Even among major creative figures Richard Wagner is a special case. This is not simply because so much is written about him, although that does mean that every new book is compelled – as here – into an act of self-justification. Rather it is the result of two other factors which the publication plethora merely reflects. The first is that we know so much about him, a good deal of which has emerged relatively recently, following struggles within the Wagner clan. Now there are thousands of letters, copious diaries (above all those of his second wife Cosima) alongside Wagner's own ambitious and often eclectic essays, and the anecdotes and written testimony of others. All these paradoxically strip Wagner as a consequence of dressing him up in so many different guises. The result is that the author of the intoxicating music dramas, which are after all the principal cause of the unprecedented fascination he exerts, emerges as the naked composer. We cannot know as much as we do without being confronted time and again by the contradictions, inconsistencies, disagreeable behaviour and odious opinions of what we might feel compelled to acknowledge as the whole man. More than most creative geniuses, Wagner has nowhere to hide. Or he has all too many seemingly different identities in which he can hide. Consequently, any attempt to fashion the Wagner of our choice (revolutionary, apostle of otherworldly redemption, disciple of sexual love, harbinger of fascism, Buddhist, virulent anti-semite or whatever) is sabotaged by the excess of contradictory information.

The second factor which further underpins the publication plethora is a reflection of exactly this excess of heterogeneous knowledge. The complete Wagner – whatever we take that finally to mean – is a complex phenomenon which suffuses into each other the private and the public, the personal and the creative, the philosopher/thinker and the poet/composer. No ambitious encounter with any of these polarities is possible without due attention to its pair.