N 1968 Robert Gutman published a popular book about Wagner ( Richard Wagner: the Man, his Mind and his Music) in which he portrayed his subject asĪ racist, psychopathic, proto-Nazi monster. Wagner and his works, some of them (notably Hartmut Zelinsky and Barry Millington) developing ingenious theories about subtly-coded anti-Semitic and racist messages that they allege are cleverly hidden, Recent commentators have built upon Adorno's view of

Given Richard Wagner's frequent anti- Semitic remarks, many have found this claim plausible. Adorno suggested that some of the characters, such as Mime and Klingsor, were anti-Semitic caricatures. For Adorno, Wagner's dramas were inherently 'völkisch'. In the vanguard of those who attacked Wagner and his heritage in the Iven the posthumous association of Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival with Hitler, who was an enthusiast for Wagner's music, and byĮxtension with Nazism it was inevitable that commentators, especially in Germany, would regard Wagner's dramas as tainted by Nazism. What is unfortunate is that discussion of them soon turned into a war of words in which truth was the first casualty. I do not mean, of course, that these subjects should be ignored.

T has become impossible, when discussing his dramas and in particular the last of them, Parsifal, to avoid the topic of Richard Wagner'sĪnti-Semitism and the claim, forcefully advanced by Robert Gutman in 1968, that Wagner was a racist.

Racial purity