The dust jacket of Nicholas Vazsonyi's Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand features a well-known painting of Wagner by Franz von Lenbach, multiplied and reproduced in different colours in order to resemble an Andy Warhol celebrity painting. Given Warhol's association with advertising, consumerism and celebrity culture, this reference sets an appropriate stage for Vazsonyi's analysis of Wagner. The author's written style is engaging and tends towards the informal: he uses many contemporary corporate buzzwords and occasionally opts for grammatically incomplete sentences, reproducing the tone of a spoken presentation. His thesis is absolutely clear, and presented in unwavering terms: that Wagner was a uniquely canny self-promoter and, furthermore, that a paradox lay at the heart of Wagner's actions, since the very means by which he promoted himself – the media, markets and aggressive branding – were all significant elements of the very modernity he conspicuously rejected.

The book's five chapters deal with persona creation, public relations, branding, marketing within Wagner's works (Vazsonyi focuses almost exclusively on Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg) and the creation of a headquarters (Bayreuth) for his brand. An epilogue deals very briefly with the so-called Wagner industry. In Chapter 1, ‘Image’, Vazsonyi is at pains to suggest that Wagner's transformation into the composer we recognize today began earlier than is generally thought, and that the years in Paris, as well as the writings he produced there, were key to his development and later image. Supported by detailed and perceptive analysis of the prose writings from 1840 and 1841, Vazsonyi suggests that, unlike other adulatory Beethoven literature from the period, Wagner's ‘A Pilgrimage to Beethoven’ was written as a direct means of furthering the author's own status as a composer. Wagner's decision to associate himself publicly with Beethoven continued, we read in Chapter 2 (‘Publicity’), with his conducting of the Ninth Symphony at a concert in Dresden in 1846. At the time, Beethoven's late works were regarded by Dresdeners as difficult and unsuitable material for a major benefit concert, but Vazsonyi demonstrates how Wagner's unconventional pre-publicity drive in the ‘personals’-type section of the Dresdener Anzeiger may well account for the concert's unexpected success. Nor was Beethoven the only dead composer to whose reputation Wagner hitched his own: in the case of Weber's interment in Dresden in 1844, Vazsonyi stresses how Wagner placed himself centre stage in the administrative, artistic and journalistic roles behind the ceremonial events.

The theme of journalism continues in Chapter 3, ‘Niche and Branding’, although here the emphasis is broadened to include the output of some of Wagner's most ardent advocates (Theodor Uhlig, Franz Brendel, Franz Liszt and Charles Baudelaire). Here, Vazsonyi has to deal with a few inconvenient remarks by Wagner that don't support the self-promotion thesis – the composer's plea to Uhlig not to publish any more polemics in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on his behalf, for instance – but he resolves these by declaring that ‘Wagner's protests ring hollow’ (p. 80). Indeed, the emphasis throughout is on reading critically between the lines of Wagner's prose in order to discern his self-promotion tactics. But despite the importance that Vazsonyi accords these prose works and the general ‘discourse’ surrounding Wagner's artworks, he retains a somewhat traditional position in viewing the artworks as self-contained and separate from the discourse (‘in the mid-nineteenth century, the media were far more equipped to disseminate and promote a discourse about the artwork, than the artwork itself’ (pp. 112–13). Ultimately, Vazsonyi's interest in this chapter is in Wagner's instrumentalization of others in order to ‘make space for something conceptually “Brand new”‘ (p. 90).

According to Vazsonyi, Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg continue the task of marketing Wagner's new brand. Painting Die Meistersinger as an ‘infomercial’ on new aesthetics is not a difficult task, but Vazsonyi also notes that the work pre-empts the age of mechanical reproduction, since Walther's prize song is repeated so often.Footnote ¹ Moreover, the song is presented as a product of nature, ‘a favorite advertising device of contemporary manufacturers’ (p. 162), and Walther's final performance of it is endorsed by a ‘professional studio audience’ (p. 164) – the Volk of Nuremberg.

Vazsonyi has to work a bit harder to present Tristan und Isolde in business terms. His analysis revolves around the idea that modernity has created consumer culture out of desires that can only be temporarily stilled: Tristan und Isolde is not, he argues, about love, but about desire and the search for satisfaction. The conclusion of the opera presents Isolde as ‘the totally satisfied consumer’ (p. 149). Her release from desire ‘is not sexual’; instead, it is predicated on the consumption of music as the very type of commodity that the ecstatic, irrational nature of the work appears to deny. Based on careful textual and musical analysis, Vazsonyi's argument offers a plausible reversal of Schopenhauer-influenced readings, the emphasis here no longer on the disavowal of desire commonly associated with the philosopher, but on the concept of desire-generation/consumerism. This revisionist position is not, however, without its tensions. Later in the book we read that ‘Wagner's special skill was the ability to preserve the artistic integrity of his towering works amidst the blaze of commodification to which he in the first place had subjected them’ (p. 204). But having depicted Tristan und Isolde as a marketing device through which the composer generated desire typical of consumer culture – a desire that the music of the opera, like all consumer products, disingenuously promises to still – Vazsonyi does not elaborate on how the work nonetheless retains artistic integrity.

