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Richard Wagner

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Performers and composers;
Poetry & Opera

   Richard Wagner
   Richard Wagner

   Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( May 22, 1813 – February 13, 1883) was a German
   composer, conductor, music theorist, and essayist, primarily known for
   his operas (or " music dramas" as he later came to call them). Unlike
   most other great opera composers, Wagner always wrote the scenario and
   libretto for his works himself.

   Wagner's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are
   notable for their contrapuntal texture, rich chromaticism, harmonies
   and orchestration, and elaborate use of leitmotifs: musical themes
   associated with specific characters, locales, or plot elements. Wagner
   pioneered advances in musical language including extreme chromaticism
   and atonality which greatly influenced the development of European
   classical music.

   He transformed musical thought through his idea of Gesamtkunstwerk
   ("total artwork"), the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and
   dramatic arts, epitomized by his monumental four-opera cycle Der Ring
   des Nibelungen (1876). Wagner even went so far as to build his own
   opera-house to try to stage these works as he had imagined them.

Biography

Early life

   Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, the ninth child of Carl Friedrich
   Wagner, who was a clerk in the Leipzig police service. Wagner's father
   died of typhus six months after Richard's birth, following which
   Wagner's mother, Johanna Rosine Wagner, began living with the actor and
   playwright Ludwig Geyer, who had been a friend of Richard's father. In
   August 1814 Johanna married Geyer, and moved with her family to his
   residence in Dresden. For the first 14 years of his life, Wagner was
   known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer. Wagner in his later years may have
   suspected that Geyer was in fact his biological father, and furthermore
   speculated (wrongly) that Geyer was Jewish.

   Geyer's love of the theatre was shared by his step-son, and Wagner even
   took part in performances. In his autobiography Wagner recalled on one
   occasion playing the part of an angel. The boy Wagner was also hugely
   impressed by the Gothic elements of Weber's Der Freischutz. At the end
   of 1820, Wagner was enrolled at Pastor Wetzel's school at Possendorf,
   near Dresden, where he received some piano instruction from his Latin
   teacher, but could not manage a proper scale and mostly preferred
   playing theatre overtures by ear. Geyer died in 1821, when Richard was
   eight. Following this, Wagner was sent to the Kreuz Grammar School in
   Dresden, paid for by Geyer's brother. The young Wagner entertained
   ambitions as a playwright, his first creative effort being a gruesome
   tragedy, Leubald und Adelaide begun at school in 1826, which was
   strongly influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe. Wagner determined to set
   this to music and persuaded his family to allow him music lessons.

   By 1827, the family had moved back to Leipzig. Wagner's first lessons
   in composition were taken between 1828-31 with Christian Gottlieb
   Müller, but it was Beethoven who would first inspire him. In January of
   1828 he first heard Beethoven's 7th Symphony and then, in March,
   Beethoven's 9th Symphony performed in the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Beethoven
   became his muse, and Wagner wrote a piano transcription of the 9th
   Symphony as well as piano sonatas and orchestral overtures. In 1829 he
   saw the dramatic soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient on stage, and she
   became his ideal of the fusion of drama and music in opera. In his
   autobiography, Wagner wrote:

     “ If I look back on my life as a whole, I can find no event that
                 produced so profound an impression upon me.           ”

   Wagner claimed to have seen Schröder-Devrient in the title role of
   Fidelio, however it seems more likely that he saw her performance as
   Romeo in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi. He enrolled at the
   University of Leipzig in 1831, however his formal music training was
   brief, comprising a few months with Christian Theodor Weinlig, the
   music director at the Leipzig Kreuzkirke. Weinlig was so impressed with
   Wagner's musical ability that he refused any payment for his lessons,
   and arranged for one of Wagner's piano works to be published. A year
   later, Wagner composed his Symphony in C major, a Beethovenian work
   which gave him his first opportunity as a conductor in 1832. He then
   began to work on an opera, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), which was never
   completed.

