A Calvinist narcissist at Takimag demonizes Michelangelo, Milton and Wagner but dares to speak of "my art"

My fart is more like it.

Here:

And yet, without this inner monstrousness, this will to affirm the self at any cost, art and science and civilization itself would not be the splendors that they are. Many great artists—Michelangelo, Milton, Wagner—have been very disagreeable personalities; it is a good question whether their achievements would exist as they do without the demonic will to glory those men exemplified.

Gaslighting your own son

From The New York Times, January 24, 1999, here:

The bare-bones account of Nietzsche's life begins not so much with his birth in 1844 as with the death of his father five years later. Carl Nietzsche was a Lutheran pastor who died of ''softening of the brain,'' which sounds very like a dementia caused by the syphilitic infection that killed his son. Responding to his mother's urgings, Nietzsche became a child prodigy, and he also began to suffer from the nightmares and headaches that plagued him all his life.

What brought him to the state of ardent discipleship in which he met Wagner in 1868 is obscure. He had known about Wagner from his teens, but had disliked the music even while he admired the mythic themes of operas like ''Tristan und Isolde'' and tried himself to write an opera based on Nordic legends. It is clearer what he admired once he had become intoxicated: Wagner promised to re-create for the Germans the cultural climate in which the classical Greek world had created the tragedies of Aeschylus. It was this that ''The Birth of Tragedy'' spelled out in 1872 to its astonished readers.

Triumph through defeat: New Yorker music critic observes that Bach's understanding of the Lutheran theology of the cross may have been ahead of its time

Here:

You need not have seen the words Passio secundum Johannem at the head of the score to feel that this is the scene at Golgotha: an emaciated body raised on the Cross, nails being driven in one by one, blood trickling down, a murmuring crowd below. It goes on for nine or ten minutes, in an irresistible sombre rhythm, a dance of death that all must join.

What went through the minds of the congregation at the Nikolaikirche, in Leipzig, on Good Friday, 1724, when the St. John Passion had its first performance? A year earlier, Johann Sebastian Bach, aged thirty-nine, had taken up posts as the cantor of the St. Thomas School and the director of music for Leipzig’s Lutheran churches. He had already acquired a reputation for being difficult, for using “curious variations” and “strange tones.” More than a few of his works begin with gestures that inspire awe and fear. Several pieces from his years as an organ virtuoso practice a kind of sonic terrorism. The Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor feasts on dissonance with almost diabolical glee, perpetrating one of the most violent harmonies of the pre-Wagnerian era: a chord in which a D clashes with both a C-sharp and an E-flat, resulting in a full-throated acoustical scream.

In the St. John Passion, Bach’s art of holy dread assumes unprecedented dimensions. The almost outlandish thing about “Herr, unser Herrscher” is that it does not simply take the point of view of the mourners and the mockers. It also adopts the perspective of the man on the Cross, gazing up and down. Aspects of the music that seem catastrophic acquire a triumphant tinge. ...

If the good people of Leipzig understood that they were in the presence of the most stupendous talent in musical history, they gave no sign. Indeed, Bach removed “Herr, unser Herrscher” from the score when he revived the St. John the following year—a hint that his listeners may have gone away unhappy.