In spite of decades of increasingly radical and wholly non-nationalistic treatments of his work, including at Bayreuth, Wagner retains a political charge that no other composer can match, or would want. Bayreuth, in particular, bent the knee enthusiastically to Hitler. The Nazis adopted Wagner as the embodiment of their racially inspired German supremacist cult. Wagner still matters, in a different way, because of the role that his operas played in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, with her son Wieland (right) and Adolf Hitler at Bayreuth, 26 July 1938. Towards the end of Wagner’s life, antisemitism became central to the whole culture of Bayreuth, and became even more virulent in the early 20th century. His belief in the possibility of enlightenment through German art – which underlies Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – is part of the explanation for his antisemitism. In today’s terms it can be said that Wagner’s nationalism moved from the revolutionary left to the nativist right. This is embodied in the longing for death in Tristan und Isolde. Later, these were eclipsed by the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose interest in Buddhism and whose pessimistic view of an existence illuminated and redeemed by sex and art Wagner found personally congenial. In his early works (including the original conception of the Ring), he was heavily influenced by the socialistic writings of Ludwig Feuerbach. Wagner’s views were shaped by philosophy and ideas in unmatched ways. In his music this mythic vision reaches its climax at the close of the Ring cycle.īrünnhilde’s Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung, the final opera in the Ring cycle – video In his world view, the artist was the prophet and embodiment of the future. Intoxicated by his ideal of ancient Greece, he placed music and theatre at the centre of an aspiration to remake the world with art and beauty at its centre. In a century of revolution, Wagner was himself a revolutionary of a special kind. In his later years, he became fiercely nationalistic, ardently welcoming the birth of the German nation state and empire. When he was a young man, he took to the barricades in Dresden and was forced into political exile. Wagner lived through war, revolution and the rise of nationalism. Wagner died in Venice the following February. His health failing, Wagner now concentrated on completing his final opera Parsifal, which opened at Bayreuth in 1882. The festival was an artistic sensation and a financial disaster for Wagner personally, from which Ludwig again rescued him. The family moved and in 1876 the Ring received its first performance in the specially built theatre. Here he resumed his four-opera Ring cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen) after an 11-year hiatus and began plans for a special festival devoted to his operas.īy 1871, Wagner had chosen the Bavarian town of Bayreuth as the festival location.
That same year, Wagner moved in with Cosima von Bülow, the daughter of the composer Franz Liszt, and began a family, settling in Lucerne. The new king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, paid off the composer’s debts and commissioned performances of new operas, including Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
In 1864, Wagner’s life turned two corners. Performances of his operas were rare, with the 1861 Paris premiere of the revised Tannhäuser a notable exception.Īn illustration of Wagner with Franz Liszt, Cosima Wagner and Moriz Rosenthal, a pupil of Liszt, in the Villa Wahnfried, Bayreuth. His marriage broke up and his debts increased. He also had a number of affairs, including with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of his main benefactors. He spent the next decade composing his major mature works, as well as writing extensively. After periods in Riga and Paris, the couple made their home in Dresden, where Wagner had a success with his opera Rienzi, wrote The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser, began writing Lohengrin, and became music director for the Saxon court.Ī militant supporter of the revolutions of 1848, Wagner was forced to flee to Switzerland the following year. The young Wagner secured short-term jobs in several German towns, during which he wrote his earliest operas (rarely performed even today) and married his first wife, Minna Planer. Fatherless sons, uncertain of their identity, would loom large in Wagner’s operas. Johanna then married Ludwig Geyer, a painter, and the boy was known as Richard Geyer until he was 14. Wagner was the ninth child of Johanna and (probably) Friedrich Wagner, the Leipzig police registrar, who died that year.
But Germany as we know it today did not exist when he was born in Leipzig in 1813.
Apocalypse Now, with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries – video His life …
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