This chapter provides an outline of Wagner’s relationship with German-language musical criticism of his time from two related angles, i.e. Wagner as the subject and the object of musical criticism. First, I summarise the emergence of professional musical criticism in the 1700s and 1800s, dependent on aesthetic and societal changes, and assess the latest status of relevant source material, which proves problematic both in case of a reliable critical edition of Wagner’s own writings as well as the availability and completeness of nineteenth-century reviews of Wagner’s works. I then proceed to sketching Wagner’s early music reviews of the 1830s and 1840s and discuss his changing attitude towards criticism in general, before tracing broader trends and shifts in critical debates around 1848 as related to Wagner. Finally, I propose the need for a more fine-grained analysis of certain key topics of nineteenth-century musical criticism in terms of ‘camps’ and ‘party lines’.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Strauss served at the helm of the oldest and most successful German society dedicated to the performance of new music, the General German Music Society (Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein). The chapter examines Strauss’s contribution to the organization’s revival at a time of decline for the ADMV, as he gazed back at founder Liszt’s legacy and looked to the future through his own music and the work of Mahler, among others. His activity is positioned within the context of affiliated composers and dominant issues throughout the ADMV’s seventy-five-year history, from its establishment by Liszt and Franz Brendel through its dissolution under the Third Reich. This essay lays bare the society’s struggles over German identity, musical modernism, and reactionary politics while recognizing its role in promoting the careers of such important figures as Mahler, Reger, and Schoenberg.