He had one mistress to whom he was faithful to the day of his death: Music. Not for a single moment did he ever compromise with what he believed, with what he dreamed. There is not a line of his music that could have been conceived by a little mind. Even when he is dull, or downright bad, he is dull in the grand manner. There is greatness about his worst mistakes. Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a matter of being dumb with wonder that his poor brain and body didn’t burst under the torment of the demon of creative energy that lived inside him, struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he did in the little space of seventy years could have been done at all, even by a great genius. Is it any wonder that he had no time to be a man? –Deems Taylor
No composer ever polarized audiences like Richard Wagner (1813-1883). From the megalomania of the Bayreuth Festival, which Wagner founded himself in the small Bavarian town, to the detractors who see Wagner as longwinded or boring, to those who cite his Teutonic and anti-Semitic leanings as having paved the way for the rise of Nazism fifty years after his death, all listeners are left with a body of music that is undeniably original and inspired. The fact remains that Wagner was as complicated and elusive a man as his music.
Wagner’s family heritage has never been fully established. His father might have been Carl Friedrich Wagner or his mother’s lover, Ludwig Geyer. (This might be a reflection of the surprising number of characters in Wagner’s operas whose fathers are unknown to them—Siegmund, Siegfried, and Parsifal.) Carl Friedrich died a year after Richard’s birth, and his widow married Geyer. An actor and painter, Geyer raised Wagner in the environs of the theatre, so Richard was writing plays in his early teens. Wanting incidental music for his plays, Wagner studied composition, though his earliest works from his teenage years are mostly lost. He wrote his first opera, Die Feen, when he was twenty, while he was working in the theatre as a chorus-master.
By the age of thirty, his reputation was firmly established with Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman). As a result, he was appointed Kapellmeister to the Saxon court in Dresden, where he worked on Lohengrin and Tannhäuser and made early sketches for The Ring and Die Meistersinger. He involved himself in the republican movement that was gaining popularity in Europe in the late 1840s, and when his participation was undeniable, an arrest warrant was issued in 1849. With the aid of Liszt, Wagner fled to Zürich, focusing his energies on writing essays, including his influential Artwork of the Future and Opera and Drama.
Also in this exile, he finished the libretti for the four Ring operas and started composing the music, but his work stopped when he fell in love (despite his marriage to Minna Planer) with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of his Swiss patrons. His thoughts on romance, he turned instead to Tristan und Isolde, which he hoped would achieve enough popularity to finance a new hall to stage The Ring. Before long, Wagner obsessed over yet another woman, Cosima von Bülow, Franz Liszt’s daughter and wife of conductor Hans von Bülow. Minna died in 1866, but Richard and Cosima had been living together two years already. In 1869, Cosima’s marriage was annulled and in 1870 she married Richard.
Meanwhile, “mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria took a passionate interest in Wagner’s music and spared no expense in support of him. After much political intrigue, construction began in 1872 on the hall in Bayreuth that would be the ideal setting for The Ring. Four years later, the hall opened with the first performances of The Ring. Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, was completed in 1882, and six months after the premiere, Wagner died of a heart attack while traveling in Venice.
At precisely 7:30 on Christmas morning in 1870, Cosima Wagner was awakened with familiar music played by a small orchestra inside her home. This was the first performance of Siegfried Idyll, with the musicians playing from memory on the staircase and Wagner conducting from the landing. Christmas was also Cosima’s birthday, and Wagner had chosen music from his Siegfried and interwoven the folk song Schlaf’ mein Kind, schlaf’ ein. Naturally, the household premiere was a great success and was even repeated several times the same day. Originally scored for flute, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, trumpet and individual strings, Wagner later authorized performance with a full string section.