Richard Wagner (1813–1883) changed opera more than almost anyone before or since. His huge music dramas, from The Flying Dutchman to the four-part Ring cycle and Tristan und Isolde, gave the world the “Ride of the Valkyries”, the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin and a new way of telling stories in music. He is also one of the most controversial figures in music history, because of his antisemitic writings.
Here are 15 interesting facts about Wagner, his life and his music.
The short version
Wagner wrote his own librettos, built an opera house for his own works in Bayreuth, and spent about 26 years on The Ring of the Nibelung, a cycle of four operas lasting around 15 hours. To hear why he matters, start with the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde.
1. He Wasn’t Initially Interested In Music
Born 1813 · Leipzig
Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813. His father died six months later, and his mother married the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer, so the boy grew up around the theater. As a child he had piano lessons but struggled to play a proper scale, preferring to pick out theater overtures by ear. His first passion was drama, not music.
That began to change when, at nine, he was bowled over by Weber’s opera Der Freischütz. In 1828 he heard Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth Symphonies, which became lifelong inspirations, and from then on he set out to learn composition, largely teaching himself before studying with Theodor Weinlig in Leipzig, who was so impressed that he refused to be paid.
2. He Wrote Both The Music And The Libretto For His Works
Words and music
Most opera composers of Wagner’s time set librettos written by professional poets. Wagner wrote his own words for every one of his operas, from his first, Die Feen, to his last, Parsifal, drawing on myths, legends and medieval poems such as the Nibelungenlied.
Writing both text and music gave him total control over the drama. In the Ring, he wrote the poem first and then spent years setting it, so that words, music and action could grow from the same ideas. It was a key part of his belief that opera should be a single, unified work of art.
3. He Was A German Nationalist
Exiled 1849 to 1862
Wagner held strong and often ugly political views. In 1849 he took part in the failed May Uprising in Dresden, a revolution against the Saxon king, and had to flee Germany. He lived in exile, mostly in Switzerland, for 12 years, until the political ban on him was lifted in 1862.
In 1850 he published the antisemitic essay “Jewishness in Music” under a pseudonym, then reissued it under his own name in 1869, which caused public protests. Long after his death, Hitler idolized his music, and the Bayreuth Festival became closely associated with the Nazi regime, which still shapes how many people view Wagner today.
4. His Operas Are Very Long
The Ring · about 15 hours
Start with: “Ride of the Valkyries, from Die Walküre”About 15 hours
Wagner’s operas are famously long. Several of his later works run well over four hours with intervals, and The Ring of the Nibelung, made up of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, takes about 15 hours across four evenings. He worked on it for roughly 26 years, from 1848 to 1874.
He saw opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art” uniting music, poetry, drama and stagecraft. The famous “Ride of the Valkyries” opens the third act of Die Walküre, the second opera of the Ring, and has since become one of the most recognizable pieces of classical music, heard in films such as Apocalypse Now.
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5. He Had A Unique Composing Style
The leitmotif
Wagner is the composer most closely linked with the leitmotif, a short musical idea tied to a character, object or emotion. In the Ring there are motifs for the gold, the ring, the sword, the gods’ fortress Valhalla and many characters, and they return, combine and change as the story unfolds, so the orchestra comments on the drama.
His harmony was just as bold. The opening of Tristan und Isolde, with the famous “Tristan chord”, holds back the expected resolution of its dissonance, and it pointed the way toward 20th-century music. Leitmotifs went on to become a basic tool of film composers, from Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings.
6. He Wrote His First Drama At The Age Of 15
Leubald · 1827 to 1828
While still at school in 1827 and 1828, aged 14 and 15, Wagner wrote a sprawling tragedy called Leubald. It borrows freely from Shakespeare, mixing elements of Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Richard III, with touches of Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist.
It is not clear how he meant to set it to music, but the wish to do so may be what first led him to study composition. No music for it survives, only the text, but it already shows his lifelong urge to write the words of a drama himself.
7. His First Opera Was Not Performed During His Lifetime
Die Feen · 1833
Start with: “Die Feen: Overture”
Wagner’s first completed opera, Die Feen (The Fairies), was written in 1833, when he was 20 and working as a chorus master in Würzburg. He wrote the libretto himself, based on a play by the Italian dramatist Carlo Gozzi.
He could not get it staged, and it was never performed during his lifetime. It finally premiered in Munich on June 29, 1888, five years after his death. It has never become a repertoire piece, but it already contains ideas, such as redemption through love, that run through his later operas.
