In August, 1750, on a journey back from Germany to London, Handel was seriously injured when his carriage overturned. In 1751 he started to lose his eyesight. He died, in 1759, in London. The last concert he went to was his own "Messiah". More than 3,000 mourners went to his funeral. He was buried with full state honours in Westminster Abbey. Handel never married, and kept his personal life very private. He left £20,000 which was a lot of money for those days (Approximately 2800000 pounds today) His niece inherited most of his money. He also left some of it to friends, servants, relations and charities. His autographs (the original copies of the music that he wrote) are now mostly in the British Museum.
Handel adopted the spelling "George Frideric Handel" on his naturalization as a British subject, and this spelling is generally used in English speaking countries. The original form of his name (Georg Friedrich Händel) is usually used in Germany, but he is known as "Haendel" in France. There was another composer with a similar name, Handl, who was a Slovene and is more commonly known as . This can be very hard for cataloguers (people trying to make a list of his music)
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner (22 May 1813 in Leipzig – 13 February 1883 in Venice) was a German opera composer. He was one of the most important opera composers in Germany during the Romantic period. Apart from some music that he wrote as a student he wrote ten operas which are all performed regularly in opera houses today. Most of his operas are about stories from German mythology. He always wrote the words himself.
Wagner changed people’s ideas of what operas should be. He thought that the drama (the story that is being told with all its tensions) was very important, and he chose the singers for his operas himself, so that he could train them into his way of thinking. The music in his operas did not give the audience a chance to applaud after big solos as it had done in the 18th century: it continues throughout the whole act. He made his music tell the story by using what he called “leitmotifs”. These were melodies or short musical phrases which belonged to particular characters in the opera, or to particular ideas. He had more influence on other composers than anybody else in his time, largely because of his harmonies which became more and more chromatic (using lots of sharps and flats), with many changes of key. He built an opera house to his own design in the German town of Bayreuth. Nearly all musicians in Europe tried to make a journey to Bayreuth to hear Wagner’s music. The Wagner festival still takes place every year there.
He studied at the University of Leipzig, although he was not allowed to be a full student because he did not have proper school qualifications. Although he lived a wild life he worked hard at his music. He studied the scores of Beethoven’s string quartets and symphonies and he wrote his own symphony which was performed in 1833 at the famous Leipzig Gewandhaus. He wrote his first opera, "Die Feen" ("The Fairies") in Würzburg. He became the conductor of a travelling opera group and fell in love with one of the singers called Minna Planer and he married her in 1836. His second opera, "Das Liebesverbot", based on Shakespeare’s play "Measure for Measure" was a failure.
Wagner always liked spending money, and he soon found he owed money to a lot of people, so he went away to Paris where he lived for three years. He was not successful at all there, none of the French musicians showed any interest in him and he was very poor. He still managed to write an opera "Rienzi" in 1841, and this was soon followed by "Der fliegende Holländer", ("The Flying Dutchman"), which still remains a favourite to opera lovers today. It was first performed in Dresden in 1843. The audience did not like it much because they were used to operas like "Rienzi" which were written in the old way. Wagner was given the job of court opera composer in Dresden. He stayed there until 1849. During that time he worked very hard to make opera performances better, improve the orchestra and train the singers. In 1845 he wrote another great opera, "Tannhäuser". People gradually started to understand the way that Wagner’s music was telling the drama of the story. After this all his operas were great successes, although there always remained some people who hated his music, e.g. the music critic Eduard Hanslick.
In 1848 he finished working on "Lohengrin" but it was not performed because he was supporting the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states, joining in the demonstrations. Although he did join the fighting he was going to be arrested, so Franz Liszt helped him to escape to Switzerland. He lived in Zürich until 1858. There he wrote about music, conducted, and read stories from Norse mythology. He was starting to think about writing operas about these stories. It was something that would take him over 25 years to complete. They were to become the four operas known as "Der Ring des Nibelungen" ("The Ring of the Nibelung") which, together, tell one long story. The four operas which make up this famous Ring cycle are "Das Rheingold" (The Rhinegold), "Die Walküre" ("The Valkyrie"), "Siegfried" and "Götterdämmerung" ("Twilight of the Gods"). Because of the political situation in Germany at the time, Wagner expected the rise of a socialist state. The operas in the Ring cycle were a new kind of music drama (which Wagner simply called “drama”). These operas can be seen as describing a new kind of world in which humans are free. The music used the idea of leitmotif (in English: “leading motive”), where musical ideas represent characters or emotions, and help the development and understanding of the story.
By 1857 Wagner had written the first two operas as well as Acts One and Two of "Siegfried". However, the third Act of "Siegfried" was not written until many years later, because he could see that at that time there was no suitable opera house to have these operas performed. He fell in love with a woman called Mathilde Wesendonk, whose husband was very rich. This affair led to a separation with his wife, Minna. He wrote an opera about an unhappy love affair: "Tristan und Isolde" ("Tristan and Isolde").
Meanwhile, he wrote another opera: "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" ("The Mastersinger of Nűrnberg"). It is the only comedy Wagner wrote.
It is set in medieval Germany and is about a song contest.
By 1864 Wagner was in debt once more. He fled to Stuttgart to avoid being put into prison (Germany at that time was still made up of many small countries, each with their own laws). Then he had a big stroke of luck. The new king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, who was only 18 years old, adored the music of Wagner. He had read the poem about the Ring of the Nibelungs (Wagner had written the words, but had not finished the music). King Ludwig invited Wagner to finish the Ring cycle for performances in Munich. He gave him somewhere to live, and his new operas were performed in Munich: "Tristan und Isolde" in 1865, "Die Meistersinger von Nűrnberg" in 1868, "Das Rheingold" in 1869 and "Die Walkűre" in 1870. There were plans for a new opera house in Munich, but it was never built because people were angry with Wagner for being in debt in spite of having lots of money from the king. Another thing people did not like was that he fell in love with the wife of the man who had conducted his operas, Hans von Bülow. Her name was Cosima. Her father was the composer Franz Liszt who had not been married to Cosima’s mother. Wagner had already left Munich in 1865, but the king still supported him, making it possible for him to live in a large house called Triebschen on Lake Lucerne. Cosima divorced von Bülow in 1870 and married Wagner in the same year.