Wagner, Adolf Heinrich Gotthilf, 1835-1917, German economist and socialist, studied at Göttingen and Heidelberg. He taught economics at several universities before becoming professor of economics at the Univ. of Berlin, a post he held for many years. He was an authority on banking and public finance and was a member of the Christian Socialist party. He promulgated a theory, known as Wagner's law, that governments increasingly assume responsibility for the economic welfare of their peoples.

Wagner, Honus, 1874-1955, American baseball player, b. Mansfield (now Carnegie), Pa. His real name was John Peter Wagner. He played semiprofessional ball in Ohio and was given a contract (1896) by the Paterson, N.J., club before entering (1897) major-league play with the Louisville (Ky.) club of the National League. He played infield and outfield positions, and when Pittsburgh replaced (1900) Louisville in the National League, Hans (a nickname also much used) soon anchored himself at shortstop with the Pirates. Wagner, called the Flying Dutchman by his fans, came to be regarded as one of the outstanding players of baseball. He led the National League in batting eight times (1900, 1903-4, 1906-9, 1911), had a lifetime batting average of .329 (batting over .300 in 17 consecutive years), made 3,430 base hits, scored close to 1,800 runs, and played in 2,785 games. Wagner, agile though massively built, excelled at fielding; he also led the National League five times in stolen bases. In 1917 he retired from baseball, but returned to the Pirates as coach (1933-52). In 1936 he was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Wagner, Otto, 1841-1918, Austrian architect. A structural rationalism was exhibited in his stations for the Vienna city railroad, built in the 1890s. His later works, showing an individual and monumental style, include the Vienna Postal Savings Building and the Steinhof Church (1906). He became a professor at the Imperial Academy of Art in 1894. His many executed designs, his projects, his teaching, and his Moderne Architektur, of which there were four editions (1896-1914), were all widely influential both in Austria and abroad.

Wagner, Richard, 1813-83, German composer, b. Leipzig.

Life and Work

Wagner was reared in a theatrical family, had a classical education, and began composing at 17. He studied harmony and the works of Beethoven and in 1833 became chorus master of the theater at Würzburg, the first of a series of theatrical positions. Die Feen (composed 1833), his first opera, was in the German romantic tradition begun by Weber; Das Liebesverbot (1835-36) demonstrated his assimilation of the Italian style. In Paris he completed Rienzi (1838-40) but was unable to have it performed there. Its production in Dresden in 1842 was highly successful, and in 1843 Wagner was made musical director of the Dresden theater.

Der Fliegende Holländer (1841) was less successful. It was based on Heine's version of the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a legendary phantom ship, and it foreshadows the idea, developed in Tannhäuser (1843-44) and prevalent in later works, of redemption by love. Tannhäuser, based in part on the actual life of Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin (1846-48) brought the German romantic opera to culmination. In Lohengrin, Wagner for the first time is more interested in his characters as symbols than as actual personages in a drama.

Wagner participated in the Revolution of 1848, fled Dresden, and with the help of Liszt escaped to Switzerland, where he stayed eight years. There he wrote essays, including Oper und Drama (1851), in which he began to articulate aesthetic principles that would guide his subsequent work.

Der Ring des Nibelungen (1853-74), his tetralogy based on the Nibelungenlied (see under Nibelungen), embodies the most complete adherence to his stated principles. In 1857, having completed the composition of the first two works of the cycle, Das Rheingold (1853-54) and Die Walküre (1854-56), and two acts of Siegfried (1856-69), Wagner laid the Ring aside without hope of ever seeing it performed and composed Tristan und Isolde (1857-59) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1862-67), his only comic opera. Tristan, based on the legend of Tristram and Isolde, was so utterly in opposition to the operatic conventions of the day that it required the intercession and support of Louis II of Bavaria to have it produced (1865) in Munich.

In 1872 Wagner moved to Bayreuth, where in 1874 he completed the third act of Siegfried and all of Götterdämmerung, the last work of the Ring cycle. There he was able to build a theater, Das Festspielhaus, adequate for the proper performance of his works, in which the complete Ring was presented in 1876. At Bayreuth, Wagner entertained the great musicians of his day. Parsifal (1877-82) was his last work.

