The BR-KLASSIK WISSEN series has already dealt with outstanding works and composers from the history of music three times. After Wieland Schmid’s extensive introductions to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and St. Matthew Passion, Jörg Handstein is now working with Richard Wagner after his successful audio biography on Gustav Mahler.
Wagner’s life, which leads from Leipzig via Riga, Paris, Dresden, Zurich and Italy to Paris, Munich, Bayreuth and Venice, is full of dramatic climaxes that a nineteenth-century novelist could hardly have imagined more colorful and exciting: From the adventurous flight from the creditors from Riga to the barricade fighting of the revolution of 1848/49 in Dresden to the surprising rescue from imminent guilty imprisonment by King Ludwig II, who enabled him to realize his festival idea.
