Biography of richard wagner the composer songs

Richard Wagner — was a German composer, conductor and theatre director who was primarily known for his operas. The greatest musical visionary of the 19th century, or an insatiable megalomaniac who didn't know when to stop? As a boy, he showed so little aptitude for music that he was the only child in his family not to receive piano lessons - he taught himself to play through Weber's Der Freischutz.

His opera career soon picked up speed - he completed Rienzi in , The Flying Dutchman in and Tannhauser in Wagner's most enduring work, Der Rin des Nibelungen The Ring of the Nibelung , consists of four separate operas and took 26 years to complete. Written in , Tristan und Isolde is another example of Wagner's operatic ideal of what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk 'Complete Art-Work'.

Wagner's last completed opera was Parsifal from , a typically epic work that told the story an Arthurian knight on the hunt for the holy grail. Even though Wagner's music was controversial it was not as extreme as his anti-Semitic declarations, found most famously in his article Das Judenthum in der Musik Judaism in Music , which notoriously led directly to Hitler's passionate espousal of his music.

What instruments did richard wagner play

Wagner died on February 13th after suffering a heart attack on holiday in Venice. Did you know? Wagner's masterpiece remains The Ring Cycle, which is made up of four different operas and takes more than fifteen hours to perform.