But on two other points he sets the ideological anti-Wagnerites straight. Wagner, who was born in 1813 and died in 1883, began his political life as a revolutionary socialist. He never moved to the right and there is no connection between his anti-Semitism and fascism. Second, just because Hitler admired his music, it does not follow that there must be something - the depiction of militarism and nationalism for instance - in Wagner that lends itself to misinterpretation.

There is militarism, nationalism and horrific violence in Shakespeare.Still, there remains the problem of "people who imagine that art is exhaustively a social product, and that its primary significance lies in its social influence". This reflects the age we live in, one almost wholly devoid of metaphysical values.Wagner underwent a famous change of outlook, which casts light on the pitfalls of seeing humanity as only the self-sufficient engineer of its own redemption. From being a companion-in-arms to the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, Wagner came to reject the efficacy of politics altogether. Art, which he began by thinking would help to introduce a just social order, he later saw as the unique means by which humans can intuit values beyond the tangible world.This switch is notoriously embodied in the Ring. The libretto still reflects a desire to see the rotten world go up in flames, but the power of love, radiant in the music, switches tracks. In the original plan for the final opera, Twilight of the Gods, love figured as the pre-Marxist Feuerbach taught Wagner to see it - the foundation for a brave new world. By the time Wagner came to the end of the cycle, love had become for him the token of ultimate human frustration in the world.

Brunnhilde, advancing into the flames, sings not of a world about to be reborn, but of the mercy of the final escape.Magee has elsewhere written with authority on Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher who inspired Wagner's turn, and Philosophy gives him the chance to bring his two great passions together. Wagner in mid-life finds in the conceptual world of Schopenhauer a shattering corroboration of his own creative intuition No day passes without his reading from the master. Rightly, Magee wants all Wagner critics to know this.In the end I could not get enough music out of this good book, nor enough philosophy. I could have done with less Schopenhauer, whose too large presence may detract from our enjoyment. Art, Magee would agree, does not necessarily lead us emotionally along the rational path the composer "intends".