His father was a stage player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an Adler—Geyer and Adler are both names of Jewish families.” The above was written about 1887-1888. Setting aside the statement that Wagner was un-German as meaningless,—men of genius are generally strangers to their nation,—the other assertion only shows that Nietzsche was in possession of the secret. He was an intimate of the Wagner household and knew its history. And what does this prove? Only that the genius of Richard Wagner, tinctured with Oriental blood, betrayed itself in the magnificence of his pictorial imagination, in the splendor of his music, in its color, glow, warmth, and rhythmic intensity. It also accounts for his pertinacity, his dislike of Meyerbeer and Heine and Mendelssohn. He was essentially a man of the theatre, as was Meyerbeer, though loftier in his aims, while not so gifted melodically. In sooth, he owes much to the Meyerbeer opera and the Scribe libretto,—Scribe, who really constructed one of the first viable dramatic books—withal old-fashioned—for musical setting. And nothing is more useless than to pin Wagner down to his every utterance in poem or speech. As Bernard Shaw has acutely pointed out, Wagner—versatile, mercurial, wonderful Wagner—was a different being every hour of the day. He explained matters to suit his mood of the moment,—a Schopenhauerian one hour, a semi-Christian the next. Liszt, Glasenapp, Heckel, Feustel, all show different portraits of this man. A German democrat he was—and a courtier, an atheist, and yet a mystic. Wagner was all things to all men, like men of his supple imagination. He abused conductors for playing excerpts from his music in concert, and then conducted concerts devoted to his own works. He wrote pamphlets on every subject, and with the prerogative of genius contradicted them in other pamphlets. He was not always a Wagnerian, and at times he differed with himself in the interpretation of his compositions. He was a genius beset by volatile moods, a very busy man of affairs, and a much-suffering creature. Wandering about the world for a half-century did not improve his temper, and yet next to Nietzsche there is no one whose judgments on Wagner’s music I would regard with more suspicion than—Richard Wagner’s. He was a born satirist. He loved to play practical jokes, and it would not be surprising if some day we should learn that Parsifal was one of his jokes on an epical scale. Remember how he mocked Mozart and Beethoven and the symphonic form in his own C major symphony, as if to say, “I, too, can cover the symphonic canvas!” No, Wagner is a dangerous authority to quote upon Wagner.