ABSTRACT
Richard Wagner was the most influential composer in Europe when L. Tolstoy was writing What is Art? and, next to Beethoven, he remains the most famous composer of his century. Tolstoy’s wholehearted attack on this figure is, again, notorious, being widely considered perverse, both in its judgements and in the method of its criticism. Wagner lived from 1813 to 1883. His formal training in music was very slight, lasting for little more than a year. Wagner was a voluminous writer. He was also the cause of much writing in others: No musician, perhaps no artist in the history of Western art, has ever had so much to say about his own life, works and ideas as did Richard Wagner. Wagner differs from Tolstoy over when the perversion first arose. For Tolstoy it was when Christianity was adopted by the Roman Empire. For Wagner it virtually coincided with the appearance of Christianity itself, the cause of the mischief being St Paul.
