Some babies are put in swaddling clothes. Others are born into families where expectations are so great that they begin to resemble similarly physical restrains. Siegfried Wagner, the only son of Richard, was born in 1869. Richard wrote the “Siegfried-Idyll” to mark the occasion, a work with and flashes of mesmerizing genius. As the male heir to Wagner and the Bayreuth clan, Siegfried was also required to compose. But when his works inevitably failed to measure up to his father’s, his wife posthumously collected them and prohibited their performance.
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