Wagner: where to start with his music

The German composer was the most influential musician of his era after Beethoven, reinventing opera and leading the way to musical modernism – yet his music’s association with the Third Reich leaves him with a complex legacy

Of all composers, Wagner remains the most controversial. No other classical musician arouses such fanaticism, for and against. Almost all of his important works are operas, a form that he reinvented, and the main ones are written in an unbroken span of music. They are also very long.

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