This book looks at whether Wagner was a forerunner of Nazism, or a true believer in human liberation - a racist or a revolutionary? The author of this book argues that the debate until now has been misconceived, that Wagner was an important shaper of the peculiarly racist revolutionism which was to triumph so devastatingly under Hitler. The author reinterprets Wagner's career against a compelling backdrop of contemporary history and ideology, with profound implications for the understanding of the operas, from the "Ring" cycle to "Parsifal".