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.

From the early nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Britons were in thrall to German composers. In 1940, music editor Ralph Hill complained of ‘the fanatical worship of the public as well as the average professional musician for the German tradition’. Instead of any unified Austro-German tradition, this was Britain negotiating a changing set of stylistic currents, played off against other continental identities and shifting ideas of old and new. Before the First World War, British musicians considered Austrians and Germans wardens of traditional styles (Brahms) as well as promulgators of modernism (Strauss and Schoenberg). British composers after Elgar, among them Holst and Vaughan Williams, responded directly to French exemplars and to the emerging folk revival. With Britten and other British composers of the 1930s, there was a marked shift of allegiance away from the musical ‘Hun’ – apart from an increasing interest in Mahler. By the later 1950s, ‘The Hun’ had ceased to be an entity for UK music lovers. Indeed, the Britain-vs.-the-continent duality was already moribund when the young Manchester group brought homegrown rather than continental modernism to London in 1956.