The winners (opera)

Die Sieger is an opera about Buddhism planned by Richard Wagner in 1856.

He had already worked out the text for it. However, it was no longer set to music. According to Wagner, the book Introduction à l'histoire du buddhisme indien by Eugène Burnouf (1844) was the model for the plot. The text that Wagner found belongs to the category of 'avadana'. This Sanskrit word denotes heroic and miraculous deeds that Buddha performed during his various incarnations.

From the fall of 1854 Richard Wagner had dealt intensively with Arthur Schopenhauer's main work The World as Will and Idea and at the same time began to be interested in Buddhism.