Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner reshaped opera and left a body of work inseparable from a body of opinion. Born in Leipzig in 1813, he lost his father to typhus within six months, and his mother married an actor and painter who may have been his biological father. He was largely self-taught in music and obsessed with Shakespeare and Beethoven. He conducted in provincial theatres, ran up debts he never stopped running up, and fled to Paris, where he was destitute. Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman brought him a post at Dresden, which he lost by taking part in the 1849 uprising; a warrant was issued and he spent twelve years in exile in Switzerland. There he wrote the theoretical works and began the Ring. His argument was for the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, in which poetry, music, staging and design serve a single conception, and he wrote his own librettos. The technical means was the leitmotif — short musical ideas attached to people, objects and ideas, developed and combined so that the orchestra comments on what the characters cannot see. Tristan und Isolde, begun in 1857, uses unresolved chromatic harmony so persistently that it is usually treated as the beginning of the breakdown of tonality. Ludwig II of Bavaria rescued him financially in 1864. The Ring took twenty-six years, and he built a theatre at Bayreuth for it with a covered orchestra pit and no boxes. He published an antisemitic essay in 1850 and reissued it under his own name in 1869. Hitler's adoption of him is not his doing and is not unconnected to what he wrote. He died in Venice in 1883.

• Lived: 1813 CE – 1883 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: composer