Richard Wagner
Influence on music

Wagner's later musical style introduced new ideas in harmony, melodic process (leitmotif) and operatic structure. Notably from Tristan und Isolde onwards, he explored the limits of the traditional tonal system, which gave keys and chords their identity, pointing the way to atonality in the 20th century. Some music historians date the beginning of modern classical music to the first notes of Tristan, which include the so-called Tristan chord.

Wagner inspired great devotion. For a long period, many composers were inclined to align themselves with or against Wagner's music. Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf were greatly indebted to him, as were César Franck, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, Jules Massenet, Richard Strauss, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Pfitzner and many others. Gustav Mahler was devoted to Wagner and his music: he sought him out on his 1875 visit to Vienna at the age of 15, and became a renowned Wagner conductor; his compositions were seen by Richard Taruskin as extending Wagner's "maximalization" of "the temporal and the sonorous" in music to the world of the symphony. The harmonic revolutions of Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg (both of whose oeuvres contain examples of tonal and atonal modernism) have often been traced back to Tristan and Parsifal. The Italian form of operatic realism known as verismo owed much to the Wagnerian concept of musical form.

Wagner made a major contribution to the principles and practice of conducting. His essay "About Conducting" (1869) advanced Hector Berlioz 's technique of conducting and claimed that conducting was a means by which a musical work could be re-interpreted, rather than simply a mechanism for achieving orchestral unison. He exemplified this approach in his own conducting, which was significantly more flexible than the disciplined approach of Felix Mendelssohn; in his view, this also justified practices that were later frowned upon, such as the rewriting of scores. Wilhelm Furtwängler felt that Wagner and Bülow, through their interpretative approach, inspired a whole new generation of conductors (including Furtwängler himself).

Among those from the late 20th century and beyond claiming inspiration from Wagner's music are the German band Rammstein; Jim Steinman, who wrote songs for Meat Loaf, Bonnie Tyler, Air Supply, Celine Dion and others; and the electronic composer Klaus Schulze, whose 1975 album Timewind consists of two 30-minute tracks, "Bayreuth Return" and "Wahnfried 1883". Joey DeMaio of the band Manowar has described Wagner as "the father of heavy metal ". The Slovenian group Laibach created the 2009 suite VolksWagner, using material from Wagner's operas. Phil Spector 's Wall of Sound recording technique was, it has been claimed, heavily influenced by Wagner.
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