Wagner – The Brilliant Bigot

Richard Wagner’s life was a dramatic saga of artistic ambition, financial struggle, and scandalous personal relationships. He revolutionized opera with his concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, leaving an indelible mark on classical music.

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The man known to history as Richard Wagner 
was born Wilhelm Richard Wagner on the 22nd of May 1813 in the city of Leipzig in 
the Kingdom of Saxony in eastern Germany, one of dozens of independent states of 
varying sizes that made up Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century.
His father was Carl Friedrich Wagner, a police official in Leipzig. Carl had married 
Johanna Rosine Pätz in 1798 and the couple would go on to have nine children. Richard was the 
youngest of this extensive brood of children. At least this is the commonly accepted story. 
According to one of Richard Wagner’s biographers, he was actually the son of a German painter and 
actor by the name of Ludwig Geyer, a close friend of Carl Friedrich Wagner who stayed at the Wagner 
house when his performing troupe was in Leipzig. Proponents of this theory note the fact that 
Richard was not baptised immediately after his birth, as nearly all children were 
in Europe before the twentieth century, and it was only after his mother made an arduous 
journey through war-torn Europe to visit Geyer at the Bohemian spa town of Teplitz that Richard was 
baptised in Leipzig on the 16th of August 1813, three months after his birth. This is adduced 
as evidence of Geyer being Richard’s father. The theory of Wagner’s illegitimacy 
is disputed by many biographers of Wagner and scholars of his work.
Wagner was born in a time of turmoil. The French Revolution of 1789 had eventually led 
to the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792, as Austria, Britain and Prussia attempted 
to crush the French political experiment. Since that time the continent had been at war almost 
endlessly, though with the French Revolutionary Wars having morphed into the Napoleonic 
Wars following the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul of France in 1799, 
later becoming Emperor of the French in 1804. Much of the fighting in the Napoleonic Wars took 
place in Central Europe as Napoleon defeated Austria and Prussia, the two most powerful German 
states, in multiple wars. The Treaty of Tilsit of 1807 had left the French ruler as the virtual 
master of the continent, with only Russia and Britain undefeated. However, Bonaparte’s vaulting 
ambition caught up with him when he decided to invade Russia in the summer of 1812, a campaign 
which saw him seize Moscow, but then abandon Russia as his men were deprived of supplies as the 
Russian winter set in, leading to the destruction of much of La Grand Armée. By the summer of 1813, 
when Wagner was born, allied Russian and Prussian armies were streaming westwards to liberate 
German lands from French rule. Although the belligerents reached an armistice in June 
as Austria mediated between the two sides, hostilities resumed by early August, with the 
Austrians siding against Napoleon. Napoleon defeated a coalition army at Dresden in August, 
but by October his enemies were converging on him at Leipzig with a large numerical advantage. 
The largest battle ever seen in Europe up to that time followed, involving over half a million men. 
It was not a catastrophic defeat for the French, but big enough given Napoleon’s numerical position 
by then that he had to begin withdrawing towards France. Thus Richard was born just as Leipzig 
briefly became the centre of the European wars. Carl Friedrich Wagner’s health declined 
precipitously during this time and he died from typhoid fever on the 23rd of November 1813 
at the age of 43, just six months after Richard’s birth. Ludwig Geyer quickly came to Johanna 
Wagner’s assistance and assumed responsibility for her children. The couple married in August 1814 
and moved to the Saxon capital, Dresden, where, in February 1815, Johanna gave birth to a daughter 
named Caecilie, who would become Richard’s closest childhood playmate. Geyer was a great influence 
on the boy, who was known as Richard Geyer until the age of 14 and shared his stepfather’s love 
for the theatre. In 1820 he was sent to study with Pastor Christian Wetzel in Possendorf near 
Dresden, from whom he acquired an interest in history and literature and began to learn to play 
the piano. This basic schooling was interrupted when Ludwig Geyer died in September 1821 at the 
age of 41. Richard was entrusted to the care of his step-uncle Karl Geyer, a goldsmith from the 
town of Eisleben, best known as the birthplace of Martin Luther. After nine months in Eisleben, 
Richard returned to Dresden and in December 1822 was enrolled at the Kreuzschule, a school that 
was founded all the way back around the year 1300 for training the local chapel choir. The Wagner 
household was full of music, and Richard’s elder sisters Rosalie and Klara were already opera 
singers. Richard developed a love for music, though he disdained Italian opera and from a young 
age preferred patriotic music such as Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, meaning The 
Marksman or The Freeshooter, inspired by German folk themes, and wanted to write his own dramas. 
At the Kreuzschule, he continued to study history and literature, showing a particular interest 
in the work of Homer, the putative ancient Greek author of the Iliad and the Odyssey and William 
Shakespeare. He tried his hand at poetry and by 1827 he was neglecting his studies to write a 
tragedy under the title Leubald und Adelaide, taking inspiration from both Shakespeare and 
the German Romantic writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In 1827 he returned to his native 
Leipzig to rejoin his family and enrolled at the Nikolaischule under the name Richard Wagner.
