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.

The Introduction presents the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and raises questions about the influence of his Berlin lectures in the 1820s. A remarkable generation came to learn from him, which included figures such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, David Friedrich Strauss, and Heinrich Heine. After his death a second generation of students came to Berlin and were inspired by his legacy. Among these were Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Søren Kierkegaard, Ivan Turgenev, and Mikhail Bakunin. All of these thinkers testify to the special intellectual atmosphere in Berlin that arose in connection with Hegel’s philosophy both during his lifetime and in the decades after his death. The present work takes as its point of departure the intellectual milieu at the University of Berlin, which was the fountain of inspiration that nourished the leading figures of the age. The introduction defines Hegel’s concepts of alienation and recognition, which are taken as the guiding themes for a study of philosophy in the nineteenth century. A handful of critical theses are sketched.