Who invented black metal, that hateful, unholy, visionary genre? Potential candidates include bands Venom, Celtic Frost, Mercyful Fate, or, most likely, the revolutionary Bathory. But exactly 100 years before Venom’s 1982 album “Black Metal” codified the term, the world saw a work similarly infused with perverted religiosity, hatred, mutilation, darkness, extreme ideological stances, blood, racist undercurrents, occultism, revolutionary soundscapes, a yearning for transcendence, and an unyielding aesthetic totality. That work, of course, was Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal.”
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