German Music Drama

3 Pages 734 Words

German music drama’s are primarily associated with the composer Richard Wagner. Richard Wagner was born in Leipsig, Germany on May 22, 1813. He attended school in Dresden and then Leipig. When Wagner was fifteen he wrote a play and when he was sixteen he wrote first pieces of music. His first pieces of music were two piano sonatas and a string quartet. He attended Leipsig University, and also studied composition and piano elsewhere. He was not really good at that. Wagner had very brief formal training. He basically was self taught.
Richard Wagner is considered one of the key figures in the history of opera. He is responsible for changing the way it is seen in the nineteenth century.
Many people did not like Richard Wagner. He is said to be one of the most controversial musical figures of the nineteenth century. He was a very smart, intellectual man. No one in that time period could compare. His life and works could be considered most of the achievements of German Romanticism- but at the same time they are liked and disliked very strongly. No other composer in musical history was looked at like this. His musical dramas were hated so much, but at the same time liked just as much. Even the people that strongly disliked him could not help but to agree what a genius he was.

Richard Wagner was the creator of German Music Drama. What German Music Drama basically was, was something that could “bind all life, reality and illusion into one symbolic union.” Wagner achieved that result with the new technique of music drama, which the leading motives re-occur often changed by the needs of the drama. It sounds very complicated but basically Wagner had his own ideas and they were a very different style. He believed in the “absolute oneness” of drama and music. “They are organically connected expressions of a single dramatic idea.” Wagner believed that “dramas have an inner and outer aspect. ...