MusiLLection

Portrait of Richard Wagner, the composer whose revolutionary vision transformed opera into musical drama. Rebel, pioneer, demagogue, revisionist, heretic. Whether admired or fiercely opposed, no one who engages seriously with Richard Wagner can deny his genius. He proposed a radically different conception of opera—one that came to dominate the second half of the nineteenth century and gave rise to passionate supporters and equally determined opponents, whose disagreements remain unresolved to this day. Wagner called for the complete fusion of music and drama into a single, indivisible entity. Drawing inspiration from ancient Greek tragedy, he envisioned a form of musical drama that went beyond established theoretical models, redefining not only how opera should sound, but how it should be conceived, structured, and experienced. Under his influence, opera was transformed into something fundamentally new, decisively distancing itself from the traditions of bel canto and conventional ly...