A lecture by Professor Tim Blanning, Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, on ‘Wagner and German Nationalism’.
‘I am the most German being, I am the German spirit’, wrote Wagner in The Brown Book. Many commentators, especially after 1933, have taken him at face value. This lecture will seek to show that in fact his relationship with German nationalism was a great deal more problematic and that even such apparently nationalist passages as Hans Sachs’s final address in 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg' have been misunderstood.