Written in exile from Germany, this potent study of Richard Wagner explodes the frontiers of musical and cultural analysis. Wagner's works are among the most controversial in the history of European music because of their powerful aesthetic qualities and, in wider political terms, because of their eventual assimilation into the official culture of the Third Reich. Measuring key elements of Wagner’s oeuvre with patent musical dexterity, Adorno sheds light on a nineteenth-century bourgeois figure whose operas betray the social gestures and high-culture fantasies that helped plant the seeds of the modern Culture Industry. Adorno provides deft musicological analyses of Wagner's scores, compositional techniques, orchestration, and staging methods while quoting copiously from the musical dramas themselves. At the same time, he offers incisive reflections on Wagner's social character and the ideological impulses of his artistic activity.