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Richard Wagner (1813-83)
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As the annual crowds to Bayreuth testify, no composer - with the possible exception of Mozart - has a more loyal, not to say adoring, following than
Richard Wagner
. His influence on musical history is also unsurpassed: his operas were revolutionary in their approach, using a recurring theme, or leitmotif, for programmatic purposes, and varying it to depict psychoanalytical developments. He expanded the orchestral palette (including the invention of the Wagner tuba) to create a more sumptuous sound than had ever previously been heard, and developed a new harmonic language in which rich chromaticism predominates. Apart from a few early works and occasional pieces, Wagner's output consists of lengthy "music dramas", all but one of them based on heroic love themes drawn from Germanic mythology. In these, he attempted to fuse all the arts: not only did he compose the music, he chose the plots and the associated symbolism, wrote the libretti and took an active role in staging.
Representing the Romantic approach to the arts at its most extreme, Wagner was a dreamer whose ambitions were only realized courtesy of the patronage of his equally unworldly soul-mate, King Ludwig II of Bavaria. For all his accomplishments, he was always a controversial figure, and even today he remains a composer whose stature is disputed far more than any other: despite the legions of adulators, many music lovers of otherwise catholic tastes listen only to fragments of his works, if they listen to them at all. This is not simply a question of Wagner's excessive nationalism and virulent anti-Semitism, which made the appropriation of his music by the Nazis inevitable. To all but the most initiated, his texts are mere doggerel, while his music is long-winded and repetitive, a point encapsulated in one of the famous asides made by the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham: "We've been playing for two solid hours and we're playing this bloody tune still!" Other useful information
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Germany,
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