   In 1833, Wagner's older brother Karl Albert managed to obtain Richard a
   position as chorusmaster in Würzburg. In the same year, at the age of
   20, Wagner composed his first complete opera, Die Feen (The Fairies).
   This opera, which clearly imitated the style of Carl Maria von Weber,
   would go unproduced until half a century later, when it was premiered
   in Munich shortly after the composer's death in 1883.

   Meanwhile, Wagner held brief appointments as musical director at opera
   houses in Magdeburg and Königsberg, during which he wrote Das
   Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), based on William Shakespeare's Measure
   for Measure. This second opera was staged at Magdeburg in 1836, but
   closed before the second performance, leaving the composer (not for the
   last time) in serious financial difficulties.

   On November 24, 1836, Wagner married actress Christine Wilhelmine
   "Minna" Planer. They moved to the city of Riga, then in the Russian
   Empire, where Wagner became music director of the local opera. A few
   weeks afterward, Minna ran off with an army officer who then abandoned
   her, penniless. Wagner took Minna back; however, this was but the first
   debâcle of a troubled marriage that would end in misery three decades
   later.

   By 1839, the couple had amassed such large debts that they fled Riga to
   escape from creditors (debt would plague Wagner for most of his life).
   During their flight, they and their Newfoundland dog, Robber, took a
   stormy sea passage to London, from which Wagner drew the inspiration
   for Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman). The Wagners spent
   1840 and 1841 in Paris, where Richard made a scant living writing
   articles and arranging operas by other composers, largely on behalf of
   the Schlesinger publishing house. He also completed Rienzi and Der
   Fliegende Holländer during this time.

Dresden

   Wagner completed writing his third opera, Rienzi, in 1840. Largely
   through the agency of Meyerbeer, it was accepted for performance by the
   Dresden Court Theatre (Hofoper) in the German state of Saxony. Thus in
   1842, the couple moved to Dresden, where Rienzi was staged to
   considerable acclaim. Wagner lived in Dresden for the next six years,
   eventually being appointed the Royal Saxon Court Conductor. During this
   period, he wrote and staged Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser, the
   first two of his three middle-period operas.

   The Wagners' stay at Dresden was brought to an end by Richard's
   involvement in left-wing politics. A nationalist movement was gaining
   force in the independent German States, calling for constitutional
   freedoms and the unification of the weak princely states into a single
   nation. Richard Wagner played an enthusiastic role in this movement,
   receiving guests at his house that included his colleague August
   Röckel, who was editing the radical left-wing paper Volksblätter, and
   the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

   Widespread discontent against the Saxon government came to a head in
   April 1849, when King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony dissolved
   Parliament and rejected a new constitution pressed upon him by the
   people. The May Uprising broke out, in which Wagner played a minor
   supporting role. The incipient revolution was quickly crushed by an
   allied force of Saxon and Prussian troops, and warrants were issued for
   the arrest of the revolutionaries. Wagner had to flee, first to Paris
   and then to Zürich. Röckel and Bakunin failed to escape and endured
   long terms of imprisonment.

Exile, Schopenhauer and Mathilde Wesendonck

   Wagner spent the next twelve years in exile. He had completed Lohengrin
   before the Dresden uprising, and now wrote desperately to his friend
   Franz Liszt to have it staged in his absence. Liszt, who proved to be a
   friend in need, eventually conducted the premiere in Weimar in August
   1850.

   Nevertheless, Wagner found himself in grim personal straits, isolated
   from the German musical world and without any income to speak of. The
   musical sketches he was penning, which would grow into the mammoth work
   Der Ring des Nibelungen, seemed to have no prospects of being
   performed. His wife Minna, who had disliked the operas he had written
   after Rienzi, was falling into a deepening depression. Finally, he fell
   victim to erysipelas, which made it difficult for him to continue
   writing.

   Wagner's primary published output during his first years in Zürich was
   a set of notable essays: The Art-Work of the Future (1849), in which he
   described a vision of opera as Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total artwork", in
   which the various arts such as music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts,
   and stagecraft were unified; Judaism in Music (1850), a tract directed
   against Jewish composers; and Opera and Drama (1851), which described
   ideas in aesthetics that he was putting to use on the Ring operas.