8. He Was Married Twice
Minna Planer and Cosima Wagner
Start with: “Siegfried Idyll”
In 1836 Wagner married the actress Minna Planer. The marriage was stormy from the start: she left him within months, they reconciled, and they later lived apart for long periods. They never divorced, and Minna died in 1866.
His second wife was Cosima, daughter of Franz Liszt and 24 years his junior. She was married to the conductor Hans von Bülow when their affair began, and she and Wagner had three children before marrying in 1870. That Christmas, Wagner surprised her with the Siegfried Idyll, played by a small band on the stairs of their villa near Lucerne for her birthday.
9. His Second Wife Ran His Festival
Cosima Wagner · 1837–1930
Cosima Wagner was not a composer, but she became one of the most powerful figures in opera. During their marriage she kept a detailed diary of their life together, published in the 1970s and running to more than 4,000 pages, which is a key source on Wagner’s last years.
After his death she took control of the Bayreuth Festival, directing it from 1886 to 1907. She did not conduct, but she oversaw productions with a team of leading conductors and fixed the canon of his ten mature operas that the festival still performs. She lived until 1930.
10. He Was A Great Conductor
Conductor and writer
Wagner was never much of a pianist, but he was one of the most important conductors of the 19th century. In the 1840s he was appointed Royal Saxon Court Conductor in Dresden, conducted concerts for London’s Philharmonic Society in 1855, and later toured Germany conducting to raise money for his festival.
He also wrote at length about conducting and shaped the next generation of conductors. Hans von Bülow led the premieres of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger, and Hans Richter was chosen to conduct the first complete Ring at Bayreuth in 1876.
11. Wagner Had A Taste For Expensive Things
A life of debt
Start with: “The Flying Dutchman: Overture”
Wagner loved luxury and lived well beyond his means, and debts plagued him for most of his life. In 1839 he and Minna fled Riga to escape their creditors. Their stormy sea crossing to London inspired his opera The Flying Dutchman.
Rescue came in 1864, when the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria became his patron and paid off his debts. Even after he became famous, the costs of his Bayreuth opera house and his villa, Wahnfried, meant Wagner was always looking for more money, relying on patrons such as Ludwig and the businessman Otto Wesendonck.
12. He Was Reputedly Very Arrogant
A difficult personality
Wagner was driven, domineering and utterly convinced of his own genius, qualities that helped him realize enormous projects but made him hard to live with. He expected friends and patrons to fund his work, and many of them, from Otto Wesendonck to King Ludwig II, did.
The most striking example is Hans von Bülow, who conducted the premieres of Tristan und Isolde in 1865 and Die Meistersinger in 1868, while Wagner was having an affair with Bülow’s wife Cosima. After the couple divorced in 1870 and Cosima married Wagner, Bülow never spoke to him again.
13. His Opera House Was Designed For His Own Works
Bayreuth Festspielhaus · 1876
Wagner felt that ordinary opera houses could not do justice to his music dramas, so he built his own. In 1871 he chose the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth, and with help from King Ludwig II, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus opened on August 13, 1876, with the first complete performance of the Ring.
The theater was designed around his ideas. The orchestra sits in a sunken, covered pit, hidden from the audience, and the auditorium is darkened during the performance so that all attention is on the stage. The annual Bayreuth Festival is still held there, devoted to his ten mature operas, and is run by his descendants.
14. His Operas Are Still Performed Today
Tristan und Isolde · 1865
Start with: “Tristan und Isolde: Prelude”
More than a century after his death, Wagner’s operas are staged by opera houses around the world, and a complete Ring cycle remains one of the biggest artistic and financial challenges a company can take on. Directors keep reimagining them in new settings and styles.
His influence reaches far beyond opera. Later composers built on his harmony and orchestration, and his approach to leitmotifs shaped the language of film music. For a first taste, the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde shows his style in about ten minutes.
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15. He Died Of A Heart Attack
February 13, 1883 · Venice
Wagner completed his last opera, Parsifal, in January 1882, and it premiered at Bayreuth later that year. He then went to Venice with his family, living in the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi on the Grand Canal.
He died there of a heart attack on February 13, 1883, at the age of 69. His body was taken back to Bayreuth and buried in the garden of his villa, Wahnfried, where Cosima’s ashes were later laid beside him.
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Summing up
Wagner was a revolutionary in music and a deeply troubling figure as a man. He wrote his own librettos, made the leitmotif central to opera, pushed harmony to its limits and built a theater to stage his works exactly as he wanted. His antisemitism and his later adoption by the Nazis mean his legacy is still argued over.
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