Wagner, Richard

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

Richard (1813-1883), the most celebrated musical composer of Germany. A native of Leipsic. He was educated in the musical atmosphere of Dresden and Leipsic. Wagner is the acknowledged master of the orchestra, but as to his work as a composer there is a difference of opinion. One school holds that his music is too declamatory and that it is deficient in melody. Wagnerian music includes Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman , Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, The Meistersinger, The Nibelung's Ring in four parts, and Parsifal. Wagner was an incomparable man capable of managing an empire. It was the ambition of his life to substitute German music for the French and Italian music to which Germany was accustomed. He held positions of prominence in Magdeburg, Dresden, London, and Munich. Toward the close of his life he settled in Bayreuth, a provincial capital in northern Bavaria, where he organized Wagnerian festivals. A theater was built for his special use on a hill overlooking the town. He made acting prominent in grand opera. Albert Lavignac, a recent critic, writes: One must go to Bayreuth to appreciate the intensity of emotion which can be produced by a Wagnerian drama, religiously played, and religiously listened to, without the interruption of applause, without the "Bravo! bravo!" without calling for encores,--all strictly prohibited there; with the scenery and the stage setting precisely as the master ordained it; with the invisible or chestra, its sonorities deliciously melting into each other, never noisy; with the auditorium in total darkness; instead of the foyer of the entr'actes, a verdant, rolling country; instead of the prompter's bell, a brilliant fanfare, sending to the four cardinal points of the sky the principal Leitmotiv of the following act. All this is intoxicating; ravishing to the supreme degree. See Bayreuth ; Orchestra ; Tann-Hauser