[Book review] Wagner in context. Ed. by David Trippett

Abstract

The volume under review is a welcome addition to the Composers in Context series by Cambridge University Press. It also poses a peculiar challenge to the series. As the editor David Trippett ponders in the Introduction, Richard Wagner might himself be ‘the context against which all others can be defined’ (p. 1). Quite simply, there are very few with the same breadth of influence in the nineteenth century and beyond, or who devoted themselves to such a range of artistic, intellectual, and political topics. Trippett is sensitive to the methodological limits of contextual studies as applied to Wagner, as well as to the potentially infinite scope of the undertaking, but happily steers clear of the self-deprecating apologies for adding to a (supposedly) vast body of Wagner scholarship that used to be de rigueur in new books about him.