We consider a lifting of Joseph ideals for the minimal nilpotent orbit closure to the setting of affine Kac–Moody algebras and find new examples of affine vertex algebras whose associated varieties are minimal nilpotent orbit closures. As an application we obtain a new family of lisse ($C_{2}$-cofinite) $W$-algebras that are not coming from admissible representations of affine Kac–Moody algebras.

We compute the algebras of self-extensions of the vacuum module and the Verma modules over an affine Kac–Moody algebra $\hat{\mathfrak g}$ in suitable categories of Harish-Chandra modules. We show that at the critical level these algebras are isomorphic to the algebras of differential forms on various spaces of opers associated to the Langlands dual Lie algebra of ${\mathfrak g}$, whereas away from the critical level they become trivial. These results rely on and generalize the description of the corresponding algebras of endomorphisms obtained by Feigin and Frenkel and the description of the corresponding graded versions due to Fishel, Grojnowski and Teleman.

We prove that the multiplicity of an arbitrary dominant weight for an irreducible highest weight representation of the affine Kac–Moody algebra A(1)r is a polynomial in the rank r. In the process we show that the degree of this polynomial is less than or equal to the depth of the weight with respect to the highest weight. These results allow weight multiplicity information for small ranks to be transferred to arbitrary ranks.