It was only a matter of time: Richard Wagner, the most volcanically controversial figure in the history of music, has inserted himself into the 2012 Presidential election. The ad above was released by the Emergency Committee for Israel, a political advocacy group overseen by William Kristol and Gary Bauer, among others. The soundtrack is a lightly mangled version of Siegfried’s Funeral Music, from “Götterdämmerung,” the final opera of the “Ring” cycle. The choice serves various purposes. First, it creates a palpable chill, endowing President Obama with a demonic aura. Second, viewers who are aware of Wagner’s anti-Semitism may instinctively associate the shouting crowd at the Democratic National Convention with anti-Jewish mobs. Finally, the ad seems designed to trigger memories of the Wagnerian iconography of Hitler’s Germany. Siegfried’s Funeral Music was the chief anthem of Nazi mourning, and was heard alongside the slow movement of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony after Hitler’s death. On some subliminal level, the ad might actually be equating Obama with Hitler. How well it works as political propaganda is not for me to judge, but it did succeed in making me feel ill.

At the New Yorker Festival, on October 7th, I will give a lecture entitled “The Wagner Vortex.” Wagner’s two-hundredth anniversary arrives next May, and we will be reminded again, if any reminder is needed, of the aesthetic and political battles that have never ceased to rage around this composer. Why does Wagner’s music have such a mesmerizing effect on listeners of many different backgrounds? What are the mechanics of this vortex that pulls us in, even in a political attack ad? And why have the operas provoked such a teeming variety of interpretations, from one end of the ideological spectrum to another? After all, before Siegfried’s Funeral Music was played for the death of Hitler it was played for the death of Lenin.

One motivation behind my present work on Wagner—I am writing a book called “Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music”—is to restore complexity to a picture that has become too cartoonishly simple. If you ask the average person about Wagner, you will probably hear two things: that he is associated with grandiosity, bombast, anything that makes a loud noise and goes on for a very long time; and that he was Hitler’s favorite composer. There is, of course, more to Wagner than that. The artist who fired the imaginations of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Mann, Cather, Kandinsky, Isadora Duncan, and Eisenstein, among hundreds of others, cannot be summed up in a few adjectives. Yes, Wagner operated on an epic scale, but he was also a master of interior moments, of the psychology of desire and despair.

Wagner must take some of the blame for the reductionist image that prevails in the public mind. It was his spiteful anti-Semitism that has caused so many people to draw a straight line from the “Ring of the Nibelung” to Hitler. The Emergency Committee for Israel’s ad—which I found by way of Norman Lebrecht’s blog, Slipped Disc—handily illustrates the tenacity of that link. An obvious irony hangs over the use of Wagner’s music in a campaign dedicated to the defense of the Zionist state: for some decades there has been an unofficial ban on live performances of Wagner in Israel. The taboo dates back to 1938, when, in the wake of Kristallnacht, a member of the board of the Israel Philharmonic, then called the Palestine Symphony, asked Arturo Toscanini to remove the “Meistersinger” Prelude from a forthcoming program. Toscanini, a committed anti-Fascist, did not believe that Wagner contained anything like an intrinsically Nazi message—otherwise, he would not have led all-Wagner concerts in America during the Second World War—but in this case he assented.

In recent decades, musicians have periodically attempted to play Wagner in Israel, setting off impassioned protests; Na’ama Sheffi’s book “The Ring of Myths: The Israelis, Wagner, and the Nazis” gives an account of them. At an Israel Philharmonic concert in 1981, Zubin Mehta, after giving audience members an opportunity to leave the hall, conducted the “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde” as an encore; in response, Ben-Zion Leitner, a Holocaust survivor and a hero of the First Arab-Israeli War, walked in front of the podium, bared his scarred stomach, and shouted, “Play Wagner over my body.” Similarly charged scenes unfolded when Daniel Barenboim led the “Tristan” Prelude in Jerusalem in 2001. This past summer, an effort by the Israel Wagner Society to present a concert at Tel Aviv University created yet another media frenzy; in the end, the university withdrew its permission, and plans to move the event to a Hilton subsequently fell through. The Israeli conductor Asher Fisch, who was to have led the concert, has personal reasons for campaigning against the unwritten ban: his mother, who was forced to leave Vienna in 1939, felt that if her son could conduct Wagner in Israel it would amount to a final victory over Hitler, and he still hopes to realize her dream. There are also practical reasons for restoring Wagner to circulation, as Fisch and others have argued. Israeli-born musicians are placed at a professional disadvantage when they lack experience in fundamental repertory for their instruments.

The battle over Wagner is intricately bound up in contemporary Israeli politics. Sheffi, who is on the pro-Wagner side, proposes that debates in the eighties and nineties signified the “opening shots in a wider cultural war between religious and secular Jews.” At the same time, more visceral emotions are at work. One strong argument against performing Wagner in Israel is that it might arouse traumatic memories in Holocaust survivors. After all, Wagner was played at Nazi state occasions and was heard regularly on Nazi newsreels. A few minutes of “Die Meistersinger” accompanies scenes of old Nuremberg in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.” One of Wagner’s most unsettling anti-Semitic slogans—“The Jew is the plastic demon of the decline of mankind”—is quoted in the hideous propaganda film “The Eternal Jew.” When, in 1998, I wrote a long article about Wagner and Hitler, I concluded that the Israeli policy was just. “If there is a place where Wagner alone is allowed to be heard,” I wrote, referring to Bayreuth, “there should also be a place where Wagner is asked to be silent.”