Tormented Titan: Malcolm Miller applauds a biography of a prominent star in the Wagner constellation

After the birth of Eva, Cosima’s second child with Wagner, in 1867, Hans von Bülow, her legal husband, finally unfettered himself from several years of feigned respectability and lashed out, describing Wagner as a ‘scoundrel’ who was ‘as sublime in his works as he is incomparably abject in his actions’. For Alan Walker this shows ‘a sense of discrimination so rare among human beings that we have no hesitation in describing it as one of Bülow’s finest achievements. [...] He took the man out of the music and it is through Bülow’s devastating dichotomy that the world still deals with the complexities of Wagner’s character.’