Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner was born in 1813 in Leipzig. His father died when he was six months old. He was brought up by his stepfather, who was an actor. He taught himself most of what he knew about music. He also wrote the words of all his operas himself. In his twenties he conducted at small theatres and was always in debt. At that time he was working at the theatre in Riga, in what is now Latvia. In 1839 he and his wife ran away from Riga to escape the people he owed money to. They slipped across the border at night and sailed to London through a storm. That storm is said to have given him the idea for his opera The Flying Dutchman. In 1843 he became conductor of the royal opera in Dresden.

In 1849 he took part in an uprising in Dresden against the king. The uprising failed, and the police ordered his arrest. Liszt, two years older, was already his friend. Liszt hid him in Weimar and then helped him escape to Switzerland with a false passport. The next year Liszt conducted the first performance of Wagner's opera Lohengrin in Weimar. Wagner himself could not be there, because he was still a wanted man in Germany. In Switzerland he began writing his biggest work, The Ring of the Nibelung. It is a set of four operas based on old German myths, and it took him 26 years to finish.

By 1864 he was 51, and he was again running away from people he owed money to. Then the new king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, came to his rescue. The king was only 18 and adored Wagner's music. He paid all of Wagner's debts and gave him money to live on. From then on his great operas were finally performed. Tristan und Isolde came in 1865 and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg in 1868. In 1870 he married Cosima, Liszt's daughter, who was 24 years younger than he was. She left her husband for him, and her husband was Wagner's friend and Liszt's pupil, the conductor Hans von Bülow. Liszt learned of the marriage from the newspapers, and he did not speak to Wagner for years. But the two made peace in the end. In 1876 the complete Ring was performed for the first time in Bayreuth, in a theatre built to his own design. Young composers came to Wagner for advice. One of them was Hugo Wolf, then 15, who waited on a hotel staircase in Vienna to show Wagner his first pieces. Wagner died in Venice in 1883, at 69. Three years later Liszt died in Bayreuth, where he had come for the festival of Wagner's operas. Wagner's operas changed what people thought music could do. Every composer after him, whether they loved his music or hated it, had to find their own answer to Wagner.