Born in Leipzig, Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theorist and poet whose operas and music had a revolutionary influence on the course of Western music.

Wagner's single-handed creation of musical drama was astounding considering the scale and scope of his art; his dream was the pursuit of an art form in which music and drama fuse together to become one. Among his major works are The Flying Dutchman (1843), Tannhäuser (1845), Tristan und Isolde (1865), Parsifal (1882), and his great tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelung (1869–76).

Although he worked primarily with opera, there is hardly an area of music he did not touch with his extended melodies, the chromatisism that finally broke the boundaries of tonality or the deep psychological and philosophical undertones of his music. Wagner's influence, as a musical dramatist and as a composer, was a powerful one. Although few operatic composers have been able to follow him in providing their own, full researched librettos, all have profited from his reform in the matter of giving dramatic depth, continuity, and cohesion to their works.

In the purely musical field, Wagner's influence was even more far-reaching. He developed such a wide expressive range that he was able to make each of his works inhabit a unique emotional world of its own, and, in doing so, he raised the melodic and harmonic style of German music to what many regard as its highest emotional and sensuous intensity. Much of the subsequent history of music stems from him, either by extension of his discoveries or reaction against them.