On a rain- and snow-filled night in early November 1868, a young student of classical philology named Friedrich Nietzsche, wrapped in an old coat that barely kept him warm, walked to the Theatre Café in Leipzig. There he met his friend Ernst Windisch, a fellow student at the university who was studying classical Indology, the science of ancient Indian texts. The two proceeded to the home of Windisch's teacher, Hermann Brockhaus, a professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Leipzig and one of the most celebrated Sanskritists in Europe. The most important family member, the one whom Nietzsche had come expressly to meet, was the composer Richard Wagner, who was visiting his sister, Frau Ottilie Brockhaus, the wife of Hermann Brockhaus.
Wagner, then 56, was captivated by the young Nietzsche's brilliance and flattered by his knowledge of his work. The friendship that began that evening was to last many years, finally ending with the creation of Parsifal, Wagner's last work. But all that really mattered to them in the world of civilisation was there that evening: India, Greece and Germany – joined, inter-connected, and even (to them) identified by the science of philology, the study of ancient texts and languages.
Nietzsche was to become one of the most influential European philosophers of the 19th century and Wagner one of its most celebrated composers. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Wagner was also a political revolutionary and ideologue – one who saw in the Orient, particularly India, the roots of German civilisation and culture. He was subsequently instrumental in bringing these ideas into wider circulation in Germany and Europe.
Wagner's concepts of the Orient and his use of them were not merely ornamental spiritual exotica, as some have supposed. Rather, they were crucial elements of his ideology – one that was articulated as he developed as an artist and was later echoed by some of the 20th century's most controversial figures, including Adolf Hitler. Behind the oriental pseudo-profundities of a dramatically distorted Buddhism – suffering, renunciation and redemption – lay the banalities of Wagner's racism, nurtured from childhood and fed intellectually by the philological thought of the day.