Web Quotableonline.com Frasescelebres.org Greatbookscollection.org

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (May 22, 1813 in Leipzig
– February 13, 1883 in Venice) was an
influential Germany|German composer, music
theory|music theorist, and essayist, primarily
known for his groundbreaking symphonic-operas (or
"music dramas"). His compositions are notable for
their continuous contrapuntal texture
(music)|texture, rich harmony|harmonies and
orchestration, and elaborate use of leitmotifs: 
themes associated with specific characters or
situations. Wagner's chromatic scale|chromatic
musical language prefigured later developments in
European classical music, including extreme
chromaticism and Atonality|atonality.  He
transformed musical thought through his idea of
Gesamtkunstwerk ("total art-work"), epitomized by
his monumental four-opera cycle Der Ring des
Nibelungen (1876). His concept of leitmotif and
integrated musical expression was a strong
influence on many 20th century film scores. Wagner
is also an extremely controversial figure, both
because of his musical and dramatic innovations,
and because he was a very public exponent of
Anti-Semitism|anti-semitic ideas.

== Works ==

=== Operas ===

Wagner's primary artistic legacy consists of the
operas that he wrote. These can be roughly divided
into three groups. The early-stage operas are Die
Feen (The Fairies), Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on
Love), and Rienzi. These works are seldom
performed today.

His middle-stage output, which is considered to be
of remarkably higher quality, began with Der
fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman
(opera)|The Flying Dutchman), followed by
Tannhäuser (Wagner)|Tannhäuser and Lohengrin.

The first of Wagner's mature operas is Tristan und
Isolde (Tristan and Isolde), often considered his
masterpiece. Next is Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg (Die Meistersinger|The Mastersingers of
Nuremberg), the only comedy in his oeuvre apart
from Das Liebesverbot, and one of the longest
operas still performed. This is followed by Der
Ring des Nibelungen, commonly referred to as the
Ring cycle, a set of four operas based on German
and Scandinavian mythology. Spanning roughly 16
hours in performance, the Ring cycle has been
called the most ambitious artistic work ever made.
Wagner's final opera, Parsifal, is a contemplative
work based on the Christianity|Christian legend of
the Holy Grail.

Through his operas and theoretical essays, Wagner
exerted a strong influence on the operatic medium.
He was an advocate of a new form of opera which he
called "music drama", in which all the musical and
dramatic elements were fused together. To this
end, he developed a compositional style in which
the orchestra has at least as great a dramatic
role as the singers themselves. The expressiveness
of the orchestra is aided by the use of
leitmotifs, musical sequences standing for a
particular character or plot element, whose
complex interleaving and evolution illuminates the
progression of the drama.

Unlike other opera composers, who generally
delegated the task of writing the libretto (the
text and lyrics) to others, Wagner wrote his own
libretti, which he referred to as "poems". Most of
his plots were based on European mythology|myths
and legends.

Wagner's musical style is often considered the
epitome of classical music's Romantic
music|Romantic period, due to its unprecedented
exploration of emotional expression. He introduced
new ideas in harmony and form, including extremes
of chromatic scale|chromaticism. In Tristan und
Isolde, he explored the limits of the traditional
Key signature|tonal system that gave keys and
chords their identity, pointing the way to the
rise of atonality in the 20th century. Certain
historians of music have even placed the beginning
of modern classical music at the first notes of
Tristan (the so-called Tristan chord.)

====Early-stage====

* (1832) Die Hochzeit
* (1834) Die Feen
* (1836) Das Liebesverbot
* (1837) Rienzi — Rienzi, der letzte der
Tribunen

====Middle-stage====

* (1843) The Flying Dutchman (opera)|Der fliegende
Holländer (The Flying Dutchman)
* (1845) Tannhäuser (Wagner)|Tannhäuser
* (1848) Lohengrin (opera)|Lohengrin

====Mature====

* (1859) Tristan and Isolde|Tristan und Isolde
(Tristan and Isolde)
* (1867) Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The
Mastersingers of Nuremberg)
*Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the
Nibelung)
** (1854) Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold)
** (1856) Die Walküre (The Valkyrie)
** (1871) Siegfried (Previously named:
Jung-Siegfried or Young Siegfried, and Der junge
Siegfried or The young Siegfried)
** (1874) Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the
Gods) (First named: Siegfried's Tod or The Death
of Siegfried)
* (1882) Parsifal

