Though Hitler reiterated in his monologue that winter evening that to him Tristan und Isolde was “Wagner’s masterpiece,” it is the stupendous Nibelungen Ring, a series of four operas which was inspired by the great German epic myth, Nibelungenlied, and on which the composer worked for the better part of twenty-five years, that gave Germany and especially the Third Reich so much of its primitive Germanic mythos. Often a people’s myths are the highest and truest expression of its spirit and culture, and nowhere is this more true than in Germany.
