This chapter explores the tension between mobility and immobility in the performance of Wagner’s works in the late nineteenth century, highlighting how their production beyond Europe (often by touring companies) and the growth of global Wagnerism took place alongside the growth of the Bayreuth enterprise, which increasingly fixed them in place, at least on an imaginative level. The chapter touches on key premiere dates for Wagner’s works beyond Europe, as well as Wagner’s own engagement with projects to present his works globally. It then turns to the touring opera companies that took Wagnerian music drama on the road (or rail, or wave), examining the challenges they faced in doing so.

Richard Wagner’s music and the way he created it are closely interconnected to the vocal delivery of the actors and singers of his childhood and youth. Or to put it more precisely: during the time of his socialisation in early nineteenth-century Saxony, there was practically no difference between the profession of an actor and a dramatic singer. The same people performed in spoken drama and music theatre what led to a declamatory style of singing that was typical for German music theatre. This style shaped Wagner’s Sprechgesang, both considering its structure and its genesis. He did as a composer what the dramatic actors of his time whose performances shifted between singing and speech did on stage: he developed his vocal lines out of declamation and created different degrees of more or less speech-like passages. The latter poses a challenge for the historically informed performance practice of his works.

Since the inaugural Bayreuth Festival of 1876, Wagner has been widely considered an innovator of the illusionist stage who foreshadowed twentieth- and twenty-first-century immersive multimedia. Yet a sole focus on his stage-technological achievements glosses over many revealing ironies. Not only was Wagner deeply ambivalent about technological progress; but he conceived of his Gesamtkunstwerk as an aid to overcome what he perceived as the socio-culturally alienating effects of industrialisation. This chapter illuminates Wagner’s ultimately fraught strategy, in both theory and practice, to advance and simultaneously conceal his stage machinery. Although pushed to new extremes, Bayreuth’s stage-technical solutions for the particularly challenging Ring cycle were firmly based on contemporary practices; moreover, they fell far behind Wagner’s idealist visions. In the end, the inevitable technologisation of Wagner’s stage presented a critical predicament in his aspiration to outdo both opera and the machine.

The chapter offers a focused historical account of Anglophone analysis of Wagner’s music, particularly that of the Ring, beginning with the work of the British Wagnerians Ernest Newman and Deryck Cooke, and continuing to that of more recent American scholars such as Robert Bailey and Warren Darcy. The central task of the chapter is to trace the analytical approaches of these and other scholars to three critical elements of Wagner’s music: leitmotiv, tonality and harmony, and form. The scene between Siegfried and the Rhinemaidens in Act 3, Scene I of Götterdämmerung serves as an example of how these analytical approaches can work, either separately or together, to enrich our understanding of Wagner’s musical practice in his penultimate opera.

This chapter locates Wagner’s response to Aeschylus in the Ring in the context of the three great theatrical responses to Greek tragedy which preceded his; Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina, and Grillparzer’s Medea. The relationship of human beings to fate, and the power of the curse, are explored as themes which all four works have in common.

Cosima Liszt, daughter of the composer Franz Liszt and Marie d´Agoult, rushed into an unsuccessful marriage with the composer and conductor Hans von Bülow. She wrote articles and visited cultural highlights in Berlin. In Munich 1864 she engaged in the love affair with Richard Wagner and a year later the child Isolde was born. She married him in 1870 in order to have the birth of Siegfried legalised and asked Bülow for a divorce. Her meticulous diaries of her life with him are a vital biographical source, although in them she perpetuates the traditional narrative of the autonomous male genius. After his death she took over the direction of the Bayreuth Festspiele and developed a style committed to Wagner’s performance practice. She excelled in matters of gesture, fusing singing aesthetic, gesture, and word/music relationship.

Wagner’s relationship with Paris was a career-long struggle with a highly developed music industry that aligned badly with his aesthetic priorities. On repeat visits for what we would now call career networking, he rented in marginal areas of Paris, tried to get on the publishing and performance ladder, courted imperial favour, conducted concerts of his own works, and finally succeeded, briefly, in getting an opera staged at the Paris Opéra (the ill-fated Tannhäuser in 1861). Thereafter, Wagner cults – always contested – began in the concert hall, where anything from riots to hushed listening greeted programmed excerpts of his works. Cultishness intensified after his death – in the press, in artistic and high-bourgeois salons, and finally at the Opéra. This chapter explores the spaces, networks, and contexts within which Wagner attempted to carve out a Paris career which allowed the full concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk to blossom only posthumously.

This chapter explores Wagner’s rhetorical elisions across three substantives essential to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptual history: nature, culture, and humanity. It begins by explicating Wagner’s engagement with contemporary philosophies of language, cognition, and climate in developing the racialised identities and implications of these interlocked categories. Disclosing Wagner’s participation in what philosopher Stephen Haymes describes as an ‘axiological preference for Western “holism” regarding what is valued’, this chapter suggests that his nature-thinking enforced an exclusionary humanism by elevating a Germanic subset of nature, culture, and humanity as solely deserving these monolithic titles.

The chapter concludes by exploring Wagner’s treatment of these categories in his libretti, particularly in Siegfried’s ‘forest murmurs’. Where some stage directors have sought to resuscitate Wagner by suggesting that his environmental imagery is separable from his infamous racism, this chapter ultimately argues that these conceptual paradigms were inextricably entwined, and were part of a synthetic regime of knowledge.

The chapter focuses on two key aspects of Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. First, drawing on Kittler’s account of changing ‘discourse networks’, the cycle is seen (and heard) as a highly media-conscious total work of art that rises from noise into meaning and ultimately returns back to noise. Music and words are able to create and transmit messages by analysing their own technical properties. The second aspect is the modernisation of war. With the help of his Valkyrie daughters, Wagner’s Wotan turns into a modern warlord who no longer bullies unwilling conscripts or mercenaries but instead mobilises the affect of modern soldier-subjects  Wagner’s Siegfried, in turn, embodies military reforms that go by the name of mission tactics. He is the human equivalent of a fully autonomous drone: the new and independently operating soldier or partisan programmed from above to think on his own.

An unofficial ban on Wagner’s music has existed in Israel since Kristallnacht in 1938. This chapter places the ban, its adherents, and its detractors, into the context of the early Zionists during the 1890s, and specifically their relation to Wagner’s music. Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism and author of The Jewish State (1896), wrote of the inspiration he took from Wagner’s music for advancing his project, opening the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 with the overture from Tannhäuser. Wagner’s regeneration writings, the discourse of secular Jews in Vienna in search of ‘the soil’ for an independent state outside Europe, and Nietzsche’s advocacy of freedom from religious or dogmatic identities all combined in unfamiliar ways to advocate a future that abandoned a European past, with Wagner in tacit support.

Locating Wagner’s views about sexuality and social mores in the context of his time, this chapter moves from the opposing arguments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft towards the end of the eighteenth century, through the idealisation of women in the Biedermeier era and the coterminous radical tendencies critical of such moral codes, to nineteenth-century representations in literature (notably the Bürgerliches Trauerspiel or Bourgeois Tragedy) and, at the end of the century, visual art (women as devils, vampires, castrators, or killers).

Documented sexual experience of the time is discussed, as are the grossly exaggerated aspects of Wagner’s own sexual career. Criticism of Wagner for failing, in his works, to abandon the phallocentric matrix of his time is unhistorical, it is argued. And indeed many of Wagner’s heroines exhibit elements of autonomy, agency, or self-determination with the potential for radical change.