Richard Wagner (n.) is not a human being at all; he is a disease.
Richard Wagner (n.) is the counterpoison against all that is German. He is poison; one cannot not dispute that.
Richard Wagner (n.) is not a man, but a disease. Everything he touches falls ill: he has made music sick.
Richard Wagner (n.) is heavy and clumsy: nothing is more foreign to him than the moments of wanton perfection which this clown Offenbach achieves as many as five times, six times, in nearly every one of his buffooneries.
Richard Wagner (n.) is still a great problem for German culture, perhaps a German misfortune, in any case a fatality.
Richard Wagner (n.) will be to his future folk not the seer of a future, as he would like to appear, but the interpreter and transfigurer of a past.