   By 1852 Wagner had completed the libretto of the four Ring operas, and
   he began composing Das Rheingold in November 1853, following it
   immediately with Die Walkure in 1854. He then began work on the third
   opera, Siegfried in 1856, but finished only the first two acts before
   deciding to put the work aside to concentrate on a new idea: Tristan
   und Isolde.

   Wagner had two independent sources of inspiration for Tristan und
   Isolde. The first came to him in 1854, when his poet friend Georg
   Herwegh introduced him to the works of the philosopher Arthur
   Schopenhauer. Wagner would later call 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 view of the human condition. He would remain an adherent of
   Schopenhauer for the rest of his life, even after his fortunes
   improved.

   One of Schopenhauer's doctrines was that music held a supreme role
   amongst the arts, since it was the only one unconcerned with the
   material world. Wagner quickly embraced this claim, which must have
   resonated strongly despite its direct contradiction with his own
   arguments, in "Opera and Drama", that music in opera had to be
   subservient to the cause of drama. Wagner scholars have since argued
   that this Schopenhauerian 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. Many aspects of
   Schopenhauerian doctrine undoubtedly found its way into Wagner's
   subsequent libretti. For example, the self-renouncing cobbler-poet Hans
   Sachs in Die Meistersinger, generally considered Wagner's most
   sympathetic character, is a quintessentially Schopenhauerian creation
   (despite being based on a real person).

   Wagner's second source of inspiration was the poet-writer Mathilde
   Wesendonck, the wife of the silk merchant Otto von Wesendonck. Wagner
   met the Wesendoncks in Zürich in 1852. Otto, a fan of Wagner's music,
   placed a cottage on his estate at Wagner's disposal. By 1857, Wagner
   had become infatuated with Mathilde.
   Richard and Cosima Wagner.
   Richard and Cosima Wagner.

   Though Mathilde seems to have returned some of his affections, she had
   no intention of jeopardising her marriage, and kept her husband
   informed of her contacts with Wagner. Nevertheless, the affair inspired
   Wagner to put aside his work on the Ring cycle (which would not be
   resumed for the next twelve years) and begin work on Tristan und
   Isolde, based on the Arthurian love story.

   The uneasy affair collapsed in 1858, when Minna intercepted a letter
   from Wagner to Mathilde. After the resulting confrontation, Wagner left
   Zürich alone, bound for Venice. The following year, he once again moved
   to Paris to oversee production of a new revision of Tannhäuser, staged
   thanks to the efforts of Princess de Metternich. The premiere of the
   Paris Tannhäuser in 1861 was an utter fiasco, due to disturbances
   caused by members of the Jockey Club. Further performances were
   cancelled, and Wagner hurriedly left the city.

   In 1861, the political ban against Wagner in Germany was lifted, and
   the composer settled in Biebrich, Prussia, where he began work on Die
   Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Despite the failure of Tannhäuser in Paris,
   the possibility that Der Ring des Nibelungen would never be finished
   and Wagner's unhappy personal life, this opera is by far his sunniest
   work. Wagner's second wife Cosima would later write: "when future
   generations seek refreshment in this unique work, may they spare a
   thought for the tears from which the smiles arose." In 1862, Wagner
   finally parted with Minna, though he (or at least his creditors)
   continued to support her financially until her death in 1866.

   Between 1861 and 1864 Wagner tried to have Tristan und Isolde produced
   in Vienna. Despite over 70 rehearsals the opera remained unperformed,
   and gained a reputation as being "unplayable", which further added to
   Wagner's financial woes.

Patronage of King Ludwig II

   Wagner's fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864, when King Ludwig II
   assumed the throne of Bavaria at the age of 18. The young king, an
   ardent admirer of Wagner's operas since childhood, had the composer
   brought to Munich. He settled Wagner's considerable debts, and made
   plans to have his new operas produced. After grave difficulties in
   rehearsal, Tristan und Isolde premiered to enormous success at the
   National Theatre in Munich on June 10, 1865, the first Wagner premiere
   in almost 15 years.

