Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (Leipzig, 22 May 1813 – Venice, 13 February 1883) was a German Romantic composer, conductor, poet, essayist, playwright and music theorist. He is best known for his operas, which the composer himself called «music dramas» and for which, unlike other composers, he also wrote the libretto and designed the staging.

In his early years, he established his reputation as a composer with works such as El holandés errante and Tannhäuser, which followed the Romantic tradition of Weber and Meyerbeer. He transformed musical thinking with the idea of the «total work of art» (Gesamtkunstwerk), the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and theatrical arts, which he developed in a series of essays between 1849 and 1852 and embodied in the first half of his monumental tetralogy El anillo del nibelungo. However, his ideas on the relationship between music and theatre changed once again, and he reintroduced some traditional operatic forms in the works of his later period, such as Los maestros cantores de Núremberg.

Wagner's works, particularly those of his later period (which correspond to his Romantic phase), are notable for their contrapuntal texture, chromatic richness, harmony, orchestration and elaborate use of leitmotifs (musical themes associated with specific characters or elements within the plot). Wagner was a pioneer of several advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism (associated with orchestral colour) and the expansion of the harmonic universe through a continual shifting of tonal centres, which influenced the development of European classical music.

His opera Tristán e Isolda is sometimes described as the starting point of contemporary art music. Wagner's influence also extended to philosophy, literature, the visual arts and the theatre. He had the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth built, his own opera house, in order to stage his works as he imagined them, with innovative designs. The premiere of the Anillo tetralogy and of Parsifal took place there, and his most important operatic works are still performed there today at an annual festival run by his descendants. Wagner's views on orchestral conducting were also very influential.

Wagner wrote extensively on music, theatre and politics, works that have been the subject of debate in recent decades, especially those of an antisemitic nature, such as his essay El judaísmo en la música, as well as because of his supposed influence on Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, an ideology also underpinned by his writings that extol German nationalism.

Wagner achieved all this despite a life that, until his final decades, was marked by political exile, turbulent love affairs, poverty and repeated flights from his creditors. His aggressive personality and his opinions, often too blunt, on music, politics and society made him a controversial figure, a label he still bears today. The impact of his ideas can be found in many of the arts of the century.