Former German infantryman Hans Himsel lived through scenes in 1944 at the Bayreuth opera house worthy of the finale of Richard Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung” when Valhalla goes up in flames. In this ...

Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, and WEB Du Bois all drew on his work. Hitler was his most fateful disciple. Has the composer’s legacy been misunderstood? At the beginning of Siegfried, the third opera in ...

“This is a book about a musician’s influence on non-musicians,” Alex Ross says. That’s good, because I am a non-musician. Ross is the premier music critic in the United States, and Wagnerism often ...

Cristian Damir Martinez Vega does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant ...