Richard Wagner’s approach to issues of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ includes the semantics of his musical style as well as his habit of assigning gender-specific traits to certain ideologies, such as nationalism. But the subject of women´s love is the main factor of his oeuvre. Women´s purpose in life lay in loving a man; aberrations turned evil (Ortrud in Lohengrin) or exuded sexual menace (Venus in Tannhäuser). His love affairs were closely related to his work, as the secret abbreviations in his draft of Die Walküre shows. He uses love as a means of redemption and salvation, but his erotic imagination was fascinated by the musical description of desire as in Tristan und Isolde. Women find their identity by finding a man, and they die when they have lost him. His music, however, is an authority able to break through the role of the woman as an appendage of the man.