To illuminate the notion of ‘totality’ in Wagner’s conception of the ‘total art work’ or Gesamtkunstwerk, this chapter invokes Schopenhauer’s claim that ordinary life is like a phantasmagoria or dream – a claim that epitomises his interpretation of Kant’s theory of knowledge. The chapter associates the notion of a phantasmagoria with that of a dream, and the latter with the nineteenth-century conception of the unconscious, in particular as presented in Freud’s characterisation of dreams as multidimensional semantic expressions. Wagner’s operas are accordingly considered to be phantasmagorias in this dream-associated sense. Wagner is often appreciated as a forefather of modernism, but by recognising the phantasmagoric, semantically-multidimensional quality of his operas he can be seen further as a forefather of postmodernism.

This chapter explores the Hegelian context of Wagner‘s works by considering the theoretical texts authored by Wagner in advance of and in preparation for his music-dramatical works. The focus is on the philosophical foundations of The Ring of the Nibelung in the politico-philosophical works Wagner wrote in the context of the Dresden uprising of 1849, in which he took part. The first section reviews the extent and import of Wagner’s theoretical writings, including State and Revolution (1849), The Artwork of the Future (1850) and Opera and Drama (1852). The second section examines the philosophical background of the Ring of the Nibelung, moving from the overt influence of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer to its deeper shaping by Hegel‘s philosophy of world history. Special consideration is given to the agreement between Hegel and Wagner in their civico-political understanding of Greek tragedy, especially Sophocles’ Theban plays, Oedipus the King and Antigone.

This chapter provides an outline of Wagner’s relationship with German-language musical criticism of his time from two related angles, i.e. Wagner as the subject and the object of musical criticism. First, I summarise the emergence of professional musical criticism in the 1700s and 1800s, dependent on aesthetic and societal changes, and assess the latest status of relevant source material, which proves problematic both in case of a reliable critical edition of Wagner’s own writings as well as the availability and completeness of nineteenth-century reviews of Wagner’s works. I then proceed to sketching Wagner’s early music reviews of the 1830s and 1840s and discuss his changing attitude towards criticism in general, before tracing broader trends and shifts in critical debates around 1848 as related to Wagner. Finally, I propose the need for a more fine-grained analysis of certain key topics of nineteenth-century musical criticism in terms of ‘camps’ and ‘party lines’.

Wagner worked indefatigably to establish ‘model’ performances of his operas. But he hoped that others would devise better solutions to the huge problems of stage performance that were intrinsic to their conception. His widow Cosima set the clock back by insisting on fidelity to the imperfect ‘models’ that had been left behind. This attitude proved a powerful spur to the theatrical revolutionaries who were knocking on her door. Their revolution was to demonstrate that Wagner’s works could be staged in different ways in different times and that this would be more faithful to his mythopoeic ambitions than Cosima’s deluded strategy.

This chapter attempts to describe the principal landmarks in stage production between Wagner’s inauguration of the Ring in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876 and Patrice Chéreau’s sensational presentation of the same work in the same theatre a hundred years later.

In contrast to a writer like Flaubert or a composer like Brahms, who scoffed at the idea of posterity even reading their letters, Wagner regarded his public persona as integral to his life’s work, not unlike Rousseau in the eighteenth century. But while family origins were a stable reference point for Rousseau, the idea of family for Wagner was more brittle. From his birth in Leipzig during unstable events leading to the 1813 Battle of Leipzig to the successful foundation of a family dynasty in Bayreuth in the 1870s, Wagner’s attitude to the nineteenth-century idea of family veered between open rebellion and full-scale adoption of its secrets and habits. I argue in outline for a better understanding of this ambivalence in Wagner’s thoughts and actions, including its consequences for his heirs and their fated relations with the Third Reich.

The technical limitations of early recording technologies did not deter the nascent gramophone industry from attempting to capture on cylinders the great Wagner singers of the late nineteenth century. As recording technologies improved, with inventions such as the microphone, magnetic tape, the long-playing record, and stereophonic sound, more Wagner, at greater length, was committed to disc and broadcast on the radio. Performance history can be traced through recordings: from who sang what where, to stylistic choices. Yet recordings have also shaped performance styles over time, with certain voices proving more easily reproducible than others and editing enabling a technical perfection rarely attainable live on stage. Listening to Wagner on headphones as one walks through a city or rides a train is far removed from making a pilgrimage to a production at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

Wagner’s relation to Italy and Italian culture has been explored numerous times in relation to his criticisms of Italian opera, where potential reinterpretations of this starkly negative assessment sit alongside analytical readings of Italianate style in certain works. This chapter moves past that tradition, situating biographical and familial contexts for Wagner’s stated dislike of Rossinian opera alongside his deep attachment to Venice, and the progressive importance his works acquired within Italy, evidenced by commercial interests that paired locomotive travel with tours of Lohengrin, Rienzi, and the Ring and the Wagnerian characters that formed advertising emblems for the Liebig meat company.

