Richard Wagner (born at Leipsic, May 22, 1813, died at Venice, Feb. 13, 1883) was one of the great geniuses of music and the mightiest master of musical drama that ever lived. For many years his works were the subject of bitter differences of opinion. Persons educated to love the old Italian operas of the Neapolitan school, which were simply entertaining, rebelled against Wagner's demand that the lyric drama be taken as the most serious of art works. Yet, as I shall show, he was simply embodying in modern music the principles of Peri, Lulli, Rameau, and Gluck. He was accused of being an iconoclast, a destroyer of all the laws laid down by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, yet he was their most enthusiastic admirer and understood them as few other musicians have done. France, England, and Italy long refused to receive his works, though they were successful in America from the outset. But his principles carried the day, and now Paris vies with London in its admiration of his works, and they have even been applauded in Italy. His first grand opera, "Rienzi," produced in 1842, was an attempt to combine the styles of Meyerbeer and some others in a work built on the old Meyerbeerian plan. It was fairly well received and remains to-day a good work of its school. But it is not in the characteristic style of Wagner. The works which have made him famous are: "The Flying Dutchman" (1843), "Tannhäuser" (1845), "Lohengrin" (1850), "Tristan und Isolde" (1865), "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" (1868), "Der Ring des Nibelungen"--a "tetralogy" consisting of four operas, "Das Rheingold," "Die Walküre," "Siegfried," and "Die Götterdämmerung"--(1876), and "Parsifal" (1882). A great deal that is confusing has been written about the Wagner system. Indeed Wagner's works have been explained so much that some persons have become convinced that they are quite beyond comprehension. Those who have attentively read the present volume should have no difficulty in understanding the brief account of the Wagner system now to be given, because that system is simply a new application of the original principles of Peri. Three salient resemblances to the Peri scheme of opera are to be found in the Wagner plan: first, the attempt to produce an art-form which should resemble the Greek drama; second, the employment of mythical or legendary stories as subjects for librettos; and third the construction of a form of recitative for the dramatic declamation of the text.