Richard Wagner was a difficult person, to put it lightly—an infamous anti-Semite and world-historical egoist known for displaying ingratitude and duplicity toward lovers, friends, and benefactors alike. Years after the German composer died in 1883, Adolf Hitler and his followers found much to like in Wagner’s writings on national purity—and also in his music, which became tightly integrated alongside the iconography of the Third Reich. “Indisputably a genius,” the poet W. H. Auden is said to