Richard wanted to leave school and devote himself entirely to artistic endeavours. Despite family 
opposition, he doubled down on his ambitions and began taking informal music lessons from Christian 
Müller, a violinist at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, where he was enraptured by performances of 
Beethoven’s symphonies. In 1829, Richard saw the soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient 
sing in Beethoven’s Fidelio and was taken by her dramatic interpretation of the role, which 
served as his ideal for an operatic performer. He immediately sent her a letter declaring his 
intention to write a piece of music worthy of her talents, later reflecting in his autobiography, 
quote, “When I look back across my entire life I find no event to place beside this in the 
impression it produced on me.” The same year, he received approval from his family to 
begin formal studies with Müller. In 1830, Wagner wrote an Overture in B-flat major inspired 
by Beethoven, whose innovations on the Classical form often shocked his audiences. Richard aimed 
to achieve the same effect by interrupting the opening theme with a loud drumbeat every fifth 
bar. When the piece was performed, the audience’s initial bewilderment was followed by laughter as 
they anticipated the thunderous boom each time it came around. In all of this he was a precocious 
talent, achieving much while he was little more than a teenager. This being said, Mozart had 
been a child prodigy and it was not unusual for European composers at the time to begin 
advanced work when they were still children. In February 1831, Wagner enrolled at Leipzig 
University as a fee-paying music student. One of the attractions of university for 
him was the social life which it offered. He soon joined the Saxonia Club, one of many 
student fraternities in Germany, one which took inspiration from liberal intellectuals and 
supported German unification. Wagner quickly took to drink and cards and developed a gambling 
addiction which caused him to lose almost every penny he had until a series of lucky wins 
led him to win back all he had lost and more. After this early experience he gave up gambling, 
quit the Saxonia Club and was encouraged to pursue more serious endeavours. In August 1831 he 
began taking lessons in composition from Theodor Weinlig, the choir leader at the Thomaskirche, 
St Thomas’ Church in the city. Wagner wrote a conventional Piano Sonata in B-flat major 
dedicated to his teacher, which was subsequently published as his Opus No. 1, and he impressed 
Weinlig with a Fantasia in F-sharp major written at his own initiative. Weinlig helped Wagner with 
his Overture in D-minor, which was well-received by the audience at its premiere at the Gewandhaus 
in February 1832. Within a few months, Weinlig informed Johanna Wagner that he had taught 
her son everything he could and several more of Wagner’s compositions were performed at the 
Gewandhaus that year. Moreover, during the course of six weeks in the early summer, Wagner wrote 
a Symphony in C-major, taking heavy inspiration from Beethoven’s earlier symphonies.
After these initial successes in Leipzig, Wagner began to look further afield and went 
travelling to some of the great cities where his heroes like Mozart had lived and played. After 
a six-week stay in Vienna, he went to Bohemia, where he called on Jenny and Auguste Raymann, the 
illegitimate daughters of Count Johann von Pachta, whom he had admired since his first trip to Prague 
in 1827. It seems possible that Richard aimed to marry one of the Raymann daughters, but after a 
few weeks he realised that Jenny, who hailed from an upper class family, would never marry a man 
of his humble birth. Taking inspiration from this development he began to write a libretto for an 
opera called Die Hochzeit or The Wedding. Unlike most operatic composers of the mid-nineteenth 
century, who worked alongside a librettist that wrote the actual words of the opera to accompany 
the music produced by the composer, Wagner wrote both the words and the music for his compositions 
himself. Inspired by his own experiences, and with a nod to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, 
the tragedy features two feuding medieval families who make peace as Hadmar, the head of one family, 
invites the representative of the other, Cadolt, to attend his daughter Ada’s wedding with her 
bridegroom Arindal. After falling in love with Ada during the preliminary festivities, Cadolt 
breaks into her apartment and attempts to seduce her. During the ensuing exchange Ada pushes 
Cadolt away and accidentally sends him plunging to his death from the balcony of her apartment. 
Horrified, she works herself up into a fit of hysteria before falling dead upon Cadolt’s 
coffin at his funeral the next day. After this personal disappointment in Prague, 
Wagner returned to Leipzig and began setting his libretto to music. He soon abandoned the 
whole enterprise after Rosalie criticised the subject matter. This downturn aside, during the 
winter of 1832 to 1833, Wagner’s symphony was performed to great acclaim at the Gewandhaus and 
on the back of this in January 1833 he went to Würzburg to take up a position as choirmaster at 
the theatre there. A year in Würzburg followed, during which he wrote his first complete opera 
Die Feen or The Fairies. Thereafter he returned to Leipzig and spent the first half of 1834 
trying to get this new work staged. Capping a productive period in his early twenties, while 
he was on holiday in Bohemia in the early summer Wagner sketched out the plot of a second opera, 
Die Liebesverbot, meaning The Ban on Love, a comic tale of forbidden love set in sixteenth-century 
Sicily and inspired yet again by one of Shakespeare’s works, Measure for Measure, one of 
the bard’s lesser-known plays. In July, Wagner went to the spa town of Bad Lauchstädt to take 
up the post of musical director at the struggling Magdeburg Theatre Company. On the day of his 
arrival, Wagner noticed Christine Wilhelmina Planer, nicknamed Minna, a beautiful tragic 
actress four years his senior, and immediately fell for her. After a tempestuous courtship, 
the couple were engaged by February 1835. Back in Magdeburg, Wagner struggled to raise 
funds for the company by holding concerts. Wagner himself was in debt and his performers were poorly 
paid. Moreover, to compound his personal problem, after the second season of the work opened at 
Magdeburg in August 1835, he heard that Minna had accepted a position at the Königstadt 
Theatre in Berlin. He had great difficulty in persuading her to stay. In January 1836, with 
the opera company on the verge of bankruptcy, he completed Die Liebesverbot and was obliged to give 
his own financial backing to ensure that it was staged. The opera premiered on the 29th of March 
to an unimpressed audience. The first showing was a disaster, with the lead singer forgetting the 
words of the songs. A second show was cancelled, so poorly received was the premiere. The 
company disbanded and Minna left for the city of Königsberg seeking to secure a job for her future 
husband at the theatre. In July Wagner followed Minna to Königsberg, where the pair were married 
in November 1836. The union did not begin well. The newlyweds argued frequently and just a 
few months later Minna left for Hamburg with a businessman named Dietrich. In the meantime, 
Wagner was appointed music director at the theatre in Riga, which though part of the Russian 
Empire was home to a large German community. A few weeks after his arrival in August, Wagner 
received an apologetic letter from Minna and the couple were reunited. His main preoccupation 
in 1838 was a new opera, Rienzi, based on the life of Cola di Rienzo, a fourteenth-century 
Italian political leader who led a popular revolt against the Roman aristocracy and briefly 
ruled Rome until his supporters turned on him. Wagner hoped that Rienzi would help him pay off 
his creditors in Riga, but when his tenure ended in the summer of 1839 he and Minna had to make a 
daring escape across the Russo-Prussian border to flee from his creditors. A nomadic period followed 
in which the couple visited London and Paris. In the latter city Wagner met the poet Heinrich 
Heine, and the composers Giacomo Meyerbeer and Hector Berlioz. Inspired by being back amongst 
fellow composers, during the winter of 1839 Wagner wrote the first movement of a symphony 
inspired by Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust. Although he soon abandoned the idea for a symphony 
and renamed it an overture, it remains one of his most popular instrumental pieces.
