Performing the “Ring&rdquo WHAT are we to do about Richard
Wagner? Nothing in the years since his death in 1883 has
succeeded in mitigating the essential unpleasantness of his
personality. Indeed, few men in the history of art can have been
so unfortunate in so many of their admirers; few can have had a
world outlook of such unparalleled evil erected in the image of
their ideas of art and life. Whatever else Wagner was, the Nazis
found a hero in him. And whatever else he was, this worshipper
of power wherever he found it remains one of the famous anti-
Semites of history. It thus might have been thought that Wagner-
man and artist alike-would have forever lain entombed in the
ruins of Hitler’s Valhalla. But on the contrary, admiration for
Wagner’s art, which even during the darkest days of World War II
had not been completely extinguished among Germany’s Western
enemies, began a steady rise after 1945. The first sign of this
popularity was the worldwide interest in the reopening of the
Bayreuth Festival in 1951