Richard Wagner
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Richard Wagner
TIME LINE: Wagners Life
1813: Wilhelm Richard Wagner is born on May 22.
Wagners father dies on November 23.
1814: Wagners mother remarries
1815: Wagners mother has a daughter Cacilie
1821: Wagners step-father dies
1829: Wagner composes his first music: two piano sonatas and a string quartet
1830: Writes a piano arrangement for Beethovens Ninth Symphony
1832: Begins work on first opera, Die Hochzeit
1833: Begins work on Die Feen
1836: Marries Minna Planer
1839: Flees to London to avoid creditors, then to Paris
1847: Takes an interest in Greek plays
1857: Begins work on Tristan & Isolde
1858: Minna finds love letter Richard wrote to Mathilde
1859: Moves to Paris with Minna and completes Tristan & Isolde
1862: Richard and Minna separate and Wagner moves to Vienna
1864: Wagner begins affair with Cosima Von Bulow
1865: A daughter Isolde is born to Richard and Cosima and he moves to Switzerland
1867: A second daughter, Eva, is born to Richard and Cosima
1869: A son, Siegfried, is born to Richard and Cosima
1870: Richard and Cosima finally get married
1878: Begins writing a series of reactionary essays
1883: Richard Wagner dies of a heart attack in Venice on February 13. The funeral
was held at Bayreuth on February 18.
WAGNERS WORKS
OPERA
COMPLETED
Die Feen
6 Jan 1834
Das Liebesverbot
Dec 1835
Rienzi
19 Nov 1840
Der fliegende HollĤnder
30 Oct 1841
TannhĤuser
13 Apr 1845
Lohengrin
28 Apr 1848
Das Rheingold
26 Sep 1854
Die WalkДјre
23 Mar 1856
Siegfried
5 Feb 1871
GĶtterdĤmmerung
21 Nov 1874
Tristan und Isolde
6 Aug 1859
Die Meistersinger
24 Oct 1867
Parsifal
13 Jan 1882
RICHARD WAGNER
Richard Wagner was one of the most influential and controversial classical composers of all time. Most of his works were operas and they addressed many aspects of his personal feelings: society, politics, religions, etc. Though many hated (and still hate) him and his work, most revere him to be a multitalented genius that brought 19th Century music to higher levels.
Wagners Life
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813 in Leipzig. At six months old, Wagner lost his father Frau Karl Friedrich to typhoid, which he caught from the corpses lying unburied in the streets after the Napoleonic War in Leipzig. Less than a year later, Wagners mother married Ludwig Geyer, who Wagner believes is his real father, even though nothing was ever proved. Geyer, like Wagner had an artistic gift. He was an actor a painter, dramatist, and singer. As a child, Geyer was determined “to make something” of Wagner (Jacobs 3). He failed at drawing and painting. Wagner did not realize he had a talent until Geyer was on his deathbed with collapsed lungs. His mother put him in the next room with a piano because Geyer said, “What if he has a talent for music (Jacobs 3)?”
Wagner had the dramatists instinct to seek escape from this world by contriving another. No other great composer began this late in life. Wagner took delight less in the symbol than in that which it symbolized- less in music as abstract sound than as a conjurer of fancies and emotions. It was not that he was less musical than the others were, but that his goal was and remained- drama. School and education did not come as an exciting thing for Wagner. He did not attend classes, and when he did, he found them boring. In the summer of 1832, he began his first opera, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding). The story was crude, but it symbolized emotional conflicts between impulse and obligation, love and morality-which were to haunt Wagner all his life and occasion some of his greatest music. Wagner was the victim of his imperious will to drama, which was not content to seek escape from this world by conjuring his musical instinct to create for him another, but must dramatize his daily life in this.
Wagner met Minna Planer, the leading actress in his opera Die Feen, who, was attracted him at once and got married in 1836. Wagner fell in love with one of