The Stray World

Wag­ner once asked Niet­z­sche to help buy under­wear for him. Silk under­wear. For women.

Richard Wag­ner had a fet­ish for silk under­wear, for pink women’s panties. For God’s sake, he sent Niet­z­sche out to buy the under­wear for him! I can’t believe this is true, that it’s not some­thing I just dreamed. I could totally have dreamed Niet­z­sche in Victoria’s Secret buy­ing silk panties for Wagner—before meet­ing Schopen­hauer at Cin­na­bon. How come this didn’t come up in Music His­tory 101? If I had a class of smil­ing inno­cent under­gradu­ates, all beam­ingly in love with Clas­sical Music, that’s the very first thing I would do in the very first class: I would lay out the whole sor­did story, then play them some of those hyper-masculine funeral marches and rous­ing chor­uses while hold­ing up a pair of pink panties.

And that’s the pre­lude to Jeremy Denk’s blog post on eat­ing at a pre­ten­tious cof­fee­house after his phone died.