‘Fresh’ hardly seems the right word, given that almost all of the chapters have previously been available either as they appear here or in earlier drafts, in a range of publications, some of them dating back to the early 1990s. ‘Engaging’ is rather more accurate. Deathridge has a phenomenal knowledge of his subject and, at his best, brings the reader into close contact with Wagner in the fullest sense of the word: the man, music, writings, historical context and cultural legacy. But despite the publisher’s blurb, the author doesn’t really offer an ‘assessment of what Wagner ultimately achieved’. Indeed, Deathridge – who is King Edward VII Professor of Music at King’s College London – is too astute a scholar to attempt such a thing. In fact, his study highlights the impossibility of so finite a task. Wagner’s achievements are continually being contested. As long as Wagner remains a musical, intellectual and cultural force of ongoing relevance, questions of ‘ultimate achievement’ will, of necessity, be deferred.

Deathridge discusses some of the pitfalls that lie in store for the Wagner scholar in ‘Wagner Lives’, his opening chapter, an examination of issues in Wagner (auto)biography. It is a fitting introduction to the volume as a whole, for it draws attention to Wagner-as-fabulist. Mindful of his stature as an eminent living personage and careful to ensure his place in history, Wagner treated his autobiography as a thing to be invented. He was the quintessential unreliable narrator.

Just as scholars are advised to tread warily when considering the composer’s record of his own life (as Deathridge puts it, Wagner’s account sometimes amounts to ‘a tortuous legacy of sex, lies and invidious hype’), so too they should take care when attempting to locate in Wagner’s dramatic works unbroken threads of continuity. Indeed, it is the discontinuities, gaps and contradictions in Wagner’s stage works that go some way towards making them so intensely fascinating. Occasions of tremendous musical beauty, power and insight, Wagner’s operas are also prized for the questions they raise and the predicaments they interrogate rather than the answers they provide.

In addition to being a prolific composer, Wagner was an avid writer. He contributed to a wide variety of topics and produced some weighty theoretical volumes which, one might assume, provided the blueprint for his stage works. But, again, we should be wary of taking Wagner at his word. His theoretical works did not necessarily set the agenda for his operas. Rather more problematic, however, is the question of whether the ideology espoused in some of his essays – especially those that address issues of race and religion – found its way into his music.

As is well known, Wagner was a notorious anti-Semite, and Wagner scholars have long debated whether or not the composer’s stage works provided a forum for his racist beliefs. Parsifal (1882), his final opera, is often seen to be a deeply compromised work. Deathridge argues the case for Parsifal as an Aryan Christian fantasy, claiming that Wagner believed its message ‘could be correctly decoded, at least by initiates’. But are Wagner’s operas written in code? Are his stage works encrypted with messages intended for initiates? While not denying that Parsifal is marked by themes espoused by Wagner in Religion and Art (1880) and the so-called ‘regeneration essays’ that were written around the same time, to speak of decoding the work seems to me to treat it too much as a cryptic manifesto rather than a diffuse work of music theatre. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that among the critical literature on Parsifal referred to disparagingly by Deathridge is an article by me.)

Rather more successful is the chapter ‘Postmortem on Isolde’, a discussion which, among other things, asks whether the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde (1859) was especially attractive to Nazi sensibilities, given that it aestheticises the experience of death, presenting as it does Isolde’s expiration as an ecstatic moment of transcendent overcoming. As Deathridge points out, ‘of all the moments in Wagner’s works, [Isolde’s Liebestod] is probably the least likely to be associated with anything mundane like politics, though the extramusical allusions built into its musical fabric in the name of the absolute do not exonerate it from reality […]’.

As the above indicates, Deathridge’s discussion of Wagner’s operas does not shy away from asking challenging and provocative questions; nor does it gloss political issues surrounding the man and his music. Not all of the book’s chapters had an earlier life in academic publications. The chapters that deal with each of the operas of Wagner’s great tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, for example, were originally written either for opera programmes or CD booklets. The tone of Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, that is to say, does not uniformly lie at the more extreme end of the academic spectrum. All of Wagner’s mature operas are discussed save Tannhäuser and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Deathridge states in the preface that he intends to address both of these works in a separate study. Yet another book on Wagner.