Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, and theorist whose operas reshaped nineteenth-century music. Trained in Leipzig and Dresden, he held early conducting posts in Wuerzburg, Magdeburg, Koenigsberg, and Riga, spent the poverty years of 1839-1842 in Paris, then served as Royal Saxon Kapellmeister in Dresden before fleeing into Swiss exile after the 1849 Dresden uprising. His works include The Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. He advanced the ideas of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) and the leitmotif, and built the Bayreuth Festspielhaus to stage his works. Supported financially by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he also authored prose writings, among them the antisemitic essay Das Judenthum in der Musik. He died in Venice in 1883.