=== Non-operatic music ===

Apart from his operas, Wagner composed relatively
few pieces of music. These include a single
symphony (written at the age of 19), and some
overtures, choral and piano pieces. Of these, the
most commonly-performed work is the Siegfried
Idyll, a chamber music|chamber piece written for
the birthday of his second wife, Cosima
Wagner|Cosima. The Idyll draws on several motifs
from the Ring cycle, though it is not part of the
Ring.  The next most popular are the Wesendonck
Lieder, properly known as Five Songs for a Female
Voice, which were composed for Mathilde Wesendonck
while Wagner was working on Tristan.

After completing Parsifal, Wagner apparently
intended to turn to the writing of symphonies.
However, nothing substantial had been written at
the time of his death.

The overtures and orchestral passages from
Wagner's middle and late-stage operas are commonly
played as concert pieces.  For most of these,
Wagner wrote short passages to conclude the
excerpt so that it does not end abruptly.  This is
true, for example, of the Parsifal prelude and
Siegfried's Funeral Music.  A curious fact is that
the concert version of the Tristan prelude is
unpopular and rarely heard; the original ending of
the prelude is usually considered to be better,
even for a concert performance.

The Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin (popularly known
in English language|English-speaking countries as
"Here Comes the Bride") is often played as the
processional at weddings.

=== Other works ===

Wagner was an extremely prolific writer, authoring
hundreds of books, poems, and articles, as well as
a massive amount of correspondence. His writings
covered a wide range of topics, including
politics, philosophy, and detailed analyses (often
mutually contradictory) of his own operas. Essays
of note include "Oper und Drama" ("Opera and
Drama", 1851), an essay on the theory of opera,
and "Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Jewishness in
Music", 1850), a polemic directed against Jewish
composers. He also wrote an autobiography, My Life
(1880).

He was responsible for several theatre|theatrical
innovations developed at the Bayreuth
Festspielhaus, an opera house specially
constructed for the performance of his operas.
These innovations include darkening the auditorium
during performances, and placing the orchestra in
a pit out of view of the audience. The Bayreuth
Festspielhaus is the venue of the annual Richard
Wagner Festival, which draws thousands of opera
fans to Bayreuth each summer.

== Biography ==

=== Early life ===

Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany, on
May 22, 1813. His father, a minor city official,
died 6 months after the birth, and in August 1814
his mother married the actor Ludwig Geyer. Geyer,
who is rumored to have actually been the boy's
father, died when he was six, leaving him to be
brought up by his mother.

Young Richard Wagner entertained ambitions to be a
playwright, and first became interested in music
as a means of enhancing the dramas that he wanted
to write and stage. He soon turned toward studying
music, for which he enrolled at the University of
Leipzig in 1831. One of his early musical
influences was Ludwig van Beethoven.

In 1833, at the age of 20, Wagner had finished
composing his first complete opera, Die Feen. This
opera, which clearly imitated the style of Carl
Maria von Weber|Weber, would go unproduced until
half a century later. Meanwhile, Wagner held brief
appointments as musical director at opera houses
in Magdeburg and Königsberg, during which he
wrote Das Liebesverbot, based on William
Shakespeare|William Shakespeare's Measure for
Measure. This second attempt was actually staged
at Magdeburg in 1836, but met with little acclaim.

On November 24, 1836, Wagner married actress
Christine Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer, and they
moved to the city of Riga where he became the
musical director at the local opera. A few weeks
afterward, Minna ran off with an army officer who
left her penniless. Wagner accepted her back, but
it was the start of a troubled marriage that would
end, three decades later, in misery.

By 1839, the couple had amassed such a large
amount of debt that they were forced to flee Riga
to escape their creditors (the recurring problem
of debt would plague Wagner for the rest of his
life.) During their flight, they took a stormy sea
passage to London, from which Wagner obtained the
inspiration for The Flying Dutchman|Der fliegende
Holländer. The Wagners lived in Paris for several
years, where Richard made a living writing
articles and making arrangements of operas by
other composers.