   In the meantime, Wagner became embroiled in another affair, this time
   with Cosima von Bülow, the wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow, one of
   Wagner's most ardent supporters and the conductor of the Tristan
   premiere. Cosima was the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and the
   famous Countess Marie d'Agoult, and 24 years younger than Wagner. Liszt
   disapproved of his daughter seeing Wagner, though the two men were
   friends. In April 1865, she gave birth to Wagner's illegitimate
   daughter, who was named Isolde. Their indiscreet affair scandalized
   Munich, and to make matters worse, Wagner fell into disfavor amongst
   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 in
   order 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 June 21 the following year. In October, Cosima
   finally convinced Hans von Bülow to grant her a divorce, but not before
   having two more children with Wagner. They had another daughter, named
   Eva, and a son named Siegfried. Richard and Cosima were married on
   August 25, 1870. (Liszt would not speak to his new son-in-law for years
   to come.) On Christmas Day of that year, Wagner presented the Siegfried
   Idyll for Cosima's birthday. The marriage to Cosima lasted to the end
   of Wagner's life.

Bayreuth

   Richard Wagner at Bayreuth. Liszt, who was also his father-in-law, can
   be seen at the piano.
   Richard Wagner at Bayreuth. Liszt, who was also his father-in-law, can
   be seen at the piano.

   Wagner, settled into his newfound domesticity, turned his energies
   toward completing the Ring cycle. At Ludwig's insistence, "special
   previews" of the first two works of the cycle, Das Rheingold and Die
   Walküre, were performed at Munich, but Wagner wanted the complete cycle
   to be performed in a new, specially-designed opera house.

   In 1871, he decided on the small town of Bayreuth as the location of
   his new opera house. The Wagners moved there the following year, and
   the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus ("Festival House")
   was laid. In order to raise funds for the construction, " Wagner
   societies" were formed in several cities, and Wagner himself began
   touring Germany conducting concerts. However, sufficient funds were
   only raised after King Ludwig stepped in with another large grant in
   1874. Later that year, the Wagners moved into their permanent home at
   Bayreuth, a villa that Richard dubbed Wahnfried ("Peace/freedom from
   delusion/madness", in German).

   The Festspielhaus finally opened in August 1876 with the premiere of
   the Ring cycle and has continued to be the site of the Bayreuth
   Festival ever since.

Final years

   Memorial bust of Richard Wagner in Venice.
   Memorial bust of Richard Wagner in Venice.
   Grave of Richard and Cosima Wagner in the garden of the Villa
   Wahnfried, Bayreuth
   Grave of Richard and Cosima Wagner in the garden of the Villa
   Wahnfried, Bayreuth

   In 1877, Wagner moved to Acireale in Italy where he began work on
   Parsifal, his final opera. The composition took four years, during
   which he also wrote a series of increasingly reactionary essays on
   religion and art.

   Wagner completed Parsifal in January 1882, and a second Bayreuth
   Festival was held for the new opera. Wagner was by this time extremely
   ill, having suffered through a series of increasingly severe angina
   attacks. During the sixteenth and final performance of Parsifal on
   August 29, he secretly entered the pit during Act III, 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. On February 13, 1883, Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in
   the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal. His body was returned to
   Bayreuth and buried in the garden of the Villa Wahnfried.

   Franz Liszt's memorable piece for pianoforte solo, La lugubre gondola,
   evokes the passing of a black-shrouded funerary gondola bearing Richard
   Wagner's remains over the Grand Canal.

Works

Opera

   Wagner's music dramas are his primary artistic legacy. These can be
   divided chronologically into three periods.

   Wagner's early stage began at age 19 with his first attempt at an
   opera, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), which Wagner abandoned at an early
   stage of composition in 1832. Wagner's three completed early-stage
   operas are Die Feen (The Fairies), Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love),
   and Rienzi. Their compositional style was conventional, and did not
   exhibit the innovations that marked Wagner's place in musical history.
   Later in life, Wagner said that he did not consider these immature
   works to be part of his oeuvre; he was irritated by the ongoing
   popularity of Rienzi during his lifetime. These works are seldom
   performed, though the overture to Rienzi has become a concert piece.

