Nietzsche wrote what I feel is the most touching and authentic one-paragraph tribute to Wagner in the literature, and it will provide the capstone to our tribute to Wagner’s Ring, since it captures its essence:
“There is a musician who, more than any other musician, is a master at finding the tones in the realm of suffering, depressed, and tortured souls, at giving language even to mute misery. None can equal him in the colors of late fall, in the indescribably moving happiness of the last, truly last, truly shortest joy; he knows a sound for those quiet, disquieting midnights of the soul, where cause and effect seem to be out of joint and where at any moment something might originate ‘out of nothing.’ (…) … indeed, as the Orpheus of all secret misery he is greater than any.” (Nietzsche Contra Wagner: p. 663]
