Summary Richard Wagner


RICHARD WAGNER

1813-1883

Wagner is the largest foreign composer of the second half of the 19th century. With his work he completed the development of the German romantic opera and made a significant contribution to the history of the world’s musical art. The central place in Wagner’s heritage is occupied by operas (altogether there are thirteen), in which a national character store is depicted, legends and legends of the German people, great pictures of nature are recreated. In his operas there is a rich, complex world of ideas and human experiences: the high heroism of the struggle and the meanness of perfidy, the thirst for feats and philosophical reflections, the beauty of self-sacrifice and the power of love. Wagner was not only a brilliant composer, but also a gifted playwright – the author of the libretto of all his operas and an outstanding conductor – one of the founders of modern conducting art, and a vivid and sharp publicist.

Richard

Wagner was born on May 22, 1813 in Leipzig. He grew up in an artistic environment and early discovered interest in theater and literature. The first compositional experiments of Wagner date back to 1828. Success came with the opera “Rienzi, the Last Roman Tribune” (1838-1840).

Wagner’s creative personality brightly unfolded in the operas of the 1840s, finished in Dresden, where after many years of wanderings the composer received a permanent place as conductor of the opera house. In the “Flying Dutchman” (“Seaman the Wanderer”, 1840-1841), “Tannhäuser” (1843-1845) and “Lohengrin” (1845-1848) with great artistic skill embodied stories and images of folk legends and legends. These operas were created in an atmosphere of social upsurge that led to the revolution of 1848-1849. After the suppression of the Dresden uprising, in which Wagner took direct part, he was forced to leave his homeland.

The composer moved to Switzerland, where he continued work on the work, which he gave a total of a quarter of a century of his life – on the tetralogy

“Ring of the Nibelung”, consisting of four operas: “Gold of the Rhine” (1852-1854), “Valkyrie” (1852-1856) ), “Siegfried” (1851-1871), “The death of the gods” (1848-1874). The plot is based on epic tales of Siegfried – the people’s hero, the fearless winner of the dark forces. At the same time, other operas were created, alongside with tetralogy, the most mature works of Wagner: the sorrowful poem about love and death “Tristan and Isolde” (1857-1859), also based on medieval legend, and the sunny, optimistic opera The Nuremberg Meistersinger (1861- 1867), started in the hardest years of the composer’s life.

In 1864, Wagner’s personal fate took a sharp turn: the patronage of King Ludwig of Bavaria gave him the opportunity to implement his artistic plans. A number of Wagner operas were staged in Munich, and in 1872 a special Wagner theater was laid in the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth. The opening of the Bayreuth celebrations (1876), on which the “Ring of the Nibelungen” was first fully sounded, was the height of Wagner’s glory. At the next Bayreuth Festival (1882), the last opera of the composer, the mystery “Parsifal” (1877-1882), was staged.

Wagner died on February 13, 1883 in Venice.


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Summary Richard Wagner