In contrast to a writer like Flaubert or a composer like Brahms, who scoffed at the idea of posterity even reading their letters, Wagner regarded his public persona as integral to his life’s work, not unlike Rousseau in the eighteenth century. But while family origins were a stable reference point for Rousseau, the idea of family for Wagner was more brittle. From his birth in Leipzig during unstable events leading to the 1813 Battle of Leipzig to the successful foundation of a family dynasty in Bayreuth in the 1870s, Wagner’s attitude to the nineteenth-century idea of family veered between open rebellion and full-scale adoption of its secrets and habits. I argue in outline for a better understanding of this ambivalence in Wagner’s thoughts and actions, including its consequences for his heirs and their fated relations with the Third Reich.