biography
| name: |
Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard
|
pronunciation:
[vahgner]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1813–83)
|
| biography:
| Composer, born in Leipzig, EC Germany. His early efforts at composition were unsuccessful, and in Paris (1839–42) he made a living by journalism and hack operatic arrangements. His Rienzi (1842) was a great success at Dresden, and he was appointed Kapellmeister, but his next operas, including Tannhäuser (1845), were failures. Deeply implicated in the revolutionary movement, he fled from Saxony (1848), moving to Paris and Zürich. The poem of the Ring cycle was finished in 1852, and in 1853 he began to write Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), followed by Die Walküre (1856, The Valkyries) and the first two acts of Siegfried (1857). In 1861 he was allowed to return to Germany, but still lacked recognition and support, and had to flee from Vienna to avoid imprisonment for debt. In 1864 he was saved from ruin by the eccentric young King of Bavaria, Ludwig II, who became a fanatical admirer of his work, and offered him every facility at Munich. His first wife, Minna, having died in 1866, Wagner then married Cosima von Bülow, the wife of his musical director, after her divorce. Die Meistersinger was completed in 1867, and Götterdämmerung in 1874. To fulfil his ambition to give a complete performance of the Ring (Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, with Das Rheingold as introduction), he started the now famous theatre at Bayreuth, which opened in 1876. Parsifal, his last opera, was staged in 1882, a year before his sudden death from a heart attack, in Venice. His son Siegfried Wagner (1869–1930) was director of the Bayreuth theatre from 1909. His grandson Wieland Wagner (1917–66) took over the directorship in 1951, and revolutionized the production of the operas, stressing their universality as opposed to their purely German significance. Wieland's brother Wolfgang Wagner (1919– ) became artistic director at Bayreuth in 1966. |
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