The emphasis of the foregoing on specific episodes or examples of Wagner's self-promotional activities has necessarily meant that certain issues and key individuals in Wagner's life were not mentioned at all, or given only passing attention. Even the discussion of his self-marketing has been selective; to document and analyze every example between 1840 and 1883 would be a tedious exercise and would soon become annoying to read. For instance, only the fewest of Wagner's thousands of published letters contain no form of self-promotion. As his fame grew, along with the sense that these letters would become part of the permanent record, the self-stylization becomes ever more pronounced. Over a period of forty-plus years, self-marketing and branding became a daily exercise for Wagner to an extent that has no precedent, especially when juxtaposed with his equally insistent and sustained condemnation of the very social and economic conditions that encouraged and even required such behaviors.

Several important supporters of the Wagnerian cause, whose work falls into the chronological period covered by this book, have not been discussed in sufficient, or any, detail. I justify this in part because the impact of their contributions belongs more properly to the phase that followed Wagner's death, when his “undertaking” became an “industry.”

Starting with the secretarial work of writing out Wagner's most extensive autobiography, My Life, not to mention the meticulous and self-effacing labor of her diaries, Cosima Wagner's increasingly archival and proprietary contribution to the Wagnerian image during the remainder of his life turned out to be the ideal preparation for the monumental role she assumed after his death to perpetuate and sustain – quite literally – the Wagnerian legacy, a role already anticipated by her active participation in the initial establishment of the Wagner societies.