Richard Wagner

Conducting posts in Würzburg, Magdeburg, Königsberg and Riga gave Wagner his theatrical education, and Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer, both reaching the stage in Dresden in the early 1840s, made his name there. From 1849 he spent eleven years in Switzerland, and it was in Zurich that he set down the theory: a work of art in which music, poetry, drama, design and movement would be one thing rather than five. Der Ring des Nibelungen tested it across twenty-six years of work and four evenings of performance, with a continuous orchestral texture organised by recurring motifs that carry memory, foreboding and comment. Tristan und Isolde, written while the Ring was interrupted, opened chromatic harmony so far that composers were still working out the consequences fifty years later. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg answered it with daylight and counterpoint, and Parsifal closed the work in 1882. To stage the Ring he built a theatre of his own at Bayreuth — a sunken, covered pit, a fan-shaped auditorium, no boxes — and opened it in 1876; the festival has run there ever since. Born in Leipzig in 1813, he died in Venice in February 1883. He reached Switzerland as a fugitive: he had taken part in the Dresden rising of May 1849, was sentenced in his absence to imprisonment, and got out with Liszt's help. Otto Wesendonck took him and his family in, and the prose works of those years, The Artwork of the Future and Opera and Drama among them, were written alongside the first two evenings of the tetralogy and the beginnings of Siegfried.