   Wagner's middle stage output is considered to be of remarkably higher
   quality, and begins to show the deepening of his powers as a dramatist
   and composer. This period began with Der fliegende Holländer (The
   Flying Dutchman), followed by Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. These works are
   widely performed today.

   Wagner's late stage operas are his masterpieces that advanced the art
   of opera. Some are of the opinion that Tristan und Isolde ( Tristan and
   Iseult) is Wagner's greatest single opera. Die Meistersinger von
   Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) is Wagner's only comedy
   (apart from his early and forgotten Das Liebesverbot) and one of the
   lengthiest operas still performed. Der Ring des Nibelungen, commonly
   referred to as the Ring cycle, is a set of four operas based loosely on
   figures and elements of Teutonic myth, particularly from later period
   Norse mythology. Taking around 20 years to complete, and requiring
   roughly 15 hours to perform, the Ring cycle has been called the most
   ambitious musical work ever composed. Wagner's final opera, Parsifal,
   which was written especially for the opening of Wagner's Festspielhaus
   in Bayreuth and which is described in the score as a
   "Bühnenweihfestspiel" (festival play for the consecration of the
   stage), is a contemplative work based on the Christian legend of the
   Holy Grail.

   Wagner drew largely from Northern European mythology and legend,
   notably Icelandic epics such as the Poetic Edda, the Volsunga Saga and
   the later German Nibelungenlied. Through his operas and theoretical
   essays, Wagner exerted a strong influence on the operatic medium. He
   was an advocate of a new form of opera which he called "music drama",
   in which all the musical and dramatic elements were fused together.
   Unlike other opera composers, who generally left the task of writing
   the libretto (the text and lyrics) to others, Wagner wrote his own
   libretti, which he referred to as "poems". Further, Wagner developed a
   compositional style in which the orchestra's role is equal to that of
   the singers. The orchestra's dramatic role includes its performance of
   the leitmotifs, musical themes that announce specific characters,
   locales, and plot elements; their complex interleaving and evolution
   illuminates the progression of the drama.

   Wagner's musical style is often considered the epitome of classical
   music's Romantic period, due to its unprecedented exploration of
   emotional expression. He introduced new ideas in harmony and musical
   form, including extreme chromaticism. In Tristan und Isolde, he
   explored the limits of the traditional tonal system that gave keys and
   chords their identity, pointing the way to atonality in the 20th
   century. Some music historians date the beginning of modern classical
   music to the first notes of Tristan, the so-called Tristan chord.

Early stage

     * (1832) Die Hochzeit (The Wedding) (abandoned before completion)
     * (1833) Die Feen (The Fairies)
     * (1836) Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love)
     * (1837) Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the
       Tribunes)

Middle stage

     * (1843) Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman)
     * (1845) Tannhäuser
     * (1848) Lohengrin

Late stage

     * (1859) Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde)
     * (1867) Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of
       Nuremberg)
     * Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), consisting of:
          + (1854) Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold)
          + (1856) Die Walküre (The Valkyrie)
          + (1871) Siegfried (previously entitled Jung-Siegfried or Young
            Siegfried, and Der junge Siegfried or The young Siegfried)
          + (1874) Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) (originally
            entitled Siegfrieds Tod or The Death of Siegfried)
     * (1882) Parsifal

Non-operatic music

   Apart from his operas, Wagner composed relatively few pieces of music.
   These include a single symphony (written at the age of 19), a Faust
   symphony (of which he only finished the first movement, which became
   the Faust Overture), and some overtures, choral and piano pieces, and a
   re-orchestration of Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide. Of these, the most
   commonly performed work is the Siegfried Idyll, a piece for chamber
   orchestra written for the birthday of his second wife, Cosima. The
   Idyll draws on several motifs from the Ring cycle, though it is not
   part of the Ring. The next most popular are the Wesendonck Lieder,
   properly known as Five Songs for a Female Voice, which were composed
   for Mathilde Wesendonck while Wagner was working on Tristan. An oddity
   is the "American Centennial March" of 1876, commissioned by the city of
   Philadelphia for the opening of the Centennial Exposition, for which
   Wagner was paid $5,000.

