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COMPOSERS

Richard Wagner

Picture of: Richard Wagner

(b.1813, d.1883) Wagner holds a unique place in high Romantic music. A many-sided genius, his greatest contributions to musical history were his epic, vocally and psychologically demanding operas, for which he wrote his own librettos, often based on myth.

NEWS AND FEATURES

IN ONE MINUTE

  • A German composer, Wagner was born the same year as Verdi.
  • He composed vast ‘music dramas’, notably the four-opera ‘Ring’ cycle.
  • Wagner was a colossal genius who revolutionised music, wrote his own texts and built his own opera house.
  • He married the daughter of Franz Liszt, Cosima.
  • W.H. Auden once called him ‘perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived’.
  • He was fiercely anti-Semitic, yet some of his closest collaborators were Jewish.
  • Wagner is commemorated to this day at the annual Bayreuth Festival.

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