The thing about Richard Wagner (1813-1883), whose music I have frequently arranged for solo guitar—he WAS a heinous anti-semite. And he wrote a particularly atrocious screed, "Judaism in Music," an attack on what he viewed as the mongrelization of "pure" classical music by inferior Jewish composers (my kind of guys!).
Still—Wagner's music qua music is so divinely inspired—and so sensually listenable (forget the dumbass librettos)—that he attracted plenty of Jewish enablers in his lifetime and plenty of Jewish adherents over the years who "should have known better" (including the father of Zionism Theodore Herzl, who wrote his book The Jewish State while listening to "Tannhäuser" every night that he worked on it). Plenty of Wagnerian nay-sayers over the years, too, of course, including George Bernard Shaw's 1898 attack on the Ring Cycle, The Perfect Wagnerite.
I grew up hearing a lot of Wagner's famous leitmotifs in things like Popeye cartoons (1934's "Shiver Me Timbers" contains a quote from "The Flying Dutchman").
But I really fell under the spell of Wagner thoroughly in 1977 after obtaining a boxed set of his Complete Orchestral Music from CBS Masterworks, which I occasionally wrote copy for—a box that contained "Entry of the Gods into Valhalla" from Das Rheingold.
This music so enchanted me (especially when zonked, which is what I had to do in Excelsis Deo just to get through a typical day—Good or Bad—at Black Rock on West 52nd St.)--music that so thrilled me, lying on my back on the carpet in a half-daze with my head between the speakers—that I recall thinking:
"If I die right now at this precise moment, I will not have had a more transcendental experience in my entire lifetime than listening to this heavenly music."
Which is obviously what Wagner's music was designed to do.
Anyway, despite a ban on Wagner in Israel for years (which I broke—shhhh!—when I played my live score co-written with Walter Horn accompanying the 1920 German Expressionist horror classic The Golem at the Next Festival in Tel Aviv in Spring of '99—a score which contains a quote from "Ride of the Valkyries")—plenty of Jewish folks love them some Wagner!!
Case in point—Larry David, who scandalizes a pious Jew by humming the "Siegfried Idyll" to Cheryl Hines while in line for a movie (and what the heck is SHE doing with RFK Jr.??)
Curb Your Enthusiasm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5yPuiJHlYo
All this is to say that after arranging a whole lot of Wagner for solo guitar over my career. "To defeat thine enemy, sing his song" was how I put it in the liner notes to my Tzadik album Street of Lost Brothers—my pal, the brilliant producer/conceptualist Sandy Pearlman (Blue Oyster Cult, The Dictators, The Clash) engaged my services to arrange the 4th movement of Bruckner's 8th Symphony for solo electric guitar, for a class he was teaching at McGill University's Schulich School of Music entitled Bruckner as Heavy Metal: From Chord Power to Power Chord.
BRUCKNER—not Wagner??
Well, Sandy was a diabolical contrarian...
So, anyway, I allowed myself to get lassoed into arranging this movement using the live recording below, an air check off Austrian radio on Oct. 17th, 1944, of the Vienna Philharmonic at the Musikverein conducted by the legendary Wilhelm Furtwängler, provided by Sandy as a template.
According to Sandy, this recording was made right when the Allies were at the Gates of Wien—and if you listened closely, you could hear the incoming cannonades. I'm not sure about that (I can't hear 'em, and I have pretty good ears).
Nevertheless, please do enjoy this (slightly truncated) Final Movement of Bruckner's 4th Symphony—and you be the judge.