Richard Wagner
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.