Wagner, Richard

A German composer, one of the musicians who possessed the greatest impact in the history of music, and the person who caused the most essential change in opera, since the days of Gluck. A remarkable innovator both in harmony and in his view of dramatic composition, in which the arts were brought together into a single unity in the "musical drama", as Wagner prefered to call opera.

Wagner upgraded the orchestra to the rank of a leading part, and developed Weber's concept of "leitmotif" (leading motif), in which a tune represents an idea or a character in an opera, and it is played with every mention or appearance of the later, advancing the story.

His operas include "Tristan and Isolde" ("Tristan und Isolde"), "Persifal", and especially "The Ring", which is a four full-length operas cycle, consisting of "The Gold of the Rhein" ("Das Rheingold"), "The Valkyries" (Die Walküre), "Siegfried" and "The Twilight of the Gods" ("Götterdämmerung"). Other known music drama by Wagner is "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg" ("Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg") and "The Flying Dutchman" ("Der Fliegende Hollander").

Wagner, whose financial state was poor, received, during his last years, a pension from King Ludwig II of Bavaria, which also helped him to found the Bayreuth Festival, where his operas are performed regularly to this very day. He spent his old age married to Kozima, the daughter of another great composer - Liszt.

Also a philosopher and a scholar of German nationalist ideas, Hitler admired his music, years after Wagner's death, and saw it as music representing the ideas of Nazism. Because of this linkage between music and ideology and his extreme antisemitism, Wagner was excluded in the State of Israel from concert and radio programs, for many years.

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