Wagner Journal

I'm pleased to have an article in the latest issue of The Wagner Journal, Barry Millington's scholarly-critical periodical. It's titled "Götterdämmerung 1945: Wagnerian Fantasies in English-Language Reports of Hitler's Death." After questioning widespread assumptions that Siegfried's Funeral Music was played round the clock on Nazi radio after Hitler's death, I observe that almost from the beginning of the war English-language journalists had been priming their readers to see the end of the Hitler regime as a "Wagnerian" event. The issue, guest-edited by Chris Walton, also includes an essay on Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark, by Kate Hopkins, and an exploration of Götterdämmerung themes in the work of the South African novelist Etienne Leroux, by Paula Fourie.