One of the most influential of all classical composers, Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813, and grew up enthralled by the theater (his stepfather was an actor). Wagner’s formidable ambition secured him conducting positions in opera houses first in Magdeburg and Riga, then in Dresden, where the powerful, dark-toned Romanticism of Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman, 1841) and Tannhäuser (1845) began to spread his name. After composing Lohengrin (1848), he was involved in the failed Dresden revolution in 1849 and fled to Switzerland. There he worked on the text and music of four “music dramas” comprising an epic cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s Ring). With the first two operas, Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold, 1854) and Die Walküre (The Valkyrie, 1856), finished, Wagner paused work on the third, Siegfried (completed 1871), to compose instead Tristan und Isolde (1859), based on Arthurian legend, but the music’s chromatic intensity and technical difficulty at first prevented performances. King Ludwig II of Bavaria had Tristan und Isolde (1865) and the comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, 1868) staged in Munich. Moving to Bayreuth in northern Bavaria, Wagner oversaw the construction (underwritten by Ludwig) of a purpose-built festival theater for the Ring; with the cycle’s fourth opera, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods, 1874) completed, the entire work was performed in 1876. In 1882 Parsifal, inspired by the medieval Grail legend, was premiered at Bayreuth, before Wagner’s death in Venice the following year.