10 things you didn't know about Wagner

Despite his stern and serious appearance in surviving photographs, Wagner had a turbulent and dramatic love life, and had a reputation as a serial womaniser. We've always said that looks can be deceiving!

Wagner designed the Bayreuth Festival Theatre, which opened for the premiere of his four-opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in 1876. Unusually, Wagner insisted that the orchestra pit in his theatre be hidden, to ensure that the audience would be looking at the singers and the drama onstage, and not be distracted by the orchestra.

The famous proverb 'the opera ain't over 'til the fat lady sings' is a reference to the valkyrie Brünnhilde’s aria in the closing scene of Götterdämmerung. Lasting for almost 20 minutes, it signals the end of Wagner's epic Ring Cycle.

Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. He believed in 'Gesamtkunstwerk': the total integration of music and drama.

Wagner popularised the use of leitmotifs — short, recurring musical phrases associated with a particular person, place, or idea. Leitmotifs are a common feature in modern cinema scores, including those of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings film series, and — most famously — Darth Vader's Imperial March in Star Wars.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle clocks in at a whopping 18 hours, and took 27 years for him to write! The Ring Cycle is technically four separate operas: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdamerung.

Austrian conductor Felix Josef von Mottel had a heart attack and died while conducting his 100th performance of Wagner’s five-hour epic Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1911. Wagner opera is not for the faint hearted!

Wagner ran up huge debts in his early 20s, and hatched a plan to flee his creditors in Riga by sailing to Paris. However his journey was hindered by storms and high seas, and a trip that was expected to take eight days ended up taking three weeks! This stormy sea crossing was the inspiration for Wagner's Romantic masterpiece, Der fliegende Holländer.

Warner Bros. Cartoons' 1957 classic 'What’s Opera, Doc?' featured Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny in a parody of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The cartoon is widely regarded as American animator Chuck Jones's masterpiece, and in 1994 was voted #1 in a list of the 50 Greatest Cartoons.

Wagner's thrilling, epic and dramatic music is featured in many famous films, including 'The Great Dictator' by Charlie Chaplin, 'Murder!' by Alfred Hitchcock, and 'Apocalypse Now' by Francis Ford Coppola.