Otto Wagner

Otto Koloman Wagner (German: [ˈɔto ˈvaːɡnɐ]; 13 July 1841 – 11 April 1918) was an Austro-Hungarian architect and urban planner, known for his lasting impact on the appearance of his home town Vienna, to which he contributed many landmarks.

Life and career

Wagner was born in Penzing, a district in Vienna. He was the son of Suzanne (née von Helffenstorffer-Hueber) and Rudolf Simeon Wagner, a notary to the Royal Hungarian Court. He studied in Berlin and Vienna. In 1864, he started designing his first buildings in the historicist style. In the mid- and late-1880s, like many of his contemporaries in Germany (such as Constantin Lipsius, Richard Streiter and Georg Heuser), Switzerland (Hans Auer and Alfred Friedrich Bluntschli) and France (Paul Sédille), Wagner became a proponent of Architectural Realism. It was a theoretical position that enabled him to mitigate the reliance on historical forms. In 1894, when he became Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, he was well advanced on his path toward a more radical opposition to the prevailing currents of historicist architecture.

Otto

Otto is a masculine German given name. It originates as an Old High German short form (variants Audo, Odo, Udo) of Germanic names beginning in aud-, an element meaning "wealth, prosperity".

The name is recorded from the 7th century (Odo, son of Uro, courtier of Sigebert III). It was the name of three 10th-century German kings, the first of whom was Otto I the Great, the first Holy Roman Emperor, founder of the Ottonian dynasty.

The Gothic form of the prefix was auda- (as in e.g. Audaþius), the Anglo-Saxon form was ead- (as in e.g. Eadmund), the Old Norse form was auð-.

The given name Otis arose from an English surname, which was in turn derived from Ode, a variant form of Odo, Otto.

Due to Otto von Bismarck, the given name Otto was strongly associated with the German Empire in the later 19th century. It was comparatively frequently given in the United States (presumably in German American families) during the 1880s to 1890s, remaining in the top 100 most popular masculine given names in the US throughout 1880–1898, but its popularity decreased significantly after 1900 with increasing anti-German sentiment leading up to World War I; it fell below rank 200 in 1919, below rank 500 in 1947, and below rank 1000 in 1975; it re-entered the top-1000 most popular given names in the US only in the 2010s, ranking 696th as of 2013.

Savings bank

A savings bank is a financial institution whose primary purpose is accepting savings deposits and paying interest on those deposits.

They originated in Europe during the 18th century with the aim of providing access to savings products to all levels in the population. Often associated with social good these early banks were often designed to encourage low income people to save money and have access to banking services. They were set up by governments or by or socially committed groups or organisations such as with credit unions. The structure and legislation took many different forms in different countries over the 20th century.

The advent of internet banking at the end of the 20th century saw a new phase in savings banks with the online savings bank that paid higher levels of interest in return for clients only having access over the web.

History

In Europe, savings banks originated in the 19th or sometimes even the 18th century. Their original objective was to provide easily accessible savings products to all strata of the population. In some countries, savings banks were created on public initiative, while in others, socially committed individuals created foundations to put in place the necessary infrastructure.

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (/ˈvɑːɡnər/; German: [ˈʁiçaʁt ˈvaːɡnɐ]; 22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is primarily known for his operas (or, as some of his later 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 Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama, and which was announced in a series of essays between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).

His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas or plot elements. His advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly influenced the development of classical music. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music.