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Nietzsche & Wagner: Reading Through the Lines of Polemics

Nietzsche and Wagner have a fascinating and torrid history. As a philologist at the University of Basil, Nietzsche was a frequent guest of Wagner and his wife Cosima. He idolized Wagner and his music. So high was his admiration for the composure that he tacked on ten extra sections to his philological pamphlet The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music that portrayed Wagner, in line with the thesis of that work, as a rare modern embodiment of Dionysian creativity mixed with Apollonian reason and discipline. Walter Kaufmann notes that the Wagner sections gave the whole work “the appearance of mere special pleading for his idol.” In addition, the fourth section of his Untimely Meditations, “Richard Wagner at Bayreuth”, was intended as a preface to Wagner’s great festival.

Perhaps Nietzsche realized the limitations imposed on this own genius by his fawning toward Wagner. In 1876, Nietzsche formally broke with Wagner, an act which began 10 years of vigorous and public disdain for his former idol. By Nietzsche’s own account, the break was precipitated by what he considered Wagner’s catering to Catholic religious sentiment in Parsifal and by the 1876 Beyreuth festival itself, where Nietzsche was nauseated both by the mass presence of obsequious Wagner worshipers and by– what he perceived to be– Wagner’s delight in these throngs. Bayreuth made clear to Nietzsche that Wagner’s “Germanic” flaws were no longer ignorable. His continued appreciation for Wagner’s music could, according to Ernest Newman, no longer reconcile him with “the fanatic vegetarian” who in “his insatiable lust for dominion” wanted to be “an undisputed dictator,” who considered “all other people, including the French in particular, inferior to the Germans,” and who “worked himself into a paroxysm over Bismark’s tolerance towards the Jews.” Wagner’s antisemitism is well known. Kaufmann puts it pointedly: “Wagner’s essays, unlike Nietzsche’s, did not have to be expurgated by the Nazis before being used in schools.”

After the break, Nietzsche would write two full books, The Case Against Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, that were essentially polemics– bracing criticism of his former father figure. I think it’s important not to take his vitriol literally though. It was Nietzsche’s way to break violently with those he at one time admired. (See also Schopenhauer, whose philosophy of withdrawal he initially extolled and later mocked; and David Strass, author of Life of Jesus, on which Nietzsche wrote his thesis only to later lampooned in his second Untimely Meditation) It was part of his philosophy of self-criticism and amori fati (love of one’s fate). Nietzsche despised systems of philosophy because he believed that they detrimentally prevented thinkers from breaking with previous conclusions. As Zarathustra instructs, “I teach you the overman. Man is something that must be overcome.” It was this reluctance to fit his thought within a self-imposed systematic structure that led Nietzsche to revel in breaking with his past notions. And “revelry”, in Nietzsche, almost always translates to polemics, both favorable and unfavorable. Thus, Nietzsche surprisingly describes Jesus Christ with adoration during portions of Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ because Nietzsche has finally come to his affirming realization that Jesus Christ himself was not the origin of the Christian slave mentality. The arc of his relationship to Wagner was the inverse.

Of all his writings about Wagner, my favorite comes in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s deluded autobiography. For all its absurd posturing, the book contains his most honest portrayal of his position on Wagner. Importantly, as this quote shows, even when Nietzsche’s affection for Wagner the man soured, he never lost admiration for Wagner’s music.

All things considered, I could not have endured my youth without Wagner’s music. For I was condemned to Germans. If one wants to rid oneself of an unbearable pressure, one needs hashish. Well then, I needed Wagner. Wagner is the antitoxin against everything German par excellence—a toxin, a poison, that I don’t deny. From the moment when there was a piano score of Tristan—my compliments, Herr von Bülow—I was a Wagnerian. Wagner’s older works I deemed beneath myself—still too vulgar, too “German.”[. . .]

I think I know better than anyone else of what tremendous things Wagner is capable—the fifty worlds of alien ecstasies for which no one besides him had wings; and given the way I am, strong enough to turn even what is most questionable and dangerous to my advantage and thus to become stronger, I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life. That in which we are related—that we have suffered more profoundly, also from each other, than men of this century are capable of suffering—will link our names again and again, eternally; and as certainly as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, just as certainly I am and always shall be.

from Ecce Homo.

-Shark