David Cormack, Antipodean: The Converse Life of David Irvine, with Four Unpublished Letters

There are probably five sides to David Irvine the Wagnerite. One is the semi-orphaned Scot who seems to have been overwhelmed by Wagner (Wagner’s ideas at least) possibly not long after he attained the Scottish age of majority (14) in 1870. This one remains a biographical enigma. Against the odds of his family circumstances it gave way to a promising young man who could make for Leipzig, become able to make contributions to the Bayreuth Society of Patrons, and somehow, at the age of 24, be received in Wahnfried in 1881 to make an impression on Wagner himself. After this he returns to biographical obscurity until he becomes the enemy of English ‘anti- Wagnerism’ in books and articles published in London from 1897 onwards. Here he makes an impression on Bernard Shaw. The fourth avatar is the would-be philosopher who in 1905 aimed to found a new Wagnerian–Schopenhauerian ethics that would sweep away not only conservative ecclesiasticism but easygoing socialism. The last is the man who abandoned all this and fled in 1912 to Australia, where he fought a few last Wagnerian contentions in the wartime press before fourteen years of silence descended until his unremarked death in 1930.