Self-Image and Friends:
Wagner Reflected in Drawing
Even before Richard Wagner became a myth, he was already a figure of public interest. From early on, portraits emerged that depicted him both seriously and ironically. A key figure in this development was his friend Ernst Benedikt Kietz, who sketched Wagner several times in Paris, Dresden, and Zurich.
Wagner’s own drawings were mostly limited to decorative doodles. All the more striking, then, are Kietz’s works, which capture the young composer poised between artistic self-stylisation and everyday life. The most famous of these drawings, The Great Parisian Charge from 1840/41, seems almost a premonition of the “master” Richard Wagner and his art – which at that point still lay far in the future.
Kietz’s pencil studies are considered the first images of Wagner that go beyond self-dramatisation. They were created at a time when Wagner saw himself as a misunderstood genius. While he liked to present himself as a visionary in his letters, Kietz’s drawings show a nervous man, whose self-image was marked by deep doubt and whose life only remained reasonably ordered thanks to his wife.
These early depictions, with their precise observation and subtle irony in the details, laid the foundation for later satirical exaggerations. Kietz was a friend who portrayed Wagner with sympathy – but without reverence.
In retrospect, these drawings mark the beginning of a visual tradition that presented Wagner as a visual echo of his own persona, long before the great scandals and the Bayreuth Festival. The portrait becomes a figure; the artist, a character – a man who moved not only through music but also through his poses.
Physiognomy and Luxurious Fabrics:
Wagner as Target
Richard Wagner’s face was practically made for caricature: pointed nose, prominent chin, domed forehead, wild hair. Even contemporaries recognised in his gestures and glances the claim to genius. For caricaturists, this physiognomy was an ideal template – they turned his portrait into a mask.
As was typical of the time, Wagner’s head appears disproportionately large in relation to his body. This stylistic device was standard in Le Journal amusant, L’Éclipse or Der Floh, used to make the features of well-known figures instantly recognisable. But in Wagner’s case, some distinctive traits were added: the characteristically raised eyebrow, the piercing gaze, and the untamed mop of hair are repeatedly emphasised – creating an unmistakable cliché.
A second point of attack for equally biting portrayals was Wagner’s legendary fondness for luxurious fabrics. In 1877, his extravagant orders from Viennese milliner Bertha Goldwag were made public – large quantities of silk, velvet, and brocade, not only for decorating his home in Tribschen but also for dressing gowns and curtains in lavish abundance. The press relished these revelations.
Der Floh caricatured Wagner as ruler over a realm of silk rolls. This scene condensed mockery and fascination: the great reformer of art appeared as a vain costume fetishist who had lost all sense of proportion.
Thus, Wagner’s physiognomy combined with symbols of luxury to form a lasting iconography of megalomania.
Sound as Assault:
Wagner the Machinist of Noise
Richard Wagner aimed to revolutionise art with his works. He dreamed of a Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art that would captivate all the senses. But many contemporaries saw his vision as a provocation. Especially in France, where his Tannhäuser famously failed at the Paris Opera in 1861, Wagner became a symbol of artistic arrogance.
No caricaturist captured Wagner’s impact as precisely as Cham, who published his Croquis, par Cham series in the satirical magazine Le Charivari each week. He depicted Wagner as a manic figure, furiously battering a bewildered orchestra with a gigantic baton. In one episode, singers desperately cover their ears while box-seat patrons peer through binoculars to check whether they are at the opera or in a military barracks.
The motif of the “noise machine” quickly became a common trope. In Der Floh, variations appeared in which Wagner operated a monstrous apparatus: deafening din blasted from huge horns, drums, and bellows. Music gave way to mechanical racket.
The caricaturists translated Wagner’s theoretical writings – particularly his programme for a “work of art of the future” – into grotesque technological fantasies. His desire to dissolve the boundaries between the arts appeared, in their view, as excessive hubris.
These caricatures mocked Wagner’s musical radicalism as a form of overblown self-promotion. The conductor became a dictator of sound. For many observers, he was not just a composer but a prophet of art as ideology – an artist who mesmerised and exhausted his audience, musicians, and patrons alike.
