Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813 and started in the Romantic opera tradition of Weber and Meyerbeer. Between 1849 and 1852 he published essays outlining his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk - the "total work of art" - which sought to fuse poetry, music, drama, and visual design into a continuous sung narrative, with music growing organically from the text rather than toggling between arias and recitatives. He realised the idea most fully in Der Ring des Nibelungen, a four-opera cycle built on leitmotifs and extreme chromaticism; Tristan und Isolde pushed harmonic language so far it became a hinge to modernism. Late in life he softened his stance against traditional operatic forms, reintroducing them in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Parsifal. To stage his vision he had the Bayreuth Festspielhaus built to his specifications; it premiered The Ring and Parsifal, and after his death in 1883 his wife Cosima took over, keeping it in family hands ever since. His unorthodox works and contentious conduct - especially his antisemitism - made him both "genius" and "disease" in his lifetime, and the argument has never stopped.