=== Dresden ===

Wagner completed writing his third opera, Rienzi,
in 1840. Fortuitously, it was accepted for
performance by the Dresden Court Theatre in the
German state of Saxony. In 1842, the couple moved
to Dresden, where Rienzi was staged to
considerable success. Wagner lived in Dresden for
the next six years, eventually being appointed the
Royal Saxon Court Conductor. During this period,
he wrote and staged Der fliegende Holländer and
Tannhäuser (Wagner)|Tannhäuser, the first two of
his three middle-stage operas.

The Wagners' stay at Dresden was brought to an end
by Richard's involvement in leftism|left-wing
politics. A nationalism|nationalist movement was
gaining force in the independent German
Confederation|German States, calling for increased
freedoms and the unification of the weak states
into a single nation. Richard Wagner played an
enthusiastic role in this movement, receiving
guests at his house that included his colleague
August Röckel, who was editing the radical
left-wing paper Volksblätter, and the
Russia|Russian Libertarian socialism|anarchist
Mikhail Bakunin.

Widespread discontent against the Saxon government
came to a boil in April 1849, when King Frederick
Augustus II of Saxony dissolved his Parliament and
rejected a new constitution pressed upon him by
the people. The May Uprising in Dresden|May
Uprising broke out, in which Wagner played a minor
supporting role. The incipient revolution was
quickly crushed by an allied force of Saxon and
Prussia|Prussian troops, and warrants were issued
for the arrest of the revolutionaries. Wagner had
to flee, first to Paris, and then to
Zürich|Zürich. Röckel and Bakunin failed to
escape and were forced to endure long years of
imprisonment.

=== Exile, Schopenhauer, and Mathilde Wesendonk
===

Wagner spent the next twelve years in exile. He
had completed Lohengrin before the Dresden
uprising, and now wrote desperately to his friend
Franz Liszt to have it staged in his absence.
Liszt, who proved to be a friend in need,
eventually conducted the premiere in Weimar in
August 1850.

Nevertheless, Wagner found himself in grim
personal straits, isolated from the German musical
world and without any income to speak of. The
musical sketches he was penning, which would grow
into the mammoth work Der Ring des Nibelungen,
seemed to have no prospects of seeing performance.
His wife Minna, who had disliked the operas he had
written after Rienzi, was falling into a deepening
depression. Finally, he fell victim to erysipelas,
which made it difficult for him to continue
writing.

Wagner's primary output during his first years in
Zürich|Zürich was a set of notable essays: "The
Art-Work of the Future" (1849), in which he
described a vision of opera as Gesamtkunstwerk, or
"total artwork", in which the various arts such as
music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts, and
stagecraft were unified; "Judaism in Music"
(1850), an anti-Semitic tract directed against
Jewish composers; and "Opera and Drama" (1851),
which described ideas in aesthetics that he was
putting to use on the Ring operas.

In the following years, Wagner came upon two
independent sources of inspiration, leading to the
creation of his celebrated Tristan and
Isolde|Tristan und Isolde. The first came to him
in 1854, when his poet friend Georg Herwegh
introduced him to the works of the philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner would later call this
the most important event of his life. His personal
circumstances certainly made him an easy convert
to Schopenhauer's philosophy, which was centered
on a deeply pessimistic view of the human
condition. He would remain an adherent of
Schopenhauer for the rest of his life, even after
his fortunes improved.

One of Schopenhauer's doctrines was that music
held a supreme role amongst the arts, since it was
the only one unconcerned with the material world.
Wagner quickly embraced this claim, which must
have resonated strongly despite its direct
contradiction with his own arguments, in "Opera
and Drama", that music in opera had to be
subservient to the cause of drama. Wagner scholars
have since argued that this Schopenhauerian
influence caused Wagner to assign a more
commanding role to music in his later operas,
including the latter half of the Ring cycle which
he had yet to compose. Many aspects of
Schopenhauerian doctrine undoubtedly found its way
into Wagner's subsequent libretti. For example,
the self-renouncing cobbler-poet Hans Sachs in Die
Meistersinger, generally considered Wagner's most
sympathetic character, is a quintessentially
Schopenhauerian creation (despite being based on a
real person).

