When Der fliegende Holländer was premiered in Stockholm in January 1872, the local music critic described Wagner's music as a “chaos of shrieks and signals.” To another critic, Wilhelm Bauck, Wagner represented an otherness that led him as far afield as Chinese music in his search for comparisons. Wagner's music was known in Sweden, as it was in the other countries and provinces around the Baltic Sea, by the 1850s. But while several of his early operas had already been staged by this time in countries on the eastern side of the Baltic—especially in Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki— Sweden had to be content with concert highlights until 1865, when Rienzi became the first of Wagner's operas to be performed at the Royal Opera in Stockholm.

Despite the voluminous literature on Wagner, there have been few insights into the reception of his works and the culture of Wagnerism. Wagner's psychological makeup far exceeds scholarly interest in his operatic legacy. This is due to the inevitable complexity of Wagner's historical influence, which reached far beyond the field of music. Wagner had participated in the Dresden Uprising in May 1849 and was known as a political figure throughout the nineteenth century. His theories on art and opera were also widely discussed in Europe as early as the 1850s. The fact that he emphasized the importance not only of music but also of drama, and of art in general, meant that his ideas interested not only musicians and composers but also novelists, dramatists, and poets. Numerous studies point to Wagner's literary influence. John Louis DiGaetani has investigated Wagnerian patterns in the fiction of Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Elwood Hartman has written on French literary Wagnerism, Erwin Koppen on the impact of decadent Wagnerism on fin-de-siècle European literature, and Raymond Furness on Wagner's influence on literature in general.

Wagner's legacy has also been studied in the context of national-cultural influences, including, for example, the reception of his music and ideas in Austria, Brazil, Catalonia, England, France, Holland, Italy, Russia, and the United States.