Was Wagner a genius or a racist lunatic?

Simon Callow thinks the composer was both – and he’s right, says Rupert Christiansen

As this newspaper’s opera critic, I am frequently solicited by nervous readers for advice on the vexed topic of Wagner. What is the best place to start? Where are the tunes? Why all the fuss?

Fanatic votary of the operas though I am, I remain stumped for an answer: reactions to the character, ambition and architecture of his music are so intensely personal and unpredictable. But now I can at least confidently direct my inquirers to Simon Callow’s new biography – a breezy introduction to a man described here as “titanic, demiurgic, superhuman and also, frankly, more than a little alarming”.

Callow makes no claim to originality and avoids musicology (if you want something more focused on the work, then I’d plump for Michael Tanner’s Faber Pocket Guide to Wagner). Instead, drawing heavily on Wagner’s own profuse if unreliable memoir and Ernest Newman’s unsurpassed researches of the Thirties, he presents a crisply succinct account of Wagner’s life and times that rattles along in exuberant prose, marred only by occasional hyperbole (“he was Rimbaud; he was Kurt Cobain; he was James Dean”).

Any attempt to analyse a personality as complex as Wagner’s is doomed, but Callow manages to be suggestive on the subject without being pretentious. Unlike the Mozart depicted in Amadeus, Wagner embodies no contradiction between man and artist: what he was, what he did and what he created cohere. Feeding this psyche was a remarkable aptitude for self-dramatisation, evident in the electrifying readings he gave of his own librettos, and an overwhelming sense of his own

Self- dramatiser: a Vanity Fair cartoon of Wagner from 1877