Richard Wagner Free Sheet Music, Program Notes, Recordings and Biography

The evolutionary of the Music Drama

In the summer of 1876, the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth became the cultural capital of the world. Emperors, kings, aristocrats, and the greatest composers of the day—including Tchaikovsky, Liszt, and Saint-Saëns—all made a pilgrimage to witness an event unprecedented in the history of art: the first complete performance of Richard Wagner's four-opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen. The performance took place in the Festspielhaus, a theater Wagner himself had designed and built, a temple for his own work. The premiere of the 15-hour epic was the culmination of a decades-long, single-minded quest to realize an artistic vision so audacious that most had thought it impossible. It was a moment that announced a profound shift in music and art, orchestrated by a man who was equal parts genius, megalomaniac, and revolutionary.

A Restless Youth and a Fateful Exile

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig. His early career was spent as a provincial opera conductor in various German towns, a frustrating job that left him perpetually in debt. He composed several early operas in the grand style of the day, but he was already formulating his own radical ideas about the future of the art form.

His life was upended in 1849. A passionate believer in utopian socialism, Wagner became an active participant in a failed revolutionary uprising in the city of Dresden. When the rebellion was crushed, a warrant was issued for his arrest, and he was forced to flee, spending the next twelve years in exile, mostly in Switzerland.

Theorist and Visionary: The Gesamtkunstwerk

Forced into a life of exile and unable to get his works performed, Wagner turned to writing. He produced a series of long, dense, and often polemical essays in which he outlined his vision for the "artwork of the future." He rejected traditional opera, with its formal arias and separation of music, drama, and poetry. He envisioned a new art form, the Gesamtkunstwerk or "total work of art," in which all these elements would be unified into a seamless whole. The music would no longer be a series of set pieces but a continuous symphonic fabric, woven together with a complex web of leitmotifs—short musical ideas associated with a character, object, or emotion.

Tristan und Isolde: The Dawn of Modern Music

During his exile, Wagner also composed a work that would change the course of music history: the opera Tristan und Isolde. Based on a medieval romance, the opera is a profound exploration of love, death, and longing. Its music was revolutionary. With its endlessly shifting, ambiguous harmonies and unresolved dissonances, the famous Prelude to Tristan is often cited as the single most important piece of music marking the beginning of the end of traditional tonality, the first step on the road to modern music.

The King and His Castle: Bayreuth

By the early 1860s, Wagner was in despair, still in debt and with little hope of ever seeing his massive new works staged. He was saved by a near-miraculous event. An obsessed 18-year-old fan ascended to the throne of Bavaria. The "mad" King Ludwig II summoned Wagner to Munich, paid off all his debts, and became his devoted patron, providing him with the funds and political will to bring his artistic dreams to life. It was Ludwig's patronage that allowed Wagner to complete his epic Ring cycle and, eventually, to build his dream opera house in the town of Bayreuth.

The Ring Cycle: A Myth for a New World

Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) is Wagner's magnum opus. This cycle of four epic operas—Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung—is a monumental work of art based on Norse and Germanic mythology. The story, for which Wagner wrote his own libretto, is a sprawling allegory about the corrupting influence of power and wealth. The music is a vast symphonic ocean, unified by hundreds of interconnected leitmotifs. It is from the second opera of the cycle, Die Walküre, that the world's most famous and thrilling operatic excerpt comes: the "Ride of the Valkyries."

Final Years and a Controversial Legacy

Wagner’s personal life was as tumultuous as his music. His affair with and eventual marriage to Cosima von Bülow—the daughter of his great friend and champion Franz Liszt, and the wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow—was a major society scandal.

It is impossible to discuss Wagner without confronting the darkest part of his legacy: his virulent antisemitism. In his notorious 1850 essay "Jewishness in Music" and in his personal writings, he espoused hateful and racist views that would later be eagerly embraced by the Nazi party, making him their composer of choice. This has left an indelible stain on his name and work, creating a complex and ongoing debate about whether it is possible to separate the magnificent art from the repellent views of the artist.

Wagner completed his final, quasi-religious opera, Parsifal, in 1882. He died of a heart attack the following year while on vacation in Venice. His influence on the composers who followed him—from Mahler and Strauss to Debussy and Schoenberg—is simply incalculable. For better and for worse, Richard Wagner changed music forever.

• References and Further Reading

• Newman, Ernest. The Life of Richard Wagner. 4 vols. Alfred A. Knopf, 1933–1946. (The classic, exhaustive biography).

• Millington, Barry. Wagner. Princeton University Press, 1992.

• Gutman, Robert W. Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.

• Köhler, Joachim. Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans. Yale University Press, 2004.