| book details |

Operation Wagner

By (author) Manuela Hoelterhoff

This book is currently unavailable. Enquire to check if we can source a used copy

| enquire |

| book description |

The dramatic story of courageous French soprano, Germaine Lubin, which reveals the dark side of Wagner's operas and how they shaped the Second World War. The brilliant French soprano, Germaine Lubin, was beautiful, sophisticated, brave, frivolous, thin and blonde, envied and adored in equal measure. When Lubin sang Wagner's Isolde in 1939 before a Nazi elite that had just ordered up the invasion of Czechoslovakia, her performance was hailed as one of the greatest in the Bayreuth Festival's history, and not just by Hitler. She decamped to France before the last night and refused to return to Germany once war was declared. But within a year, the Nazi Kommandatur set up shop in Paris minutes away from the Opera where Lubin was star soprano. After the liberation of Paris, Lubin was silenced. It took many years, some of them spent in prison, before she was cleared of being a collaborator and her life-saving actions came to light. Too late for Lubin; her voice had gone and her son had committed suicide. Hoelterhoff marshalls an incredibly famous and wide-ranging cast of characters to tell a multi-layered story with as many leitmotivs as one of Wagner's operas. She takes us back to Germany in 1939, and revisits Paris and Bayreuth today, showing the drama, tragedy and humour of opera and its recent history. In vivid and compelling detail, Operation Wagner brings to life the moment when Germany's melding of theatre and reality reached an apotheosis that haunts it still.