Richard Wagner, Author at The Imaginative Conservative

About Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is primarily known for his operas, especially Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Der fliegende Holländer, and his four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Overture: “Christopher Columbus”

By Richard Wagner|2023-10-09T09:24:07-05:00October 9th, 2017|Categories: Audio/Video, Music, Richard Wagner|

The twenty-two-year-old Richard Wagner composed this dramatic overture as part of the incidental music for a play about the explorer, written by the composer's friend, Guido Theodore Apel. Wagner also wrote a chorus and orchestral epilogue for the play, but these have been lost. At its premier the music “astonished everyone and was tumultuously applauded," [...]