There are a hundred ways to listen to your conscience … But that you feel something to be right may have its cause in your never having thought much about yourself and having blindly accepted what has been labelled right since your childhood.

The Gay Science, Section 335

Nietzsche was to call 1864 his wasted year. In October he enrolled as a student at the University of Bonn. Playing the dutiful son, he entered the theological faculty, though his greater interest was in classical philology. His choice of Bonn had been decided by two celebrated classical philologists on the teaching staff, Friedrich Ritschl and Otto Jahn. He found the theology course boring and he missed his mother and his sister. Bonn was some three hundred miles from Naumburg. For the first time in his life, they were not within walking distance. But even while missing them he was able to put the distance between them to good, if dishonest, use. They still believed that he intended to join the Church and he failed to disabuse them.

He decided that his life up till now had been parochial. The way to rectify his ignorance of the world was to join a Burschenschaft, a student fraternity. It was a movement that became horribly tainted by later association with the Hitler Youth. But when it was founded, in 1815, its purpose was to give shared, liberal cultural values to the generation of German students across the aggregation of the Bund, though the federation kept such a tight curb on the intellectual activity of the Burschenschaften, in case the societies turned political and subversive, that they didn’t do much more than go for mountain hikes, sing songs, fight duels and drink beer. Nietzsche joined the exclusive Franconia fraternity expecting learned discussions and parliamentary debate but found himself, instead, raising his tankard and roaring out fraternity drinking songs. Striving to fit in, he muddled himself into what he described as a strange imbroglio of bewildering movement and feverish excitability.

‘After bowing in all directions in the most courteous way possible, I introduce myself to you as a member of the German Students’ Association named the Franconia,’ he wrote to his dear Mamma and Llama. Even they must have grown weary of his many letters describing the Franconia’s outings which invariably started with a marching parade, all done up in their fraternity sashes and caps and singing lustily. Marching behind a hussar band (‘attracted great attention’) they usually ended in becoming extraordinarily merry at an inn or the hovel of some peasant whose hospitality and strong drink they condescendingly accepted. An unlikely new friend appears: Gassmann, editor of the Beer Journal.

A duelling scar was an essential badge of honour and Nietzsche took an unconventional approach to acquiring one. When he felt his swordsmanship was up to it, he went for a delightful walk with a certain Herr D., who belonged to an association that was on duelling terms with the Franconia. Nietzsche was struck by what a pleasant adversary Herr D. would make. He said to him, ‘You are a man after my own heart, could we not have a duel together? Let us waive all the usual preliminaries.’ This was hardly in accordance with the duelling code but Herr D. agreed in the most obliging way. Paul Deussen acted as witness. He reported the glistening blades dancing around their unprotected heads for about three minutes, before Herr D.’s blade hit the bridge of Nietzsche’s nose. Blood trickled; honour was satisfied. Deussen bandaged up his friend, bundled him into a carriage, took him home and put him to bed. A couple of days and he was fully recovered.1

The scar is so small you cannot see it in photographs but it was a cause of enormous satisfaction to Nietzsche. He had no inkling how Herr D.’s friends laughed when he told them the story.

The Franconians frequented the brothels of Cologne. Nietzsche visited the city in February 1865, engaging a guide to show him the cathedral and other famous sights. He asked to be taken to a restaurant and maybe the guide thought he was too shy to ask for what he really wanted because he took him to a brothel instead. ‘Suddenly I found myself surrounded by half a dozen creatures in tinsel and gauze who gazed at me expectantly. For a moment I stood absolutely dumbfounded in front of them; then, as if driven by instinct I went to the piano as the only thing with a soul in the whole company and I struck one or two chords. The music quickened my limbs and in an instant I was out in the open.’2

This is all we know of the incident but it resounds down Nietzschean literature and legend. Some believe that he didn’t just play a few chords on the piano and leave it at that, but lingered for the usual purpose whereupon he contracted syphilis, from which his later mental and physical health problems stemmed. One reason for this is that in 1889, after he had lost his mind and was in the asylum, he said that he had ‘infected himself twice’. The doctors assumed he was talking about syphilis. Had they looked at his medical records, they would have discovered that he had gonorrhoea twice, a fact he admitted to doctors while still in his right mind.

Thomas Mann makes the brothel incident pivotal in his enormous novel Doctor Faustus, in which Mann retells the Faust legend, reimagining Nietzsche in the title role. Mann takes the night in the brothel as the night that Nietzsche/Faustus sells his soul to the devil for the woman he desires. She becomes his obsession and his succubus. In earlier versions of Faustus, Helen of Troy customarily takes this role but Mann bizarrely replaces Helen with Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, a poor creature who in order to consummate human love must undergo terrible tortures: her tongue is cut out as the price of turning her fishtail into a human cleft and each step she walks on human feet cuts her like sharp-edged swords. Maybe this tells us more about Mann than it does about Nietzsche.

