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Facts about Wagner

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By the 1938-1939 season, Wagner had only one opera in the list of 15 most popular operas of the season, with the list headed by Italian composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci.

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Through his operas and theoretical essays, Wagner exerted a strong influence on the operatic medium.

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Some biographers have asserted that Wagner in his final years became convinced of the truth of the Aryanist philosophy of Arthur de Gobineau.

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Wagner had to flee, first to Paris and then to Zьrich.

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Wagner took Minna back, but this was but the first debвcle of a troubled marriage that would end in misery three decades later.

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Richard Wagner played an enthusiastic role in this movement, receiving guests at his house that included his colleague August Rцckel, who was editing the radical left-wing paper Volksblдtter, and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

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The uneasy affair collapsed in 1858, when his wife intercepted a letter from Wagner to Mathilde.

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Wagner made highly significant, if controversial, contributions to art and culture.

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Wagner drew largely from Icelandic epics, namely, The Poetic Edda, The Volsunga Saga and the later Austrian Nibelungenlied.

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On Christmas Day of that year, Wagner presented the Siegfried Idyll for Cosima's birthday.

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Levi however held Wagner in adulation, and was asked to be a pallbearer at the composer's funeral.

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Wagner was largely brought up by a single mother.

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In 1861, the political ban against Wagner was lifted, and the composer settled in Biebrich, Prussia, where he began work on Die Meistersinger von Nьrnberg.

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Wagner completed Parsifal in January 1882, and a second Bayreuth Festival was held for the new opera.

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The overtures and orchestral passages from Wagner's middle and late-stage operas are commonly played as concert pieces.

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By 1857, Wagner had become infatuated with Mathilde.

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Wagner's theory of musical drama has shaped even completely new art forms, including film scores such as John Williams' music for Star Wars.

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Nietzsche's first book, Die Geburt der Tragцdie ("The Birth of Tragedy," 1872), was dedicated to Wagner.

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Despite his very public views concerning Jewry, Wagner had several Jewish friends and colleagues.

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Liszt disapproved of his daughter seeing Wagner, though the two men were friends.

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On another occasion, Zubin Mehta played Wagner in Israel in spite of walkouts and jeers from the audience.

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The May Uprising broke out, in which Wagner played a minor supporting role.

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The next most popular are the Wesendonck Lieder, properly known as Five Songs for a Female Voice, which were composed for Mathilde Wesendonck while Wagner was working on Tristan.

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Controversial historian Richard J. Evans suggests there is no evidence that Hitler even read any of Wagner's writings and further argues that Wagner's works do not inherently support Nazi notions of heroism.

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Wagner was and remains a controversial figure, both for his musical and dramatic innovations, and for his anti-semitic and political opinions.

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Wagner's ideas were a major influence on Nietzsche, who was 31 years his junior.

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The Italian form of operatic realism known as verismo owes much to Wagnerian reconstruction of musical form.

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The Wagners' stay at Dresden was brought to an end by Richard's involvement in left-wing politics.

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Wagner frequently accused Jews, particularly Jewish musicians, of being a harmful alien element in German culture.

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Wagner's fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864, when King Ludwig II assumed the throne of Bavaria at the age of 18.

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Others who resisted Wagner's influence included Rossini ("Wagner has wonderful moments, and dreadful quarters of an hour"), though his own "Guillaume Tell," at over four hours, is comparable to Wagner's operas in length.

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After the Festival, the Wagner family journeyed to Venice for the winter.

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Franz Liszt's memorable piece for pianoforte solo, La lugubre gondola, evokes the passing of a black-shrouded funerary gondola bearing Richard Wagner's mortal remains over the Grand Canal.

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Wagner was not above putting digs and insults to specific individuals into his work, and it was usually obvious when he did.

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The Wagners moved there the following year, and the foundation stone for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus ("Festival House") was laid.

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Chamberlain resigned, and Churchill was appointed prime minister and formed an all-party government.