   A vocal and instrumental piece which is not often performed and
   somewhat forgotten, "das Liebesmahl der Apostel" (The Love-Meal of the
   Apostles) is a piece for male choruses and orchestra, composed in 1843.
   Wagner had just successfully played Rienzi in Dresden. However, Der
   fliegende Holländer witnessed a bitter failure. Wagner, who had been
   elected at the beginning of the year to the committee of a cultural
   association in the city of Dresden, received a commission to evoke the
   theme of Pentecost. The premiere took place at the Dresdner
   Frauenkirche on 6 July 1843, and was performed by around a hundred
   musicians and almost 1,200 singers. The concert was very well received.

   After completing Parsifal, Wagner apparently intended to turn to the
   writing of symphonies. However, nothing substantial had been written by
   the time of his death.

   The overtures and orchestral passages from Wagner's middle and
   late-stage operas are commonly played as concert pieces. For most of
   these, Wagner wrote short passages to conclude the excerpt so that it
   does not end abruptly. This is true, for example, of the Parsifal
   prelude and Siegfried's Funeral Music. A curious fact is that the
   concert version of the Tristan prelude is unpopular and rarely heard;
   the original ending of the prelude is usually considered to be better,
   even for a concert performance.

   One of the most popular wedding marches played as the bride's
   processional in English-speaking countries, popularly known as "Here
   Comes the Bride", takes its melody from the " Bridal Chorus" of
   Lohengrin. In the opera, it is sung as the bride and groom leave the
   ceremony and go into the wedding chamber. The calamitous marriage of
   Lohengrin and Elsa, which reaches irretrievable breakdown twenty
   minutes after the chorus has been sung, has failed to discourage this
   widespread use of the piece.

Writings

   Wagner was an extremely prolific writer, authoring hundreds of books,
   poems, and articles, as well as voluminous correspondence, throughout
   his life. His writings covered a wide range of topics, including
   politics, philosophy, and detailed analyses (often mutually
   contradictory) of his own operas. Essays of note include "Oper und
   Drama" ("Opera and Drama", 1851), an essay on the theory of opera, and
   " Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Judaism in Music", 1850), a polemic
   directed against Jewish composers in general, and Giacomo Meyerbeer in
   particular. He also wrote an autobiography, My Life (1880).

Theatre design and operation

   Wagner was responsible for several theatrical innovations developed at
   the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, an opera house specially constructed for
   the performance of his operas (for the design of which he appropriated
   many of the ideas of his former colleague, Gottfried Semper, which he
   had solicited for a proposed new opera house at Munich). These
   innovations include darkening the auditorium during performances, and
   placing the orchestra in a pit out of view of the audience. The
   Bayreuth Festspielhaus is the venue of the annual Richard Wagner
   Festival, which draws thousands of opera fans to Bayreuth each summer.

   The orchestra pit at Bayreuth is interesting for two reasons:
    1. The first violins are positioned on the right-hand side of the
       conductor instead of their usual place on the left side. This is in
       all likeliness because of the way the sound is intended to be
       directed towards the stage rather than directly on the audience.
       This way the sound has a more direct line from the first violins to
       the back of the stage where it can be then reflected to the
       audience.
    2. Double basses, 'cellos and harps (when more than one used, e.g.
       Ring) are split into groups and placed on either side of the pit.

Wagner's influence and legacy

   Richard Wagner's bust in "Festspielpark Bayreuth"
   Richard Wagner's bust in "Festspielpark Bayreuth"

   Wagner made highly significant, if controversial, contributions to art
   and culture. In his lifetime, and for some years after, Wagner inspired
   fanatical devotion amongst his followers, and was occasionally
   considered by them to have a near god-like status. His compositions, in
   particular Tristan und Isolde, broke important new musical ground. For
   years afterward, many composers felt compelled to align themselves with
   or against Wagner. Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf are indebted to him
   especially, as are César Franck, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, Jules
   Massenet, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Pfitzner and dozens of others.
   Gustav Mahler said, "There was only Beethoven and Wagner". The
   twentieth century harmonic revolutions of Claude Debussy and Arnold
   Schoenberg (tonal and atonal modernism, respectively) have often been
   traced back to Tristan. The Italian form of operatic realism known as
   verismo owes much to Wagnerian reconstruction of musical form.