Wagner's second source of inspiration was the
poet-writer Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the
silk merchant Otto von Wesendonck. Wagner met the
Wesendoncks in Zürich in 1852. Otto, a fan of
Wagner's music, placed a cottage on his estate at
Wagner's disposal. By 1857, Wagner had become
infatuated with Mathilde. Though Mathilde seems to
have returned some of his affections, she had no
intention of jeopardising her marriage, and kept
her husband informed of her contacts with Wagner.
Nevertheless, the affair inspired Wagner to put
aside his work on the Ring cycle (which would not
be resumed for the next twelve years) and begin
work on Tristan und Isolde, based on the Matter of
Britain|Arthurian love story of the knight Tristan
and the (already-married) lady Isolde.

The uneasy affair collapsed in 1858, when Minna
intercepted a letter from Wagner to Mathilde.
After the resulting confrontation, Wagner left
Zürich alone, bound for Venice. The following
year, he once again moved to Paris to oversee
production of a new revision of Tannhäuser,
staged thanks to efforts of Pauline de
Metternich|Princess de Metternich. The premiere of
the new Tannhäuser in 1861 was an utter fiasco,
due to disturbances caused by aristocrats from the
Jockey Club. Further performances were cancelled,
and Wagner hurriedly left the city. 

In 1861, the political ban against Wagner was
lifted, and the composer settled in
Wiesbaden-Biebrich|Biebrich, Prussia, where he
began work on Die Meistersinger|Die Meistersinger
von Nürnberg. Remarkably, this opera is by far
his sunniest work. (His second wife Cosima would
later write: "when future generations seek
refreshment in this unique work, may they spare a
thought for the tears from which the smiles
arose.") In 1862, Wagner finally parted with
Minna, though he (or at least his creditors)
continued to support her financially until her
death in 1866.

=== Patronage of King Ludwig II ===



Wagner's fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864,
when Ludwig II of Bavaria|King Ludwig II assumed
the throne of Bavaria at the age of 18. The young
King, an ardent admirer of Wagner's operas since
childhood, had the composer brought to Munich. He
settled Wagner's considerable debts, and made
plans to have his new opera produced. After grave
difficulties in rehearsal, Tristan und Isolde
premiered to enormous success at the Munich Court
Theatre on June 10, 1865.

In the meantime, Wagner became embroiled in
another affair, this time with Cosima von Bülow,
the wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow, one of
Wagner's most ardent supporters and the conductor
of the Tristan premiere. Cosima was the
illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and the
famous Countess Marie d'Agoult, and 24 years
younger than Wagner. Liszt disapproved of his
daughter seeing Wagner, though the two men were
friends. In April 1865, she gave birth to Wagner's
illegitimate daughter, who was named Isolde. Their
indiscreet affair scandalized Munich, and to make
matters worse, Wagner fell into disfavor amongst
members of the court, who were suspicious of his
influence on the King. In December 1865, Ludwig
was finally forced to ask the composer to leave
Munich. He apparently also toyed with the idea of
abdicating in order to follow his hero into exile,
but Wagner quickly dissuaded him.

Ludwig installed Wagner at the villa Triebschen,
beside Switzerland's Lake Lucerne. Die
Meistersinger was completed at Triebschen in 1867,
and premiered in Munich on June 21 the following
year. In October, Cosima finally convinced Hans
von Bülow to grant her a divorce. Richard and
Cosima were married on August 25, 1870. (Liszt
would not speak to his new son-in-law for years to
come!) On Christmas Day of that year, Wagner
presented the Siegfried Idyll for Cosima's
birthday. The marriage to Cosima lasted to the end
of Wagner's life. They had an additional daughter,
named Eva, and a son named Siegfried.

