Music: Wagner's Stage

Adolf Hitler loved music—especially Wagner. In Mein Kampf, he had written: "My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth master knew no bounds." The Third Reich, Hitler said, had its foundations in the German myths of Composer Richard Wagner, and the shrine at Wagner's Bayreuth was called "the Olympus of German art." In 1938 Hitler ordered that the military music of his favorite composer be used at all of Nürnberg's pagan rallies, and he sat for long hours at Berchtesgaden listening to recordings of Siegfried.

Hitler did not believe (or quite possibly had never read) Nietzsche's The Case of Wagner: "One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. . . . Wagner's stage requires but one thing: Germans! .. [and] Germans themselves have no future." Nor did Hitler look deeply into the final cataclysmic scene of his beloved Götterdämmerung, for which Wagner himself had written the program note: "The will that wanted to shape an entire world according to its wish can finally attain nothing more satisfactory than . . . annihilation."

Last week Hamburg's official Nazi radio station dutifully, tirelessly played excerpts from Götterdämmerung for an hour, then made its announcement: Adolf Hitler was dead.