American Toby Jug Museum 

Richard Wagner character jug produced by Meriann Original of Japan in 1964. Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas". Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionized opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesize the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realized these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).