Music: Wagner No Aryan?

In Germany, every crop-haired infant Siegfried, every pig-tailed little Brünnhilde counts Richard Wagner one of Nazidom's special heroes. Composer Wagner not only glorified pagan German gods and goddesses in his Ring of the Nibelungs; he and his wife Cosima were also openly antiSemitic, believed and spread the racial nonsense preached by Count Joseph Arthur Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Yet Wagner himself was perhaps what Nazis call non-Aryan. He may have been the son of a supposedly part-Jewish actor named Ludwig Geyer. Last week this old contention, long pishtushed by German Wagnerites,...

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