In a tantalizing comment in the epilogue, Vazsonyi suggests that ‘[f]rom a marketing standpoint, Parsifal is in many ways Wagner's most interesting case’ (p. 206). Surprisingly, the work is dispatched in one paragraph. In the final chapter, attention is focused on Bayreuth as a ‘hub’ comprising physical plant (the Festspielhaus), business headquarters (Villa Wahnfried) and the centre of a web of support (the Wagner societies and the Bayreuther Blätter). Here, Vazsonyi attempts to draw the ideas from preceding chapters into a grand narrative about self-promotion, arguing that ‘Wagner's festival became the vessel into which he could pour all the disparate elements of his marketing activities of the preceding three decades’ (p. 171). An earlier remark that ‘successful marketing was Wagner's “secret” agenda lifelong’ (p. 77) confirms this tendency towards an all-embracing narrative: Vazsonyi views Wagner's adult life through a very particular lens, thus downplaying the possibility of opportunism in a career noted for its changing political and philosophical sympathies. Indeed one fundamental question remains unanswered: can a single brand accommodate the waywardness and contradictions of Wagner's thought and actions?

Within this book, there is little detail on the concept of ‘brand’. It would be useful to know, for example, how ‘brand’ differs from ‘product’. It would also be useful to have some sense of the history of brand-creation, so that Wagner's strategies could be viewed in a historical context. At the outset, Vazsonyi concedes that most of Wagner's strategies were neither unique nor unprecedented (p. 1), but he does not dwell on issues of precedent and common practice. And although Vazsonyi argues that the modernity of Wagner's tactics anticipates contemporary consumer and events-driven culture, he chooses not to draw on contemporary marketing or events management theory for support.

Vazsonyi's use of theory is generally light, so while a range of well-known names (Adorno, Habermas, Bourdieu, McLuhan and Kristeva, for example) do crop up, the references are fleeting and Vazsonyi's analysis never alights at length on any theoretical position. The term ‘self-fashioning’ is a case in point: without delving into its history or scholarly usage, Vazsonyi employs it frequently to refer to Wagner's depiction of himself as: ‘most German of the Germans’ (p. 12); an outsider/avant-garde artist/victim of conventional opinion; an anti-modernist; not-Meyerbeer; and, related to the latter, an outspoken anti-Semite. According to Vazsonyi, Wagner assumed an anti-Semitic stance from early in his career, and not just at the time of writing ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’. Indeed, Vazsonyi's stance on Wagner's anti-Semitism is uncompromising: he argues that ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ was not an anomaly within Wagner's output; rather it was integral to his strategy, since the essay functioned as a way of defaming Meyerbeer, and hence formed a significant plank in the composer's ploy to eliminate competition.

On this point and many others, Vazsonyi is not reluctant to challenge other Wagner scholars: general Wagner scholarship is condemned as suffering from ‘chronic imprecision, the unquestioned perpetuation of misinformation, as well as the unreliability even of purportedly source materials’ (p. 75), while the work of many individual scholars is presented as analytically inadequate or incomplete, or even ‘fundamentally wrong’ (p. 199).

Pierre Bourdieu, one of the theorists mentioned several times in Vazsonyi's book, has written that ‘[a]ll critics declare not only their judgement of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art’.Footnote ² Vazsonyi's book is a compelling example of the struggle to promote a particular line of argument in an overcrowded field. More than this, however, it also shows that the canonical composers and their output are still worth fighting over. Vazsonyi himself acknowledges this, when he follows Bourdieu in remarking that ‘“Canonization” yields long-term economic benefits denied the creator, but from which the intellectual class draws dividends through teaching, scholarship, publication, and performance’ (p. 26). Yet despite Vazsonyi's references to Bourdieu, what is missing from his work is a detailed sense of the field of cultural production of which Wagner was part. Instead, attention is focused on self-promotion and the means by which the composer himself furthered his own career. This is surely an example of what Bourdieu calls ‘the “charismatic” ideology’, which ‘directs attention to the apparent producer, the painter, writer or composer, in short, the “author”, suppressing the question of what authorizes the author, what creates the authority with which authors authorize.’Footnote ³

Despite Vazsonyi's Bourdieusian insight that ‘in our star and celebrity-culture, we need to attribute events to a single, identifiable, recognizable figure’ (p. 51), he is not adverse to perpetuating the very myth he believes Wagner started: early on, we read that ‘the case of Wagner is different from that of any composer, any artistic figure, predecessors and contemporaries alike’ (p. 9); later on (in this case in connection with Wagner's pre-publicity drives), Vazsonyi argues that there ‘was no precedent for what Wagner did, nor has any creative artist since managed anything quite on the same scale’ (p. 88); being a Wagnerian is described as ‘a category of commitment entirely different in range, scope, and intensity from the kind demanded by any other composer of the modern Western or any other tradition’ (p. 102); and Wagner's fundraising schemes ‘laid the groundwork for a global, self-perpetuating network of fiscal and moral support that still has no equal’ (p. 185). Many of these statements are untested, and in the end, one suspects that the case for absolute uniqueness cannot be proven: these arguments say as much about Vazsonyi's focus on Wagner and the position from which he surveys the cultural field as about Wagner's ranking in the global singularity stakes.

In Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner, James Garratt casts Wagner in a very different light to Vazsonyi, offering a corrective to the idea that Wagner was unique in his discourse or modus operandi. Garrett's in-depth exploration of the role of the social in nineteenth-century German music discourse and practice places Wagner firmly in context, to the point that the composer recedes into the background and his inclusion in the book's title becomes questionable. Garrett argues that Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunst had ‘elements in common with contemporary artistic manifestos from across the politically progressive spectrum’ (p. 168) and that the composer's thoughts on art's social relevance ‘have been encountered earlier in the writings of Vormärz democrats and socialists’ (p. 175). In a section entitled ‘Commemorative festivals and the cult of genius’, Garrett examines celebrations of Mendelssohn during that composer's lifetime, including ‘toasts, adulatory poems, torch-light processions, serenades, laurel wreathes and even, on one occasion, fanfares as he mounted the conductor's podium’ (p. 90). Mendelssohn and others were not, Garrett suggests ‘merely passive objects of this process, but rather manipulated their status as figureheads’. Self-publicity and public criticism of others emerge not as peculiarly Wagnerian traits, but as common nineteenth-century tactics: the Young Germans were particularly adept at attacking the opinions of opponents, Garrett notes, and in that sense ‘Tannhäuser the character embodies the Young German trait of defining himself through opposition’ (p. 49). Garrett points to Franz Brendel as an example of a writer and critic constantly on the offensive, portraying him not as a mouthpiece and publicist for Wagner alone, but also as a staunch believer in a new, collective subjectivity beyond individualism and as a steadfast admirer of Beethoven, whose Ninth Symphony Brendel particularly revered.

Throughout his book, Garrett takes great care to situate music discourse in relation to preceding political and literary landscapes. In four of the six chapters, his detailed analysis of the varied strands of aesthetics, liberalism and socialism in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Germany dwells at length on discourse unrelated to music, and this conscientious, context-heavy approach may end up trying the patience of those hoping to get a swift overview of developments in the sphere of music. Indeed, despite its title, the book devotes significant attention to the pre-Wagner period.

At the centre of Garrett's thesis lies the concept of the social within artistic practice. The author challenges what he presents as a received view that nineteenth-century German musicians and artists regarded the artistic sphere as separate from the social and political sphere. This premise is odd, given the presence of Wagner in the title and the existence of a substantial body of literature dealing with Wagner's views on society and politics. Nevertheless, Garrett makes a compelling case for reconsidering the relationship between autonomy and social function in nineteenth-century German music discourse. While citing the well known cases of Wackenroder, whose connection of ‘pure instrumental music and aesthetic separatism becomes a topos of German Romantic literature’ (p. 27) and E.T.A. Hoffmann, who sought to safeguard ‘music's autonomy and artistic significance’, thus ‘marginalizing moral and social issues’ (p. 28), Garratt also notes that not all musical autonomists abandoned the idea of the social in music, instead ‘assigning the function of cultivation to vocal and in particular choral music’ (p. 33). Indeed a rich seam of concern with the social in music emerges throughout the book, whether in relation to commentaries of the Vormärz period (1830s–1840s), in which Romanticism was associated with reaction (Chapter Two), singing festivals and male-voice choirs, for which Wagner, Mendelssohn, Spohr and Loewe wrote works (Chapter Three), the politicization of musical discourse during the revolutions of 1848–1849 (Chapter Four), the conflicted socio-political and aesthetic goals of figures associated with the New German School (Chapter Five), or the workers’ movement in the 1860s and beyond (Chapter Six).

One theme emerges clearly: music commentators focused on many of the same points as literary commentators, namely the advantages of bringing the wider public in contact with art, and art's role in cultivating people and preparing them for political emancipation and an ideal future society. But Garrett returns frequently to the position that those involved with music were less radical in their social and political ambitions than their literary counterparts or that reality did not match rhetorical investment in music as a social agent. The festivals that could have functioned as catalysts for politicized music making were dependent on conservative authorities for approval; many liberals subjected themselves to self-censorship in order to safeguard their professional positions; and music more often than not remained a middle-class activity. In Chapter Six, which deals with workers’ movements in the second half of the nineteenth century, Garrett remarks that working-class music from the period has attracted much less scholarly attention than middle-class music. In a sense, he perpetuates this situation, since this chapter is significantly shorter than the others.

Garrett's overall conclusion that a ‘plurality of social modes of viewing art’ (p. 215) flourished within nineteenth-century discourse alongside the aesthetics of autonomy is uncontroversial and well supported by the preceding chapters. But the book ends with an unexpected excursion to the present: in this era of ever greater individualism, Garrett writes, communal music-making can perhaps help once more to ‘bridge the gap between individual aspiration and the dream of community’ (p. 215). It is an odd and unprepared note on which to end, but it prompts one further reflection on the part of the reader, namely that the ‘outreach’ activities of contemporary music institutions are by no means a new idea, and that nineteenth-century discourse evidently anticipated many of today's concerns with accessibility in the arts.