Wilhelm Richard Wagner entered a world in chaos: in 1813, the year of his birth, a coalition of Prussian, Swedish, Russian, and Austrian forces fought Napoleon's armies across Germany, culminating in an immense battle at Leipzig, the composer's birthplace. His childhood was also marked by personal upheaval and disorder. His apparent father, the court clerk Carl Friedrich Wagner, died when he was an infant, whereupon Johanna Wagner, his mother, married the actor and painter Ludwig Geyer, who was rumored to be Wagner's real father. Because Geyer raised him, Wagner was ensconced in an artistically inclined, literary-minded, mildly bohemian setting. He loved the theater from an early age and remained a theatrical creature til the end of his life. Music interested him mainly as a means of achieving theatrical ends. His output of instrumental music was thin, and only in his theater pieces — thirteen operas in all — did his distinctive voice fully emerge.
As a composer, Wagner was the willful progeny of Beethoven, the dominant force in the ascendancy of musical Romanticism. At approximately the same time that the literary Romantics held sway in Germany and England, Beethoven unleashed unprecedented storms of sound in his instrumental and orchestral writing, with the world-embracing structure of the Ninth Symphony as his culminating achievement. Opera, however, somewhat eluded his grasp: Fidelio, his only effort in the form, underwent a series of revisions and remains problematic as a theatrical conception. Wagner set himself the goal of completing the transmission of Beethovenian energy into the operatic field. His German nationalism caused him to prioritize Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber as influences, although French Romanticism, especially that of Hector Berlioz, had a considerable effect on him. He was also a close student of the long-breathed melodic forms of Italian bel-canto opera. Wagner's musical language was eclectic, at times highly imitative. He had a way, however, of uttering other people's ideas so thunderously that they became his own.
Wagner liked to present himself as a largely self-taught, self-formed figure. His critics would make a habit of calling him an amateur, a dilettante. He was, in fact, a thoroughly trained musician who mastered the arts of harmony and counterpart while studying in Leipzig, partly at the Thomasschule, where Bach once presided. Student works such as the Symphony in C attest to his proficiency. As unconventional as Wagner's mature scores could be, they were always exactingly notated. The chaotic, flamboyant side of his character has to be balanced against an almost Victorian industriousness. His Romantic valorization of emotion over intellect required him to disguise this part of his personality, but Cosima Wagner's diaries give plentiful evidence of it. As Pierre Boulez once noted, one of the most common phrases in the diaries is "R. working."
The Wagner cult, with its urge to frame the composer as a phenomenon divorced from conventional musical life, tended to discount his early works, where his debts to multinational opera traditions are unmistakable. Die Feen (The Faeries), his first successful stab at the genre, was completed in 1833, when he was twenty; Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), followed in 1836. Both works have an Italianate inflection: the first adapts a fairy-tale by Carlo Gozzi, and the second is based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, set in Sicily. Nonetheless, the German Romantic influence is paramount, and premonitions of the later Wagner are especially strong when the material requires intimations of the supernatural and the malevolent. Act II of Die Feen ends with a convulsion of orchestral violence that, for better or worse, would come to define the Wagnerian aesthetic:
In Liebesverbot, the darkly prowling theme representing Friedrich, the oppressively puritanical governor of Palermo, foreshadows the fateful leitmotifs of the Ring and vocal setpieces such as "Die Frist ist um" in The Flying Dutchman:
Such charismatically forbidding gestures appear in other Wagner works, such as the opening theme of the Faust overture, composed during his first stay in Paris:
After apprentice appointments directing opera in various German cities and in the Latvian capital of Riga, Wagner moved to Paris in 1839, hoping to prove himself in the marketplace of grand opera. The heavyweight of the genre was the German-Jewish émigré Giacomo Meyerbeer, who, in his masterwork Les Huguenots, wove gripping and sometimes terrifying scenes of religious persecution into more conventional plotline of star-crossed love. Wagner's envy of Meyerbeer's success may have seeded his later anti-Semitism, although professional jealousy cannot explain the depth of his hatred. Meyerbeer was in fact generous in his support for his younger compatriot. It was thanks to him that Rienzi, Wagner's third opera, received its premiere in Dresden, in 1843.
The source for the libretto was Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes, about the historical figure of Cola di Rienzo, who led an unsuccessful populist uprising in fourteenth-century Rome. As is discussed in Chapter 10 of Wagnerism, Adolf Hitler claimed to have experienced an epiphany at a Rienzi performance in his youth, and the grandiose overture regularly figured in the ceremony of the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg. The opera is destined to remain problematic because of that association.
On the musical level, Rienzi suffers from a degree of bloat: the panoramic grandeur of Wagner's dramatic vision runs ahead of his control of his materials. Despite its undeniably grand setpieces and vocal monologues, it represents something of a backward step from the bubbling invention of Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot. Wagner would complete his transition to maturity with The Flying Dutchman, a far more economical and forcefully argued construction. Rienzi has, however, excited the imaginations of stage directors who see an opportunity to capitalize on the young Hitler's enthusiasm for the piece. A 2010 Deutsche Oper staging by Philipp Stölzl placed the work in a fascist setting; somewhat predictably, the iconography invokes the plate-glass window at Hitler's Berchtesgaden retreat.