While continuing to work on Rienzi, Wagner desperately sought Meyerbeer’s support 
in having Die Liebesverbot staged in Paris, convinced that it simply hadn’t found its right 
audience yet after the flop back in Magdeburg in 1836. While Meyerbeer actively attempted to 
help the young German, nothing was forthcoming. Instead, in June 1840, Wagner scaled back his 
ambitions and proposed a new one-act opera, Der Fliegende Holländer, The Flying Dutchman, 
based on one of Heine’s short stories. In an attempt to make ends meet, Wagner also turned 
his hand to music criticism by writing journal articles about the German musical scene, which 
brought him name recognition but little money. He narrowly avoided being sent to debtors’ prison 
and although he completed Rienzi in November, he abandoned hopes of staging it in Paris and 
instead wrote to the king of Saxony asking to stage it in Dresden. Wagner received approval 
in June 1841, which encouraged him to continue working on The Flying Dutchman, the libretto which 
he had written in just ten days in May 1841. He worked frantically on the music in July and August 
and by November the opera was complete. With this, in early 1842 Wagner began to make arrangements 
for its premiere in Berlin. By then he was desperate to leave Paris and return to Saxony. 
At around this time, Heine introduced him to the work of the medieval German poet, Tannhäuser, 
a fourteenth-century folk poet and singer, while his friend Samuel Lehrs, a Jewish scholar, 
encouraged him to write operas based on medieval Germanic literature and introduced him to the 
tale of Lohengrin, also known as The Knight of the Swan. After returning to Germany in April, Wagner 
began sketching out scenes for a Tannhäuser opera, named after the medieval poet. He otherwise spent 
the autumn supervising rehearsals of Rienzi, which premiered at the Dresden Court Theatre on 
the 20th of October 1842. From the conductor’s podium, Wagner was astonished by the reaction he 
received from the audience, who remained in their seats throughout the six-hour long performance. 
After the struggles of the past six or so years it was a seeming validation of his work.
Wagner’s circle was also expanding in important ways during these years. At a concert in Berlin, 
he had his first proper meeting with Franz Liszt, the virtuoso Hungarian pianist and composer who 
was a European celebrity already by that time. The two men would soon become close friends. With 
negotiations for The Flying Dutchman dragging on, Wagner agreed to give its premiere in Dresden on 
the 2nd of January 1843. Following Heine’s lead, Wagner initially set the drama off the Scottish 
coast, but shifted the scene to Norway as an echo of his own personal experiences crossing the 
North Sea between Germany, England and France in the late 1830s. Instead of a historical grand 
opera like Rienzi, Wagner turned to a familiar folk legend about a Dutch ghostship doomed to 
remain at sea forever. In Wagner’s telling, the Dutch captain has an opportunity to lift his curse 
once every seven years when his ship is carried to shore, provided he could find a wife who will 
be true to him. In exchange for a chest of gold, he wins the hand of Senta, the daughter of a 
Norwegian sea-captain named Daland. Although Senta had been in love with the huntsman Erik, she 
is familiar with the tale of the Flying Dutchman and agrees to marry the strange mariner. That 
evening, the Dutchman overhears Erik scolding Senta for breaking a vow to be true to him. In 
despair, he informs Senta of his identity and orders his ghostly crew to set sail. Senta throws 
herself into the sea, vowing to be faithful until death, an act of redemption that breaks the 
curse and sees the pair ascend to heaven. Although he received criticism from friends 
and colleagues who complained that his music lacked the kind of melody that was viewed as 
aesthetically pleasing by many music lovers in the nineteenth century, Wagner was pleased with 
the reception to The Flying Dutchman, which on top of the earlier success of Rienzi in 1842 was 
seeing his star rise in European circles. In February 1843 he was appointed royal kapellmeister 
at the Saxon court, a position which put him on a secure financial footing for the first time in his 
life as he entered his thirties. As part of his agenda to reform Dresden’s musical establishment, 
he secured the employment of Carl August Röckel, a musician and socialist who introduced him 
to radical politics. Wagner continued work on Tannhäuser and completed the libretto on 
his 30th birthday on the 22nd of May 1843, but his duties at the theatre prevented him 
from completing the music until April 1845. At the core of Wagner’s opera is Tannhäuser 
the poet’s struggle between profane love, represented by the pagan goddess Venus in 
her subterranean grotto under the Venusberg, and sacred love, represented by the Virgin Mary 
and the devoted Princess Elisabeth, the niece of a German aristocrat. Tannhäuser goes on a pilgrimage 
to Rome seeking forgiveness for his dalliances with Venus, but rather than receiving absolution 
from the Pope he continues to be damned, and chooses to return to Venus’ embrace. In a 
departure from a Germanic legend, one in which Tannhäuser enters the Venusberg and is never seen 
again, in Wagner’s version he achieves redemption after seeing Elisabeth’s dead body carried in a 
procession. He collapses to his knees by her side, falls dead and gains admission to heaven.
