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.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s relationship to Richard Wagner and his music was complex, contradictory, even paradoxical. Neither Nietzsche’s emphatic allegiance to Wagner in his early years nor his later rejection should be taken literally. The revaluation of the performative moment in cultural analysis is part of a core of thoughts that Nietzsche chewed over again and again from his first years in Basel until his collapse in Turin. His conception of the Attic tragedy is based on the assumption that the tragedy must be considered in the original context, with its cultic background and performative outcome, as opposed to the reduction of the drama to a written text, as introduced by Aristotle and continued by the Alexandrian philologists. It is here that Nietzsche demonstrates the most in common with Wagner. Yet for Nietzsche, performativity becomes a type of thinking and writing through which he ultimately distances himself from metaphysical thinking and from Wagner.

Richard Wagner was a composer keenly aware of the state of his health and willing to go to great lengths to improve it. Like many Europeans of his era, Wagner often sought relief for his physical and mental afflictions at one of the region’s many spas. The basic principles of hydrotherapy dated back to Roman times, but the nineteenth century saw an explosion in the development of spa facilities and an accompanying profusion of professional and lay healers who proffered their healing methods to spa patrons of all classes. Offering a glimpse into the flourishing culture of water cures during Wagner’s time, this chapter illuminates key elements of the spa regimen, explores several of Wagner’s spa getaways and their curative aims, and weighs various views on diet, exercise, and hydrotherapeutic techniques promoted by nineteenth-century health advocates such as Vincenz Priessnitz and Sebastian Kneipp.

Whilst Richard Wagner has long been acknowledged as one of the central figures in the history of orchestration, his treatment of the orchestra has only rarely received scholarly attention. This chapter uses a series of analytical vignettes to examine Wagner’s approach to the orchestra, each addressing a paradox or opposition. The aim is not to expound some grand, overarching narrative, but, instead, to use the friction between competing factors to demonstrate the inherent complexity of Wagner’s approach to the orchestra. The multidimensionality of Wagner’s orchestration is also seen in the highly nuanced interaction of its three main parameters: texture, timbre, and spatiality. The development of Wagner’s orchestration over his lifetime is not presented as a continuous progression; the individuality of each of Wagner’s scores – and even of scenes within those operas – reflects the inseparability of Wagner’s orchestration from its dramatic motivation.

If histories of Western music were written according to individual influence, Richard Wagner might be taken as the context against which all others can be defined. Such is the breadth of his presence in nineteenth-century studies. Friedrich Nietzsche called him ‘the bad conscience of his time’, while Thomas Mann put it in microcosm in 1933: ‘Steeped in sorrows and grandeur, like the nineteenth century he so perfectly epitomizes – thus does the intellectual figure of Richard Wagner appear to me.’ So opens Mann’s most influential essay on the composer. One would be forgiven for assuming, like Mann, that to map the various contexts of Wagner in 2023 is tantamount to mapping the cultural and intellectual riches of a version of nineteenth-century Europe itself, with the world on its fringes. From Gilgamesh to spa culture, Aeschylus to blood alcohol measurement, horn resonance to Sanskrit poetry – the potential array defies coherence, raising the question of whether it is really Wagner’s historical persona making encyclopaedic claims (via the unity we ascribe to his subjectivity) or the legions of writers who have woven, and continue to weave, his reception history.

The reception of Wagner’s music as physically affecting, sound that manipulates the bodies of listeners, took place within a context of research into human and animal physiology. From reflex mechanisms to sense energies, the physiological response to art brought about new understandings of ‘physiological aesthetics’ in figures from Herbert Spencer to Thomas Huxley and Francis Galton, with a corresponding ‘physiological music theory’ applied by Ernst Mach and Hermann von Helmholtz. This led to various efforts at quantification of ear acuity and the role of the auditory nerve.

In the shadow of decadence, critical evaluation of works like Tristan and Tannhäuser traverse the spectrum from appreciation (‘bliss of the spinal cord’) to anxiousness (‘Wagner increases exhaustion’). Against these claims, Wagner’s numerous writings on sentience (Sinnlichkeit), rooted in Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy of perceptual realism, were directed towards topics as diverse as a theory of performance, the role of critics, and animal testing.

