The corpus of Western art music (particularly Austro-German) is the greatest animal achievement upon the earth, surpassing all national literatures, cities and scientific or technological feats.

There are passages in Mozart of such exquisite force they alter physiological time. I still remember the winter day the Adagio of the G minor String Quintet changed my 13-year-old life. Mozart is a greater earth, an endless bounty of paradisical rainfall. Three of my recent favorites are the Andante of the Twelfth Piano Concerto, Se il padre perdei from Idomeneo, and the Rondo from the Clarinet Trio.

I’m not quite sure how Mozart was possible, but clearly an aristocratic culture of pathological leisure is a prerequisite. I assure you it’s no accident that the arche uttered forth Bach and Frederick and Beethoven and Napoleon concurrently. It is impossible to overstate how much the Prophet Nietzsche was created by German music. Germany hasn’t produced anyone, artist or otherwise, of any real significance since the double culling. The 21st century successor to the lineage of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms wasn’t born because his would-be great-grandfather lies under a Flemish poppy flower - and no one would appreciate him if he was.

I hung out at a hostel with some yuppie Austrians who lived about 2 blocks away from the birthplace of Anton Bruckner in Ansfelden. It made me very sad that they had never heard of him. I revere this great and lonely (autistic) man, who intoned in long, subterranean accents the völkisch essence of the Alemannic earth. There are passages in Bruckner like the Harp entries in the Adagio of the Eighth Symphony that seem to summon to Leben und Geist the ancient warrior bones of the Teutoburger Wald and the Black Forest. He is to Austria-Germany what Mussorgsky is to Russia - the Orpheus of Heimat.

Some older Germans still retain the instinct to worship the holy memory of Richard Wagner, but too many, if they know him at all, are inclined to guiltily associate him with Hitler. Bayreuth should be the greatest of the oaken shrines but now it’s just another check-list museum to give somebody Chinese tourist income.

Of course, the best Teuton blood is long rotted in the mud of Verdun or the concrete slivers of Volgograd. The Germans of today are thoroughly cucked and degenerated and entirely unworthy of their majestic sonic inheritance. More than a man died from that gunshot in the bunker. The entire edifice of Austro-German culture, a culture so unlike the Anglo that spoke everything meaningful in music, was extinguished. The genetic ability to sustain or comprehend such an achievement was gone.

But all beautiful things must die. Orpheus must come to sparagmos. Faust must be de-birthed back into the Ewige Weibliche. Valhalla must succumb to Götterdämmerung. And yet the limping glory of Western art music is that it’s there - on the page. We’ll never witness the aural harvest of the Viennese sound masters at the turn of the Napoleonic century any more than we’ll witness the Renaissance or ancient Athens. But we can breed back into the race those who are worthy to inherit it.