   Wagner made a major contribution to the principles and practise of
   conducting. His essay On conducting (1869) advanced the earlier work of
   Hector Berlioz and proposed that conducting was a means by which a
   musical work could be re-interpreted, rather than simply a mechanism
   for achieving orchestral unison. The central European conducting
   tradition which followed Wagner's ideas includes artists such as Hans
   von Bulow, Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwangler and Herbert von Karajan.

   Wagner also made significant changes to the conditions under which
   operas were performed. It was Wagner who first demanded that the lights
   be dimmed during dramatic performances, and it was his theatre at
   Bayreuth which first made use of the sunken orchestra pit, which at
   Bayreuth entirely conceals the orchestra from the audience.

   Wagner's concept of leitmotif and integrated musical expression has
   been a strong influence on many 20th century film scores such as John
   Williams' music for Star Wars. American producer Phil Spector with his
   " wall of sound" was strongly influenced by Wagner's music. Wagner also
   heavily influenced rock composer Jim Steinman and led him to create
   what he called Wagnerian Rock. The rock subgenre of heavy metal music
   also shows a Wagnerian influence with its strong paganistic stamp. In
   Germany Rammstein and Joachim Witt (his most famous albums are called
   Bayreuth for that reason) are both strongly influenced by Wagner's
   music. The movie "The Ring of the Nibelungs" drew both from historical
   sources as well as Wagner's work, and set a ratings record when aired
   as a two-part mini-series on German television. It was subsequently
   released in other countries under a variety of names, including "Dark
   Kingdom: The Dragon King" in the USA.

   Wagner's influence on literature and philosophy is also significant.
   Friedrich Nietzsche was part of Wagner's inner circle during the early
   1870s, and his first published work The Birth of Tragedy proposed
   Wagner's music as the Dionysian rebirth of European culture in
   opposition to Apollonian rationalist decadence. Nietzsche broke with
   Wagner following the first Bayreuth Festival, believing that Wagner's
   final phase represented a pandering to Christian pieties and a
   surrender to the new demagogic German Reich. In the twentieth century,
   W. H. Auden once called Wagner "perhaps the greatest genius that ever
   lived", while Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust were heavily influenced by
   him and discussed Wagner in their novels. He is discussed in some of
   the works of James Joyce although Joyce was known to detest him. Wagner
   is one of the main subjects of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which
   contains lines from Tristan und Isolde and refers to The Ring and
   Parsifal. Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine
   worshipped Wagner. Many of the ideas his music brought up, such as the
   association between love and death (or Eros and Thanatos) in Tristan,
   predated their investigation by Sigmund Freud.

   Not all reaction to Wagner was positive. For a time, German musical
   life divided into two factions, Wagner's supporters and those of
   Johannes Brahms; the latter, with the support of the powerful critic
   Eduard Hanslick, championed traditional forms and led the conservative
   front against Wagnerian innovations. Even those who, like Debussy,
   opposed him ("that old poisoner"), could not deny Wagner's influence.
   Indeed, Debussy was one of many composers, including Tchaikovsky, who
   felt the need to break with Wagner precisely because his influence was
   so unmistakable and overwhelming. Others who resisted Wagner's
   influence included Gioachino Rossini ("Wagner has wonderful moments,
   and dreadful quarters of an hour"), though his own " Guillaume Tell,"
   at over four hours, is comparable in length to Wagner's operas.

