Opera composer Richard Wagner has hit a milestone birthday this year. He’s 200 years old, or would be if he were still alive. Wagner established German opera in the repertory of the world, and because he was as much a dramatist as a composer, he wrote his own librettos (the story and lyrics). He created a radical new way to tell stories in music, letting them develop over whole, long acts instead of dividing them into separate musical “numbers” like most of 19th-century opera. He also chose radical subjects for his music dramas, basing them on German and Scandinavian mythology.
Though opera is a genre for voices, Wagner was one of the most inventive composers for orchestra and expanded its role in opera. In Wagner’s operas, the orchestra helps tell the story, reveals what is going on in characters’ minds, and structures the long sections of dramatic dialogue. Wagner’s harmony was considered daring and innovative in his day and is still studied in music conservatories today. Because his radical ideas could not be accommodated easily in opera houses of the time, he actually found a way to build his own, at Bayreuth, in the German state of Bavaria.
Though Wagner is one of the handful of most brilliant and influential composers the 19th century produced, he was also terribly anti-Semitic (hating Jewish people), as was his second wife, Cosima. Although Wagner died 50 years before Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany, his family and the opera house he founded were involved in the Nazis rise to power and his operas were important pillars in the cultural life of the Nazi regime. These facts have cast a shadow over Wagner’s creations ever since. We may try to separate music and politics, but sometimes it’s difficult.
In many ways, though, the Wagnerian controversy has contributed to the continued development of opera. Staging ideas created at Bayreuth by his grandchildren and by later generations of producers, designers, and musicians to try to deal with Wagner’s complicated legacy continue to enrich and enrage operagoers.
Wagner’s life makes a great story, and his music is some of the most beautiful and emotional we have from the 19th century. Find out more, watch video clips, and listen to music at SFCV’s Composer Gallery page.