During the two terms Nietzsche spent at Bonn, music and musical composition remained his great passion. He wrote a full-length parody of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld which won him the nickname ‘Gluck’ among the Franconia fraternity. He visited Robert Schumann’s grave to lay a wreath and he became so indebted by the purchase of a piano that he could not afford the journey home to his mother and sister at Christmas. Observing that his money always ran out fast, ‘probably because it was so round’,3 he sent in his place a volume of eight of his musical compositions (very Schubertian at this stage) expensively bound in lavender morocco and accompanied by wearisomely detailed instructions as to how his dear Llama was to play and sing them: seriously, mournfully, with energy, with a little flourish, or sometimes with great passion. Even in absentia he did not relinquish control over his doting women.

The Easter following the brothel incident, he was at home and he refused to take the sacrament of communion in church. Easter is an occasion of obligation for practising Christians and this was no faint gesture but a cause of fundamental terror to Mamma and Llama, for whom Nietzsche’s apostasy was negating what they felt was the only real goal of this life on earth: the eventual reunification of them all with beloved Pastor Nietzsche in Heaven.

Nietzsche was not yet suffering a full-blown loss of faith, but he was harbouring grave doubts. As he sat in his student study, a shrine to his dead father whose photograph stood on the piano beneath an oil painting of Christ’s deposition from the Cross, he was reading a book by David Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, and making a list of twenty-seven scientific books he intended to read.

Along with his whole generation he was negotiating the shaky ground between science and faith, a problem in need of a solution. It seemed to be moving towards transferring blind faith in God to equally blind faith in scientists, who claimed to have discovered the mysterious nature of matter in something called ‘the biological force’, which accounted for the amazing diversity of the natural world.

A contemporary encyclopaedia explained the formation of the universe in an account that was not dissimilar from Empedocles:

‘An eternal rain of diverse corpuscles which fall in manifold motion, consume themselves in falling, creating a vortex,’ existing within the ether, which was ‘a luminiferous medium with the nature of an elastic solid medium filling all space, through which light and heat are transferred in waves’. Light ‘could not be explained in any other way’, though it remained a puzzle ‘how the earth could move through the ether at the rate of nearly a million miles a day. But if we consider that the shoemaker’s wax is so brittle that it splinters under the blow of a hammer and that it yet flows like a liquid into the crevices of a vessel in which it is placed, and that bullets sink slowly down through it and corks float slowly up through it, the motion of the earth through the ether does not seem so incomprehensible.’4

The universe explained through shoemaker’s wax; faith in science was becoming as irrational as faith in God. Strauss’s book examined Jesus’s life ‘scientifically’. Nietzsche compared Strauss to a young philological lion stripping off the theological bearskin. If Christianity meant belief in an historical event or an historical person, then he would have none of it.

Llama demanded clarification. He wrote to her: ‘Every true faith is indeed infallible; it performs what the believing person hopes to find in it, but it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth … Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, then have faith; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.’5

*

Too little had been achieved during his two terms at Bonn. He had got into debt and slept late. His collection of illnesses had been joined by rheumatism of the arm. He was sarcastic and peevish as he regretted the time and the money spent on the ‘beery materialism’ and ‘mindless bonhomie’ of the Franconia. Fortunately, a quarrel between the two philology professors Jahn and Ritschl became so vitriolic that Ritschl left Bonn to teach at Leipzig University. Nietzsche followed him.

The new beginning suited him well. Every morning he was up at five for a lecture. He founded the Classical Society, which agreed with him better than the Franconia fraternity. He turned a local café into ‘a sort of philological stock exchange’, and bought a cupboard to store its periodicals and papers. He joined the thriving Philological Society and gave papers in Latin on all sorts of obscure classical highways and byways; ‘I have independently enlarged it by recently finding the evidence why the Violarium of Eudocia does not go back to Suidas but to Suidas’ chief source, an epitome of Hesychius Milesius (lost, of course) …’6

He had the gift of bringing the dry subject to life, a rare talent in the field of philology. His talks were well attended. He was popular.

He was entirely free of philistine pedantry, one of his fellow-students recalled; ‘I came away from his talks with the impression of an almost astounding precocity and confident self-assurance.’7 He argued Homer against Hesiod and he excited the faculty by challenging the accepted idea that the Odyssey and the Iliad were folk-poetry written by several poets, arguing that it was inconceivable that such magnificent literary work should not be driven by one outstandingly creative individual. Ritschl praised his work on Theognis and he won a prize for an essay on Diogenes Laertius. He headed the essay with the line from one of Pindar’s Pythian Odes that he would treasure all his life: ‘Become what you are, having learned what that is.’8

Nietzsche was starting out on this road of becoming when fate intervened in the shape of the territorial ambition of Bismarck, whose expansionist policies were causing a succession of small wars designed to manoeuvre Prussia to the forefront of Germany at the expense of the Bund, and Germany, eventually, to the forefront of Europe. In 1866 Prussia had fought and won a short war against Austria and Bavaria. The Prussian army had invaded Saxony, Hanover and Hesse and declared that the German Confederation no longer existed. The following year, 1867, these issues were still rumbling on and Nietzsche was called up to serve as a private in the mounted section of a field artillery regiment stationed at Naumburg. He had taken some riding lessons but his experience of horses was not extensive.

