"I was particularly captivated by the
personality of that gifted Emperor Frederich II., … it delighted
me to find in the German mind the capacity of appreciating beyond the
narrow bounds of nationality all purely human qualities, in however
strange a garb they might be presented. For in this I recognised how
nearly akin it is to the mind of Greece. In Frederick II I saw this
quality in full flower. A fair haired German of ancient Swabian
stock, heir to the Norman realm of Sicily and Naples, who gave the
Italian language its first development and laid a basis for the
evolution of knowledge and art where hitherto ecclesiastical
fanaticism and feudal brutality had alone contended for power, a
monarch who gathered at his court the poets and sages of eastern
lands and surrounded himself with the living products of Arabian and
Persian grace and spirit – this man I beheld betrayed by the Roman
clergy to the infidel foe, yet ending his crusade, to their bitter
disappointment, by a pact of peace with the Sultan from whom he
obtained a grant of privileges to Christians in Palestine which as
the bloodiest victory could scarcely have secured."
This was what Wagner wrote about the personality of
Frederick II whom he discovered in reading Raumer's History of the
Hohenstaufen.
Reading passages like this in Wagner's autobiography My Life makes me wonder if Wagner, like Nietzsche, has been a victim of media campaigns against him, passed down the generations, because of his anti-cleric attitudes. I think it is highly likely, as even assuming Wagner presented himself in the best light in his autobiography (although actually he is very self critical), he would hardly write something like this if he didn't mean it.
