"When Wolfgang Wagner was growing up, the Bayreuth Festival was at its pre-war apogee. Under the aegis of Wolfgang's English mother, Winifred, the festival devoted to the works of Richard Wagner had become the jewel in the crown of Nazi cultural life. Behind the scenes, there was artistic tension and personal conflict as the name of Wagner became coopted to a cause which he had never espoused. Wolfgang Wagner recounts his own extraordinary encounters with prominent Nazi figures, including Hitler, and traces the tangle of music and politics which, with the defeat of the Third Reich, left the Festival discredited and almost destroyed." --.