Wagner indulged in much financial foolishness and in the end enjoyed considerable critical success. Although during his lifetime opposition to him and to his ideas went to fantastic lengths, Wagner's operas held a position of complete dominance in the next generation, retaining their enormous popularity in the 20th cent.

Assessment

Wagner's operas represent the fullest musical and theatrical expression of German romanticism. His ideas exerted a profound influence on the work of later composers. For the principle of sharply differentiated recitative and aria, Wagner substituted his "endless melody" and his Sprechgesang [sung speech], calling his operas music-dramas to signify the complete union of music and drama that he sought to achieve. He thought that music could not develop further with the resources it had employed since Beethoven's time, and he maintained that the music of the future must be part of a synthesis of the arts.

Adapting German mythology to his dramatic requirements, Wagner applied to it an increased emotional intensity, derived from the harmonic complexity and power of Beethoven's music, to produce what he termed a "complete art work." He achieved a remarkable dramatic unity due in part to his development of the leitmotif, a brief passage or fragment of music used to characterize an episode or person and brought in at will to recall it to the audience. At the same time, Wagner greatly increased the flexibility and variety of his orchestral accompaniments. He was responsible for the productions of his works from libretti to details of sets and costumes.

Family Members

Wagner's second wife, Cosima Wagner, 1837-1930, was the daughter of Liszt and the comtesse d'Agoult. From 1857 to 1870 she was the wife of Hans von Bülow. In 1870 she married Wagner. After his death she was largely responsible for the continuing fame of the Bayreuth festivals.

Their son, Siegfried Wagner, 1869-1930, composed 11 operas, orchestral and chamber music, and some vocal pieces, but was known chiefly as a conductor. With his wife, Winifred Williams Klindworth, he directed the Bayreuth festivals, a tradition carried on by their sons Wieland and Wolfgang from 1951 until 2008 (jointly until Wieland's death in 1967) and Wolfgang's daughters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner, from 2008.

Wagner, Robert Ferdinand, 1877-1953, American legislator, b. Germany. He arrived with his family in the United States in 1885 and grew up in poor surroundings in New York City. After he received his law degree, he became attached to Tammany Hall and was elected (1904) to the New York state assembly. In the state senate (1910-18), Wagner was noted for his investigations of factory conditions; as justice (1919-26) of the state supreme court, he did much to protect the rights of labor. He served (1927-49) in the U.S. Senate, where he was one of the chief leaders in directing New Deal legislation, particularly the acts establishing the National Recovery Administration (1933), the National Labor Relations Board (1935), social security, and the U.S. Housing Authority (1937). In the 1940s he sponsored bills calling for the extension of federal housing. He resigned from the Senate in 1949 because of ill health. His son, Robert Ferdinand Wagner, Jr., 1910—91, b. New York City, entered politics with his father's encouragement. He was a member of the New York state assembly (1938-41), and after service in the air force in World War II, he became successively New York City tax commissioner (1946), commissioner of housing and buildings (1947), chairman of the City Planning Commission (1948), and president of the borough of Manhattan (1949). Elected mayor of New York in 1953, he was overwhelmingly reelected in 1957. Wagner broke (1961) with the Tammany organization after long association and, after defeating the organization candidate in the primary election, won a third term as mayor. In 1965 he chose not to run for reelection. He was appointed (1968) U.S. Ambassador to Spain, but he resigned in Feb., 1969, and ran unsuccessfully in the New York Democratic mayoral primary in June of that year.

orig. Julius Wagner, knight von Jauregg

(born March 7, 1857, Wels, Austria—died Sept. 27, 1940, Vienna) Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist. Knowing that malaria could be controlled with quinine and having observed that patients with some nervous disorders improved after infections with fever, he induced malaria to treat syphilis patients who had central nervous system disorders. For thus controlling an incurable fatal disease, he was awarded a 1927 Nobel Prize. Though antibiotics replaced this treatment for syphilis, it led to the development of fever therapy.

Learn more about Wagner-Jauregg, Julius with a free trial on Britannica.com.