Wagner’s attitude towards the Paris-centred tradition of grand opéra and its German-language cousin, große Oper, was equivocal. On the one hand, he mercilessly dissects the shortcomings of the genres in his Zurich writings; on the other hand, borrowings are rife and a notable exemplar exists in Rienzi. After disentangling and contextualising that contradiction in relation to Wagner’s early works and writings, this chapter considers the tensions between municipal and international resources in staging ‘grand’ works, the shifting associations of German genre such as Singspiel, große romantische Oper, and große Oper, and the witness born to this by Wagner’s prose drafts for incomplete works such as Die Sarazenin and Friedrich I.

Today’s reception of Wagner and assumptions about the composer’s complicity in inspiring the Holocaust are primarily influenced by events that transpired long after the composer’s death. This chapter analyses Wagner’s own shifting attitudes toward Jews in the context of his life and times and considers the twentieth-century events that have shaped the Wagner legacy: Adolf Hitler’s associations with the Wagner family and Bayreuth, the exploitation of works and musical excerpts for political purposes during the Third Reich, rumours about the use of Wagner’s music in concentration camps, repertoire and staging during the Hitler years, and the troubled and conflicted reception of Wagner’s works in Israel. It also considers how refugees from Nazi Germany initially raised suspicion about the anti-Semitic content of the music dramas and their characters, how post-war scholarship has concentrated on proving these allegations, and how the Wagner family still struggles to come to terms with the past.

The German soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient had a profound influence on aesthetic ideals regarding vocal delivery and emergent genres for German commentators from Ludwig Tieck to Rellstab and Wagner. With a focus on contemporary biographical sources and reception, this chapter contextualises her reception within the German states as irreducibly hybrid, as a voice that dissolved aesthetic boundaries, most clearly between speech and song. The shifting role of bel canto vis-à-vis contemporary sopranos (Henrietta Sontag / Maria Malibran), and the emergence of new genres characterise her complex reception, all of which is set against Wagner’s own claims for her artistry, following her creation of the roles Adriano (Rienzi), Senta (Holländer), and Venus (Tannhäuser).

The finale of Schubert's Piano Trio in E flat, D 929, composed in 1827, encapsulates the doubling that permeates the soundworlds of this chapter. The funereal theme from the Andante, cast initially in C minor, re-emerges in curious locations – first in B minor at bar 279, then in E flat minor at bar 795 – moments before the end of the piece (Example 2.1). In both instances, the theme, detached from its processional accompaniment, skims a texture of pizzicato chordal interjections in the upper range of the violin part and étude-like figurations in the piano part. Such reconfigurations position the funereal music, seemingly of the past, as returning in the present.

On first hearing, these repetitions may not sound out of the ordinary. Yet tracing their roots back to the theme's initial presentation in the Andante unsettles ideas of the Finale bringing about ‘resolution and closure’. Its first appearance in the upper registers of the cello (bars 1–21) carries signs of the disjuncture to follow, as it soars above the accompaniment, rooted in the dactylic pattern of death in Schubert's music, while confined by its restricted melodic compass (Example 2.2). Mournful on the surface, replete with disruptive undercurrents, the theme distorts the regularity of the funeral march through the accent on the second half of the bar (cf. bars 4 and 5), the dotted rhythmic motion, and emphasis on the minor iv. Here, as in all of Schubert's music, surface details run deep. Thus, when the texture is inverted in bars 21–40, the theme doubled in the upper ranges of the piano, the impression of hovering at the boundaries is intensified through the withdrawal from piano to pianissimo.

Returns of this kind, connected to and detached from their earlier incarnations, provide a backdrop against which to hear the doubles and distortions across the main case studies of this chapter: the Grande Marche Funèbre, D 859, the C minor Impromptu, D 899/1, and the F minor Fantasy for four hands, D 940.