[attach id=232922 size="large"]Richard Wagner in an 1871 portrait.[/attach]

For his 200th birth anniversary, Richard Wagner’s home town of Leipzig will get a life-sized bronze statue of the composer with a black shadow several times his diminutive height looming behind him.

To be unveiled on the birthday, May 22, the €220,000 cost was raised privately and mostly from outside Leipzig, said Markus Kaebisch, 44, a businessman who spearheaded the effort.

The city will also hold many exhibitions and concerts throughout the year.

However, Kaebisch said Leipzig still has a “difficult” relationship with its native son, in part because of the anti-Semitism and Hitler, but also because Leipzig was host to so many other musical greats, including Bach, converted Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn – whom Wagner reviled – and Schumann.

He was a real entertainer, like a Las Vegas entertainer

“It’s never been a Wagner city,” he said. “And I’m sure it won’t be better after this year is over.”

Music critic Barry Millington, whose book The Sorcerer of Bayreuth adds to a bibliography some say makes Wagner the third most written-about person in history, after Jesus and Napoleon, says there is no extricating him from his anti-Semitism.

“I’m attacked by the Wagnerians who think I am dragging him through the mud... They want the Wagner experience to be in this idea-free zone, they want to erect a firewall between the music and the ideology and you can’t. Wagner’s music is rooted in the ideology. That for me is what makes it fascinating,” the British author said.

Wagner’s infamous 1850 essay Judaism in Music, published at first under a pen name and some 20 years later under his own, took vile swipes at contemporary Jewish opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer and the converted Mendelssohn, depicting them and other Jews as “a swarming colony of maggots” feasting on the carcass of German culture. The rants continued unabated right up to Wagner’s death in a Venice palazzo in 1883.

“Anti-Semitism is woven into the fabric of the music of Wagner,” Millington said.

Another view comes from Hamburg-based author Joachim Kohler, one of whose books, called Wagner’s Hitler, the Prophet and His Disciple in English, struck a raw nerve with Wagnerians.

Kohler said he had changed his opinion and now saw Wagner’s anti-Semitism as an adjunct of his artistic mind, not as a scenario for which Hitler and the Holocaust were the inevitable last act.

“Yes, I made a mistake... so I revised and I came to the conclusion that Wagner’s anti-Semitism was not political, it was theatrical,” Kohler said.

“And the proof that he had not deep-rooted anti-Semitism against people, it was just an idea against people, is that he had so many Jewish friends.”

Kohler’s latest book, entitled The Laughing Wagner in German, paints an altogether different picture of Wagner from the grim anti-Semite. Wagner, who stood just over 168cm tall, enjoyed cracking jokes and stood on his head when welcoming the visiting Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil to Bayreuth for the festival’s opening in 1876.

“He was a real entertainer, like a Las Vegas entertainer,” Kohler said, adding that Wagner’s “genius gave him not a multiple personality because the different personalities knew of each other, but I would say he had multiple identities.

“There were really opposites in him that can’t be easily reconciled because they are opposites.”