If histories of Western music were written according to individual influence, Richard Wagner might be taken as the context against which all others can be defined. Such is the breadth of his presence in nineteenth-century studies. Friedrich Nietzsche called him ‘the bad conscience of his time’, while Thomas Mann put it in microcosm in 1933: ‘Steeped in sorrows and grandeur, like the nineteenth century he so perfectly epitomizes – thus does the intellectual figure of Richard Wagner appear to me.’ So opens Mann’s most influential essay on the composer. One would be forgiven for assuming, like Mann, that to map the various contexts of Wagner in 2023 is tantamount to mapping the cultural and intellectual riches of a version of nineteenth-century Europe itself, with the world on its fringes. From Gilgamesh to spa culture, Aeschylus to blood alcohol measurement, horn resonance to Sanskrit poetry – the potential array defies coherence, raising the question of whether it is really Wagner’s historical persona making encyclopaedic claims (via the unity we ascribe to his subjectivity) or the legions of writers who have woven, and continue to weave, his reception history.

The reception of Wagner’s music as physically affecting, sound that manipulates the bodies of listeners, took place within a context of research into human and animal physiology. From reflex mechanisms to sense energies, the physiological response to art brought about new understandings of ‘physiological aesthetics’ in figures from Herbert Spencer to Thomas Huxley and Francis Galton, with a corresponding ‘physiological music theory’ applied by Ernst Mach and Hermann von Helmholtz. This led to various efforts at quantification of ear acuity and the role of the auditory nerve.

In the shadow of decadence, critical evaluation of works like Tristan and Tannhäuser traverse the spectrum from appreciation (‘bliss of the spinal cord’) to anxiousness (‘Wagner increases exhaustion’). Against these claims, Wagner’s numerous writings on sentience (Sinnlichkeit), rooted in Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy of perceptual realism, were directed towards topics as diverse as a theory of performance, the role of critics, and animal testing.

Liszt first met Wagner in 1841, when the latter briefly introduced himself in an ‘awkward’ exchange in Paris following Heinrich Laube’s cynical recommendation ‘to lose no time in looking [Liszt] up, as he was “generous”’.1 After Liszt had heard Rienzi in Dresden (1844), a second meeting followed in Berlin, mediated by Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient. Thereafter, Wagner contacted Liszt in 1845 about funds for the planned Weber memorial in Dresden, and again in 1846, when he sent the scores of Rienzi and Tannhäuser in dogged pursuit of Liszt’s esteem: ‘I proceed quite openly to rouse you up in my favour.’2 By 1848, he began requesting personal financial help from Liszt, initially selling the copyright to his extant operas and accepting commissions, but thereafter simply requesting a series of bailouts, often in uncomfortably obsequious, manipulative prose. The year 1849 marked a sea-change: Liszt conducted the first performances of Tannhäuser since the Dresden premiere (as a late substitution for Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella that Liszt – on point of resignation – forced on the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna for her birthday) and gave Wagner a supreme endorsement by publishing two piano transcriptions from the opera, declaring to its salivating composer: ‘Once and for all, number me in future among your most zealous and devoted admirers; near or far, count on me and make use of me.’3