Wagner built Bayreuth to trap audiences inside his myths
Richard Wagner (1813–1883) wrote both words and music for every stage work, wove leitmotifs through dense orchestral textures, and finally built his own theatre at Bayreuth to plunge audiences into the drama. Hailed as a genius and damned as a disease, he still divides listeners over his antisemitism.
Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813, the youngest of nine children of a police clerk who died of typhoid within months. His stepfather, the actor Ludwig Geyer, shared his love of theatre, and the boy once played an angel on stage. He could barely manage a scale at the piano, preferring to pick out overtures by ear. Hearing Beethoven's Seventh and Ninth symphonies at the Gewandhaus in 1828 fired him, and in 1829 the soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient showed him what a fusion of music and drama could be. At Leipzig University the cantor Theodor Weinlig taught him for free and got his piano sonata published as Opus 1.
His early career was a string of debts and flops. Die Feen, written at 20 in Weber's style, went unstaged until after his death; Das Liebesverbot, drawn from Measure for Measure, closed before its second night in 1836 and left him bankrupt. He married the actress Minna Planer that year, a stormy match. Fleeing creditors in Riga in 1839, the couple endured a rough sea crossing to London that fed The Flying Dutchman, then scraped by in Paris writing articles.
Meyerbeer's backing got Rienzi staged in Dresden, where Wagner became Royal Saxon Court Conductor and premiered The Flying Dutchman in 1843 and Tannhäuser in 1845. Radical friends such as Mikhail Bakunin drew him into the failed May Uprising of 1849, and he spent the next twelve years in exile. Liszt conducted Lohengrin in Weimar in 1850 while its composer lived on handouts in Switzerland.
His mature scores pushed chromatic harmony and restless key changes so far that Tristan und Isolde is seen as a forerunner of modernism. The Bayreuth Festspielhaus, designed to his requirements, hosted the first Ring and Parsifal, and after his death his widow Cosima and then their descendants ran the festival.
Source: Richard Wagner
