Richard Wagner

Germany, 1833–1883

Composer, conductor and theorist whose music dramas transformed 19th-century opera. The extreme chromaticism of Tristan und Isolde pushed Western harmony to the edge of tonality.

MusicRoots documents 3 artists who influenced Richard Wagner and 13 artists Richard Wagner influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.

Who influenced Richard Wagner?

• Ludwig van Beethoven — Wagner traced his entire artistic project to Beethoven's Ninth — his 1870 essay 'Beethoven' frames the music drama as its heir.
• Franz Liszt — Liszt's harmonic daring fed directly into Wagner's late style — Wagner admitted becoming 'a quite different fellow as a harmonist' after studying Liszt's works.
• Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina — Wagner was overwhelmed by Palestrina's Holy Week music and made his own performing edition of the Stabat Mater, conducting it in Dresden.

Which artists did Richard Wagner influence?

• Arnold Schoenberg — Wagner's extreme chromaticism in Tristan und Isolde was the direct precursor to Schoenberg's atonality.
• Claude Debussy — Wagner's chromatic harmony was something Debussy both absorbed in his youth and later consciously pushed away from.
• Anton Bruckner — Bruckner idolized Wagner and dedicated his Third Symphony to him — the score bears the inscription 'to the eminent Excellency Richard Wagner'.
• Maurice Ravel — Wagner's harmonic ambition was part of the late-Romantic backdrop that shaped Ravel's generation.
• Alexander Scriabin — Wagner's Tristan chromaticism runs through early-to-middle Scriabin — his Divine Poem pays explicit homage to Tristan on the road to the 'mystic chord'.
• Gustav Mahler — Mahler was the supreme Wagner conductor of his age and absorbed Wagner's harmonic and orchestral world into the symphony.
• Richard Strauss — Strauss converted to Wagnerism against his father's wishes after studying Tristan — Wagner's orchestra and chromaticism became his native language.
• Jean Sibelius — Sibelius made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth in 1894 and wrestled with Wagner's influence — absorbed in his tone poems even after he renounced opera.
• Klaus Schulze — Schulze recorded under the alias 'Richard Wahnfried' — named for Wagner's villa — an official, lifelong declaration of his Wagnerian scale and devotion.
• Gustav Holst — Early Holst was steeped in Wagner — operas like Sita are openly Wagnerian, before he forged his own austere idiom.
• Jim Steinman — Steinman wrote rock on an operatic scale, and the Wagner comparison was made so often that it became his nickname - the Richard Wagner of rock and roll.
• GAS — Wagner is the largest of the sources Voigt loops under GAS - the records are built from small samples of Austro-German classical music put through zoom, loop and alienation.
• Vincent d'Indy — D'Indy heard the first Ring at Bayreuth in 1876 and came back a Wagnerian for life — the chromatic harmony he then taught to a generation of French composers.