Richard wagner compositions professional#

She comes, followed by King Marke, but Tristan dies in her arms. Tristan and Isolde express their passion in powerful, erotically charged music, but daylight comes, the hunting party returns, and Tristan is mortally wounded by Melot.ĪCT THREE The dying Tristan, who has been taken back to Kareol, his castle in Brittany, by the faithful Kurwenal, waits for Isolde to come to him. Each drink it, expecting death, but instead fall in love.ĪCT TWO While Marke is away on a night-time hunt, arranged by the treacherous Melot, who is also in love with Isolde, the lovers meet for an extended tryst. She orders her servant Brangane to prepare a poison, but Brangane substitutes a love-potion. Isolde’s first husband died at Tristan’s hand, and although she nursed the wounded Tristan, she now hates him for what he did. Wagner’s epic music drama of love and death, written in 1857-59, was first performed in Munich in 1865.ĪCT ONE King Marke’s henchman Tristan is returning to Cornwall with the Irish princess Isolde, Marke’s betrothed. He made his official debut as an opera conductor, with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in 1834 the following year, at the age of 22, he composed his second opera, Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), a comedy based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and began making notes for his autobiography

Richard wagner compositions professional#

He was not yet 20 when he stepped into his first professional post, as chorusmaster and rehearsal conductor at a theater in Wurzburg, and not quite 21 when he finished his first opera, Die Feen (The Fairies).

He spent his youth writing plays (corpse-ridden melodramas) and music (piano sonatas, songs, overtures, and a symphony).

What is certain is that Wagner had a love of literature, theater, and music, along with a powerful creative drive, from childhood. Though many have speculated that Geyer was the boy’s actual father (citing the adult Wagner’s physical resemblance to his stepfather and obvious artistic gift), there has never been any proof. His father, Carl Friedrich Wagner, worked for the Leipzig police department and died when Richard was six months old less than a year later Richard’s mother married family friend Ludwig Geyer, an actor and painter based in Dresden, who died when Richard was eight. Precocious, intellectually gifted, and largely self-taught in composition, Wagner received his early schooling in Dresden and finished his education in Leipzig as a student at the Thomasschule (where he received training in harmony and counterpoint from Theodor Weinlig), and at the University of Leipzig. His mature music dramas achieved an entirely novel synthesis of elements in their scale, emotional intensity, and stunning disclosure of a glorious, hauntingly sensuous tonal language, they changed the course of history not only in music but in the other arts as well. His early works carried forward the precepts of German Romanticism (owing much to Weber and Heinrich August Marschner ), Italian bel canto (owing much to Bellini), and French grand opera (owing much to Auber and Meyerbeer), while boldly breaking new ground. As an artist he was an unyielding perfectionist, governed by a visionary insight into character and emotions and by an unerring instinct for what could be achieved on stage and in sound. In addition to being one of the supreme geniuses in the history of opera he was, apart from Beethoven, the most influential composer of the 19th century. Alone among the great figures in the history of opera, he never worked with a librettist, crafting the texts for all of his works himself. German composer and conductor, author of the greatest German operas of the 19th century and of revolutionary advances in harmony, orchestration, musical dramaturgy, and aesthetics.