Liberation: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

APRIL 5, 2019

Richard Wagner’s music was appropriated by Nazi Germany, used for inspiration and a road map to a “vision of the future” of Germany – particularly his extraordinary Ring Cycle. Götterdämmerung, recounting the final fate of Earth and the Norse Gods, closely paralleled what the Nazi command envisioned of their Reich. During the time of the Nazi party’s ascendancy, the music of Mendelssohn was banned, but in a concert that declared liberation from the Reich, his was the first music performed by the Berlin Philharmonic after the end of the war and the defeat of Nazi ideology.