It was at Triebschen, in 1869, that Wagner first
met the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who
quickly became a firm friend. Wagner's ideas were
a major influence on Nietzsche, who was 31 years
his junior. Nietzsche's first book, Die Geburt der
Tragödie ("The Birth of Tragedy", 1872), was
dedicated to Wagner. The relationship eventually
soured, as Nietzsche became increasingly
disillusioned with various aspects of Wagner's
thought, such as his pacifism and anti-Semitism.
In Der Fall Wagner ("The Case of Wagner", 1888)
and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (Nietzsche vs. Wagner,
1895), he would condemn Wagner as decadent and
corrupt, even criticizing his earlier adulatory
views of the composer.

=== Bayreuth ===



Wagner, settled into his newfound domesticity,
turned his energies toward completing the Ring
cycle. At Ludwig's insistence, "special previews"
of the first two works of the cycle, Das Rheingold
and Die Walküre|Die Walküre, were performed at
Munich, but Wagner wanted the complete cycle to be
performed in a new, specially-designed opera
house.

In 1871, he decided on the small town of Bayreuth
as the location of his new opera house. The
Wagners moved there the following year, and the
foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus
("Festival House") was laid. In order to raise
funds for the construction, "Wagner society|Wagner
societies" were formed in several cities, and
Wagner himself began touring Germany conducting
concerts. However, sufficient funds were only
raised after King Ludwig stepped in with another
large grant in 1874. Later that year, the Wagners
moved into their permanent home at Bayreuth, a
villa that Richard dubbed Wahnfried
("Peace/freedom from delusion/madness", in German
language|German).

The Festspielhaus finally opened in August 1876
with the premiere of the Ring cycle. Present at
this unique musical event was an illustrious list
of guests: Wilhelm II of Germany|Kaiser Wilhelm,
Pedro II of Brazil|Dom Pedro II of Brazil, King
Ludwig (who attended in secret, probably to avoid
the Kaiser), and other members of the nobility;
and such accomplished composers as Anton Bruckner,
Edvard Grieg, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky|Pyotr
Tchaikovsky, and Franz Liszt.

Artistically, the Festival was an outstanding
success. ("Something has taken place at Bayreuth
which our grandchildren and their children will
still remember," wrote Tchaikovsky, attending the
Festival as a Russian correspondent.)



Financially, however, it was an unmitigated
disaster. Wagner abandoned his original plan to
hold a second festival the following year, and
travelled to London to conduct a series of
concerts in an attempt to make up the deficit.

=== Final years ===
In 1877, Wagner began work on Parsifal, his final
opera. The composition took four years, during
which he also wrote a series of increasingly
reactionary essays on religion and art.


Wagner completed Parsifal in January 1882, and a
second Bayreuth Festival was held for the new
opera. Wagner was by this time extremely ill,
having suffered through a series of increasingly
severe angina attacks. During the sixteenth and
final performance of Parsifal on August 29, he
secretly entered the pit during Act III, took the
baton from conductor Hermann Levi, and led the
performance to its conclusion.

After the Festival, the Wagner family journeyed to
Venice for the winter. On February 13, 1883,
Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in the
Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal. His body was
returned to Bayreuth and buried in the garden of
Wahnfried.

== Anti-Semitism and Nazi appropriation ==

During the 20th century, the public perception of
Wagner increasingly centered on his anti-semitism,
largely due to the appropriation of his music by
elements of the Nazi Germany|Nazi hierarchy. 

Wagner promulgated many anti-semitic views over
the course of his life, through both conversation
and numerous writings. He frequently accused Jews,
and in particular Jewish musicians, of being a
harmful foreign element in Germany, and called for
the abandonment of Jewish culture and their
assimilation into German culture. Some scholars
have argued that his operas also contain hidden
anti-Semitic messages, but this claim is disputed.

