Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883)

Richard Wagner inspired in his contemporaries extremes of reaction. For some his music seemed as misguided and repulsive as his anti-Semitism, while others were overwhelmed by the size of his ambition and achievement, to which everything had to be sacrificed. Wagner's career was in many ways thoroughly discreditable. He betrayed friends and patrons, accumulated debts with abandon, and seemed, in pursuit of his aims, an unprincipled opportunist. Nevertheless, whatever his defects of character, he exercised a hypnotic influence over his immediate followers, while his creation of a new form of music-drama, in which the arts were combined, and the magnitude of his conception continue to fascinate.

Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813, probably the son of the actor and painter Ludwig Geyer rather than of his mother's husband, the police actuary Carl Friedrich Wagner. It was Geyer who superintended the boy's upbringing