When the subject is Richard Wagner, the grandmaster of opera, we can only speak in superlatives. At once loved and hated, the composer, dramatist, author, theater director, and conductor, who wrote the libretti for all of his operas, also offered his reflections on culture, politics, and religion in ten hefty volumes of prose. Possessing extraordinary management skills, he was not only an outstanding conductor and teacher, but also had the Bayreuth Festival Theater built expressly for his music dramas, where his works are still performed to this day.

It took time, however, for Wagner to find his own voice; he had to experience two flops (the operas Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot) before finally paving the way for his soaring, pioneering music dramas, of which he wrote a total of thirteen. The composer, who spent his whole life deeply in debt, was continually on the run, pursued by creditors and tax collectors. Always leaving scorched earth in his wake, Wagner was called, mockingly, “the credit-whiz, the luxury-addicted revolutionary” by Thomas Mann. His work championed the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), which sought absolute transcendence by uniting together all the arts.

For twenty-five years, Wagner worked on the Ring des Nibelungen, a cycle consisting of four parts: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. With a running time of around 15 hours, it remains the longest work in the history of music, and probably the greatest challenge music theater has to offer. His legacy, however, carries a bitter aftertaste: his treatise Judaism in Music reveals him to be a proponent of anti-Semitism.

© Helmut Jasbar, ORF - Radio Österreich 1