Richard Wagner, who left us ten magnificent works for the operatic stage, was the most important force in the development of opera in the nineteenth century. The most determined of “musical idealists” in the operatic realm, Wagner changed forever the way audiences regarded opera and raised standards in all aspects of production and performance. Analogous to the various autonomous theories of art current in the nineteenth century, musical idealism was a reaction against the prevalent worship of the virtuoso at the expense of the work and against the trivialization of the performance into a social occasion. Much of what we have come to associate with Wagnerism – musical idolatry, a quasi-religious musical experience, the Wagnerian “hush” at performances, the idea of an elite community of musical artists – was anticipated by idealist trends elsewhere in the musical culture of Wagner's time. Berlioz, for example, had written of an imaginary city called “Euphonia,” free from the social and commercial pressures of the day; Schumann had criticized the behavior of concert audiences; and festivals devoted to Handel's oratorios and Beethoven's symphonies had been established well before the peak of Wagner's influence.