(born June 8, 1877, Nastätten, Hesse-Nassau, Ger.—died May 4, 1953, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. politician. He immigrated with his family to New York City in 1885. He became active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the state legislature (1904–19) and as a justice of the state court of appeals (1919–26). In the U.S. Senate (1927–49), he became an ally of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt and introduced New Deal labour and social-reform legislation, including the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), the National Labor Relations Act (known as the Wagner Act), and the Social Security Act. He cosponsored the Wagner-Steagall Act (1937), which created the U.S. Housing Authority. His son, Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (1910–91), served as mayor of New York (1954–65).

Learn more about Wagner, Robert F(erdinand) with a free trial on Britannica.com.

(born May 22, 1813, Leipzig, Ger.—died Feb. 13, 1883, Venice, Italy) German composer. His childhood was divided between Dresden and Leipzig, where he had his first composition lessons; his teacher refused payment because of his talent. His first opera, The Fairies (1834), was followed by The Ban on Love (1836); the premiere performance was so unprepared that the event was a fiasco, and he henceforth determined not to settle for modest productions. The success of Rienzi (1840) led him to be more adventurous in The Flying Dutchman (1843) and even more so in Tannhäuser (1845). Caught up in the political turmoil of 1848, he was forced to flee Dresden for Zürich. During this enforced vacation, he wrote influential essays, asserting (following G.W.F. Hegel) that music had reached a limit after Ludwig van Beethoven and that the “artwork of the future” would unite music and theatre in a Gesamtkunstwerk (“total artwork”). In 1850 he saw Lohengrin produced. He had begun his most ambitious work, The Ring of the Nibelung, a four-opera cycle. The need for large-scale unity brought him to the concept of the leitmotiv. He ceased work on the Ring's third opera, Siegfried, in the throes of an adulterous love with Mathilde Wesendonk and wrote an opera of forbidden love, Tristan und Isolde (1859), which also seemed to break the bonds of tonality. He published the Ring librettos in 1863, with a plea for financial support, and Louis II of Bavaria responded, inviting Wagner to complete the work in Munich. From the late 1860s to the early 1880s, Wagner completed work on Die Meistersinger, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, and the long-deferred Parsifal, as he also oversaw the building of the great festival theatre at Bayreuth (1872–76) that would be dedicated to his operas. His astonishing works made Wagner one of the most influential and consequential figures in the history of Western music and, indeed, of Western culture. In the late 20th century his undoubted musical stature was challenged somewhat by the strongly racist and anti-Semitic views expressed in his writings, and evidence of anti-Semitism in his operas was increasingly documented.

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(born July 13, 1841, Penzing, near Vienna, Austrian Empire—died April 11, 1918, Vienna) Austrian architect and teacher. In 1893 his general plan (not executed) for Vienna won a major competition, and in 1894 he was appointed professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. As a teacher, Wagner soon broke with tradition by insisting on function, material, and structure as the bases of architectural design. Among his notable buildings, all in the Art Nouveau style, are a number of stations for the City Railway of Vienna (1894–97) and the Postal Savings Bank (1904–06). The latter, which had little decoration, is recognized as a milestone in the history of modern architecture, particularly for the curving glass roof of its central hall. Wagner's lectures were published in 1895 as Moderne Architektur.

Learn more about Wagner, Otto with a free trial on Britannica.com.

orig. John Peter Wagner

(born Feb. 24, 1874, Mansfield, Pa., U.S.—died Dec. 6, 1955, Carnegie) U.S. baseball player. Wagner played principally for the Pittsburgh Pirates (1900–17) and coached the team from 1933 to 1951. The right-handed hitter led the National League in batting average in eight seasons (1900, 1903–04, 1906–09, 1911) and in stolen bases five seasons. His total of 252 three-base hits remains a National League record. Nicknamed the “Flying Dutchman” for his speed, Wagner is considered one of the greatest shortstops and all-around players in baseball history.

Learn more about Wagner, Honus with a free trial on Britannica.com.

