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Person1813 – 1883

Richard Wagner

Also called: Wagner

German composer who drew on Norse myth and Germanic legend for the four-part music drama The Ring of the Nibelung, and built the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, where the complete cycle was first performed in 1876

Born in Leipzig in 1813, he was court conductor in Dresden until he joined the Dresden uprising of 1849 and fled to Switzerland to escape arrest. In exile he championed the “music drama” uniting music and theatre and wrote the libretto and music of The Ring of the Nibelung. From 1864, with the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he staged works such as Tristan und Isolde (1865), and he built a festival theatre at Bayreuth solely for his own works, where the complete Ring was first performed in 1876. He married Liszt’s daughter Cosima, and died in Venice the year after staging Parsifal in 1882. He left a deep mark on music history, but his antisemitic essay “Jewishness in Music” and the Nazis’ later use of him keep him controversial.

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1 related event

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    1876Premiere of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at Bayreuthkey figure

    On 13–17 August 1876 Richard Wagner’s four-part music drama The Ring of the Nibelung was first performed complete in the new Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, Germany. Weaving together Norse myth, the Völsunga saga and the German Nibelungenlied, it reshaped how modern Europe imagined Norse mythology.

Themes this person appears in

  • Norse MythologyAD 793 – 1876

    From the world made of Ymir’s body through Odin’s runes, Thor’s adventures and the death of Baldr to Ragnarök and the rebirth of the world — Norse myth in story order, alongside the temple at Uppsala, the Oseberg ship, runestones, the Gosforth Cross, Snorri’s Edda, the Codex Regius and Wagner’s Ring