Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand

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Acknowledgments
A note on translation and style
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Image
2. Publicity
3. Niche and branding
4. Consumers and consumption
5. Hub
Epilogue: the Wagner industry
Bibliography
Index.

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All modern artists have had to market themselves in some way. Richard Wagner may just have done it better than anyone else. In a self-promotional effort that began around 1840 in Paris, and lasted for the remainder of his career, Wagner claimed convincingly that he was the most German composer ever and the true successor of Beethoven. More significantly, he was an opera composer who declared that he was not composing operas. Instead, during the 1850s, he mapped out a new direction, conceiving of works that would break with tradition and be literally 'brand new'. This is the first study to examine the innovative ways in which Wagner made himself a celebrity, promoting himself using every means available: autobiography, journal articles, short stories, newspaper announcements, letters, even his operas themselves. Vazsonyi reveals how Wagner created a niche for his works in the crowded opera market that continues to be unique.

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It is ... a cracking good read as we learn about Wagner's abilities to turn himself into a 'brand' or to act as his own 'PR agent'. An important book, too, as Vazsonyi foregrounds an aspect of Wagner we hear too little about, re-aligning a great 19th-century figure through the filter of an avowedly 21st-century sensibility

In a series of pithy, highly readable yet thoroughly documented chapters, Vazsonyi examines the way in which Wagner worked to develop what we would nowadays call his image

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