Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, revolutionary, pamphleteer and antisemite who wrote his own libretti, invented the music drama, built a theatre at Bayreuth for his four-opera Ring, and changed the course of music with a chord. Tristan and Isolde, composed between 1857 and 1859 under the influence of Schopenhauer and of a friend’s wife, is the drama of a love that can be fulfilled only in death, and its opening harmony, left unresolved for four hours, is where modern music is said to begin. He fled Dresden after the rising of 1849, was rescued by Ludwig of Bavaria, and married Liszt’s daughter. Nietzsche loved and then renounced him.