Richard Wagner classical music. His "Tristan und Isolde" is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music. Wagner had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which embodied many novel design features. The "Ring" and "Parsifal" were premiered here and his most important stage works continue to be performed at the annual Bayreuth Festival, run by his descendants. His thoughts on the relative contributions of music and drama in opera were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional forms into his last few stage works, including "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" ("The Mastersingers of Nuremberg"). Until his final years, Wagner's
Opera in German revolutionary and controversial composers in musical history and his innovations changed the course of opera, not just in Germany and Austria but throughout Europe. Wagner gradually evolved a new concept of opera as a "Gesamtkunstwerk" (a "complete work of art"), a fusion of music, poetry and painting. His earliest experiments followed the examples set by Weber ("Die Feen") and Meyerbeer ("Rienzi"), but his most important formative influence was probably the symphonic music of Beethoven. Wagner believed his career truly began with "Der fliegende Holländer" (1843). Together with the two works which followed, "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin", this has been described as