All those lucky enough to have been to music events held in the morning will be sympathetic to Wagner’s idea of daytime opera festivals performed when everyone is wide awake. It was one of the many ideas he derived from Ancient Greece, and was one of the reasons why he was a mid-nineteenth-century social revolutionary, with Marx and Bakunin – so that there would be an educated audience of all classes, or no classes, for his works.

This superbly-illustrated book, by one of several outstanding British Wagner experts, seems at first like an ideal starting-point for understanding the importance of the bicentennial of the composer’s birth in May 2013. As the author says, Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle ‘is one of the pillars of Western civilization’. Not to have experienced it is like having lived without seeing Hamlet or having heard Beethoven symphonies.

However, on closer inspection, this handsome volume seems more like an ingeniously put-together collection of articles and programme notes, with at least one serious biographical gap, and whose main purpose is not only to emphasize that ‘Anti-Semitism is an intrinsic element of the Wagnerian world view’, but to assert that it is actually present in most of his work.

No one can deny that Wagner wrote a profoundly anti-Jewish pamphlet and was theoretically anti-Semitic – like Voltaire, William Cobbett and Dostoevsky, to name but a few – though it did not stop him having Jewish friends and colleagues, most famously the first conductor of Parsifal, Hermann Levi, who was devoted to Wagner. In this respect, he was strikingly like our own Thomas Carlyle, whose own ugly anti-Jewish opinions did not stop him having a devoted Jewish amenuensis (Victor Neuberg).

Wagner’s anti-Semitism was mentioned by Gustav Mahler, understandable in the context of the notoriously anti-Semitic Vienna of his time. It was taken up by the influential thinker Theodor Adorno (who was half-Jewish and therefore possibly prone to ‘protest too much’), and publicized after the Eichmann trial in 1963, the first proper revelation of the Holocaust. It was further stressed by the American critics, Paul Rose and Marc Weiner, in the spirit of political correctness applied to the Jewish question, and in turn was repeated here by Barry Millington and others. In that spirit, this book implicitly defends the ban on Wagner’s work in Israel, while ignoring the thousands of people (including Jewish people) all over the world – above all in Germany, where people are ultra-conscious of Jewish sensibility – who know, enjoy and love Wagner’s work.

The puzzle is: why should such a critic as Millington, who knows and appreciates Wagner like few others, want to spoil his work for everyone else. For who, in this world of so many available attractions, wants to trouble with a body of work – let alone such a vast body – which is explicitly anti-Semitic? Because, to take just one example, Millington argues that the evil characters of Mime and his brother Alberich in ‘The Ring’ are depicted by Wagner as Jews. This coincides precisely with Nazi programme notes on the operas. What Millington and such programme notes ignore is that these two unsavoury brothers are but pitiful victims of the real villain of the piece, the emblematic tycoon, although often sympathetic, Aryan God, Wotan.

Yes, the magnificent God Wotan is the root of all evil in ‘The Ring’! Wagner remained a revolutionary, despite his famous silk underwear.

The serious biographical gap in this book is Wagner’s Paris period in the early 1840s. It was there, envious of the enormous success of the operas of Halévy and Meyerbeer (both Jews), that Wagner first became seriously anti-Jewish. Meyerbeer was kind to him and lent him money, oblivious of the humiliation he was inflicting onto his beneficiary, who never forgave him. It is odd that a book like this should omit these crucial Paris years.

Wagner, whose works are so emotionally elemental, was infinitely complex, a magnificent writer of librettos (which have been successfully performed without music!), but also of essays and stories (influenced in his prose style by the Jewish convert to Christianity, Heinrich Heine). Wagner was Human-All-Too-Human, to coin the phrase of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who loved and also hated him. The music has to be heard to be believed, but Wagner wrote not operas but ‘music dramas’. Without the words, you may as well see a silent film of a Shakespeare play, albeit with orchestral accompaniment.

(Barry Millington, Richard Wagner: the sorcerer of Bayreuth, Thames & Hudson, 2012)