Richard Wagner

He died in 1883 on 13th February at the age of 69, from a heart attack. He was on a holiday in Venice with his wife Cosima and his children.

His body was shipped back to his home in Bayreuth where he had spent the last years of his life; he was buried in the garden of Villa Wahnfried.

The genesis of his musical dramas laid the foundation for several art forms of the 20th century. His compositions were not merely articulate scripts of literature; rather they contained intense and polemic philosophy.

Richard Wagner was born on 22 May 1813 in Leipzig, Germany, to a baker’s daughter, Johanna Rosine and her husband Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the police service who died of typhus six months after Richard’s birth.

He was the 9th child of his parents. After Carl’s death, his mother moved along with her children to live with a friend of her deceased husband, Ludwig Geyer in Dresden.

His mother had an affair with Geyer, and probably went on to marry him, but no church documents have been retrieved to document the same.

Until he was fourteen years old, Richard believed that Geyer was his biological father; he was named Wagner after he learned that he was originally the son of Carl Wagner and Geyer was his stepfather.

Ludwig Geyer had a mighty influence on his life. Geyer was a painter, actor and poet and it was through him that Wagner experienced theatre.

Richard Wagner’s brother Albert helped him become a choir master in 1833. In the same year he composed his first piece of opera called ‘Die Feen’ which when translated means ‘The Fairies’.

However, he couldn’t stage his first opera. In order to attain professional growth, in 1834 he became a musical director at the opera house in Magdeburg.

It was during this time that he wrote ‘Das Liebesverbot’ or ‘The Ban on Love’, a piece similar to Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’, that was staged in 1836 at Magdeburg theatre itself.

Nonetheless, it was only performed once;curtains were drawn on the second show as the theatre shut down, which left him reeling from financial losses.

At this gutted moment in his life, the actress Christine Wilhelmine ‘Minna’ Planer helped him get back on his feet by introducing him to the theatre at Konigsberg.

They married on 24 November 1836, but their love lasted only for six months as Planer left him for a wealthier man. The marriage being a failure urged Wagner to move to Riga.

At Riga he became the music director of a local theatre and aided Minna’s sister Amalie, as a singer at the theatre. This act of benevolence reconciled the separated couple and Minna came back into his life.

In the late 1830s Wagner was steeped in debt and in order to save himself from creditors, he escaped to Paris in search of wealth and success. He lived in France and hoped to prosper but found no opportunity and took a deep dislike for the French musical culture.