In his introduction to Wagner in Context, the volume’s editor David Trippett acknowledges what an undertaking it is to try and map the contexts in which the composer – an incorrigibly voracious and omnivorous consumer of ideas – lived his life and produced his works. ‘One would be forgiven for assuming, like [Thomas] Mann,’ he writes, ‘that to map the various contexts of Wagner in 2023 is tantamount to mapping the cultural and intellectual riches of a version of 19th-century Europe itself.’ But map it he and his nearly 40 contributors do, with only minimal recourse to Wagnerian inflation in terms of the book’s length – most volumes in CUP’s series, it seems, are some 50 pages shorter, with fewer chapters.

As Trippett also explains, the remit is to address the context around Wagner and his works – for direct commentary on those, one should look elsewhere. But the array of subjects tackled is dizzying, split into six sections: ‘Place’; ‘People’; ‘Politics, Ideas and Bodies’; ‘Life, Language and the Ancient World’; ‘Music and Performance’; and ‘Reception’. The first of these is probably the most straightforward, its excellent first three chapters (covering Paris, Dresden, and Zurich and Lucerne) even charting a loose chronological progression. Chapters on Italy, London and Bayreuth further fill out the picture, while those on America and ‘Spain in the Cosmos of Richard Wagner’ – covering two countries he never visited – are inevitably a little less concrete, the former unfocused, the latter essentially a summary of his attitudes to Cervantes and Calderón.

The nature of the chapters on ‘People’ depends very much on the people in question. Chapters on Liszt by Joanne Cormac and Cosima Wagner by Eva Rieger, for example, are in large part biographical, with Rieger also going on to cover Cosima’s Bayreuth regime – and providing a sympathetic reassessment of it. John Deathridge offers a fascinating account of the tensions within the broader Wagner family, while Anno Mungen assesses the influence of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient. Chapters on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, meanwhile, plunge us deep into the philosophical deep end.

Throughout the rest of the book, one begins to see the enormous challenge of such volumes and sense that Trippett’s task – a formidable one at the best of times – was not helped by some writers losing track of what one imagines was their brief. One begins to really appreciate those writers who stick to their tasks, offering clear and readable summaries of the areas in question. Thankfully there are plenty who do that: in part 3, for example, Tim Blanning and Mark Berry on national and revolutionary politics respectively, or Holly Watkins’s eye-opening chapter on ‘Health and Wellness’ (including the story of Wagner’s champagne-enhanced hike around St Moritz in 1853.)

Part 4 includes much that’s revealing, too, with Anna Stoll Knecht sifting through the evidence regarding Wagner’s apprenticeship (he wasn’t, it seems, quite so unteachable or rebellious as often made out) and Sven Friedrich casting light on his finances, putting the amounts he earned (derisory) and the amounts he was loaned (not quite as much as one might think) in context. The chapters in part 5 are all excellent too: Edward Reeve presents an intelligent treatment of Wagner’s orchestration, for example, while Patrick McCreless’s chapter on ‘Wagner and Analysis’ deserves special praise for tackling a subject that could so easily have tied itself in musicological knots. Patrick Carnegy’s chapter on stagings between 1876 and 1976 does an impressive job of distilling the contents of his celebrated Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (Yale UP, 2/07).

The final section, ‘Reception’, is more varied, but Laura Tunbridge provides a clear-sighted if necessarily selective chapter on ‘Sound Recording’, while Geoffrey Winthrop-Young offers a challenging, provocative but horizon-expanding exploration of The Ring in relation to the ideas of the theorist Friedrich Kittler. Some eyebrows might be raised by the final chapter, Tim Summers’s ‘The Wagnerian Erotics of Video Game Music’, especially when film music is largely absent from the book, but I ended up finding this fascinating, too.

A few typos have made it through into the final book: there’s a George Solti, for example, and a reference at one point to Hagen’s wife Sieglinde in Die Walküre. More problematic, though, are issues arising from chapters either written by German contributors in English or translated from German. We read of Hitler’s ‘so-called “seizure of power” in 1933’ in one chapter, for example, while in another Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) is referred to as ‘Wagner’s son-in-law and Hitler’s mastermind’, a confusing phrase even if one guesses what it should mean.

It’s a shame such things couldn’t be ironed out, since otherwise Trippett has done an excellent job in assembling the volume. A certain inconsistency is perhaps unavoidable in books such as this, but overall this is a rewarding read and an ambitious, serious and open-minded addition to the Wagner literature. 

This review originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today