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Reducing the life of as controversial and gigantic a figure as Richard Wagner to two paragraphs may seem impossible, but then again bringing Wagner down to size would not be such a bad thing. Born in Leipzig in 1813, Wagner grew up in a prominent theatrical family and from an early age was inclined to make a career in the arts. His musical training was rather piecemeal and almost haphazard, learning from books and a variety of teachers, and though he eventually did acquire a phenomenal technique through which to express his genius, his earliest operas Die Feen (1834) and Das Liebesverbot (1836) are today largely ignored. He in fact experienced some difficulty in getting his musical career off the ground, taking positions in Würzburg, Königsberg, and Riga before trying his luck in Paris in the early 1840s. There he met with very little success, much to his annoyance, though it was in Paris that he wrote Der fliegende Holländer in 1841, now considered his first mature opera. A longtime fascination with German mythology began to bear fruit in Tannhäuser (1845, revised 1860).
Wagner had also long been preoccupied with politics, and took such an active role in the 1848–1849 revolution in Dresden that, once the revolution failed, he was forced to flee Saxony or face a possible death sentence. His years of exile from Germany were spent mostly in Switzerland, where he busied himself with writing some of his weightiest philosophical tracts such as Oper und Drama, and then produced Lohengrin in 1848. With this opera, he finally began to win wider recognition. In the mid-1850s he started working on what would become Der Ring des Nibelungen—whose music was composed over almost twenty years. Also in the 1850s, he began his romance with Cosima von Bülow, a daughter of Franz Liszt. She was already married to the prominent pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, though that did not stop Wagner from stealing her away and eventually making her his own wife. Thanks in part to his characteristic impecuniousness, Wagner was in a state of despair about his career when in 1864 a miracle occurred: King Ludwig II of Bavaria invited him to come to Munich to rely on royal financial support so he could compose his music in relative security. Also characteristically, Wagner eventually managed to sabotage this incredibly lucrative relationship.