“This is an ambitious and important book that conveys the immensely depressing conclusion that even intellectual and cultural figures of great creativity and imagination (Dante, Bach, Beethoven) are dangerously malleable in the hands of their interpreters. Scholars, students, and the general public need now look no further than Dennis’s book to find a cogent, reliable, and astute assessment of every Nazi attitude toward every canonical cultural figure of the western tradition, and a number of others besides.” –Celia Applegate, author of Bach in Berlin