At this point in the debate about the development of music there came a strong external stimulus. Wagner was without doubt the most powerful and innovative force in music in the second half of the nineteenth century, and much of the debate about the progress and/or regress of music that occupied English critics for the remainder of the century stemmed from the controversy provoked by Wagner.

Wagner’s music – in the form of the Overture and March from Tannhäuser – was first heard in London in 1854, and the following year Wagner was engaged to conduct the Old Philharmonic Orchestra’s season. The concerts included orchestral and choral extracts from Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. The press reaction to the music was generally hostile. J.W. Davison declared the Lohengrin music to be ‘rank poison … an incoherent mass of rubbish, with no more pretension to be called music than the jangling of gongs’. Wagner’s appointment was not renewed, and his music disappeared from the Philharmonic’s programmes for eight years and appeared only sporadically in the following ten years. The story at the other main London concert venue – the Crystal Palace – was similar. The music that was played dated almost entirely from his earlier years. It was not until 1870 that a Wagner opera was staged in London: Der fliegende Holländer, dating from twenty-seven years earlier, was performed, as was customary, in Italian.

Der Ring des Nibelungen and after

However, from 1875 onwards, exposure to Wagner’s music grew apace, with two London productions of Lohengrin (in Italian) in that year. In Germany, rehearsals were taking place for the opening of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre in 1876 and the first performances of the complete cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen. The anticipation of this event stimulated lively discussion of Wagner in books and in the press.

In England, as in other countries, a Wagner Society had been founded to promote Wagner’s music and ideas and to raise money for the forthcoming festival. Ranged against these apologists for Wagner were a number of critics, including Davison and Joseph Bennett, who expressed profound reservations about, or even continued hostility towards, Wagner. But the searing contempt that characterised the 1855 reviews had by 1873 given way, for the most part, to a more rationally conducted debate.