Abstract The literature on Wagner that appeared during the composer’s life and for some time afterwards is for the most part passionately for or against him, and it rarely sticks to opera: after all, Wagner didn’t. And so he was championed or condemned not only as a composer but also as an essayist and, later, as the highly visible promoter of the Bayreuth Festival. His new theater was inaugurated in 1876 with the first performance of the complete Ring of the Nibelung, an event that attracted world-wide attention and brought, in addition EPILOGUE .. Modern man represents biologically a contradiction of values, he sits between two stools, he says yes and no in the same breath. No wonder that it is precisely in our age that falseness itself became flesh, became even genius! That Wagner “dwelt among us”! Not without reason did I call Wagner the Cagliostro [i.e., the impostor] of modernism... But all of us, whether we know it, will it, or not, have within our bodies values, words, formulas, morals that are antagonistic in their origin-physiologically we are false... A diagnosis of the modern soul-where to begin? With a determined incision into this agglomeration of contradictory instincts, with the suppression of its antagonistic values, with vivisection of its most instructive case.-To the philosopher the case of Wagner is a stroke of luck. This essay, as anyone may see, was inspired by gratitude.