to which Wagner fans from around the world are drawn each summer. It is currently run by Wagner's great-granddaughters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier.

He claims it is still deeply contaminated by the family's connection to the Nazi party – not least due to Wagner's British-born daughter-in-law Winifred, who fostered close relations with Adolf Hitler – and will remain so until the family reveals the extent of its connection with the dictator. He has urged it to finally make public the large amount of private correspondence between Hitler and the Wagner clan, as well as dozens of rolls of private film footage.

Hitler considered Wagner, who died in 1883, to be his favourite composer and had plans to turn Bayreuth into a huge temple to the musician and his music.He took much of his inspiration for his antisemitic thinking from Wagner, who wrote a hate-filled treatise called Jewishness in Music and variously referred to Jews as worms, rats, warts and trichinae (an intestinal parasitic worm).

Modern-day Wagner enthusiasts are adamant that it is possible – and desirable – to separate the man and his music. Christian Thielemann, one of Germany's leading conductors, admitted that Wagner could be extremely unpalatable but argued that the music was untainted by his politics. "C-Major remains C-Major," he insisted.

Thielemann prefers to concentrate instead on the power of the music. "Wagner's music is like a drug, which moves people in a fundamental way," he said.

Those who are moved include much of Germany's political elite, headed by Angela Merkel and her Wagner-enthusiast husband Joachim Sauer,