Cult Figure and Demigod:
Wagner as Idol
Richard Wagner created not only operas but also his own image. He staged his work as a sacred artefact and himself as the high priest of a new artistic religion. The cult surrounding his persona was fuelled above all by the Bayreuth Festival – encouraged by devoted followers and gleefully dismantled by caricaturists.
In Le Journal amusant or Der Floh, Wagner was drawn atop lofty pedestals, flanked by figures from his operas while devotees waved banners and knelt before him. Bayreuth became the cathedral of delusions of grandeur, the festival summer a pilgrimage. Caricaturists turned Wagner into a living monument – part artist, part statue, part pseudo-saint.
Kladderadatsch reached for classical symbolism, depicting Wagner as a Caesar with laurel wreath and score in hand – a triumphant figure who not only created The Ring but crowned himself as well. The laurel became both the emblem of his claim to immortality and an object of ridicule.
In Austria, Der Floh had none other than Jupiter bestow lightning bolts upon Wagner, presenting him next to a giant kettle drum as Lord of Thunder.
These caricatures highlighted the fine line between genius and hubris. Wagner’s art, they suggested, was no longer about aesthetic pleasure or reflection – but about the uncritical worship of its creator.
Nationalism and Antisemitism:
Wagner as Political Herald
Richard Wagner was far more than a composer: he was a political writer, aesthetic ideologue, polemicist, and fierce critic of the establishment. Through his close fusion of art and politics, Wagner polarised opinion like no other artist of his era.
In France, where his operas initially met with resistance, satirists merged Wagner’s national art with Prussian militarism. In a notorious caricature from Le Sifflet, he appears as a general in a spiked helmet; in La Vie parisienne, he fires off salvos from a cannon-shaped tuba – a symbol of the crushing impact of his music.
Wagner’s antisemitism also became a subject for caricature. His pamphlet Judaism in Music is considered one of the most infamous antisemitic tracts of the 19th century. In Wagner caricatures – such as those in Humoristische Blätter – the stereotypical antisemitic “Jewish” figure appears as the embodiment of all that Wagner sought, with missionary zeal, to purge from art and society as “un-German.”
These satirical images exposed the connection between revolutionary posturing and ideological narrow-mindedness. Artistic renewal was accompanied by nationalist and racist doctrines. Art became a weapon.
Following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, Wagner came to symbolise – and personify – the new German Empire and its chauvinistic attitudes. Yet in letters to King Ludwig II of Bavaria (dated 10 February and 15 July 1878), he expressed disdain for Prussia’s state ideology: “This new Germany disgusts me! Is this supposed to be an empire?”
Money, Patrons, Megalomania:
Wagner as Bankrupt Peacock
Richard Wagner possessed no economic talent. For him, money was mere filthy lucre – an expression of Jewish-capitalist rule. At the same time, his need for luxury as a precondition for artistic productivity always led to greater expenses than income – which he could only partially cover by conducting concerts. Bankruptcy was both a real and recurring theme throughout the first fifty years of his life. As a result, Marxism initially seemed to him a plausible remedy.
After losing his position as Royal Saxon Court Conductor due to his participation in the 1849 uprisings and his flight into exile in Zurich, Wagner no longer had any regular income. He thus became reliant on the support of friends and patrons – a “borrowing genius,” as Thomas Mann later put it.
Only with the seemingly endless patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, beginning in 1864, did Wagner’s situation change dramatically. But while Wagner believed the world owed him whatever he needed to create his works, the king’s generous gifts, privileges, and the prospect of a theatre of his own aroused envy.
Münchener Punsch and Stadtfraubas made Wagner’s closeness to the king a recurring theme. Caricatures repeatedly portrayed Wagner as a favourite, a supplicant, or a manipulator. In reference to Ludwig I’s scandalous affair with dancer Lola Montez, Wagner was mockingly dubbed the king’s “Lolus.”
The Viennese press – particularly Der Floh – later picked up these Munich themes and shifted focus to Bayreuth. There, Wagner was depicted as an insatiable spendthrift, declaiming pompously about art while royal gold coins poured into his pockets.
