traditional forms into his last few stage works,
including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg).

Until his final years, Wagner's life was characterised by political exile, turbulent love affairs,
poverty and repeated flight from his creditors. His controversial writings on music, drama and
politics have attracted extensive comment, notably, since the late 20th century, where they
express antisemitic sentiments. The effect of his ideas can be traced in many of the arts
throughout the 20th century; his influence spread beyond composition into conducting,
philosophy, literature, the visual arts and theatre.

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