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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: enchanting make-believes; but a poet's sincerest vision of the
world must always take precedence of his prettiest fool's
paradise.
As many English Wagnerites seem to be still under the impression
that Wagner composed Rienzi in his youth, Tannhauser and
Lohengrin in his middle age, and The Ring in his later years, may
I again remind them that The Ring was the result of a political
convulsion which occurred when Wagner was only thirty-six, and
that the poem was completed when he was forty, with thirty more
years of work before him? It is as much a first essay in
political philosophy as Die Feen is a first essay in romantic
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