# Richard Wagner — What Is Art? character guide

> Richard Wagner in What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** Wagner

**First appearance:** 0003-i

## Snapshot

The composer whose music-dramas Tolstoy dissects as the era's most seductive counterfeit, a case study in how the upper classes mistake novelty for art.

## Who they are

Wagner is the living test case for Tolstoy's charge that modern art has lost the capacity to transmit real feeling, substituting technical ambition and borrowed emotion. Tolstoy grants Wagner's fame and the devotion of his admirers, then argues that his attempt to fuse music and drama violates the separate realms of each art, producing effects that imitate sincerity without possessing it. Wagner's prestige makes him the pivot of the treatise's middle chapters, where Tolstoy turns from theory to the damning evidence of celebrated works.

## In the story

### [XII](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/what_is_art_se/chapters/xii)

Criticized for praising Beethoven's last period and creating music based on erroneous theories.

### [Chapter XIII: Wagner and the Counterfeit of Art](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/what_is_art_se/chapters/xiii)

Composer whose works, especially 'The Nibelung's Ring', are used as the central example of counterfeit art.

### [XVII](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/what_is_art_se/chapters/xvii)

Cited as a composer whose music is admired but contributes to the perversion of art.

### [Appendices](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/what_is_art_se/chapters/appendices)

Excerpt from a letter by Wagner is included as an appendix.

### [III](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/what_is_art_se/chapters/iii)

Subject of the chapter; his opera cycle 'The Nibelung's Ring' is summarized and criticized.

## Links

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- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/what_is_art_se/characters