Controversies

   Wagner's operas, writings, his politics, beliefs and unorthodox
   lifestyle made him a controversial figure during his lifetime. In
   September 1876 Karl Marx complained in a letter to his daughter Jenny:
   "Wherever one goes these days one is pestered with the question: what
   do you think of Wagner?" Following Wagner's death, the debate about his
   ideas and their interpretation, particularly in Germany during the 20th
   Century, continued to make him politically and socially controversial
   in a way that other great composers are not. Much heat is generated by
   Wagner's comments on Jews, which continue to influence the way that his
   works are regarded, and by the essays he wrote on the nature of race
   from 1850 onwards, and their putative influence on the anti-Semitism of
   Adolf Hitler.

Antisemitism

   Prior to 1850 there is little evidence that Wagner held any strong
   views on Jews. However, in that year he published " Das Judenthum in
   der Musik" (originally translated into English as "Judaism in Music,"
   by which name it is still known, but better rendered as "Jewishness in
   Music") under a pseudonym in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The essay
   began as an attack on Jewish composers, particularly Wagner's
   contemporaries (and rivals) Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer,
   but expanded to accuse Jews of being a harmful and alien element in
   German culture. Wagner wrote that the German people were repelled by
   Jews due to their alien appearance and behaviour: "with all our
   speaking and writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation, we always
   felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with
   them." He argued that Jewish musicians were only capable of producing
   music that was shallow and artificial, because they had no connection
   to the genuine spirit of the German people.

   The initial publication of the article attracted little attention, but
   Wagner republished it as a pamphlet under his own name in 1869, leading
   to several public protests at performances of Die Meistersinger von
   Nürnberg. Wagner repeated similar views in several later articles, such
   as "What is German?" (1878), and subsequent memoirs of him often
   recorded his derogatory comments on Jews. Although many have argued
   that he suggested only that Jews should suppress their Jewish-ness,
   others have interpreted sections of his writing literally, to mean
   wiping out or burying the Jewish people.

   Some biographers have suggested that antisemitic stereotypes also
   appear in his operas. The characters of Mime in the Ring, Sixtus
   Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, and Klingsor in Parsifal are thought
   to be Jewish stereotypes, though they are not explicitly identified as
   such in the libretto. These claims are disputed. In all of Wagner's
   many writings about his works, there is no mention of an intention to
   caricature Jews in his operas; nor does any such notion appear in the
   diaries written by Cosima Wagner, which record his views on a daily
   basis over a period of 8 years.

   Despite his very publicly shared disparaging views concerning Jews,
   Wagner continued to have Jewish friends, colleagues and supporters
   throughout his life.

Racism & Nazi appropriation

   Some biographers have asserted that Wagner in his final years came to
   believe in the racist philosophy of Arthur de Gobineau, and that this
   is reflected in the opera Parsifal. Wagner showed no significant
   interest in Gobineau until 1880, when he read Gobineau's An Essay on
   the Inequality of the Human Races. However, Wagner had completed the
   libretto for Parsifal by 1877, and the original drafts of the story
   date back to 1857.

   Despite this lack of chronology, it is sometimes claimed that Parsifal
   is a racist opera which reflects Gobineau's influence. Wagner's own
   writings show that he was very interested in Gobineau's idea that
   Western society was doomed because of miscegenation between "superior"
   and "inferior" races. However, he does not seem to have subscribed to
   Gobineau's belief in the superiority of the supposed Germanic or "
   Nordic" race.

   Wagner's writings on race would probably be considered unimportant were
   it not for the influence of his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
   who expanded on Wagner and Gobineau's ideas in his 1899 book The
   Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a work proclaiming the
   superiority of Aryan races which later became required reading for
   members of the Nazi party.

   Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Wagner's music, and used it to extol his
   heroic mythology of the German nation. There continues to be debate
   about the extent to which Wagner's views might have influenced the
   Nazis. As with the works of Nietzsche, the Nazis used those parts of
   Wagner's thought which were useful for propaganda and ignored or
   suppressed the rest. For example Joseph Goebbels banned Parsifal in
   1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, due to the
   perceived pacifistic overtones of the opera.

   As a result of this appropriation by the Nazi party, Wagner's operas
   have never been staged in the modern state of Israel. Although his
   works are broadcast on Israeli government-owned radio and television
   stations, attempts to stage public performances in Israel have been
   halted by protests, including protests from Holocaust survivors.
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