During an annual trip with Minna to the baths at Marienbad in the summer of 1845 while he 
awaited the premiere of Tannhäuser in October, Wagner produced a prose sketch for his opera 
Lohengrin. His productivity did not stop there, and he sketched out the plot for Die Meistersinger 
von Nürnberg, The Master Singer of Nuremburg, although it would be another two decades before 
he turned it into an opera. His work in Dresden ensured that he was unable to return to completing 
Lohengrin until the summer of 1846, but by August 1847 he had a complete draft of the opera 
finished. His work though suffered at this time owing to a combination of personal setbacks and 
the febrile political environment which Germany and Europe as a whole were cast into in the 
late 1840s. Firstly, on the 9th of January 1848, just over a week after he began putting together 
the full score for Lohengrin, Wagner’s mother Johanna died at the age of 69. Just weeks later 
revolution began spreading across Europe, fuelled by dismay at rising food prices and regional 
famines caused by the potato blight. In France, King Louis-Philippe was overthrown in February 
1848. The revolutionary fervour reached Dresden in late February. King Frederick Augustus II 
was initially reluctant to give concessions, but as the opposition mounted and the 
demonstrations grew larger and larger, on the 13th of March he replaced his cabinet 
with members of the liberal opposition. While Wagner was preoccupied with completing the score 
to Lohengrin as the revolts were breaking out, in April, perhaps inspired by the wave of 
pan-German nationalism sweeping Central Europe, he produced a proposal for a German National 
Theatre which he hoped to become the first director of. After the German National Assembly 
convened in Frankfurt on the 18th of May Wagner began to contribute to the political debate, but 
his attempt to offer a compromise between monarchy and republicanism failed to satisfy either party, 
and in late 1848 he learned that the Court Theatre was no longer prepared to stage Lohengrin as 
he became mired in political controversy. Despite warnings from Minna to steer clear of 
politics, by the autumn Wagner was contributing regular articles to the Volksblätter or 
People’s Journal, a new publication founded by his friend Röckel, who was elected to the 
Saxon assembly in January 1849. In early 1849, Wagner wrote a sketch for a drama entitled 
Jesus von Nazareth, in which he would present the historical Jesus as a social revolutionary, 
devoid of all his religious trappings. In Saxony, the political winds were already turning against 
the revolutionaries, after the conservative Baron Friedrich von Beust was appointed 
prime minister in February 1849. In March, Röckel introduced Wagner to Mikhail Bakunin, 
the Russian political radical who would go on to become one of the most influential thinkers 
in the development of political anarchism. The two men quickly became friends. Meanwhile, 
the National Assembly in Frankfurt produced a new Constitution which elected King Frederick William 
IV of Prussia as emperor of a united Germany, but the Prussian ruler refused to accept an 
imperial crown from the people. In early April, Wagner penned an article in which he assumed the 
voice of the “Goddess of Revolution” to announce, quote, “I shall destroy the dominion of the 
one over the many, of the dead over the living, of matter over mind. I shall shatter the 
power of the mighty, of law and of property.” While the Saxon assembly adopted the German 
Constitution, the king’s conservative ministers responded by dismissing their liberal 
colleagues. In early May an uprising broke out on the streets of Dresden. While Wagner supported the 
revolutionaries by handing out propaganda posters to the king’s soldiers and performing other 
roles, the appearance of Prussian troops three days later signalled the beginning of the end for 
the uprising. Wagner left Dresden on the 9th of May after narrowly avoiding arrest. By July 1849 
Wagner had settled in political exile in Zurich in Switzerland, where the 1848 revolutions had seen a 
new liberal constitution. Here he began working on a series of essays about art. While he continued 
to support political revolution, with the failure of the 1848 revolutions he looked towards an 
artistic revolution instead. Inspired by the work of socialist writers like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 
and Ludwig Feuerbach, Wagner also denounced both Christianity and industrialisation, both of which 
he believed were constraining human creativity. Minna soon joined Richard in Switzerland, but the 
experience of the revolution of 1848 in Germany had further tested the couple’s already fragile 
marriage. In March 1850, Wagner visited Bordeaux, after being promised an annual allowance of 3,000 
francs from the wine merchant Eugène Laussot and his 21-year-old wife Jessie. He soon discovered 
that Jessie was unhappily married. The two began an affair and planned to elope to Greece or 
Turkey, but this was foiled when Eugène Laussot found out about the scheme. Wagner was deprived of 
his allowance and returned shamefaced to Minna. In August, Liszt arranged for Lohengrin to premiere 
in the town of Weimar, but Wagner could not attend as an arrest warrant was still out for him in 
the German lands. In the same month, Wagner wrote the essay Jewishness in Music, claiming Jewish 
composers were motivated for commercial reasons to write catchy tunes that lacked artistic depth. In 
this he criticised Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer in particular, both German Jewish 
composers. Despite having several Jewish friends, Wagner increasingly resorted to anti-Semitic 
tropes in his writing and argued that Jews could never be German without renouncing their 
Jewish identity. Wagner’s anti-Semitism possibly stemmed from his rivalry with Meyerbeer, though 
it was also reflective of a growing strand of a more virulent anti-Jewish sentiment around Europe 
in the second half of the nineteenth century. Wagner saw himself in the vanguard of 
a revolution in music. In January 1851 he completed his influential treatise Opera and 
Drama, a distillation of his views. For Wagner, the height of artistic creativity was the ancient 
Greek tragedy, which prioritised the dramatic effect of the text and staging above that of 
the musical accompaniment. Back in 1848, while he was still in Dresden, Wagner had identified the 
dramatic potential of the Nibelunglied or Song of the Nibelungs, a thirteenth-century German epic 
poem in which the hero Siegfried meets his death after visiting the Burgundian court. Wagner wrote 
the libretto for an opera entitled Siegfried’s Tod or Siegfried’s Death. In 1851, armed with his 
new conceptual framework, which some biographers have labelled, quote, “a religion in disguise,” 
Wagner broadened his ambitions, and in the summer of that year he wrote a libretto for Der junge 
Siegfried, or The Young Siegfried. By November, he conceived of the project as three dramas 
introduced by a three-act prologue and envisaged building a festival theatre where the entire cycle 
would be performed over four successive evenings. Over two weeks in November, Wagner drew on Norse 
sagas and wrote prose sketches for Das Rheingold, The Rhinegold, and Die Walküre, The Valkyries, 
the prologue and the first full-length drama of his new scheme, what would eventually 
become The Ring Cycle, his magnum opus. He completed the libretto for Walküre in June 
1852 and Rheingold in early November, before embarking on changes to his two Siegfried dramas. 
