Wagner, Richard
Wagner, Richard (1813–83),German opera composer and music theorist who wrote the texts of his musical dramas and who remains as highly controversial as he has been extremely influential. He studied music in Leipzig and held brief appointments at theatres in Würzburg, Magdeburg, and Riga in the 1830s while writing and composing several early operas. It was with one of these, Rienzi (1840), in the style of grand opera of the 1830s, that he achieved his first notable stage success and appointment in 1843 as court Kapellmeister in Dresden. His fame rests, though, on the operas that followed: Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman, 1841); Tannhäuser (1845); Lohengrin (1847); the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), comprising Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold, 1854), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie, 1856), Siegfried (1870), and...
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