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.

First mentioned in 1194, Bayreuth became the centre of the rule of the Margraves of Andechs-Merania. The city reached its Baroque heyday in the mid-eighteenth century under the regency of Margraves Friedrich and Wilhelmine, a sister of Friedrich II of Prussia (‘the Great’). After the loss of the margravial residence in 1769 and as a result of the Napoleonic Empire, the city lost its former importance and passes from Prussian to Bavarian rule. The poet Jean Paul (actually Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) lived in Bayreuth from 1804 until his death in 1825. With Richard Wagner’s move to Bayreuth in 1872, the construction of the Festspielhaus, and the founding of the Bayreuth Festival in 1876, the city in the Franconian province becomes the epitome of German culture with international significance and impact – but also a symbol of the ideological claim to Wagner by National Socialism and the Wagnerian Adolf Hitler.

Wagner and money is a cantus firmus of his biography. Notoriously broke, he is often regarded as a ‘pump genius’. He always demanded financial generosity from anyone who wanted to call themselves his friend. His pre-March criticism of capitalism has its origins in his completely underdeveloped economic mind. In King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he gained his most powerful and significant patron from 1864 onwards. But contrary to the widespread prejudice, it was by no means excessive sums that the king spent on Wagner. Moreover, in times without copyright and regulated royalty payments, artists were always dependent on patrons and gainful employment. Under today’s legal conditions, Wagner would have been a millionaire.

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.

Though Theodore Thomas had introduced Wagner’s music to America in 1861, following a ‘Grand Wagner Night’ in Boston in 1853, it was not until 1872 that Wagner rose to fame in America with a performance of ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. Thereafter Wagner’s music assumed a dominant place in American music and cultural life for the better part of the next four decades.

This chapter explores unusual facets of Wagner in relationship to America, including the heretofore unexamined influence on Wagner of writers such as Friedrich Gerstäcker, the German migration to America, Wagner in the Yiddish theatre, and Wagner’s views on America. For Wagner, America was the harbinger of modernity and represented a new frontier for his pioneering music dramas, which enabled an untutored mass audience to experience the intensity and spiritual claims in Wagner’s alluring realisation of drama with music. Wagner’s innovations in narration through sound would have the greatest influence through a novel modern medium – motion picture – and would define how music in the twentieth century became an indispensable instrument of mass entertainment within American film.

This chapter explores the tension between mobility and immobility in the performance of Wagner’s works in the late nineteenth century, highlighting how their production beyond Europe (often by touring companies) and the growth of global Wagnerism took place alongside the growth of the Bayreuth enterprise, which increasingly fixed them in place, at least on an imaginative level. The chapter touches on key premiere dates for Wagner’s works beyond Europe, as well as Wagner’s own engagement with projects to present his works globally. It then turns to the touring opera companies that took Wagnerian music drama on the road (or rail, or wave), examining the challenges they faced in doing so.

Richard Wagner’s music and the way he created it are closely interconnected to the vocal delivery of the actors and singers of his childhood and youth. Or to put it more precisely: during the time of his socialisation in early nineteenth-century Saxony, there was practically no difference between the profession of an actor and a dramatic singer. The same people performed in spoken drama and music theatre what led to a declamatory style of singing that was typical for German music theatre. This style shaped Wagner’s Sprechgesang, both considering its structure and its genesis. He did as a composer what the dramatic actors of his time whose performances shifted between singing and speech did on stage: he developed his vocal lines out of declamation and created different degrees of more or less speech-like passages. The latter poses a challenge for the historically informed performance practice of his works.

Since the inaugural Bayreuth Festival of 1876, Wagner has been widely considered an innovator of the illusionist stage who foreshadowed twentieth- and twenty-first-century immersive multimedia. Yet a sole focus on his stage-technological achievements glosses over many revealing ironies. Not only was Wagner deeply ambivalent about technological progress; but he conceived of his Gesamtkunstwerk as an aid to overcome what he perceived as the socio-culturally alienating effects of industrialisation. This chapter illuminates Wagner’s ultimately fraught strategy, in both theory and practice, to advance and simultaneously conceal his stage machinery. Although pushed to new extremes, Bayreuth’s stage-technical solutions for the particularly challenging Ring cycle were firmly based on contemporary practices; moreover, they fell far behind Wagner’s idealist visions. In the end, the inevitable technologisation of Wagner’s stage presented a critical predicament in his aspiration to outdo both opera and the machine.

The chapter offers a focused historical account of Anglophone analysis of Wagner’s music, particularly that of the Ring, beginning with the work of the British Wagnerians Ernest Newman and Deryck Cooke, and continuing to that of more recent American scholars such as Robert Bailey and Warren Darcy. The central task of the chapter is to trace the analytical approaches of these and other scholars to three critical elements of Wagner’s music: leitmotiv, tonality and harmony, and form. The scene between Siegfried and the Rhinemaidens in Act 3, Scene I of Götterdämmerung serves as an example of how these analytical approaches can work, either separately or together, to enrich our understanding of Wagner’s musical practice in his penultimate opera.

This chapter locates Wagner’s response to Aeschylus in the Ring in the context of the three great theatrical responses to Greek tragedy which preceded his; Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina, and Grillparzer’s Medea. The relationship of human beings to fate, and the power of the curse, are explored as themes which all four works have in common.

Cosima Liszt, daughter of the composer Franz Liszt and Marie d´Agoult, rushed into an unsuccessful marriage with the composer and conductor Hans von Bülow. She wrote articles and visited cultural highlights in Berlin. In Munich 1864 she engaged in the love affair with Richard Wagner and a year later the child Isolde was born. She married him in 1870 in order to have the birth of Siegfried legalised and asked Bülow for a divorce. Her meticulous diaries of her life with him are a vital biographical source, although in them she perpetuates the traditional narrative of the autonomous male genius. After his death she took over the direction of the Bayreuth Festspiele and developed a style committed to Wagner’s performance practice. She excelled in matters of gesture, fusing singing aesthetic, gesture, and word/music relationship.