Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) is the most polarizing composer in the canon, and not just because of his anti-Semitism, which was explicit, vicious, and widely read in his lifetime. He is polarizing because his music is overwhelming — it demands total submission or total rejection. You cannot listen to Tristan und Isolde (1865) as background music. It fills rooms. It demands to be the only thing happening.

Wagner invented the Gesamtkunstwerk — the total work of art, in which music, poetry, staging, and drama fuse into a single experience. He designed his own opera house at Bayreuth specifically for his works, with the orchestra hidden in a pit so the sound rises from below without a visible source. He wrote his own libretti. He controlled everything. The Ring Cycle — four operas, 15 hours of music performed over four evenings — was a 26-year project.

The harmonic language he developed in Tristan und Isolde — constantly shifting, constantly delaying resolution, keeping the listener in a state of unresolved yearning — is considered the beginning of the dissolution of tonality. Debussy heard Wagner in Paris and built an entire aesthetic around not sounding like him. Brahms resisted. Mahler absorbed everything. Strauss continued the tradition. Arnold Schoenberg drew a direct line from the Tristan chord to his own twelve-tone system.

StyleHigh Romantic music drama. Endless melody, leitmotifs (recurring themes attached to characters/ideas), chromaticism pushed to its limits. Demands everything.

Listen: Prelude to Tristan und Isolde. Seventeen minutes. Then the Liebestod that closes the opera.