This is reflected in his prose essays and music dramas. they ride intellectual hobby horses of varying colors and breeds, and some of the most ambitious artistic works, like the Ring tetralogy, ride several horses at the same time'#. Wagner also adjusted his ideas in pursuit of his artistic dream, namely his own theatre Bayreuth, for which he needed funding.
Wagner's anti-Semitic background could be said to have been influenced by his idea that had some kind of universal power. Some of his writings are anti-Semitic, in his famous essay, Judaism in Music, he spoke of a "natural abhorrence- of Germans for Jews, of a "repulsive otherness in the Jewish character,"" and seemed at one point to propose something like physical self-annihilation as the Jews' only redemption from their "curse-'#. This was a result of Wagner's belief that ascribes all forms of resistance to his work to imagined Jewish conspiracies; whereas in reality his cause was actively promoted by Meyerbeer, supposedly the chief instigator of these intrigues, until Wagner publicly attacked him'#. Wagner, however, in the case of Jewish connections being useful to his art, had collaborations with men such as Joseph Rubenstein and Hermann Levi claiming that art was higher when criticized by other anti-Semites. His essays on race also included topics on vÖlkisch (a magical or organic expression of the German race') theories, influenced by the racial theorist Count Arthur de Gobineau and the orientalist and cultural philosopher Paul de Lagarde. Wagner's essays on socio-political issues and art, for example Art and Revolution and The Ark-Work of the Future, show the influence of Feuerbach, left Hegelianism, Bakunin and later Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner first read Schopenhauer, in 1854, at a time when his somewhat facile optimism was already giving way to doubts about the possibilities of establishing heaven on earth'#, and this was particularly important because it marked for him an apocalyptic moment, which can be seen in his works at the time, for example his essay "Beethoven-.
