Featured on PDR in the collection A Closer Look at Richard Wagner’s Manuscripts

Richard Wagner was one of the most influential and controversial composers ever to have lived. With his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art") - by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts — he revolutionised opera and gave birth to such masterpieces as Tristan und Isolde and the epic four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. If his music was sublime, his political views regarding "race" were far from it — in his writings he frequently expressed anti-semitic views (particularly in his racist tract Judaism in Music). The beauty of his music and the vileness of some of his political opinions (complicated by the fact that he was reported to have had life-long Jewish friends), make him a continuing…