Richard Wagner: A Biography

"Yes, this is a very handy book. It’s the most convenient one-volume biography on Richard Wagner in English that I know. Watson writes about Wagner’s relationship with his second wife Cosima particularly well, but I think it’s all very good. It’s thoroughly sane and straightforward; it doesn’t have any stunning insights but it’s fair minded. He’s not grinding any axes, which is unusual for a writer on Wagner. There aren’t that many biographies of Wagner in English. Most books are about him and his music, with varying degrees of emphasis on the music or the action with just a certain casual reference to the life. There are other books that are hard to classify like Martin Geck’s Richard Wagner: A Life in Music (2013) which is a very useful book but it’s a quite sophisticated conceptual approach. I thought about recommending it but, on the whole, I think it might be too demanding for those new to Wagner on the whole."