Richard Wagner / YMMV

Americans Hate Tingle: His music is highly divisive at best in Israel, owing to its later association with Nazism.
Awesome Ego: By all accounts, the man was a massive egotist and never afraid to share his high opinion of himself. Depending who you ask, that could make him either an Insufferable Genius who had a Determinator's faith in the value of his work — or just plain insufferable.
Designated Hero: The fitness of several of Wagner's heroes to protagonisthood has been questioned. ("How could Elisabeth choose that whiner Heinrich over Wolfram?")
Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: All of Wagner's operas are heavy on the Rule of Symbolism, and as a result many, many possible interpretations have been proposed.
Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Most Wagner fans will get salty if he's referred to as a "Nazi composer". Although many of the Nazis were indeed fans of Wagner (Adolf Hitler chiefly among them), Wagner never returned the dubious compliment since he had been dead for several decades before the Nazi Party ever existed. ^note
Fanon Discontinuity: Not too many fans of Wagner care about Die Feen or Das Liebesverbot. You might know of somebody who likes Rienzi, but he or she will probably enjoy everything thereafter as well. Overlaps with Canon Discontinuity, as Wagner himself did not consider these early operas part of his canon and his own Bayreuth Festival has never presented them, though they have announced plans to finally present Rienzi in 2026.
Misattributed Song:
- No, Wagner did not write any part of Carmina Burana. Carl Orff began writing it in 1935 (Wagner had been dead for 52 years by then) and the collection of poems and texts it was based on dated back to the 13th century at the latest.
- Nor did he write "In the Hall of the Mountain King" (or the entirety of the music for Peer Gynt for that matter). That was Edvard Grieg, but at least it was written within Wagner's lifetime (1875, 8 years before his death), making the error slightly more forgivable.
Music to Invade Poland to: Wagner is often used as background music for scenes of war-related activities (including World War II). This is partly because World War II Germans actually were fond of Wagner's music and occasionally used it in their propaganda (such as the Wochenschau newsreels), which has given it Unfortunate Implications in some circles to this day. Since Wagner himself died long before the Nazis rose to power, this may be largely a case of Hitler Ate Sugar; however, it's complicated by the fact that he is also on record with some nasty anti-Semitic statements of his own. On the other hand, complicating things still further are the fact that Wagner was also a left-leaning socialist for much of his life, befriended Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakhunin and participated in the Dresden May Uprising (which got him exiled by the Saxon government), and expressed a strong distrust of power in his works (along with a belief in The Power of Love). In other words, much like the case of his erstwhile friend Friedrich Nietzsche, it is quite likely that his untimely death resulted in his appropriation by people of whom he would have been unlikely to approve in the slightest.
Older Than They Think: Many people think that the saxophones were invented in the Jazz Age, but Wagner had requested Adolphe Sax to figure out how to create an instrument to play a smooth brass/woodwind sound back in 1840.
Once Original, Now Common:
- Wagner's Musik der Zukunft ("The Music of the Future") was considered daringly, even outrageously, innovative in his own time; but he became so influential that his music is now reckoned old-fashioned and even stereotypical by some.
- Wagner's leitmotif technique - that is, associating one musical idea with a particular character, item or feeling and repeating it whenever that/they recurred - was revolutionary at the time, but is standard practice in film music today. His writings also had a huge influence on the development of musical theatre.
Overshadowed by Controversy: Wagner is regarded as an innovative, influential and important composer, but to this day he remains a very controversial figure for his anti-Semitism, which by accounts was extreme even by the standards of his own time, such as his attempts to damage the reputations of Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer with his notorious Das Judenthum in der Musik (Jewishness in Music). Solidifying his infamy was Adolf Hitler being a big fan of his music while sharing anti-Semitic beliefs but taking them to the extreme, as well as Hitler's friendliness with members of the Wagner family and the Nazis using his music for propaganda, traumatising victims in concentration camps. It is debated if Wagner would have supported the Nazis or not, as he died six years before Hitler was even born, and he had respect for Jewish artists like his conductor friend Hermann Levi, who had immense admiration and respect for Wagner and ended up one of his pallbearers (though Wagner asked Levi to baptize himself as a Christian to conduct the Parsifal premiere and backed down only when Ludwig II of Bavaria stepped in). Nevertheless, his music is all but banned in Israel, and attempts to perform his music there have been met with mass protests.
It's Popular, Now It Sucks! / Vindicated by History: Wagner's popularity dismayed many of his non-fans in the 1800s, some of them decrying the ruin of society. In Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century, a bitter composer describes Wagner as one of the worst things ever to happen to music:
... in the last century [the 1800s], a certain Richard Wagner, a sort of messiah who has been insufficiently crucified, invented the Music of the Future and we're still enduring it; in his day, melody was already being suppressed, and he decided it was appropriate to get rid of harmony as well — and the house has remained empty ever since. [Verne then spends the rest of the chapter describing the musical crimes of the Church of the Wagnerians, and how music was clearly "ruined" by this hard modern sound.]
- Much to the horror of the "real music fans" (such as, apparently, Verne) this new artist's sound fused wild, overwhelmingly powerful overtures, interruptions of the melodic line with chaotic passages pitting the sections of the orchestra and melody against one another, occasional intentionally grating atonal chords, intense focus on the bass section, interwoven repeating musical phrases, and a dark, angsty sound. Worse, other composers embraced this sound, and it became hugely popular.

YMMV / Richard Wagner

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