COMPOSERS
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
- $6m to stage Wagner's Ring in LA
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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.
- He is best known for the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ used in the film ‘Apocalypse Now’.
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ESSENTIAL RELEASES
- The Ring of the Nibelung
- The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
- Tristan und Isolde