Richard Wagner
Other interpretations

Wagner's ideas are amenable to socialist interpretations; many of his ideas on art were being formulated at the time of his revolutionary inclinations in the 1840s. Thus, for example, George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Perfect Wagnerite (1883):

picture of Niblunghome under the reign of Alberic is a poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism as it was made known in Germany in the middle of the 19th century by Engels 's book The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Left-wing interpretations of Wagner also inform the writings of Theodor Adorno among other Wagner critics. Walter Benjamin gave Wagner as an example of "bourgeois false consciousness", alienating art from its social context. György Lukács contended that the ideas of the early Wagner represented the ideology of the "true socialists" (wahre Sozialisten), a movement referenced in Karl Marx 's Communist Manifesto as belonging to the left wing of German bourgeois radicalism and associated with Feuerbachianism and Karl Theodor Ferdinand Grün, while Anatoly Lunacharsky said about the later Wagner: "The circle is complete. The revolutionary has become a reactionary. The rebellious petty bourgeois now kisses the slipper of the Pope, the keeper of order."

The writer Robert Donington has produced a detailed, if controversial, Jungian interpretation of the Ring cycle, described as "an approach to Wagner by way of his symbols", which, for example, sees the character of the goddess Fricka as part of her husband Wotan's "inner femininity". Millington notes that Jean-Jacques Nattiez has also applied psychoanalytical techniques in an evaluation of Wagner's life and works.
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