Wagner

Exploring the question of whether Wagner was a forerunner of Nazism, or a true believer in human liberation - a racist or a revolutionary - this book argues that the debate until now has been misconceived, and that Wagner was an important shaper of the peculiarly racist revolutionism which was to triumph so devastatingly under Hitler. The author reinterprets Wagner's career against a backdrop of contemporary history and ideology, with implications for the understanding of the operas, from the Ring cycle to Parsifal.