Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was a German composer, dramatist, poet, writer, theater director, and conductor. With his music dramas, he is considered one of the most important innovators of European music in the 19th century. He changed the expressive power of Romantic music and the theoretical and practical foundations of opera by designing dramatic plots as Gesamtkunstwerk (total works of art) and writing the librettos, music, and stage directions himself. He founded the Bayreuth Festival, dedicated exclusively to the performance of his own works, in the Bayreuth Festival Theater, which he designed himself. His innovations in harmony influenced the development of music into the modern era. With his essay Judaism in Music, he belongs to the intellectual history of obsessive advocates of anti-Semitism.