Wagner tends to generate rather fierce, lively and often bad-tempered
debate between "Wagnerites" and "Anti-Wagnerites", not least where his
political and racial ideas are concerned.  Dieter Borchmeyer has
written: "The merest glance at writings on Wagner, including the most
recent ones on the composer's life and works, is enough to convince the
most casual reader that he or she has wandered into a madhouse.  Even
serious scholars take leave of their senses when writing about Wagner
and start to rant.  There are transcendental Wagnerians with their heads
in the clouds, phallo-Wagnerians whose sights are set somewhat lower,
meekly feminist "Wagnériennes" and brashly political "Wagnerianer" --
and in every case there are their polemical opposite numbers, busily
condemning and unmasking Wagner in the name of the very same values and
on the strength of the very same evidence, their desire to unmask Wagner
driving them to the very brink of scientific and psychological flagell-
antism and persuading them to see a causal link between 'Parsifal' and
Auschwitz." [From the preface to 'Drama and the World of Richard Wagner', 
tr. Daphne Ellis, Princeton, 2003].

Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer; this coupled with his own anti-
Semitism (as expressed most clearly in his essay, 'Judaism in Music',
concerning which see below under "Frequently asked questions") has made
RW a controversial figure even today. His music is still widely
boycotted in Israel; although a recent performance of the 'Siegfried
Idyll' by the Rishon Lezion SO attracted, among a large audience, only
one protester. It needs to be added that RW never advocated violence
against the Jews, nor against any racial or ethnic minority.

During RW's early career, he associated with radicals and revolutionaries
(such as the anarchist Bakunin, whom some people regard as the model for
Siegfried). For his part in the Dresden Uprising of 1849, from which he
made a narrow escape, RW was outlawed in most of Germany and he went into
exile in Switzerland. In his later career, under the sponsorship of the
King of Bavaria, RW became more conservative (although he never renounced
his utopian socialism) and nationalistic. 

He was particularly negative about the French, especially after the
failure of his opera 'Tannhäuser' at the Paris Opera in 1861 (hence RW's
'A Capitulation' of 1870, in which he obviously enjoys the idea of the
besieged Parisians eating rats). According to RW (in 'German Art and
German Policy', 1867) the Germans were capable of developing a culture
superior to the civilisation of the despised French -- a culture in which
German art, not least Wagner's art, would occupy centre stage.