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On February 13, 1883, Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal.

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Later that year, the Wagners moved into their permanent home at Bayreuth, a villa that Richard dubbed Wahnfried ("Peace/freedom from delusion/madness," in German).

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Wagner's chromatic musical language prefigured later developments in European classical music, including extreme chromaticism and atonality.

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In 1833, at the age of 20, Wagner composed his first complete opera, Die Feen.

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The initial publication of the article attracted little attention, but Wagner republished it as a pamphlet under his own name in 1869, leading to several public protests at performances of Die Meistersinger von Nьrnberg.

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Meanwhile, Wagner held brief appointments as musical director at opera houses in Magdeburg and Kцnigsberg, during which he wrote Das Liebesverbot, based on William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.

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An oddity is the "American Centennial March" of 1876, commissioned by the city of Philadelphia for the opening of the Centennial Exposition, for which Wagner was paid $5,000.

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Wagner's three completed early-stage operas are Die Feen(The Fairies), Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), and Rienzi.

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One of the most notable of these was Hermann Levi, a practising Jew and son of a Rabbi, whose talent was freely acknowledged by Wagner.

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Apart from his operas, Wagner composed relatively few pieces of music.

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One of the many roles of Ares was in the founding of Thebes.

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The essay purported to explain popular dislike of Jewish composers, such as Wagner's contemporaries (and rivals) Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer.

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Young Richard Wagner entertained ambitions to be a playwright, and first became interested in music as a means of enhancing the dramas that he wanted to write and stage.

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Wagner's music dramas are his primary artistic legacy.

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Wagner's late stage operas are his masterpieces that advanced the art of opera.

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Wagner repeated similar views in several later articles, such as "What is German?"

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Cosima Wagner's diary entry for June 3rd recounts one exchange in which Wagner "positively exploded in favor of Christianity as compared to racial theory."

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Wagner spent the next 12 years in exile.

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American producer Phil Spector with his "wall of sound" was strongly influenced by Wagner's music.

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The Bayreuth Festspielhaus is the venue of the annual Richard Wagner Festival, which draws thousands of opera fans to Bayreuth each summer.

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Some are of the opinion that Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Iseult) is Wagner's greatest single opera.

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Many aspects of Schopenhauerian doctrine undoubtedly found its way into Wagner's subsequent libretti.

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Wagner's second source of inspiration was the poet-writer Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the silk merchant Otto von Wesendonck.

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Wagner subsequently wrote three essays in response to Gobineau's ideas: "Introduction to a Work of Count Gobineau," "Know Thyself," and "Heroism and Christianity" (all 1881).

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Wagner's operas, writings, his politics, beliefs and unorthodox lifestyle made him a controversial figure during his lifetime.

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Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany, on May 22, 1813.

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After Wagner's death in 1883, Bayreuth increasingly became a focus for German nationalists attracted by the mythos of the operas, who came to be known as the Bayreuth circle.

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The marriage to Cosima lasted to the end of Wagner's life.

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Wagner's musical style is often considered the epitome of classical music's Romantic period, due to its unprecedented exploration of emotional expression.

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Wagner completed writing his third opera, Rienzi, in 1840.

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Wagner was an extremely prolific writer, authoring hundreds of books, poems, and articles, as well as a massive amount of correspondence.

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Wagner, settled into his newfound domesticity, turned his energies toward completing the Ring cycle.

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In April 1865, she gave birth to Wagner's illegitimate daughter, who was named Isolde.

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Wagner would later call this the most important event of his life.

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After completing Parsifal, Wagner apparently intended to turn to the writing of symphonies.

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In 1862, Wagner finally parted with Minna, though he (or at least his creditors) continued to support her financially until her death in 1866.

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Charles Baudelaire, Stйphane Mallarmй and Paul Verlaine worshipped Wagner.

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In "The Philosophy of Composition," an essay in which Poe describes his method in writing "The Raven," he claims to have strictly followed this method.

