Wagner and light

A theater enthusiast, considered one of the major composers of late Romanticism, Wagner wrote his own opera librettos to achieve total cohesion between text and music. He drew his inspiration from the great legends of Europe, especially Germanic ones, to develop the great themes of German Romanticism: feelings, wandering, mystery, solitude... With The Flying Dutchman, the first of his ten major operas, he found his style and invented the leitmotiv (a musical motif associated with a character). After Tannhäuser, composed two years later, he fell in love with his host's wife and wrote Tristan and Isolde. His major work, however, is undoubtedly his Tetralogy, which took him some thirty years to write and includes Siegfried, the name he gave to his son and which inspired Siegfried-Idyll, dedicated to his wife Cosima.