Richard Wagner consistently downplayed the significance of his musical education. Undoubtedly, he was very keen to cultivate the notion of the untutored genius, just as Ludwig van Beethoven had done. However, as we saw in our last episode, his first

Christoph Columbus (1835) One certainly could not fault Richard Wagner for being persistent, but one has to question his judgment regarding his pursuit of Minna Planer. Minna did everything in her power to get rid of him! She fled from

At the tender age of 13 and accompanied by his mother, young Richard made his first journey to the city of Prague. They visited his two sisters who were employed as singers at the National Opera. The vibrant cultural and

Dresden, with its well-known Sächsische Staatskapelle, Kreuzchor and Semper Opera House, cannot only be considered one of the great ‘musical’ cities in Germany, but most importantly, its cultural and political milieu played a significant role in the musical and artistic

7 pieces for Goethe’s Faust, Op. 5 No. 6. Gretchen am Spinnrade No. 7. Melodram It is at least conceivable that Leah David’s rejection fueled Richard Wagner’s gradually growing hatred for the Jewish race. It is without doubt, however, that

I spent much of last year studying Wagner’s great tetralogy of music dramas, The Ring of the Nibelung. If anyone hasn’t done so, I would heartily recommend it – simply to list the number of things I found fascinating about

It is generally acknowledged that no single operatic composer influenced Richard Wagner as decisively as Carl Maria von Weber. When Richard was nine, Weber came to Dresden to rehearse and conduct his opera Der Freischütz. In his autobiography, Wagner gives

In his most renowned psychoanalytic conjecture — appropriately dubbed the “Oedipus complex” — Sigmund Freud suggested that a child’s unconscious mind projects the desire to sexually possess the mother, and kill the father. Freud derived his theory from ancient Greek