The Cult of Richard Wagner

For Friedrich Nietzsche he was “a volcanic eruption of the total undivided artistic capacity of nature itself.” For Thomas Mann he was “probably the greatest talent in the entire history of art.” H. L. Mencken considered his operas “the most stupendous works of art ever contrived by man.” The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss credited him as “the incontestable father of the structural analysis of myths.” For Paul Valéry, exposure to his operas was so overwhelming as to make him “reject, with the sadness of impotence, everything that was literature.” Adolf Hitler, after first encountering his music, found himself “captivated at one stroke. … My youthful enthusiasm … knew no bounds.” For Hermann Levi, a rabbi’s son who endured his most scabrous anti-Semitic attacks and who led the premiere of “Parsifal,” that “most Christian of all artworks,” he was “the best and noblest person.” W. H. Auden considered him as a human being utterly contemptible.