Richard Wagner
TIME LINE: Wagner’s Life
1813: Wilhelm Richard Wagner is born on May 22.
Wagner’s father dies on November 23.
;1814: Wagner’s mother remarries
§ 1815: Wagner’s mother has a daughter Cacilie
§ 1821: Wagner’s step-father dies
§ 1829: Wagner composes his first music: two piano sonatas and a string quartet
§ 1830: Writes a piano arrangement for Beethoven’s 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.
WAGNER’S WORKS
OPERA COMPLETED
Die Feen 6 Jan 1834
Das Liebesverbot Dec 1835
Rienzi 19 Nov 1840
Der fliegende Holländer 30 Oct 1841
Tannhäuser 13 Apr 1845
Lohengrin 28 Apr 1848
Das Rheingold 26 Sep 1854
Die Walküre 23 Mar 1856
Siegfried 5 Feb 1871
Götterdämmerung 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.
Wagner’s 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, Wagner’s 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.
Robert Schumann was a composer and music critic who lived from 1810-1856. He considered himself to be the one to follow in Beethoven and Schubert's footsteps. At the end of his career, Schumann had left his audiences quite puzzled, even his wife Clara Wiek Schumann found some his works to be "confusing and out there". During the late 19th century, Schumann's works mostly were considered undistinguished, gray, and colorless, but that was the opposite of what Schumann intended, he had intended to "reinvent instrumental music".
Born to poor parents in Hamburg, Germany, Brahms’s first music lessons come from his father who played the double bass. Known as a prodigy of the piano at nine, he quickly started to study seriously and began to compose. Incredibly, at fifteen he gave a public concert and by the time he turned twenty, he had composed piano pieces that are still played today. Moreover, after he taught at Dusseldorf for some time, he became attached to the court of Lippe-Detmold in which he settled until 1860. Constantly composing, he again resided in Hamburg after 1860. For the first time, he visited Vienna in 1862 and remained there. He spent increasingly more of his time in composition during the last twenty years of his life. Furthermore, he went on tours to play and conduct his own compositions, and received increasing honors and popularity. Brahms never married and also never left the continent of Europe, refusing to even visit England when Cambridge University desired to grant him an honorary degree. He was a humorous, gruff and a rather disorderly man, and by the 1890’s, he had become one of the most distinguished citizens of Vienna. (Weinstock 457).
The death of Robert Johnson was tragic and the myths that surround him will last forever. In August 1938, Johnson played the last show of his life. The jealous husband of a woman that he began an affair with while in Greenwood, Mississippi poisoned Johnson. During the show the husband poisoned Johnson's whiskey. Johnson died on August 13th, 1938, three days after he was poisoned.
While many countries in Europe were celebrating the freedom to listen to any music they wanted, the Nazi Party was taking over Germany. The music that was listened to in Germany had to be approved by the Nazis. According to Adolf Hitler good German music was that of Beethoven, Wagner and Bruckner. Out of the three composers, Richard Wagner was Hitler’s favorite. He would have his music performed at functions and rallies for the Nazi Party. Wagner’s music was loved, but even more so, his political views were very much liked by Hitler (“Nazi Approved Music”). Wagner wrote a booklet called “Das Judebthum in die Musik” translated: Judaism in Music. It talks about his feeling towards Jewish people, and how he believes that they ruin the arts to everyone in the public (“‘Degenerate’ Music”). The Nazis seemed to have lost the true meaning of music and made other lose it as well. Hans Pfitzner said that the best thing about Wagner’s music was that it was German; Gustav Mhaler responded saying, “All great artists leave their
Mahler’s family belonged to a German-speaking minority in Bohemians. They were also Jewish. His father and mother moved when he was still an infant and his father started a business. Their family grew fast but of the 12 children they had only 6 lived through the year of infancy. Iglua the town in which they moved when Gustav was only a baby was now a town of 20,000 people of which introduced him to music. He watched street dance, dance tunes, folk melodies, and the trumpet calls and marches of the local military band. At 4 years old Gustav was introduced to the piano and immediately loved it at the age of 10 he had his first public show, but Gustav’s school performance was doing as well so his father sent him to another one but Gustav was very unhappy and soon returned home. Later that year he suffered the horrible loss of his brother to a long illness. After Gustav tried to express his feelings in music he began to work on an opera of his lost brother. Neither the music nor play ever got recognized much.
One of the greatest figures of 19th century European art, Wilhelm Richard Wagner, is most commonly recognized in the world by his outstanding operas. However, the legacy he left for the future generations goes far beyond his music. Wagner’s personal philosophy, controversial ideas, progressive vision, and most of all, his enigmatic personality still evokes interest among both his admirers and critiques. Addressing the composer’s musical heritage, it is probably the legendary opera Parsifal that is just as much disputed over as its creator. The significance of this work, as well as its controversy, seems to reflect Wagner’s complicated personality, and thus is worth studying even in more than a century after the composer’s death.
Mahler's early career was spent at a serious of regional opera houses (Hall in 1880, Laibach in 1881, Olmutz in 1882, Kassel in 1883, Prague in 1885, Liepzig in 1886-8, Budapest from 1886-8, and Hamburg from 1891-7), a normal career path, until he arrived as head of the Vienna Opera in 1897. Mahler ended some of the more slovenly performance pra...
Wagner’s newfound focus on redemption rather than overcoming, yes, would have upset Nietzsche. But as most can relate, seeing poppy boy bands remain on the top of the charts over true artists; Nietzsche in that what he considered to be Wagner’s weakest moment become his most shining, must have been infuriating for him. The wrath is not focused solely on Wagner however, but as well at the masses that gathered to worship at his alter; Wagner himself was a slave to Wagnerianism and European decadence. Nietzsche recalls a story of Goethe reflecting on what dangers romanticism the most, to which he though ““suffocating of the rumination of moral and religious absurdities.” In brief: Parsifal.” (EH, “The Case of Wagner, 3). The performance so intertwined with the symbolism of a moral-religious world that it distracts from its content. Nietzsche almost asks us to strip these connotations and motifs away to see what stands. In a non-Christian light, does Parsifal even exist? Deconstructed and without the pieces, the many props and abundant imagery, could the opera even be written? “The musician now becomes an actor” Nietzsche says of Wagner; more performer than composer. European decadence has burdened music by forcing it away from its focus on life to the escape from living.
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composer has had an influence on the music we hear today. However, perhaps one of the most
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