After he fled the Dresden Uprising in May 1849, friends helped Wagner to settle in Zurich. He conducted the local orchestra and wrote copious essays about himself and the future of music and drama. Wagner returned to composition in 1853 with his Ring des Nibelungen, but set it aside in 1857 in favour of Tristan und Isolde, inspired by Mathilde Wesendonck, whose husband Otto had provided him with a new home next to their own. But private passion became public knowledge in 1858, forcing Wagner to abandon both Zurich and his marriage. By 1865 he was in Munich, funded by King Ludwig II. But Wagner meddled too much in the affairs of others and had to flee again. He found a new home in Tribschen outside Lucerne, where Cosima von Bülow joined him in 1868. They remained there until April 1872, when they moved to Bayreuth.

Richard Wagner’s approach to issues of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ includes the semantics of his musical style as well as his habit of assigning gender-specific traits to certain ideologies, such as nationalism. But the subject of women´s love is the main factor of his oeuvre. Women´s purpose in life lay in loving a man; aberrations turned evil (Ortrud in Lohengrin) or exuded sexual menace (Venus in Tannhäuser). His love affairs were closely related to his work, as the secret abbreviations in his draft of Die Walküre shows. He uses love as a means of redemption and salvation, but his erotic imagination was fascinated by the musical description of desire as in Tristan und Isolde. Women find their identity by finding a man, and they die when they have lost him. His music, however, is an authority able to break through the role of the woman as an appendage of the man.

Gender and sexuality were crucial to Wagner’s Ring even before a note was written; his aesthetic theories for nascent music drama were gendered from the start, with text the male sperm that fertilizes music-as-woman. Wagner’s attitudes to gender were in many ways typical of his time, with active man situated above passive woman in the biological and social hierarchy. But his works are more complex and even found supporters among contemporary feminists. In fact, it is often his female characters who act, not the men, and it is the women who restore order when men trigger chaos. Wagner himself saw correlations between his sexual life and his work; we here examine instances of congruence and incongruence. We also consider how Wagner’s approach to sexuality in his works influenced the composers, writers and artists who came after him.