Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard 1813-83
German composer, one of a small number of composers who profoundly affected the course of musical history

Wagner was born in Leipzig and educated at Dresden and at the Leipzig Thomasschule. He wrote a Symphony in C in 1832, and his first completed opera was Die Feen ('The Fairies'), written in the style of Carl Maria von Weber's Oberon. It was not, however, performed during his lifetime. His next work, Das Liebesverbot ('Forbidden Love', based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure), was produced in 1836 at Magdeburg, where Wagner had been appointed music director two years earlier. There he met Minna Planer, a member of the company, who became his wife in 1836.

The Magdeburg opera soon went bankrupt, as did the theatre at K�nigsberg, where Wagner found his next post. After a period as assistant conductor at Riga (1837-39), he resolved to try his luck in Paris with his partly-finished opera based on Bulwer Lytton's romance Rienzi. There, in spite of Giacomo Meyerbeer's help, he barely made a living by journalism and by undertaking hack operatic arrangements. He left Paris in 1842 with Rienzi, which he had finished in a debtors' prison, still unperformed, but now accepted for presentation at Dresden, where it scored a resounding success.

Der fliegende Holl�nder (1843, 'The Flying Dutchman') was also successful, and Wagner was shortly afterwards appointed kapellmeister at Dresden. There he conducted performances of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and other works that became legendary. Tannh�user was produced there in 1845. At this point Wagner began work on the theme that was to develop into the Ring cycle. He began with the poem for Siegfrieds Tod ('The Death of Siegfried', the future G�tterd�mmerung, 'Twilight of the Gods'), which he completed in 1848. Lohengrin was finished in 1848, but by this time Wagner was deeply implicated in the revolutionary movement and barely escaped arrest by fleeing from Saxony. Aided financially by Franz Liszt at Weimar, he went first to Paris and later to Zurich. Lohengrin was eventually produced at Weimar by Liszt in 1850.

During his exile Wagner again made a living by writing, and he completed the poem of the Ring cycle in 1852; the following year he began to write the music for Das Rheingold ('The Rhinegold'), followed by Die Walk�re (1856, 'The Valkyrie') and Acts 1 and 2 of Siegfried (1857). This was interrupted (1857-59) by work on Tristan und Isolde, which was based on the old German version of the legend by Gottfried von Strassburg, and is often claimed to have been inspired by Wagner's current love affair with Mathilde, wife of his friend and patron Otto Wesendonk. Once again he sought to gain favour in Paris, and eventually Napoleon III called for a command performance of Tannh�user, but the opera failed there. In 1861 he was allowed to return to Germany, but he still had a hard battle for recognition. Tristan was accepted at Vienna but abandoned as impracticable before it could be performed, and, now aged 50, pursued by creditors and vilified by critics, the composer was on the point of giving up in despair when the tide dramatically turned.

The eccentric young King of Bavaria, Ludwig II, impressed by the pageantry of Lohengrin, read Wagner's Ring poem with its pessimistic preface. He summoned Wagner to his court, and lavished hospitality on him. Tristan was staged with brilliant success at Munich in 1865, but Wagner's extravagance, political meddling, and preferential treatment aroused so much hostility that he was obliged to withdraw temporarily to the villa of Tribschen at Lucerne in Switzerland. Cosima, wife of the musical director Hans von B�low and daughter of Liszt, had been having an affair with Wagner since 1863, and now left her husband and joined him; she eventually married him in 1870 after being divorced, Wagner's wife Minna having died in 1866. A son, Siegfried, was born to Wagner and Cosima in 1869.

In Switzerland Wagner finished Die Meistersinger ('The Mastersingers'), his only non-tragic drama, which scored a success in 1868. However his greatest ambition, a complete performance of the Ring, was as yet unfulfilled. Productions in Munich of Das Rheingold in 1869 and Die Walk�re in 1870 were against Wagner's wishes, as he dreamed of an ideal theatre of his own. Determined to fulfil his wish, he set about raising funds himself, and on a fraction of the required total plus a large amount of credit he started the now famous theatre at Bayreuth, which opened in 1876 with a first complete programme of the Ring cycle. By 1874 Wagner and Cosima had moved to their new home, at Bayreuth, Wahnfried, and he had completed work on G�tterd�mmerung, the final part of the Ring cycle. Parsifal, his last opera, was staged in 1882. The following year, he died in Venice from a heart attack.

Wagner reformed the whole structure of opera. He wrote all his texts himself, after painstaking research, completing the poem for each work before embarking on the music. He was influenced by the work of Weber and Meyerbeer (although in the end he professed to despise him), as well as Liszt and Hector Berlioz. His great objective was the integration of music and drama, and he took the norms of tonality to their extreme in Tristan. Of great importance was his development of the leitmotiv, and in the Ring (in particular) he constructed a network of musical ideas that forms the musical and psychological basis of his drama. His music is often (especially in Tristan) deeply erotic.

Wagner's music, life and writings are apt to arouse extremes of adulation and hostility, but seldom indifference. In his own time, he was set up with Liszt as the hero of the Romantic faction in opposition to the followers of Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann, and for many years clashes between the rival partisans were to afflict concert-promoters and conductors all over Europe.

Bibliography: More has been written about (and by) Wagner than perhaps any other figure in the history of European culture. He was a prolific writer of letters and prose, and many editions and translations have appeared. His autobiography is My Life (new edn, 1983). See also B Magee, Aspects of Wagner (rev edn, 1988); D Cooke, I Saw the World End, A Study of Wagner's Ring (incomplete on Cooke's death, 1979); C von Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography (translated by M Whitall, with an extensive bibliography, 1978); R Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, his Mind and his Music (1968); E Newman, Wagner Nights (1949) and The Life of Richard Wagner (1933-47).