Neither Star Wars nor The Lord of the Rings could have been conceived without Wagner’s precedent, and it’s no coincidence that all three attract a crazed allegiance. But the “Ring” cycle depicts a more complex and human world. Good men win the wrong battles, heroes follow misconceived advice, and leaders strike disastrous deals. We see Wotan first as a swaggering figure, but he is almost immediately entangled in his own arcane rules of destiny. His authority erodes and Wagner’s magical universe, like our own battered planet, experiences a crippling loss of confidence. Eventually Wotan, too, falls victim to an apocalypse he cannot prevent. The “Ring” is the most pessimistic of sagas, a fable of total annihilation.

This perpetually urgent tale is bundled with some toxic themes. Mystic nationalism rooted in hoary myth, purification through violence, and virtue based on bloodline all come together in the character of Siegfried. Like his creator, the fair-haired naïf has an unpleasant streak: arrogant, narcissistic, sneering, and given to unthinking rage. He first appears kicking around the craven, cringing blacksmith-dwarf who raised him: Mime, who tries vainly to forge a sword that the muscular boy can’t break. Eventually, Siegfried does the job himself by melting down the shards of his shattered ancestral weapon called Nothung and hammering it back into invincibility. Having reclaimed his heritage of lethal pride, he is ready to do some slaying.

I find myself simultaneously stirred and repelled by Siegfried. Who doesn’t crave a superhero—especially now? The score, heavy with purpose, propelled by an urgent bass line and sparking fanfares, galvanizes the scene of violent renewal. Yet we are also witnessing a terrible coming-of-age: the transformation of an innocent into a mighty man filled with ignorant righteousness. Siegfried embodies conviction without knowledge, courage without compassion, desire without empathy. He is deeply dangerous.

Wagner identified powerfully with Siegfried, calling him “The Man of the Future,” which is also how the composer thought of himself. (He gave the name Siegfried to his only son, whose arrival he explained to his not-yet-wife Cosima by saying, “The world spirit wanted me to have a son by you.”) Just as his young hero used his new sword to split the anvil on which it was forged, Wagner shattered customary operatic practice, dispensing with discrete arias followed by pauses for applause. Instead, he wrought a seamless fusion of all elements: To dramatize Norse myths, he created a pseudo-archaic form of German, whose cadences dictated the stately melodic lines, which in turn flowed together into endless scenes. The “Ring” was an assertion of revolutionary freedom germinating from ancient roots.

Having armed his hero and given him purpose and a destiny, Wagner led him to the dragon’s forest lair—and then put down his pen. The interruption lasted seven years. I like to think that Siegfried’s creator was troubled (as I am) by the shining pure-blooded killing machine he’d created. Another generation of German revolutionaries had no such qualms about the idea of a dazzling, final apotheosis. Adolf Hitler felt at home in Bayreuth. He loved Wagner’s town, his operas, his family. So strongly did he feel about Wagner’s vision of German national mythology that he conflated the composer’s cult of personality with his own, turning Bayreuth into a showcase of Nazi pride. Sometimes Hitler even tinkered with designs.

Wagner’s anti-Semitism generally gets the blame for the association between his work and the Nazis; it’s the principal reason that his work is still virtually banned in Israel. Certainly his hatred of Jews was real, lifelong, and central to his worldview. Refusing to see that hideous aspect of his operas is an act of willful self-delusion. But a far more central cause of Hitler’s adulation is what draws the rest of us in: the coercive rapture of the score. Wagner at his most fervent summons white-water rapids of music, bearing the listener along with its roiling energy.

He achieves this power to bypass the mind partly through his use of leitmotif, a melodic phrase or harmonic move associated with a narrative element. There are leitmotifs for individual characters, abstract concepts (like fate, a curse, or oblivion), props (sword, ring, helmet), and plot events, and they all recur and recombine. Committed Wagnerians study them with ornithological thoroughness, learning to recognize and catalogue the enormous array of musical shards.

The leitmotifs take on added potency when they float on what Wagner called a “sea of harmony,” a current of immense power and inexorable direction, with no apparent beginning and no clear end. It is the musical equivalent to pronouncing, slowly but with rising urgency, the phrase, “I want you TO . . .” and then waiting, leaving the ear primed for a verb, craving the relief of unambiguous meaning. Wagner keeps withholding the missing piece even as he multiplies desires, spinning out minute upon minute of music that rushes from one expectation to the next. Harmonic sequences, stretched from momentary passages into panoramic lengths, become at once epic and erotic.

The interaction of melodic strands suspended in liquid harmonies is calculated to bypass the brain and become a physical experience. The effect is dreamlike—a constant series of partially grasped memories. The eternal and the hectic overlap. This, I think, is why some people are so allergic to Wagner: They either are immune to its narcotic quality or they resist it with all their might.

The “Ring’s” ability to hot-wire the emotions has provoked suspicion since it was new. When it landed in America in 1889, the New York Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel pointed out that the critical mind was an impediment to full enjoyment. Instead, he advised the brave to plunge into Wagner’s world “with a fixed resolve to keep a tight check line on the rational faculty and give free rein to the imagination.” Yet even as he advocated letting go, the critic seemed discomfited by the implications of that advice. I’m just as torn. I adore the “Ring,” but immersing myself in it involves a battle between reason and impulse, and I’m never sure which side I’m rooting for.