Dresden, the capital city of the Kingdom of Saxony since 1806, was intimately connected with Wagner’s childhood and his early professional life as Royal court Kapellmeister from 1843 to 1849. The locale is thus both a key site of early life impressions and the site of the composer’s most critical period of creative development, from the premiere of Der fliegende Holländer up to the first conceptual stages of Der Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy. The shared post of Hofkapellmeister involved continual negotiations between a musical-theatrical ancien régime and Wagner’s developing vision of a radical new aesthetic-social order manifested in his own operas, writings and utopian ideals. Wagner’s programming of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at key junctures during the later period of his Kapellmeistership and the burning of the ‘old’ (Pöppelmann) court theatre during the May 1849 insurrection are read as symbolic of a key transition in Wagner’s life and artistic career.

Wagner’s project for the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth also established ‘the Bayreuth idea’, in which festival visitors were to participate directly in the performances. Initially, an explicit separation of art and politics anchored this separation, yet later ideologies came to influences the Bayreuth circle, and in turn, the Festival itself. Two are examined in this chapter, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (in relation to Cosima), and Adolf Hitler (in relation to Winifred), alongside the Festival in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The first of Wagner’s visits to London, in 1839, failed to secure the hoped-for performance of his Rule Britannia overture. He was also unable to meet Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, on whose Rienzi novel he had designs.

The second visit, in 1855, was made to conduct eight concerts for the Philharmonic Society, but Wagner fell foul of the conservative nature of the society’s programming, of old-fashioned performing practices in the country, and of the more reactionary members of the London press.

The third visit, in 1877, was intended to defray the deficit of the inaugural Bayreuth Festival with a series of concerts in the Royal Albert Hall. Economically the project misfired, but it sparked interest in his work among leading musicians, artists and intellectuals. It also helped pave the way for the surge of Wagnerism that would grip the arts in England at the close of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

This chapter addresses the political and intellectual context for Wagner’s revolutionary socialism. The nineteenth century stood in the light and shadow of the French Revolution, emboldened and fated to revisit and to relive many of its questions and practices. Wagner’s life mixed revolutionary theory and practice: in the Dresden uprising of 1849, but also in its ‘Vormärz’ prologue and in its apparently counter-revolutionary aftermath. Wagner experienced revolution on at least three geographical levels, European, German, and Saxon, the third receiving particular attention here. The focus is on Wagner’s most unambiguously revolutionary period, the 1840s and early 1850s, yet these ideas continued to play out in life, thought, and dramatic oeuvre: not only until completion of the Ring in 1874, Wagner’s revolutionary ‘fire cure’ reaching fulfilment in the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung, but in Parsifal and beyond. Earlier themes did not go unchanged; they provided shifting foundations for further dramatic exploration.

When Wagner was born in 1813, Germany did not exist. Saxony was part of Napoleon’s ‘Confederation of the Rhine’, a collection of puppet-states. By the time he died, the German Empire was the most powerful and prosperous state in continental Europe. This sensational transformation was marked by periodic domestic upheaval (the revolutions of 1830 and 1848–9), a demographic explosion, an industrial revolution and three victorious wars for Prussia (against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870). The accompanying political, social, and cultural changes were on a commensurate scale. Nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and political Catholicism all emerged as mass movements, responding to radical changes in the public sphere driven by urbanisation, mass literacy and a communications revolution. By the time Wagner died in 1883, Germany had changed more than during the previous millennium.

Wagner’s early compositional training is seldom examined, perhaps because of his unambiguous claim in 1851 to be an autodidact, taught only by ‘life, art and myself’. Yet Wagner’s work with Christian Müller and particularly with Theodor Weilig on early works and in abstract skills (notably counterpoint) reveal various dependencies. Wanger’s shifting attitude towards this period of training sits alongside his choice of more public mentors, in Beethoven and Weber, whose works he studied and arranged.

Richard Wagner’s musical and prose works are shot through with ideas, imagery, and speculation relating to race. Given the influence of racial theorising on almost every area of nineteenth-century European thought and culture, this is hardly surprising. Yet Wagner did not just absorb theories of race: he actively disseminated them, a fact that remains a troubling, if unavoidable part of his legacy. This chapter provides a selective overview of the history of scientific racism in Europe (especially Germany) from the Enlightenment era to the early twentieth century, focusing on the intersections of racial theory with aesthetics, comparative philology, and religious ideologies, including antisemitism. Special attention is devoted to Arthur de Gobineau’s influence on Wagner’s late essays, and the impact of those writings on the Bayreuth Circle, including Houston Stewart Chamberlain.