Richard Wagner developmental in its treatment of leitmotifs. Wagner took 26 years from writing the first draft of a libretto in 1848 until he completed "Götterdämmerung" in 1874. The "Ring" takes about 15 hours to perform and is the only undertaking of such size to be regularly presented on the world's stages. Wagner's final opera, "Parsifal" (1882), which was his only work written especially for his Bayreuth Festspielhaus and which is described in the score as a ""Bühnenweihfestspiel"" ("festival play for the consecration of the stage"), has a storyline suggested by elements of the legend of the Holy Grail. It also carries
Ernst August Wagner where later he wrote several plays and dramas. He died there of tuberculosis in 1938. Ernst August Wagner was born on 22 September 1874 in Eglosheim near Ludwigsburg as the ninth of ten children, as well as one half-brother and half-sister. Most of his siblings died early, so that in 1913 only two sisters and one brother remained. After his father, a poor peasant with drinking problems, died one day before Ernst Wagner's second birthday, the indebted family was forced to sell their farm. His mother tried to make a living by running a small shop; she soon remarried, but