From Bach to Wagner, European music carried a coded message. According to Giorgio Locchi, the breakthroughs of tonal music ushered in a new sense of historical time: neither the linearity of Christian history nor the cyclicality of the ancients, but a three-dimensional vision encompassing past, present, and future. Finding artistic expression in Richard Wagner and philosophical articulation in Friedrich Nietzsche, this tendency marked a new beginning for European civilisation through a new myth: Suprahumanism.

In this seminal essay, first published in Italian in 1982, Locchi traces the origins of the Suprahumanist Myth, examines the intellectual kinship between Wagner and Nietzsche, and sets out an open theory of history.

Today, Europe faces a choice between the triumph of egalitarianism and the ‘end of history,’ or regeneration through the affirmation of Suprahumanism that resounded in the Wagnerian epic.

1935–2013