Wagner's first and most controversial anti-Semitic
essay was "Das Judenthum in der Musik", originally
published in 1850 in the Neue Zeitschrift under
the pen-name "K. Freigedenk" ("free thought"). The
essay purported to explain "popular dislike" of
the music of Jewish composers such as Wagner's
contemporaries, Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo
Meyerbeer. Wagner wrote that the German people
were repelled by Jews due to their alien
appearance and behavior — "freaks of Nature"
blabbering in "creaking, squeaking, buzzing"
voices — so that "with all our speaking and
writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation, we
always felt instinctively repelled by any actual,
operative contact with them." He argued that
Jewish musicians were only capable of producing
music that was shallow and artificial, a parroting
of true music, for they had no connection to "the
genuine spirit of the Folk". In the conclusion to
the essay, he wrote of the Jews that "only one
thing can redeem you from the burden of your
curse: the redemption of Wandering Jew|Ahasuerus
– going under!" Although this has been taken
to mean actual physical annihilation, in the
context of the essay it refers to the eradication
of Judaism and the conversion of Jews to
Christianity; in essence he called for the
complete assimilation of the Jews into mainstream
German culture.

The initial publication of the article attracted
little attention, but Wagner republished it as a
pamphlet under his own name in 1869, leading to
several public protests at performances of Die
Meistersinger.

Wagner attacked the Jews in several other essays.
In "What is German?" (1878), for example, he wrote
that

:The Jew... took German intellectual labour into
his own hands; and thus we see an odious travesty
of the German spirit upheld to-day before the
German Folk, as its imputed likeness. It is to be
feared, ere long the nation may really take this
simulacrum for its mirrored image: then one of the
finest natural dispositions in all the human race
were done to death, perchance for ever.

In spite of his anti-Semitic writings, Wagner had
an extensive network of Jewish friends and
colleagues. The most notable of these was Hermann
Levi, a practicing Jew whom Wagner chose to
conduct the premiere of Parsifal, his last opera.
Initially, Wagner wanted Levi to become baptized
before conducting Parsifal, presumably due to the
religious content of the opera, but he later
dropped the issue. Levi maintained a close
friendship with Wagner, and was asked to be a
pallbearer at the composer's funeral. Historian
Will Durant pointedly states that Wagner himself
was Jewish, however there is no evidence of this.
Nevertheless, during his childhood Wagner was
known by the surname of his step-father, Ludwig
Geyer. Geyer is a common surname among German
Jews, though Ludwig himself had no known Jewish
ancestors. Wagner may not have known this. His own
physiognomy was later caricatured in a manner that
resembles anti-Semitic images of the time (hooked
nose and over-large head). The possibility that
Geyer may have been his real father combined with
sensitivity about his looks may have been a motive
for Wagner's intense desire to stress his
rejection of Jewishness and commitment to
Germanness.  

After Wagner's death in 1883, Bayreuth became a
meeting place for a group of extreme right-wing
Wagner fans that came to be known as the Bayreuth
circle, endorsed by Cosima, who was much more
anti-Semitic than Richard. After the death of
Cosima and Siegfried Wagner in 1930, the operation
of the Festival fell to Siegfried's widow, English
born Winifred Wagner|Winifred, who was a personal
friend of Adolf Hitler, a fan of Wagner's music.
The Nazis frequently played Wagner during their
rallies. Certain scholars have argued that
Wagner's views, particularly his anti-Semitism,
influenced the Nazis, but these claims remain
controversial. Many aspects of Wagner's worldview
would certainly have been unappealing to the
Nazis, such as his pacifism and calls for
assimilation.

Wagner's works have been blacklisted in the modern
state of Israel, and what few performances have
occurred have evoked much controversy. Although
they are commonly broadcast on government-owned
radio and television stations, attempts at staging
public performances have been halted by protests,
especially by the Holocaust|Holocaust survivors.
For instance, after Daniel Barenboim conducted a
passage from Tristan and Isolde as an encore at
the 2001 Israel Festival, a parliamentary
committee urged a boycott of the conductor, and an
initially scheduled performance of Die Walküre
had to be withdrawn. On another occasion, Zubin
Mehta played Wagner in Israel in spite of walkouts
and jeers from the audience.