Here Wagner was getting into new territory, highly conceptual and ambitious work that would see his 
name written in the annals of musical history. Wagner’s libretti for his four-part epic, 
The Ring of the Nibelungs, what we call The Ring Cycle today, found favour among his friends 
when he presented sample pieces to them. These included the silk merchant Otto Wesendonck and 
his 23-year-old wife Mathilde. In April 1852, Wagner’s friends encouraged him to give 
four performances of The Flying Dutchman to enthusiastic Zurich audiences. The following 
May, several dozen musicians came together in Zurich to participate in three special concerts 
in honour of Wagner’s fortieth birthday. In June, Wagner dedicated a Piano Sonata in A-flat major 
to Mathilde Wesendonck, who inspired a burst of productivity from Wagner. The score of Rheingold 
was composed between November 1853 and May 1854 and the first two acts of Walküre in September 
1854. At this juncture, taking inspiration from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s 
The World as Will and Representation, as well as his increasingly romantic affection for 
Mathilde Wesendonck, Wagner began sketching out the scenario for Tristan und Isolde, based on an 
Arthurian romance. He then returned to Walküre and drafted the music for the third act in November 
and December. Conscious of the need to continue making a living even while he was preparing 
what would come to be revered as his best work, in the spring of 1855 he accepted an invitation 
by the Old Philharmonic Society in London to conduct eight concerts in the capital of the 
British Empire. Although British musicians were unaccustomed to his style, and the audiences 
preferred the likes of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, by the end of his four-month stay in June 1855 
he had won the admiration of the Londoners, while his Tannhäuser Overture was well-received 
by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Upon returning to Zurich, Wagner began 
orchestrating Walküre and completed the full score in March 1856. Although he moved onto 
Siegfried and continued working on it into 1857, Wagner was diverted for a time to completing 
another one of his most iconic works, Tristan und Isolde, a version of the Germanic 
tale of Tristan and his love for Isolde. He was inspired in his composition thereof by his 
relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck. In early 1857, Otto Wesendonck invited Wagner to rent a 
cottage next to the villa that was being built for him and Mathilde in Zurich. The Wagners moved in 
at the end of April. In August, not long after the Wesendoncks moved in, they received a visit from 
the conductor Hans von Bülow and his young wife, Cosima, the second daughter of Franz Liszt. In 
the presence of Mathilde, Cosima, and Minna, Wagner completed the libretto of Tristan over 
three weeks that autumn. The three women were in attendance when Wagner gave a reading of his 
new drama, in which the title characters shared a love that transcended their existing loveless 
marriages. In different ways, all three were emotionally affected by the performance. Minna 
viewed the other two with suspicion, sensing that her strained marriage was close to an end and 
Richard was openly discussing it in his new work. The newlywed Cosima was a fervent admirer of 
Wagner’s and was perhaps disappointed that he had chosen Mathilde as his muse. By October, Wagner 
and Mathilde were walking arm in arm in public, and the composer immediately began writing the 
music for Tristan. With Mathilde at the window of his study, Wagner also wrote the first four of a 
set of five songs set to her poetry, known as the Wesendonck Lieder. While Otto was conveniently 
away in America on business, Wagner serenaded Mathilde and showered her with dedications, though 
the relationship seemingly remained platonic. The idyllic winter that Wagner spent with Mathilde 
could not last. After Otto’s return Wagner left briefly for Paris in January 1858. By the time 
he returned to Zurich in early February he discovered that he had a rival for Mathilde’s 
affections in the latter’s Italian teacher, Francesco de Sanctis. In early April, Wagner 
wrote Mathilde a soothing letter of apology after an argument the previous night, 
but his message was intercepted by Minna, who interpreted it as an invitation to an illicit 
encounter. As a result, both Wagner and Mathilde were forced to give a full account of their 
relationship to their respective spouses. The resulting storm blew over and in May Wagner’s 
spirits were seemingly lifted by the arrival of the 16-year-old Karl Tausig, a young Jewish 
prodigy who had arrived on Liszt’s recommendation. However, in early July Wagner resolved that he 
had to keep his distance from the Wesendoncks and so he moved away from Zurich. This momentous 
decision also entailed his separation from Minna, who refused to accompany him. Their acrimonious 
parting took place in the presence of Hans and Cosima von Bülow. In a further twist in the drama, 
Cosima confided in Wagner that she made a mistake marrying her husband and was deeply unhappy. 
The Bülows left Zurich in mid-August and Wagner left for Italy the following morning. It was an 
acrimonious end to a period which had seen Wagner producing some of his greatest work.
After his departure from Zurich, Wagner spent seven months in Venice, where he worked 
on music for Act 2 of Tristan und Isolde. He was under surveillance from the Austrian 
authorities who ruled the city at that time, as well as large parts of northern Italy. In 
March 1859 he left Italy to escape the hostilities breaking out between Italian nationalists and 
the Austrians at the start of the Second War of Italian Independence, a movement which would lead 
to the unification of Italy into the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Wagner decamped to Lucerne, where 
he completed the score to Tristan und Isolde in early August. The following month, he reluctantly 
went to Paris and embarked on his third attempt to make a name for himself in the French 
capital. He also invited Minna to rejoin him. While the traditionalists continued to criticise 
him, in France Wagner won the support of a younger generation of admirers and obtained Emperor 
Napoleon III’s backing to stage Tannhäuser at the Grand Opera. After rehearsals began 
in September 1860, Wagner had to deal with complaints from French musicians who found certain 
sections too challenging. The eventual performance on the 13th of March 1861 started well and 
Act 1 was enthusiastically applauded by the audience upon its conclusion, however Act 2 saw 
a coordinated protest from the gentlemen of the prestigious Jockey Club of Paris, a men’s club 
that had taken over the Champ de Mars in central Paris for their equestrian activities in the 
middle of the nineteenth century. It was common practice for members of the Club to arrive late to 
performance at the opera, something which Wagner protested against by refusing to structure the 
performance to accommodate them. The Jockey Club members responded by heckling the work. Wagner did 
not take this lying down and decided to cancel the whole thing in response. He would never permit 
another production of Tannhäuser in Paris. The brutal reception of Tannhäuser in Paris and 
the controversy which it aroused led to a debate throughout the continent about the qualities of 
Wagner’s music. Wagner sought to have the Tristan und Isolde premiere somewhere in Germany, after 
being granted an amnesty the previous year and the dropping of the charges against him stemming from 
his involvement in the failed revolution of 1848. He eventually decided on a premiere in Vienna. 
On the 15th of May he saw Lohengrin performed for the first time in the Austrian capital, having 
been unable to attend the premiere in Weimar years earlier. However, while the German-speaking 
world was more receptive to his work than was the public in France, the musicians at Vienna found 
Tristan und Isolde too challenging to perform and the premiere of it was postponed. Amidst 
these difficulties, Wagner decided to return to working on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg more 
than 15 years after writing the prose sketch, and started work on the libretto in January 1862. For 
much of the year, Wagner travelled around Europe seeking a place that would inspire his creativity. 
He had been granted amnesty in Saxony and Minna was awaiting him in Dresden, but after a few 
ill-tempered reunions, the couple saw each other for the last time in November 1862. During the 
winter, Wagner gave a series of three concerts in Vienna, featuring extracts from his yet-unfinished 
Meistersinger and Ring Cycle. The pieces included the exhilarating Ride of the Valkyries at the 
opening of Act 3 of Walküre, which continues to be an audience favourite to this day.
