A Seductive Tale: Jonas Karlsson enjoys the German-language version of a new novel about Hermann Levi

Hermann Levi, the Jewish conductor of the premiere of Parsifal in Bayreuth 1882, has long been regarded as a symbolic, if highly contentious figure in the scholarship on Wagner. Renowned historian Peter Gay rather reductively interpreted Levi as little more than ‘A Study in Service and Self-Hatred’. In my view, Laurence Dreyfus’s essay ‘Levi’s Guilt and Parsifal’s Shame’ remains one of the most level-headed contributions to this debate, sagaciously reading Levi neither as a self-hating Jew who through his actions renounced and even denounced his religious and ethnic heritage, nor as a hapless victim of a rabid anti-Semite, whose cultural importance could be reduced to this aspect alone.