Richard Wagner "Ring" as a work reflecting Christian ideals. Many of these later articles, including "What is German?" (1878, but based on a draft written in the 1860s), repeated Wagner's antisemitic preoccupations. Wagner completed "Parsifal" in January 1882, and a second Bayreuth Festival was held for the new opera, which premiered on 26 May. Wagner was by this time extremely ill, having suffered a series of increasingly severe angina attacks. During the sixteenth and final performance of "Parsifal" on 29 August, he entered the pit unseen during act 3, took the baton from conductor Hermann Levi, and led the performance to its
Ernst August Wagner Ernst August Wagner Ernst August Wagner (22 September 1874 – 27 April 1938) was a German mass murderer who, on 4 September 1913 killed his wife and four children in Degerloch. He subsequently drove to Mühlhausen an der Enz where he set several fires and shot 20 people, of whom at least nine died, before he was beaten unconscious by furious villagers and left for dead. He was the first person in Württemberg to be found not guilty by reason of insanity after several psychiatric assessments diagnosed him to suffer from paranoia. He was brought to an asylum in Winnenthal,