@Foofie,
In re: Wagnerian Opera heroes
These were based on folk heroes, late Norse mythology and literary epics. Some of that material has Celtic analogs. In fact, there is a debate among scholars whether the word "iron" is of Celtic or Germanic origin because the two groups lived in each other's back pockets for so long.
Wagner himself was anti-semitic and did much to demonize Mendelsshon because he was a Jew but Mahler, himself a Jew, held Wagner in high esteem.
You might find this excerpt from Wiki helpful:
Some biographers have suggested that antisemitic stereotypes are also represented in Wagner's operas. The characters of Mime in the Ring, Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, and Klingsor in Parsifal are sometimes claimed as Jewish representations, though they are not explicitly identified as such in the libretto. Moreover, in all of Wagner's many writings about his works, there is no mention of an intention to caricature Jews in his operas; nor does any such notion appear in the diaries written by Cosima Wagner, which record his views on a daily basis over a period of eight years.
Despite his very public views on Jews, throughout his life Wagner had Jewish friends, colleagues and supporters. In his autobiography, Mein Leben, Wagner mentions many friendships with Jews, referring to that with Samuel Lehrs in Paris as "one of the most beautiful friendships of my life."
The topic of Wagner and the Jews is further complicated by allegations, which may have been credited by Wagner himself, that he himself was of Jewish descent, via his supposed father Geyer. In reality, Geyer was not of Jewish descent, nor were either of Wagner's official parents. References to Wagner's supposed 'Jewishness' were made frequently in cartoons of the composer in the 1870s and 1880s, and more explicitly by Friedrich Nietzsche in his essay The Wagner Case, where he wrote 'a Geyer (vulture) is almost an Adler (eagle)'. (Both 'Geyer' and 'Adler' were common Jewish surnames.)
Some biographers have asserted that Wagner in his final years came to believe in the racialist philosophy of Arthur de Gobineau, and according to Robert Gutman, this is reflected in the opera Parsifal.Other biographers such as Lucy Beckett believe that this is not true. Wagner showed no significant interest in Gobineau until 1880, when he read Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Wagner had completed the libretto for Parsifal by 1877, and the original drafts of the story date back to 1857. Wagner's writings of his last years indicate some interest in Gobineau's idea that Western society was doomed because of miscegenation between "superior" and "inferior" races.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who greatly admired Wagner's work and married Wagner's daughter, Eva, some years after the composer's death, expanded on Gobineau's and Wagner's ideas in his 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century a work proclaiming the superiority of Aryan races. In his old age, Chamberlain became a supporter of Adolf Hitler who visited Chamberlain and attended his funeral in 1927.
