The operatic festival Richard Wagner founded in 1876 is the oldest and most famous in the world. It is also the most controversial, for it became the cultural showcase of the Third Reich. In this prize-winning and generously-illustrated book - the first to provide a frank and fully rounded history of Bayreuth - Frederic Spotts describes the festival's performances and productions, the Wagner family who have run it, its debasement into 'Hitler's court theatre', and its postwar liberation from its chauvinistic, anti-Semitic past. Provocative and compelling, the book will fascinate all Wagner...