Around the time of his 50th birthday in May 1863, Wagner settled in Vienna to supervise 
rehearsals of Tristan und Isolde. However, the challenges were proving insurmountable and in 
March 1864 the production was finally cancelled. Wagner was facing one of the most acute crises 
of his professional life. He had conceptualised a new form of musical drama, but he was so ahead of 
his time that there was seemingly nobody capable of performing it in Vienna. On a personal level, 
he was desperate for female companionship after the collapse of his marriage, but unwilling 
to definitively cut his marital ties. In late November 1863, Wagner made a visit to the Bülows 
in Berlin and enjoyed a carriage ride with Cosima while Hans was otherwise occupied. As they 
parted, they came to an understanding that they were destined to spend their futures with 
each other. Yet Wagner’s emotional relief at these developments could not alleviate his huge debts, 
which compelled him to leave Vienna in March 1864. He resumed his wanderings until early May, when 
he received a visit from Franz von Pfistermeister, cabinet secretary to the 18-year-old King Ludwig 
II of Bavaria, an enthusiastic admirer of Wagner’s since he had seen a production of Lohengrin in 
1860 and who had recently risen to the Bavarian throne. The king invited Wagner to his court 
in Munich and promised to rescue him from his uncertain fate. Within hours of being given 
King Ludwig’s offer, Wagner was accompanying Pfistermeister on the train to Munich, where 
he had his first audience with King Ludwig, who urged him to finish his Ring Cycle and 
promised to be at his disposal. The king was as good as his word and authorised an initial 
payment to Wagner five days later to help him pay off his debts. In addition to a regular salary and 
a bonus for completing the Ring Cycle, by the end of the year, Ludwig had given Wagner over 130,000 
gulden, or one-tenth of his entire civil list. Armed with this new patronage, in May, Wagner 
moved to the shores of Lake Starnberg to the southwest of Munich, where he met with Ludwig 
almost every day. Though he enjoyed Ludwig’s patronage, two further missing pieces had to fall 
into place for Wagner to achieve personal and professional fulfilment. He was expecting 
a visit from the Bülows in early summer. Cosima arrived ahead of her husband in late June 
and immediately began an affair with Wagner. When Hans arrived a week later, he was none the 
wiser. In October, Wagner moved to Munich to being preparing for the premiere of Tristan und Isolde 
there and in November Ludwig announced plans for a new festival theatre to be built for Wagner 
at a prominent hilltop location. Faced with a major change to their city’s skyline, the king’s 
ministers sought to undermine Wagner’s influence with the king. After being assured of the king’s 
confidence in March 1865, the composer carried on with his plans to premiere Tristan und Isolde 
on the 15th of May 1865. Wagner was fortunate to have the services of husband-and-wife acting duo, 
Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr, in the title roles. Rehearsals began on in early April, the same day 
that Cosima gave birth to a daughter named Isolde, the product of her extramarital liaison with 
Wagner. This, as he entered his mid-fifties, was Wagner’s first child. Meanwhile, Hans von 
Bülow, who knew the score inside out, ensured that it was performed to Wagner’s standards. While the 
premiere was delayed and only eventually performed on the 10th of June, it had an electrifying effect 
when it was staged. Beyond the tragic subject matter, Wagner’s music had a revolutionary impact. 
Wagner opens the opera with a dissonant chord, known as the Tristan chord, and maintains the 
harmonic tension throughout the whole four-hour spectacle, only achieving the resolution at 
the end of Act III with Isolde’s death. After two more triumphant public performances 
of Tristan, things began to unravel when the 29-year-old lead actor, Ludwig Schnorr, died in 
Dresden on the 21st of July following a sudden illness. By August, Cosima had installed 
herself in Wagner’s house as his secretary, and began handling his correspondence 
and negotiations with the Bavarian court. In November Wagner was invited to stay a week at 
King Ludwig’s childhood home of Hohenschwangau Castle, sitting on a peak among the forested 
hills of southwestern Bavaria. Four years later, Ludwig would begin building the iconic 
Neuschwanstein Castle at a nearby site, decorating the interiors with scenes from Wagner’s 
operas. Although he was feted at Hohenschwangau, tensions between Wagner and Ludwig’s ministers 
were reaching breaking point on account of the fees he was being paid and the cost of the 
artistic programme he had promoted. Wagner began urging the king to dismiss his cabinet and appoint 
ministers who were more willing to entertain his plans, but instead in December Ludwig, 
under pressure from his government ministers, reluctantly demoted Wagner and asked him to leave 
Munich, while continuing to reassure him of his personal patronage. Richard was also stunned to 
hear of Minna’s death on the 25th of January 1866. Soon afterwards he and Cosima moved into a house 
on the northern shore of Lake Lucerne called Tribschen, where Wagner worked on the music 
for Meistersinger. A few weeks later, Wagner received a visit from King Ludwig, who expressed 
a desire to abdicate and join him in Switzerland. Wagner recognised that it was no use having 
a former king as his patron and urged Ludwig to reconsider. In the meantime, rumours about 
Wagner’s relationship with Cosima intensified. Bülow was appalled by the publicity and wrote to 
Ludwig to resign his post, but Wagner was still determined to have him conduct Meistersinger 
and advised Cosima to return to her husband. By this time, she was already pregnant with her 
and Richard’s second child, a daughter to be named Eva who was born on the 17th of February 1868.
Whatever feelings he may have had about Wagner as a person, Bülow continued to admire his 
music. Hence, he conducted the premiere of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Munich in June 1868 
even as rumours of his wife’s affair with Wagner continued to fly. Set in sixteenth-century 
Nuremberg, the opera focuses on the city’s guild of mastersingers, an association of amateur 
musicians who worked as tradesmen. The spectacle opens with a declaration of love between the 
young knight Walther von Stolzig and Eva Pogner, the daughter of a mastersinger who decrees 
that she is to be married to the winner of a forthcoming song contest. As an outsider, Walther 
is not a member of the guild and is unfamiliar with its arcane rules. The innovative composition 
that he submits as his application is rejected, leaving the town clerk Beckmesser as the favourite 
to win Eva’s hand. Eva appeals for assistance from the veteran mastersinger Hans Sachs, who 
instructs Walther in the guild’s traditions and works with him on a song that meets the spirit of 
the guild’s rules. Beckmesser comes across Sachs’ composition and attempts to perform it in the song 
competition but fails to master the unusual style. Walther steps in to give a flawless performance, 
and is declared winner of the competition. Wagner, the outsider who challenged the traditional 
rules of musicmaking, was invited to watch the performance from the royal box, and broke 
convention by bowing to acknowledge the audience’s ovation at the end of the second act.
