Oh the poor girl, to be an off-spring of such a family. I started to skip some of her essays of the operas, as she may be Wagner's great-grand-daughter, but, dear God, she's a boring writer, and I, for one, don't need, in 2001, the message of Tristan und Isolde etc., rammed down my throat.

When I looked at this book at Frankfurt flughafen in 1999 the German edition had some of the text blacked out, and I've heard since that Anja Silja objected to the text concerning her after the book was printed. Silja doesn't come out as very likeable in the English version, but then, does anyone ever like their father's mistress? [For Frau Wagner's information, her father and Frau Silja never made a production together in Milan, and the Stuttgart Lulu was 1966, not 1960.]

I get very tired when it's page after page of bad behaviour by irredeemably dreadful people to their nice relations. I also get a bit irritated when young people are brought up well beyond their means and talents just because they are the great grandchildren of a famous composer. It's pretentious. One longs to shout at them: "Break free, go away, make your own life for yourself away from Bayreuth."

I also don't care for Frau Wagner's future plans for the Bayreuth Festival!!!! Wagner isn't Walt Disney, dear, and Bayreuth, and I would have Nike Wagner think about this strongly, was there before she was born and will be there after she is long dead. A sobering thought but a very useful one.

Although the Wagner grand-daughter exhibits brilliant gifts that seem handed down from the great composer himself,it has become tiresome and tedious to keep harping on his so-called "anti-Semitism". After all,when all is said and done,and if she were aware of Wagner's essay Art and Revolution,he made it clear that his secular humanism despised Christentum most as the cause of debasement of Man and stifling of artistic creativity.Even the essay Judentums in der Musik is most lucid when it allows for the likeliest conclusion:that it is really Christentums that has proven most detrimental to music. It is Nietszche who truly echoes the truest Wagnerian lucidity by terming traditional Christentum as the "The Ultimate Corruption" [Letzte Koruption]. Ironically,she has too gullibly yielded to current faddishness,as if a mere product of her own society,the condition of which was Wagner's greatest weakness and partly the source of his decadent side. His gratest music is a triumph of anti-christianitic,humanistic visionaryism. Let us cease this masochistic catering to viciously inferior,decadent fashion.