# Richard Wagner

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/barry-millington/richard-wagner

![Richard Wagner](https://quivercdn.com/covers/thames-and-hudson/barry-millington/richard-wagner_978-05-0051-643-0.jpg?v=2026-07-14%2017%3A32%3A07)

- Authors: [Barry Millington](https://www.bookquiver.com/barry-millington)
- Language: en_GB
- Published: 2012-10-22

## Description

Richard Wagner is one of the most influential – and controversial – composers in the history of music. Over the course of his long career, he produced a stream of spellbinding works that challenged musical convention through their richness and experimentation, ultimately paving the way for modernism. Moving at a fast pace, the book encompasses a refreshingly wide range of themes, from the composer’s sources of inspiration, his fetish for exotic silks, and his relationship with his wives and mistresses, to accusations of anti-Semitism, the operas’ proto-cinematic nature, and the turbulent legacy both of the Bayreuth Festival and of Wagnerism itself. Making use of the very latest scholarship – much of it undertaken by the author himself as editor of The Wagner Journal – Barry Millington reassesses received notions about Wagner and his work, demolishing ill-informed opinion in favour of proper critical understanding. The result is a radical – and occasionally provocative – reappraisal of this most perplexing of composers. With its many intriguing images and quotations from contemporary documents, Richard Wagner: The Sorcerer of Bayreuth will grip anyone interested in music and in the wider cultural life of the 19th century and beyond.

## Editions

### Richard Wagner

- Publisher: thames_and_hudson
- ISBN: 978-05-0051-643-0
- Pages: 320
- Published: 2012-10-22
- Language: en_GB