Richard Wagner of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who thought the work "divinely composed", and that of the French newspaper "Le Figaro", which called the music "the dream of a lunatic". Amongst the disillusioned were Wagner's friend and disciple Friedrich Nietzsche, who, having published his eulogistic essay "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" before the festival as part of his "Untimely Meditations", was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as Wagner's pandering to increasingly exclusivist German nationalism; his breach with Wagner began at this time. The festival firmly established Wagner as an artist of European, and indeed world, importance: attendees included Kaiser Wilhelm I,
Ernst August Wagner irritability". He then went to Switzerland for two months, where he tried to sell some of his poems to newspapers. In July 1901, Wagner was assigned a teaching position in Mühlhausen an der Enz, where he stayed until 1902. Sometime in the summer of 1901, while drunk, he sodomized an animal. He then became increasingly wary and suspicious that others might be aware of his deed, and began to see signs and hints that the villagers of Mühlhausen were mocking him for this act of bestiality. For this reason, he bought a revolver, which he always carried with him from