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Richard Wagner

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Richard Wagner was a German essayist and perhaps the most influential composer of the 19th century. His works and opinions have generated a great deal of controversy, and a brief summary of his life and place in history is practically impossible. It has been said that more has been written about Wagner than perhaps any other historical figure with the exception of Christ and Muhammad.

Biography

Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig on May 22, 1813 and died in Venice on February 13, 1883. His father was a minor city official and died when Richard was 6 months old. In August 1814 his mother married the actor Ludwig Geyer (who may actually have been the boy's father).

Early in life, Wagner thought he would be a playwright, and turned to music originally to enhance the dramas he wanted to write and stage. But it was his operas to his own libretti, styled by him as "music dramas", that came to change radically the concept of stage music and, to some extent, music itself. Early musical influences were performances of Carl Maria von Weber's "Der Freischuetz" and Beethoven's "Fidelio". Among other strong acknowledged influences was the philosopher Schopenhauer.

Wagner commenced the study of music at the University of Leipzig, but had a struggling existence till 1839, when he made the acquaintance of Meyerbeer, who assisted him in his attempts to have his operas produced in Paris. He came in contact also with Heine, who helped him with the libretto of "Der Fliegende Holländer".

Harking back to Greek ideals as he saw them, Wagner intended to create a new kind of stage work, one dubbed "Gesamtkunstwerk" (or Total Art Work), combining all aspects of artistic creation including music, drama, poetry, painting, and the like. He devised his own plots, often derived from legend and German myth and folklore, with the idea that this would awaken a resonance in his audience. For some, his revolutionized opera were nothing more than morality plays, where love and materialism were incompatible and the gaining of all power had as a price of the loss of love. For some, his music carried the opera and dominated everything. His huge orchestras created a river of sound that overwhelmed the audience. His of the "leitmotiv" - musical themes which stand for characters and events - would be present throughout a work, reappearing interwoven with other melodies whenever the story makes reference to them.

In his stage works, the themes of love, death, and the attaining of power predominate. As for many figures of the Romantic Era, for Wagner losing one's self in the grand passion of love was a redemptive force over the corruption of the world. These themes came to dominate his life as well.

Anti-Semitism

Throughout his life, Wagner held virulent anti-Semitic views, which he promulgated both publicly and privately. Such views were not uncommon in Europe during Wagner's time, nor do they appear in his operatic works; but they have gained a disproportionate prominence due to the appropriation of Wagner's works by the Nazis decades after the composer's death.

Wagner's most notorious anti-Semitic statements appeared in "Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Judaism in Music"), an article which he wrote in 1849 at the age of 36. It was originally published in the Neue Zeitschrift, under the pen-name "K. Freigedenk" ("free thought"). Its aim, Wagner wrote, was "to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognise as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof". He criticized the music by Jewish composers, such as Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, as sweet and tinkling without depth. He claimed that Jews are "hateful", "heartless", and "hostile to European civilisation". Several of these criticisms were repeated in his major theoretical essay, "Oper und Drama" ("Opera and Drama"), 1852.

The initial publication of "Judaism in Music" attracted little attention, apart from a protest from eleven masters of the Leipzig Conservatorium to Brendel, the editor of the Zeitschrift. In 1869, Wagner republished it as a pamphlet under his own name. In a supplement, he called for the expulsion of Jews from Germany. Since such an expulsion was impractical, he argued, the only practical alternative was their assimilation into German culture. By this time, Wagner had become a prominent composer, and the article drew a round of vigorous protests from various parties.

Some of Wagner's anti-Semitism is attributable to the nationalist movements which, during the writing of "Judaism in Music", was sweeping the musical world. In Germany, Wagner was part of a movement to create a unified Germany, which at the time was a collection of weak states. In particular, much of Wagner's thought was bent toward reviving German music by returning it to its roots in folk music. In this atmosphere, many Germans, including Wagner, viewed Jewish culture as foreign elements that had to be expelled in order to rediscover "true" German culture.

There are indications that many of Wagner's more virulent anti-Semitic statements were rhetorical. Wagner had several Jewish friends, such as Hermann Levi, the conductor to whom he entrusted performances of his later operas. In a conversation with Cosima in 1878, he said: "if I wrote about the Jews again, I would say that there is nothing to be held against them, only they came to us Germans too soon; we were not stable enough to absorb this element."

Half a century after Wagner's death, many of Wagner's operas and prose writings were appropriated by the propaganda of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler was a fan of Wagner's music, and Wagner's daughter-in-law Winifred Wagner was a friend of Hitler. Winifred ran the Bayreuth Festival from 1930 until the end of World War II, when she was ousted.

As a result of the Nazi association, public performances of Wagner's music is banned in Israel. Ironically, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, was a passionate Wagnerian.

Operas