In a comment to this review of a recent performance of Wagner’s Ring by the English National Opera, commenter Laon makes a fascinating assertion that I had not previously heard: Hitler turned away from Wagner in the final years of WWII.

Read on if you’re interested:

Laon claims that the Nazis

asked for no further productions of the Ring cycle after 1942 (it seems Wagner’s message finally got through: people who seek power lose everything they love, and the ability to love; and they experience ignominious downfall); and that immediately after the Nazis taking power, and control of the operatic repertoire, performances of Wagner opera reduced in number.

This withdrawal of Wagner from the German operatic repertoire continued and accelerated throughout the Nazi period, 1933-1945. I don’t think this was really because the Nazis understood Wagner’s messages enough to see how hostile they were to their enterprise. It was more that his operas were complex, hard, and made people think: their disappearance from the repertoire was part of a general dumbing down of culture under Nazi rule.

So if you want to associate an operatic composer as the soundtrack of Nazism, the on-the-ground reality as revealed by the actual performance statistics would suggest that Verdi’s the Nazi’s man, followed by Lortzing. . . .

Coming back to Götterdämmerung, the last time Hitler is known to have listened to music from that opera, it was after the collapse in Russia and the funeral of a senior Nazi. The funeral music from Götterdämmerung was played but Hitler apparanly couldn’t stand it. Goebbels noted in his Diary, in 1943, that the Wagner music made Hitler “upset”. Thereafter Hitler didn’t listen to much Wagner, according to the people around him in the last years.

It seems that Hitler figured out, rather belatedly, that an anarchist pacifist ratbag like Wagner was not exactly on his side. Wagner was an antisemite, as we know, just as we ought to know this about a lot of other cultural figures, but don’t: but there was more to being a Nazi, or proto-Nazi, than being an antisemite.

So: the Ring came under a partial performance ban, and Hitler seems to have been shaken by Götterdämmerung in particular. No surprise: its message, on the subject of seeking power, is profoundly anti-Nazi. That’s exactly why the Allies used Wagner, especially the Ring cycle, in their propaganda broadcasts into Germany: that message about the futility and evil of seeking power that is the heart of the Ring. And they were able to use Wagner’s own granddaughter, Friedelind Wagner, to help explain it. (She fled Germany and made anti-Nazi broadcasts into Germany for the Allies, along with Thomas Mann and other cultural figures.)

If I think about Nazis in relation to Götterdämmerung, which is seldom because Götterdämmerung is pretty vast in its range of meaning, it’s about the destruction of Nazism. Their destruction is the meaning the Nazis ultimately took from Götterdämmerung, and in that respect they were right.

Fascinating stuff — if you like that sort of thing.