This chapter provides an outline of Wagner’s relationship with German-language musical criticism of his time from two related angles, i.e. Wagner as the subject and the object of musical criticism. First, I summarise the emergence of professional musical criticism in the 1700s and 1800s, dependent on aesthetic and societal changes, and assess the latest status of relevant source material, which proves problematic both in case of a reliable critical edition of Wagner’s own writings as well as the availability and completeness of nineteenth-century reviews of Wagner’s works. I then proceed to sketching Wagner’s early music reviews of the 1830s and 1840s and discuss his changing attitude towards criticism in general, before tracing broader trends and shifts in critical debates around 1848 as related to Wagner. Finally, I propose the need for a more fine-grained analysis of certain key topics of nineteenth-century musical criticism in terms of ‘camps’ and ‘party lines’.

The composers, performers, teachers, and fellow pupils with whom Mahler rubbed elbows during his first period as a resident of Vienna represented the upper echelon of European musical culture. He was both eager and well suited to make the most of this opportunity; his musical ability, his capacity for work, and his fervent sense of ethical responsibility to the art encouraged him to draw all he could from this rich array of colleagues. This chapter presents salient information on these figures, concentrating on teachers (Josef Hellmesberger, Julius Epstein, Robert Fuchs, and Franz Krenn), student colleagues (Ludwig Krzyzanowski, Hugo Wolf, Hans Rott, and Arnold Rosé), and establishment figures (Johannes Brahms, Eduard Hanslick, and the peculiar outsider Anton Bruckner). By the time of his departure in 1883, Mahler would know the city from the inside, but that experience would not protect him in his maturity from the hard lessons learned by so many of his teachers, peers, and idols: that living as a Viennese musician inevitably left scars.