Friends, Foes, Love Affairs:
Wagner’s Networks
Richard Wagner demanded unconditional admiration, loyalty, support, and generosity from his friends. He resembled the eye of a hurricane around which devotion, dependency, and enmity swirled.
The Viennese magazine Der Floh repeatedly published scenes showing Wagner surrounded by his ever-changing circle of allies and adversaries. Caricaturists especially delighted in mocking his relationships with publishers, opera directors, and conductors like Hans von Bülow. The latter was initially a fervent Wagnerian – until Wagner stole his wife, Cosima, daughter of Franz Liszt. In the resulting cartoons, Wagner appears as a charming seducer.
Sometimes he is shown as Paris reaching for Cosima’s hand, while rivals and critics look on in horror from the edges. Other images place him in a fishing boat, casting his line for the Rhinemaidens.
Franz Liszt, meanwhile, is turned into an allegory of the loyal, long-suffering patron – sometimes a Grail knight supporting Wagner, at other times a mount upon which Wagner triumphantly rides. These images reflect a deeper truth: without Liszt’s support, Wagner’s rise would have been nearly impossible.
The caricatures reveal the hollowness of the grandiosity that permeated Wagner’s personal relationships. An artist who recognised no boundaries, a lover who took what he wanted, a strategist who saw friendship as blind obligation to himself. Between admiration and discomfort, there was little room for neutrality.
Wagner in Series:
Picture Stories
Richard Wagner’s life story – and the myth that crystallised around it – eventually became the subject of extended pictorial narratives, a sort of forerunner to modern comics.
French magazines like Le Journal amusant and Viennese publications like Der Floh published picture series presenting Wagner’s biography as a cautionary ballad: from the misunderstood genius in Paris to triumph in Munich and eventual coronation in Bayreuth. Each episode was exaggerated with irony: the debt-maker, the court flatterer, the prophet with laurel and ledger.
These picture stories were more than simple mockery. They distilled what Wagner’s critics believed he represented: excess, self-dramatisation, ruthlessness. In some series, he transforms from scene to scene – from conductor to beggar, then to high priest standing before a congregation of devoted listeners. The satirical logic was merciless: one who aspires to greatness can only end as a caricature of himself.
Visual narratives of his music followed a similar pattern. The conductor became a noise-maker, the Festspielhaus a factory of thunder. Musicians tumbled from their chairs, critics fled with cotton in their ears.
Through these magnifying lenses of the Wagner myth, it became clear once again: the distance from the sublime to the ridiculous is only a small step.
Satire in the 19th Century:
Caricature as Medium
The explosive rise of satirical magazines in the 19th century significantly enhanced Richard Wagner’s public profile. Caricature was the fastest, most effective, and sharpest medium of its time. It seized on every scandal, rumour, or sensation – and made it visible to a mass audience in just a few strokes.
In France, Le Charivari and Le Journal amusant were among the most influential outlets. Week after week, they published portraits that reduced well-known figures to grotesque proportions. Illustrators like Cham turned opera into a stage of ridicule – and Wagner into a favourite target.
In Berlin, Kladderadatsch combined political commentary with biting social critique, while in Vienna Der Floh dissected cultural life. In Munich, Punsch lampooned Wagner’s role at the court of King Ludwig II. These publications typically appeared weekly and reached circulation figures that extended well into the provinces.
The success of caricature was closely tied to the invention of lithography at the turn of the century. Lithographic stones enabled not only large print runs but also coloured images, making caricatures appear like miniature paintings. Each colour required its own stone; each printing stage demanded precision – a considerable effort that nonetheless demanded exceptional craftsmanship, even for a fleeting joke.
Yet satire was not without limits. Censorship, confiscations, and fines occurred repeatedly. The most famous example is the “pear” caricature of King Louis-Philippe, which triggered a political earthquake in France. Wagner, however, was not only a victim but also a beneficiary: the widespread satirical reproduction of his scandals and peculiarities made him widely known – even outside artistic circles.
Thus, the Wagner myth is, above all, a media phenomenon. In caricature, Wagner becomes both vulnerable and immortal. It is the prism through which admiration, anger, and ridicule are refracted – placing the “Master” in the “Spot(t)-light”, and revealing the human – all too human (Nietzsche) in even his grandeur.