Of all composers, Wagner remains the most controversial. No other classical musician arouses such fanaticism, for and against. Almost all of his important works are operas, a form that he reinvented, and the main ones are written in an unbroken span of music. They are also very long.
The music you might recognise
The two best-known pieces of music by Wagner could not be more different. This is worth remembering, since Wagner’s music is sometimes wrongly stereotyped as being merely loud. The Ride of the Valkyries is indeed loud – and warlike, too. Francis Ford Coppola used it to accompany a Vietnam war helicopter attack on a village in Apocalypse Now. The contrast with the quiet bridal chorus from the opera Lohengrin could not be greater. Better known as Here Comes the Bride, Wagner’s tune is used the world over at weddings.
His life …
Richard Wagner was emphatically German. But Germany as we know it today did not exist when he was born in Leipzig in 1813. Wagner was the ninth child of Johanna and (probably) Friedrich Wagner, the Leipzig police registrar, who died that year. Johanna then married Ludwig Geyer, a painter, and the boy was known as Richard Geyer until he was 14. Fatherless sons, uncertain of their identity, would loom large in Wagner’s operas.
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. 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.
A militant supporter of the revolutions of 1848, Wagner was forced to flee to Switzerland the following year. He spent the next decade composing his major mature works, as well as writing extensively. He also had a number of affairs, including with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of his main benefactors. His marriage broke up and his debts increased. Performances of his operas were rare, with the 1861 Paris premiere of the revised Tannhäuser a notable exception.
In 1864, Wagner’s life turned two corners. 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. That same year, Wagner moved in with Cosima von Bülow, the daughter of the composer Franz Liszt, and began a family, settling in Lucerne. 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.
By 1871, Wagner had chosen the Bavarian town of Bayreuth as the festival location. The family moved and in 1876 the Ring received its first performance in the specially built theatre. The festival was an artistic sensation and a financial disaster for Wagner personally, from which Ludwig again rescued him. His health failing, Wagner now concentrated on completing his final opera Parsifal, which opened at Bayreuth in 1882. Wagner died in Venice the following February.
And times …
Wagner lived through war, revolution and the rise of nationalism. When he was a young man, he took to the barricades in Dresden and was forced into political exile. In his later years, he became fiercely nationalistic, ardently welcoming the birth of the German nation state and empire.
In a century of revolution, Wagner was himself a revolutionary of a special kind. 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 his world view, the artist was the prophet and embodiment of the future. In his music this mythic vision reaches its climax at the close of the Ring cycle.
Wagner’s views were shaped by philosophy and ideas in unmatched ways. In his early works (including the original conception of the Ring), he was heavily influenced by the socialistic writings of Ludwig Feuerbach. 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. This is embodied in the longing for death in Tristan und Isolde.
In today’s terms it can be said that Wagner’s nationalism moved from the revolutionary left to the nativist right. His belief in the possibility of enlightenment through German art – which underlies Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – is part of the explanation for his antisemitism. 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.
Wagner was part of a circle of 19th-century composers who looked for new ways of writing music, new ideas about harmony and orchestration (including new instruments) and new forms, especially in the dramatic marriage of the voice and the orchestra. Berlioz and Liszt were his peers, but neither of them envisaged anything as ambitious as the unified “complete art work” of music, drama and staging which Wagner aimed to create in the theatre at Bayreuth, above all in Parsifal.
Why does he still matter?
Wagner was the most influential musician of the era following Beethoven. His new use of harmony and his explicit attention to the sensuous nature of the musical experience broke away from older and more formal types of musical construction. To this day, the unresolved dissonance of the so-called “Tristan chord” at the beginning of Tristan und Isolde is often seen as the start of musical modernism.
Wagner’s direct influence lasted for at least a century. Composers as different as Debussy, Schoenberg, Strauss and Elgar cannot be easily understood except in a post-Wagnerian context. All of them embraced (or struggled to differentiate themselves from) Wagner’s musical language.
But the two main reasons why Wagner still matters are aesthetic and political. Wagner’s music, and its scale, means that any production of his operas require enormous artistic effort. Nowhere is this more true than of the four-opera Ring cycle, which took Wagner more than 20 years to complete. Performances of Wagner remain public artistic events. In that sense, he is the godfather of the modern rock festival.
Wagner still matters, in a different way, because of the role that his operas played in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The Nazis adopted Wagner as the embodiment of their racially inspired German supremacist cult. Bayreuth, in particular, bent the knee enthusiastically to Hitler. 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.
Great performers
No one matters more in a Wagner performance than the conductor, who must have a sense of the music’s structure and textures that makes sense both at key moments and over long arcs. Historically, the greatest name here is Wilhelm Furtwängler, who makes the works surge and cohere like no other. Among contemporary conductors, Daniel Barenboim comes closest to Furtwängler. Georg Solti’s Ring cycle remains an all-time classic studio recording, as does Carlos Kleiber’s Tristan und Isolde. But, in the really distant past, the almost complete performance of act three of Parsifal under Karl Muck, recorded in Berlin in 1927-8, is a treasure beyond price.
Singers matter almost as much. Earlier generations revered sopranos Kirsten Flagstad and Frida Leider, tenor Lauritz Melchior and bass-baritone Friedrich Schorr. Their recordings all still provide thrilling listening, especially Melchior with Lotte Lehmann on the complete Die Walküre act one under Bruno Walter in 1935. In the early stereo recording era, Birgit Nilsson and Astrid Varnay lead the soprano stakes, with Jon Vickers and René Kollo among the best tenors and Hans Hotter supreme in the bass roles. Among today’s Wagnerian specialists, Nina Stemme, Jonas Kaufmann and Bryn Terfel are often the equals and more of the giants of the past.
And two further tips
Wagner operas are long. On first listening, it is easy to get lost in what is happening. It really is worth persevering, and getting the hang of Wagner’s style, especially his symbolic yet malleable leitmotiv themes. Listen again and it will come.
But not all Wagner is long. The orchestral overtures and preludes are often played as standalone pieces. They offer a good way into the music of the operas themselves. Don’t forget, either, the five Wesendonck Lieder (or Songs), which point the way to Tristan, or the Siegfried Idyll, the musical love letter to Cosima that Wagner wrote for chamber orchestra in 1870.
