Each winter thousands of sophisticated Manhattanites throng the Metropolitan Opera House to goggle at old-fashioned Norse gods and blimp-like maidens disporting themselves in animal skins and burlap. The music-dramas of Richard Wagner, with their wilful, slow-witted heroes (Siegfried, Parsifal, Lohengrin), and their clever, conniving villains (Beck-messer, Mime, Alberich), are far & away Manhattan's favorite operas.
What U. S. Wagner fans like about Wagner is the surging music and the epic drama; but they lose themselves only temporarily in the make-believe of the Wagnerian fairyland. But in Adolf Hitler's Aryan Germany, that fairyland...
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