Alex Ross, ‘Götterdämmerung’ 1945: Wagnerian Fantasies in English-Language Reports of Hitler’s Death

‘Wagnerian Concert of Death’ was a headline in the Daily Mail on 2 May 1945. The death in question was, of course, that of Adolf Hitler, who had shot himself in his bunker in Berlin two days earlier. The Daily Mail article was reporting on the radio broadcast that had accompanied the news of Hitler’s death on the evening of 1 May – an announcement preceded by a suspenseful ninety-minute period in which warnings of a forthcoming bulletin were interpolated into a musical programme heavy on Wagner and Bruckner. The framing of Hitler’s death as ‘Wagnerian’ became a familiar cliché in the years and decades that followed.