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Their compositional style was conventional, and did not exhibit the innovations that marked Wagner's place in musical history.

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The movie "The Ring of the Nibelungs" drew both from historical sources as well as Wagner's work, and set a ratings record when aired as a two-part mini-series on German television.

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The young King, an ardent admirer of Wagner's operas since childhood, had the composer brought to Munich.

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On November 24, 1836, Wagner married actress Christine Wilhelmine "Minna" Planer.

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Following Wagner's death, the debate about and appropriation of his beliefs, particularly in Germany during the twentieth century, made him controversial to a precedential degree among the great composers.

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Wagner initially objected to this and was quoted as saying that Levi should be baptized before conducting Parsifal.

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Hitler was a fanatical student and admirer of Wagner's ideology and music, and sought to incorporate it into his heroic mythology of the German nation (a nation that had no formal identity prior to 1871).

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Wagner is one of the main subjects of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which contains lines from Tristan und Isolde and refers to The Ring and Parsifal.

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Wagner's middle stage output is considered to be of remarkably higher quality, and begins to show the deepening of his powers as a dramatist and composer.

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Nevertheless, Wagner found himself in grim personal straits, isolated from the German musical world and without any income to speak of.

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Many scholars have argued that Wagner's views, particularly his anti-Semitism and purported Aryan-Germanic racism, influenced the Nazis.

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Not all stories of Hippocrates portrayed him in a positive manner.

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Later in life, Wagner said that he did not consider these immature works to be part of his oeuvre; he was irritated by the ongoing popularity of Rienzi during his lifetime.

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Nietzsche broke with Wagner following the first Bayreuth Festival, believing that Wagner's final phase represented a pandering to Christian pieties and a surrender to the new demagogic German Reich.

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Wagner advises Jews to follow the example of Ludwig Bцrne by abandoning Judaism.

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The Wagners spent 1840 and 1841 in Paris, where Richard made a scant living writing articles and arranging operas by other composers, largely on behalf of the Schlesinger publishing house.

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Wagner was by this time extremely ill, having suffered through a series of increasingly severe angina attacks.

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Records state that Wagner's conversations with Gobineau during the philosopher's five-week stay at Wahnfried in 1881 were punctuated with frequent arguments.

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Levi's position as Kapellmeister at Munich meant that he was to conduct the premiere of Parsifal, Wagner's last opera.

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After the deaths of Cosima and Siegfried Wagner in 1930, the operation of the Festival fell to Siegfried's widow, English-born Winifred, who was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler.

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Many aspects of Wagner's personal philosophy would certainly have been unappealing to Nazis, such as his quietist mysticism and support for Jewish assimilation.

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Wagner's early stage began at age 19 with his first attempt at an opera, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), which Wagner abandoned at an early stage of composition in 1832.

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Some biographers, such as Robert Gutman have advanced the claim that Wagner's opposition to Jewry was not limited to his articles, and that the operas contained such messages.

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Their indiscreet affair scandalized Munich, and to make matters worse, Wagner fell into disfavor amongst members of the court, who were suspicious of his influence on the King.

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Gustav Mahler said, "There was only Beethoven and Wagner."

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Wagner's influence on literature and philosophy is also significant.

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Die Meistersinger von Nьrnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) is Wagner's only comedy (apart from his early and forgotten Das Liebesverbot) and one of the lengthiest operas still performed.

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The rock subgenre of heavy metal music also shows a Wagnerian influence with its strong paganistic stamp.

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Wagner met the Wesendoncks in Zьrich in 1852.

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Otto, a fan of Wagner's music, placed a cottage on his estate at Wagner's disposal.

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Cosima was the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and the famous Countess Marie d'Agoult, and 24 years younger than Wagner.

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The relationship eventually soured, as Nietzsche became increasingly disillusioned with various aspects of Wagner's thought, especially his appropriation of Christianity in Parsifal and his anti-Semitism, and with the blind devotion of Wagner's followers.

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