George Bernard Shaw described 'the perfect Wagnerite' as a socially aware listener who could decrypt the radical message of Wagner's music dramas. Here, Timothy Anderson instead examines the 'Bad Wagnerites' of the nineteenth century: the amateurs and reformers who translated, criticised and adapted Wagner's music to suit their projections of a better world. These 'Bad Wagnerites' often misread and mixed up Wagner's works. But they could also be a force for good. Addressing little-known authors in Britain and the USA – including society eccentrics, poets, novelists, and campaigners for Black liberation – Bad Wagnerites demonstrates how the music dramas guided social and artistic reform in the nineteenth century. The bathos glimpsed and embarrassment sensed in Wagner was not simply a distraction from the spectacle, but rather became crucial in guiding attention from Wagner's otherworldly myths to the inequalities of wealth, gender, and race which shape operatic listening to this day.