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The German composer Richard Wagner was a controversial figure during his lifetime, and has continued to be so after his death.〔Millington, Barry (Ed.) (1992).〕 Even today he is associated in the minds of many with Nazism and his operas are often thought to extol the virtues of German nationalism. The writer and Wagner scholar Bryan Magee has written:
Most of these perceptions arise from Wagner's published opinions on a number of topics. Wagner was a voluminous writer and published essays and pamphlets on a wide range of subjects throughout his life.〔Many of Wagner's writings are available online in English translations at (The Wagner Library ).〕 Wagner's writing style is verbose, unclear and turgid, which has greatly added to the confusion about his opinions. Several of his writings have achieved some notoriety, in particular his essay ''Das Judenthum in der Musik, (Jewishness in Music)'', a critical view on the influence of Jews in German culture and society at that time. The essays he wrote in his final years were also controversial, with many readers perceiving them to employ an endorsement of racist beliefs. Some commentators also believe that some of Wagner's operas contain adverse caricatures of Jews. Wagner was promoted during the Nazi era as one of Adolf Hitler's favourite composers. Historical perception of Wagner has been tainted with this association ever since, and there is debate over how Wagner's writings and operas might have influenced the creation of Nazi Germany. Finally there is controversy over both extremes of Wagner's life, his paternity and his death. It is suggested that he was the son of Ludwig Geyer, rather than his legal father Carl Friedrich Wagner, and some of his biographers have proposed that Wagner himself believed that Geyer was Jewish. A belief also exists that his fatal heart attack followed an argument with his wife Cosima over the singer Carrie Pringle, with whom some claim he had an amorous relationship. == Paternity == Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813, the ninth child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the Leipzig police service and Johanna Rosine Wagner. Wagner's father died of typhus six months after Richard's birth, by which time Wagner's mother was living with the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer in the Brühl, at that time the Jewish quarter of Leipzig. Johanna and Geyer married in August 1814, and for the first 14 years of his life, Wagner was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer. Wagner in his later years discovered letters from Geyer to his mother which led him to suspect that Geyer was in fact his biological father, and furthermore speculated that Geyer was Jewish.〔Magee, Bryan (2002) pages 358 - 361.〕〔Gutman, Robert (1968, revised 1990) page 4.〕〔('A Vulture is Almost an Eagle' )〕 According to Cosima's diaries (26 December 1868) Wagner "did not believe" that Ludwig Geyer was his real father. At the same time Cosima noted a resemblance between Wagner's son Siegfried and Geyer.〔Deathridge (1984), p. 1〕 The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was one of Wagner's closest acolytes, and proof-read Wagner's autobiography ''Mein Leben''. It may have been this closeness that led Nietzsche to claim in his 1888 book ''Der Fall Wagner'' (The Case of Wagner) that Wagner's father was Geyer, and to make the pun that "Ein Geyer ist beinahe schon ein Adler" (A vulture is almost an eagle) —Geyer also being the German word for a vulture and Adler being a very common Jewish surname. Despite these conjectures on the part of Wagner and Nietzsche, there is no evidence that Geyer was Jewish, and the question of Wagner's paternity is unlikely to be settled without DNA evidence. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Wagner controversies」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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