That said, it is difficult to criticise someone
for the views someone later in history had upon
them. Hitler's admiration for Wagner was not
returned, considering that Wagner died six years
and two months before Hitler was even born (on
April 20, 1889). His overall religious views are
somewhat ambiguous, not in nature or of his
devotion, but of what he believed. Wagner was an
enthusiast for Jesus Christ, but insisted he was
of Greek origin and not Jewish. He also insisted
the Old Testament of the Bible had nothing to do
with the New Testament, and that the God of Israel
was not the same God he believed was the father of
Jesus. Wagner criticised the Ten Commandants,
claiming it lacked the mercy and love of Christian
teachings. But, with some strong Christian values,
many Christian friends, and numerous Jewish
friends, he did attach himself to many vehemant
atheists. Most of his atheistic philsopher friends
insisted, upon hearing he was working upon an
opera titled Jesus of Nazareth, that Jesus appear
as a weak character. Overall, Richard Wagner is
hard not to find anti-Semitic, but has had varied
religious views over his life and an odd mix of
beliefs and friends.

== Links and references ==

=== Media ===

multi-listen start
multi-listen item|filename=Richard Wagner -
Tristan und Isolde - Vorspiel.ogg|title=Tristan
und Isolde: Vorspiel|description=|format=Ogg
multi-listen end

=== Selected readings ===

* Magee, B., The Tristan Chord: Wagner and
Philosophy, Metropolitan Books (2001)
* Tanner, M., Wagner, Princeton University Press
(1995)
* Lee, M. Owen. Wagner: The Terrible Man and His
Truthful Art. Toronto:
http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/ University of
Toronto Press, 1998.
* Runciman, J.F., Wagner (1913). Project Gutenberg
edition http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14441 here.
* Dahlhaus, C., Wagners Konzeption des
musikalischen Dramas

=== External links ===
*
http://www.carolinaclassical.com/articles/wagner.h
tml Richard Wagner: Zenith of German Romanticism

==== Wagner and his operas ====

* http://www.bayreuther-festspiele.de/ Bayreuth
Festival
*
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/music/wagner/general-faq/
preamble.html The
humanities.music.composers.wagner FAQ.
* http://www.rwagner.net/ RWagner.net. Contains
libretti of Wagner's operas, with English
translations.
* http://www.wagneroperas.com Wagner Operas. A
comprehensive website featuring photographs of
productions, recordings, librettos, and sound
files.
* http://www.trell.org/wagner/ Richard Wagner Web
Site. An assortment of articles on Wagner and his
operas.
* http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/ The
Wagner Library. English translations of Wagner's
prose works, including some of Wagner's more
notable essays.
* http://reactor-core.org/judaism-in-music.html
Wagner's essay "Das Judenthum in der Musik" or
"Judaism in Music"
*http://www.wagnerfestival.hu/ Wagner festival in
the cave theatre Fertörakos, Hungary

==== Related topics ====

* http://www.richard-wagner-postkarten.de/ The
Richard Wagner Postcard-Gallery. A gallery of
historic postcards with motives from Richard
Wagner's operas.
* http://www.rain.org/~karpeles/wedmch.html Photo
of Wagner's manuscript for the Bridal Chorus.
*
http://www.richard-wagner-museum.ch/en/index/index
.htm Richard Wagner Museum in the  country manor
Triebschen beside Lucerne, Switzerland where he
and Cosima lived and worked from 1866 to 1872. The
museum has also a large collection of old musical
instruments.
* http://mondediplo.com/2001/10/06wagner Better to
know by Edward Said, Le Monde diplomatique

===Sound samples ===

* media:Ride of the Valkyries.ogg|Ride of the
Valkyries, from Wagner's opera, Die Walküre (ogg
format, 19 seconds, 89KB)
* http://www.wagneroperas.com/indexwagnerians.html
The Wagnerians

=== See also ===

* Jim Steinman considers Richard Wagner to be his
hero and created his own genre, dubbed Wagnerian
Rock.
* What's Opera, Doc?. A famous cartoon using
Wagner's Ring music, in which the Ride of the
Valkyries is sung by Elmer Fudd with the words
"Kill the wabbit!"
* Klaus Schulze (German electronic composer and
Wagner admirer) dedicated his 1975 album Timewind
to Wagner's death (two 30-min tracks, "Bayreuth
Return" and "Wahnfried 1883"). He also used the
alias Richard Wahnfried for a part of his
discography.