Wagner's Mein Leben has been a sourcebook for his many biographers, though to say that it should be read with reservations is an understatement. The jacket note claims, quite accurately, that it is "celebrated for its frankness" - in fact, it was regarded as rather daring at the time, but it also apparently contains many evasion's and even distortions of the truth which Ernest Newman listed in his monumental biography of the composer. Wagner had an astonishing life, full of adventure, intrigue, scandal and even physical danger, and it was hardly necessary for him to gild the lily, but from early middle age he was regularly attacked and even slandered, so this self portrait is a flattering and self justifying one. His mannered, effusive prose style, in any case, is hard to take. The book ends in 1864, when Wagner was 51 and Ludwig of Bavaria had become the Fairy Godfather of his up and down career.