With so many of his long gestating works now finished and having premiered, Wagner restarted 
work on The Ring Cycle by returning to Act 3 of Siegfried. By this time Cosima and he were ready 
to formalise their relationship and for Cosima to leave Hans. Following a trip with Wagner to 
Italy in September, Cosima became pregnant with their third child. Although Hans denied Cosima’s 
request for a divorce, she took her daughters, Isolde and Eva, and moved in with Wagner 
permanently in mid-November 1868. This new period of Wagner’s life was not just characterised by 
his relationship with Cosima. Not long afterwards, in May 1869, Wagner received a visit from 
the young philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the newly appointed professor of philology at the 
University of Basel. The two men had first met in Leipzig the previous November and Wagner was glad 
to be acquainted with a promising scholar and fellow admirer of Schopenhauer and Greek tragedy, 
whom he felt instinctively understood his music. Nietzsche became a frequent visitor to Tribschen 
and was staying as a guest when Cosima gave birth to their third and final child, a boy who they 
named Siegfried, on the 6th of June. Over the following days, Wagner completed the piano sketch 
of Siegfried and worked on its orchestration while Hans Richter led rehearsals for Rheingold. At 
the dress rehearsal, Wagner concluded that while the music was good, the scenery and costumes were 
totally inadequate. He thus sought to postpone the premiere, if not cancel it altogether. Ludwig was 
adamant that the show would go ahead and dismissed Richter. Das Rheingold premiered on the 22nd of 
September under the direction of Franz Wüllner, who also gave the premiere of Die Walküre on the 
26th of June 1870. The performance was a success, though Wagner continued to be irritated 
by the fact that Ludwig had seemingly take over production of The Ring Cycle.
In June 1870, following various legal toing and froing, the Bülows’ marriage was formally 
dissolved. Wagner married Cosima on the 25th of August. The couple were looking for new pastures 
where Wagner could achieve his ambitions of staging the Ring Cycle as part of a four-day 
festival and were drawn to the town of Bayreuth in northern Bavaria. However, before they could 
progress this plan, war broke out between France and Prussia. Wagner was inspired in the months 
that followed to compose the Kaisermarch in honour of Kaiser Wilhelm I, who was proclaimed the 
emperor of a new German Empire in January 1871, fulfilling in some fashion the German nationalist 
aspirations that had inspired the revolution of 1848. With the war winding down, the Wagners 
arrived at Bayreuth in the late spring of 1871. They were impressed by the place and Wagner 
resolved to premiere the whole Ring Cycle here. He spent the remainder of the year working on 
the music for the fourth and final part of it, renamed Götterdämmerung or Twilight of the Gods. 
During the winter, he received permission from the Bayreuth authorities to build his theatre 
and in April he and Cosima moved to the town to supervise the construction work, with the 
foundation stone laid down on the 22nd of May 1872. As King Ludwig refused to offer financial 
backing, Wagner travelled throughout Europe giving concerts to raise money. Despite these 
efforts, finances were running low by the end of 1873 and in January Ludwig finally agreed to 
a loan. On 28 April 1874, the Wagners moved into a new house called Wahnfried, where he completed 
Götterdämmerung in November, more than 25 years after he first conceived his Nibelung drama. 
Wagner’s life’s work was coming to a climax. On the 13th of August 1876 the inaugural Bayreuth 
Festival opened with a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, followed by Das Rheingold, 
conducted by Hans Richter. Rheingold sets the scene for the tragedy that is about to unfold in 
The Ring Cycle: the dwarf Alberich the Nibelung steals gold from the Rhine maidens and forges 
a ring enabling him to be master of the world. Fearing a challenge to his authority, Wotan, 
king of the gods, steals the ring from Alberich, but not before the dwarf curses all future holders 
of the ring. Wotan is soon forced to give up the ring to the giants Fasolt and Fafner, who abduct 
the goddess Freia, whose golden apples enable the gods to remain youthful. This sets the stage 
for Die Walküre, in which Wagner introduces the Valkyries, the nine warrior daughters of Wotan who 
protect Valhalla, the home of the gods. Meanwhile, Wotan has fathered a pair of twins, Siegmund and 
Sieglinde, whom he hopes will help the gods take back the ring from Fafner. After growing up 
apart, Siegmund and Sieglinde fall in love, even after realising they are siblings. The gods 
are angered by the incestuous union and decree that Siegmund must die in battle with Sieglinde’s 
husband Hunding. The Valkyrie Brünnhilde defies her father and helps Siegmund, only for 
Wotan to shatter Siegmund’s sword Nothung, allowing Hunding to stab Siegmund to death. 
Wotan then banishes Brünnhilde from Valhalla. Siegfried, the third part of The Ring Cycle, opens 
in the cave of the dwarf Mime, Alberich’s brother, who is raising the young Siegfried as his foster 
child. Mime hopes that Siegfried could help him slay the dragon Fafner and retrieve the ring for 
the Nibelungs, but the young man refuses to help without knowing his parentage. Mime explains that 
Siegfried’s mother Sieglinde died in childbirth and entrusted him with Siegmund’s broken sword. 
After Mime fails to repair the sword, Siegfried forges Nothung himself. Mime takes Siegfried 
to Fafner’s lair and the hero stabs the dragon, enabling him to gain possession of the ring. 
Siegfried realises that Mime intends to poison him to steal the ring and kills him. In Act 
3, Siegfried encounters an old man. Failing to recognise his grandfather Wotan, he mocks him 
and breaks the spear that symbolises Wotan’s authority. Siegfried eventually passes through a 
ring of fire, where he sees Brünnhilde sleeping in her armour. He falls in love with her and awakens 
her with a kiss. After some hesitation Brünnhilde is won over and renounces her divine powers in the 
name of mortal love. Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final stage of the cycle, then begins with a 
reminder of the cursed ring, which Siegfried gives Brünnhilde as a token of his love. Brünnhilde’s 
sister, the Valkyrie Waltraute, informs her that Wotan’s spear has been broken, and asks 
for the ring to restore Wotan’s authority, but Brünnhilde remains faithful to Siegfried 
and refuses to give it up. In the meantime, Siegfried arrives at the Hall of the Gibichungs 
near the Rhine, where he falls victim to a plot by King Gunther and his half-brother Hagen. After 
being given a potion that makes him forget his love for Brünnhilde, Siegfried is ordered to 
kidnap her and bring her to Gunther’s court. Brünnhilde accuses Siegfried of betrayal, and 
Siegfried is eventually slain by Hagen. Brünnhilde belatedly realises that Siegfried is innocent and 
orders a tall funeral pyre to be built for him. After lighting the pyre, Brünnhilde mounts her 
horse and rides into the flames, which rise up and cause the Hall of the Gibichungs to collapse. 
