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    Wilhelm Richard Wagner (

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    Teodora Udrescu
    Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, and conductor in the 19th century who is best known for his operas. He revolutionized opera by developing the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, where he sought to synthesize poetry, visual arts, music, and drama with music being subsidiary to drama. His compositions were notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies, and use of leitmotifs associated with characters and ideas. He had his own opera house built in Bayreuth, Germany where his most famous works like The Ring of the Nibelung cycle and Parsifal premiered and continue to be performed annually. Throughout his life he wrote controversial essays on music, drama, and politics that

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    Wilhelm Richard Wagner (

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    Teodora Udrescu
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    Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, and conductor in the 19th century who is best known for his operas. He revolutionized opera by developing the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, where he sought to synthesize poetry, visual arts, music, and drama with music being subsidiary to drama. His compositions were notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies, and use of leitmotifs associated with characters and ideas. He had his own opera house built in Bayreuth, Germany where his most famous works like The Ring of the Nibelung cycle and Parsifal premiered and continue to be performed annually. Throughout his life he wrote controversial essays on music, drama, and politics that

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    Wagner

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    Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, and conductor in the 19th century who is best known for his operas. He revolutionized opera by developing the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, where he sought to synthesize poetry, visual arts, music, and drama with music being subsidiary to drama. His compositions were notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies, and use of leitmotifs associated with characters and ideas. He had his own opera house built in Bayreuth, Germany where his most famous works like The Ring of the Nibelung cycle and Parsifal premiered and continue to be performed annually. Throughout his life he wrote controversial essays on music, drama, and politics that

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    97 views2 pages

    Wilhelm Richard Wagner (

    Uploaded by

    Teodora Udrescu
    Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, and conductor in the 19th century who is best known for his operas. He revolutionized opera by developing the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, where he sought to synthesize poetry, visual arts, music, and drama with music being subsidiary to drama. His compositions were notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies, and use of leitmotifs associated with characters and ideas. He had his own opera house built in Bayreuth, Germany where his most famous works like The Ring of the Nibelung cycle and Parsifal premiered and continue to be performed annually. Throughout his life he wrote controversial essays on music, drama, and politics that

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    Richard Wagner

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    "Wagner" redirects here. For others with the surname, see Wagner (surname). For other
    uses, see Wagner (disambiguation) and Richard Wagner (disambiguation).

    Richard Wagner in 1871

    Wilhelm Richard Wagner (/ˈvɑːɡnər/, German: [ˈʁɪçaɐ̯t ˈvaːɡnɐ] ( listen);[1] 22 May 1813 –
    13 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who
    is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, "music
    dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for
    each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the
    romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised
    opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), by which he sought
    to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama.
    He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner
    realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des
    Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).

    His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures,
    rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs—musical phrases
    associated with individual characters, places, ideas, or plot elements. His advances in
    musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly
    influenced the development of classical music. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes
    described as marking the start of modern music.

    Wagner had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which embodied many
    novel design features. The Ring and Parsifal were premiered here and his most important
    stage works continue to be performed at the annual Bayreuth Festival, run by his
    descendants. His thoughts on the relative contributions of music and drama in opera were to
    change again, and he reintroduced some traditional forms into his last few stage works,
    including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg).

    Until his final years, Wagner's life was characterised by political exile, turbulent love affairs,
    poverty and repeated flight from his creditors. His controversial writings on music, drama and
    politics have attracted extensive comment, notably, since the late 20th century, where they
    express antisemitic sentiments. The effect of his ideas can be traced in many of the arts
    throughout the 20th century; his influence spread beyond composition into conducting,
    philosophy, literature, the visual arts and theatre.

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