On August 23rd, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led the Wagner Group, and Dmitry Utkin, who coined the name, were killed when their plane fell from the sky. To quote Hans Sachs in “Die Meistersinger”: “Madness! Madness! Madness everywhere!” agent with Nazi leanings, was protesting the erratic conduct of Russia’s war on Ukraine-a country that, according to Russian propaganda, was overrun by neo-Nazis, even though Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, is Jewish. A Russian mercenary organization called the Wagner Group, its name supplied by an ex-G.R.U. The eternally problematic composer Richard Wagner, the godfather of all cancelled artists, was once again at the top of the news, seventy-eight years after the Daily Mail reported on Nazi radio memorials for Hitler under the headline “ Wagnerian concert of death.” Having spent a fair portion of my life sifting through the chaotic aftermath of Wagner’s life and work, I had assumed that the old wizard’s notoriety was past its peak, but his capacity to consternate the world anew should never be discounted. “W agner calls off threat to march on Russia capital” was the disorienting lead story in the June 25, 2023, edition of the Times. Photograph from brandstaetter images / Getty Contemporary discourse has little patience with maddening contradictions of the kind that Wagner embodies.
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