Hardly any composer was so rejected, and so celebrated by his contemporaries as Richard Wagner. The Leipzig musicologist Hugo Riemann (1849-1919) describes him as “the greatest dramatic composer of the 19th century and without doubt the most energetic and concentrated musical thinker of all time…”. Eduard Hanslick, by contrast, radically rejects Wagner’s “new music” in its aesthetic content. He is an adherent of the idea of “permanent music”, formulated by Brahms, which only acquires validity th...