The Rhine bursts its banks, the Rhine-maidens retrieve the ring, and the curtain falls as 
Valhalla and its gods are consumed by flames. The Bayreuth Festival was attended by 
several monarchs, including two emperors, Wilhelm I of Germany and Pedro II of Brazil, 
as well as an incognito Ludwig of Bavaria, all of whom paid tribute to Wagner’s 
accomplishments. Also in attendance were an array of distinguished composers including Pyotr Ilyich 
Tchaikovsky, Anton Bruckner, Camille Saint-Saens and Wagner’s father-in-law, Franz Liszt. Nietzsche 
was also briefly in attendance. This was the peak of Wagner’s career from an artistic perspective 
and few can deny that the performance of The Ring Cycle gave expression to a form of German 
nationalism just a few years after the founding of the German Empire which was a significant 
feature of European cultural life in the nineteenth century. Yet, while it was an artistic 
success, the festival was a financial failure and after three cycles the festival closed at the end 
of August with a loss of 150,000 thalers. Wagner was unhappy with some of the scenery and staging 
and vowed to make changes the following year. However, given financial difficulties and his 
own failing health, Wagner would never see The Ring Cycle performed at Bayreuth again in his 
lifetime, and his efforts to sell the festival theatre to either the German imperial government 
or the government of Bavaria came to nothing. Instead, in January 1877, Wagner turned his 
attention to Parsifal, based on the Arthurian knight Percival and his quest for the Holy Grail. 
He first alighted on the idea in 1857 and wrote a prose sketch in 1865. By April 1877 the libretto 
was complete. Despite its Christian symbolism, which drew Nietzsche’s ire and contributed 
to the end of his friendship with Wagner, Parsifal was also inspired by Indian 
philosophies, particularly Buddhism, in its emphasis on purity and death as a release 
from human suffering. Wagner managed to finish his orchestral sketch in 1879, but his declining 
health compelled him to take long breaks in Italy, which inspired the set design for Parsifal. 
During these years, he was also preoccupied with writing articles discussing issues such as German 
identity and religion for the Bayreuther Blätter, a journal he founded in 1878. He continued 
to view the Jewish people with suspicion and favoured their expulsion from Germany. Conversely, 
he had been clearly identified as a proponent of German nationalism, The Ring Cycle effectively 
being a major statement about the mythology of the Germanic people and an epic for an age of 
a unified German state. Later his work would be employed, just like that of Nietzsche and 
many other nineteenth-century German writers, to promote the Nazi regime in Germany, but beyond 
his often ambiguous anti-Semitism we should not view Wagner as someone who would have approved of 
the tenets of National Socialism and the uses to which his work was later put.
In September 1879, Wagner cut his ties to the Munich Court Theatre in order to prevent King 
Ludwig from insisting on a premiere for Parsifal in the Bavarian capital. The king responded 
magnanimously, and placed the court theatre at Wagner’s disposal for festival performances at 
Bayreuth. Wagner envisaged staging Parsifal in 1882 and engaged his Jewish friend, Hermann Levi, 
as its conductor. Wagner completed the full score to Parsifal on the 13th of January 1882 during a 
winter break in Palermo in Sicily and returned to Germany in April. After the usual complaints about 
costumes and scenery, alongside the disappointment that King Ludwig would not be present, Wagner 
saw Parsifal premiere on the 26th of July 1882. It ran for 16 performances in total, ending 
five weeks later. During the final performance, Wagner sneaked into the orchestra pit in the third 
act, took the baton from Levi and conducted the rest of the opera. Not long after this poignant 
episode, the Wagner family went to Venice in mid-September. The composer’s health deteriorated 
rapidly over the winter and he died of a heart attack on the 13th of February at the age of 69. 
His body was transported to Bayreuth, where it was buried in the garden at Wahnfried. The festival 
which he and Cosima founded here continues to this day as a way of celebrating Wagner’s work and 
that of other nineteenth-century composers. Richard Wagner left behind a legacy as one of the 
most controversial musicians in world history. As a composer and dramatist, he revolutionised 
operatic music, breaking away from the rules of harmony and tonality that were otherwise 
adhered to unquestioningly in the nineteenth century. Despite his unconventional approach, 
he soon established himself as one of the great modern composers. All of his mature operas have 
become part of the modern operatic repertoire and every year tens of thousands of his admirers 
flock to Bayreuth to attend the annual festival that he inaugurated in 1876. His work also 
can be said to have formed the template for how modern film scores are often arranged, while 
one of the most iconic scenes in modern cinema is in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now when a 
helicopter brigade descends to attack a village with Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries blaring 
out of speakers to the surrounding countryside. The most controversial aspect of Wagner’s 
life were his political views. These were inconsistent and evolved over time. While his 
youthful left-wing views moderated over time, his attitude to the Jewish people hardened 
in an age of growing anti-Semitism in Europe, though contradictorily he counted many Jewish 
people among his close friends. Nevertheless, he had a tendency to blame the adherents of 
Judaism for all of the world’s ills. Furthermore, his ideas about the superiority of German culture 
rooted in medieval folk legend were appropriated by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during the 
1930s, with Hitler portrayed as Parsifal, cleansing the past and bringing forth a new 
order. Much of this criticism is probably unfair. Wagner cannot be held responsible for the ends 
to which his music was put by political agents long after his own lifetime. Instead he should 
be appreciated in light of his own career and work as one of history’s great composers.
What do you think of Richard Wagner? Can the artist be separated from their art? Is it 
possible to enjoy and appreciate Wagner’s artistry and dramatic abilities while rejecting 
his more controversial political views? Please let us know in the comment section and in the 
meantime, thank you very much for watching.