This book is a life of the great composer Richard Wagner, recounted by him, to me, in a conversation that obviously couldn't have taken place, unless you believe in time-travel. But Wagner had already played the trick, so why shouldn't I? In 1839, he wrote an essay-in-the-form-of-a-novel which he called "Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven - A Pilgrimage to Beethoven"; an entirely imaginary and symbolic pilgrimage of course, given that Beethoven had been dead twelve years already. But what better way to get inside a great man's mind than to invent a dialogue with him and root out from your own guts the words you know he would have used? So I have done with this book. Beethoven was one of Wagner's first heroes, alongside Weber and the poet Heine (whose Jewishness he excused); he later added Schopenhauer and Gobineau to his pantheon. I can't claim that Wagner is one of my heroes, though I do admire his music, and respect the innovations that he brought to the Opera (as Hans Eisler put it, "he was a great composer, unfortunately"). I can't say that I like the man at all, though clearly there must have been something likeable, even loveable, about him, given the number of women who fell slavishly at his feet; the number of men who tolerated their wives' passions for him and continued to support him even during the period of those passions; the number of artists, musicians, aristocrats, politicians and plain ordinary folk who gathered round his charisma as disciples. Yet he was just as clearly a narcissist, a sponger, a misanthrope, a foot-stamping, sulking master of the tantrum, a tyrannical taskmaster and a hedonist par excellence. He treated his first wife dreadfully, acted with spite and contempt towards anyone who didn't hail him as the genius that he knew he was, and expected everyone to provide his needs and expectations with unfailing loyalty, servility and immediacy. His jealousy knew no bounds. His contempt for the French, the Italians, the Germans was only a reflection of his contempt for all Mankind; his anti-Semitism was really no greater than his hatred of any other race or nation that fell short of his exorbitant expectations of humanity - as all inevitably did. Yet he fought in revolutions for the cause of freedom (whose existence he denied), and democracy (which he was opposed to), believed in Love and Purity (both of which he sullied constantly), created masterpieces (most of them flawed), and strove as perhaps no man before or since has ever striven to create a culture and a civilisation in which the highest and most sacred potentials of humanity might be the norm; an ubermensch civilisation, which unfortunately manifested itself as National Socialism some years after his death, and claimed him, when he couldn't have defended himself (though he probably wouldn't have wanted to) as its Muse. A mass, in other words, of contradictions, usually (as I've tried to demonstrate) in the same sentence. Could a man truly be a god and a demon at the same time? It seems he could, if his name was Richard Wagner. One of the reasons for undertaking this pilgrimage to Bayreuth was to try to find out."