(born June 8, 1877, Nastätten, Hesse-Nassau, Ger.—died May 4, 1953, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. politician. He immigrated with his family to New York City in 1885. He became active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the state legislature (1904–19) and as a justice of the state court of appeals (1919–26). In the U.S. Senate (1927–49), he became an ally of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt and introduced New Deal labour and social-reform legislation, including the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), the National Labor Relations Act (known as the Wagner Act), and the Social Security Act. He cosponsored the Wagner-Steagall Act (1937), which created the U.S. Housing Authority. His son, Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (1910–91), served as mayor of New York (1954–65).

Learn more about Wagner, Robert F(erdinand) with a free trial on Britannica.com.

(born July 13, 1841, Penzing, near Vienna, Austrian Empire—died April 11, 1918, Vienna) Austrian architect and teacher. In 1893 his general plan (not executed) for Vienna won a major competition, and in 1894 he was appointed professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. As a teacher, Wagner soon broke with tradition by insisting on function, material, and structure as the bases of architectural design. Among his notable buildings, all in the Art Nouveau style, are a number of stations for the City Railway of Vienna (1894–97) and the Postal Savings Bank (1904–06). The latter, which had little decoration, is recognized as a milestone in the history of modern architecture, particularly for the curving glass roof of its central hall. Wagner's lectures were published in 1895 as Moderne Architektur.

Learn more about Wagner, Otto with a free trial on Britannica.com.

orig. Julius Wagner, knight von Jauregg

(born March 7, 1857, Wels, Austria—died Sept. 27, 1940, Vienna) Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist. Knowing that malaria could be controlled with quinine and having observed that patients with some nervous disorders improved after infections with fever, he induced malaria to treat syphilis patients who had central nervous system disorders. For thus controlling an incurable fatal disease, he was awarded a 1927 Nobel Prize. Though antibiotics replaced this treatment for syphilis, it led to the development of fever therapy.

Learn more about Wagner-Jauregg, Julius with a free trial on Britannica.com.

orig. John Peter Wagner

(born Feb. 24, 1874, Mansfield, Pa., U.S.—died Dec. 6, 1955, Carnegie) U.S. baseball player. Wagner played principally for the Pittsburgh Pirates (1900–17) and coached the team from 1933 to 1951. The right-handed hitter led the National League in batting average in eight seasons (1900, 1903–04, 1906–09, 1911) and in stolen bases five seasons. His total of 252 three-base hits remains a National League record. Nicknamed the “Flying Dutchman” for his speed, Wagner is considered one of the greatest shortstops and all-around players in baseball history.

Learn more about Wagner, Honus with a free trial on Britannica.com.

Wagner is a city in Charles Mix County, South Dakota, United States. The population was 1,675 at the 2000 census.

Geography

Wagner is located at (43.080349, -98.294799).

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 2.7 square miles (7.0 km²), of which, 2.7 square miles (7.0 km²) of it is land and 0.37% is water.

Wagner has been assigned the ZIP code 57380 and the FIPS place code 68020.

Demographics

As of the census of 2000, there were 1,675 people, 678 households, and 406 families residing in the city. The population density was 619.4 people per square mile (239.5/km²). There were 747 housing units at an average density of 276.2/sq mi (106.8/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 63.40% White, 0.24% African American, 34.33% Native American, 0.06% Asian, 0.48% from other races, and 1.49% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.99% of the population.

There were 678 households out of which 28.0% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 40.4% were married couples living together, 14.6% had a female householder with no husband present, and 40.0% were non-families. 37.0% of all households were made up of individuals and 21.5% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.37 and the average family size was 3.11.

In the city the population was spread out with 28.5% under the age of 18, 5.4% from 18 to 24, 22.9% from 25 to 44, 19.5% from 45 to 64, and 23.7% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 40 years. For every 100 females there were 80.7 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 74.6 males.

The median income for a household in the city was $21,863, and the median income for a family was $28,021. Males had a median income of $26,216 versus $17,333 for females. The per capita income for the city was $12,207. About 20.5% of families and 25.1% of the population were below the poverty line, including 30.6% of those under age 18 and 28.6% of those age 65 or over.

References

External links