Richard Wagner
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Richard Wagner (b.Leipzig, 22 May 1813; d.Venice 13 Feb.1883) was a German opera composer. He was a composer of the Romantic period. The harmony that he used became more and more chromatic. That means that there are lots of sharps and flats, and it is difficult sometimes to tell what key the music is in. This actually makes it very exciting. In his opera “Tristan and Isolde” there is a famous chord at the beginning which gives the music lots of tension. Slowly this tension is released and after a while there is a sense of calm. This describes the story very well. The Tristan chord is very famous, and made other Romantic composers want to write harmony which was more and more chromatic.
Wagner wrote 10 famous operas: Der Fliegende Holländer, (The Flying Dutchman), Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde), four operas which form the a cycle called the Ring of the Nibelung: Rheingold (Rhinegold), Walkűre(Valkyrie), Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods); Die Meistersinger von Nűrnberg (The Mastersingers of Nűrnberg) and Parsifal.
Wagner uses “leitmotifs” in his operas. This means that there are tunes which are associated with particular characters or events. He had an opera house built in Bayreuth to his own design so that he could stage his own operas the way he wanted them. Most of the operas are about stories from the old German mythologies. The Mastersingers is the only one which is a comic opera. Wagner wrote all the words for his operas himself.
During the second world war, Adolf Hitler found that the music of Richard Wagner was something typically German. After the war, the music was branded as being something of the Nazis. Wagner's music is therefore played very rarely in Israel and other states with influential Jewish population.
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