Wagner's anti-semitism is strikingly similar in its personal origins to Hilter's. The worst period of deprivation and humiliation he ever had to suffer was the two and half years during which he tried and failed to establish himself in Paris, which was then the world capital of opera, at a time when the roost was ruled by Meyerbeer, a Jew, and the next figure to him was Halevy, also a jew. It came close to breaking his spirit. (His fears found expression in a short story he wrote at the time about a young German composer dying in Paris in neglect, poverty and despair.) Even in its duration the period of the humiliation was roughly the same as Hilter's in the Vienna dosshouse. Both men were the sons of petty officials, both were megalomaniac, and in both of them the experience of being brought to the edge of starvation by society's total disregard of them seems to ahve activated a sense of persecution which bordered on paranoia ... Wagner - ferociously conscious of his neglected genius, and utterly destitute - hated the works whose popular acceptance barred the way to his own. He saw them as gimcrack and fraudulent, which they were. In retrospect he hated them all the more because in desperation he had succumbed to the temptation to write like them himself.