‘If some daimon were ever to lead you early one morning between, let us say, five and six o’clock to Naumburg and were to have the kindness to intend guiding your steps into my vicinity, then do not stop in your tracks and stare at the spectacle which offers itself to your senses. Suddenly you breathe the atmosphere of the stable. In the lanterns’ half-light, figures loom up. Around you there are sounds of scraping, whinnying, brushing, knocking. And in the midst of it all, in the garb of a groom, making violent attempts to carry away in his bare hands something unspeakable … it is none other than myself. A few hours later you see two horses racing around the paddock, not without riders, of whom one is very like your friend. He is riding his fiery, zestful Balduin, and hopes to be able to ride well one day … at other times of the day he stands, industrious and attentive, by the horse-drawn cannons and pulls shells out of limber or cleans the bore with the cloth or takes aim according to inches and degrees, and so on. But most of all he has a lot to learn … Sometimes hidden under the horse’s belly I murmur, “Schopenhauer, help!”’9

The artillerymen were taught to mount their horse at the run, flinging themselves boldly into the saddle. His short-sightedness made him a bad judge of distance and in March he misjudged the leap, crashing his chest onto the saddle’s hard pommel. Stoically, he continued the exercise but that evening he collapsed and was put to bed with a deep chest wound. After ten days on morphine with no improvement, the army doctor opened up his chest; two months later his wound was still suppurating and refusing to heal. To his astonishment, a small bone came into view. He was told to bathe the cavity with camomile tea and nitrate of silver solution and to take a bath three times a week. This did not produce the desired result, and there was talk of an operation. The famous Dr Volkmann of Halle was consulted, and he recommended a salt-water cure at the brine baths of Wittekind. The little spa village was a gloomy place, rainy and damp, and his fellow-invalids were far from stimulating. To avoid their banal conversation, at mealtimes he sat himself next to a man who was deaf and dumb. Happily, the cure worked; the wounds healed, leaving only deep scars, and he was able to leave the depressing place.

In October he was declared temporarily unfit for active service and invalided out of the army until the following spring, when he was expected to come back for a month’s gun hauling exercise, an activity hardly compatible with the successful completion of the healing of the wounds. On 15 October he celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday and three weeks later came the glorious first meeting with Richard Wagner, soon after which Nietzsche received the invitation to take up the Chair of Philology at Basle.

It was an astonishing offer; Nietzsche was still a mere student. He had spent two terms at Bonn University and two terms at Leipzig and he had no degree from either but his distinguished teacher Ritschl had recommended his outstandingly brilliant pupil for the post. He was offered the chair on 13 February 1869, and in order that he could take it up he was awarded his doctorate by Leipzig, without examination, on 23 March. In April he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle with a stipend of three thousand francs.

Ecstatically proud to be the youngest ever professor to be appointed there, he spent some of the money on clothes, taking great pains to repudiate youthful fashions and selecting only those styles that would make him look older.

He had his reservations about the Swiss, suspecting them to be a race of ‘aristocratic philistines’, and about Basle, a wealthy, conservative society built on the ribbon trade, a place of impeccable parlours, infallible city elders and a small university of only 120 students, most of them studying theology.

The university insisted he give up his Prussian citizenship. They did not want him called back for further military service. They suggested he become a Swiss national, but while he revoked his Prussian citizenship he never fulfilled the requirements for Swiss citizenship. As a result he became stateless for the rest of his life, which he felt was certainly better than joining the ranks of the philistines.

‘I would rather be a Basel professor than God,’10 he said, and it was here that he discovered how much he enjoyed teaching. He was contracted to teach at the local secondary school, the Pädagogium, as well as at the university. He taught the history of Greek literature, ancient Greek religion, Plato and pre-Platonic philosophy, and Greek and Roman rhetoric. He made his pupils study Euripides’ The Bacchae and write on the Dionysian cult.

His pupils ‘seemed united in the impression they sat at the feet not so much of a pedagogue as of a living ephor [one of the magistrates in ancient Sparta who shared power with the king], who had leapt across time to tell them about Homer, Sophocles, Plato and their gods. As if he spoke from his own knowledge of things quite self-evident and still completely valued – that was the impression he made.’11

But this was not achieved without cost. One of his pupils describes Nietzsche’s bad days, when it was painful to watch him struggle to give his lecture. At the lectern, his face almost touching his notebook despite the thick eyeglasses, the words would be produced slowly and laboriously, with long pauses in between. Unbearable tension built up as to whether he would be able to complete the task.12

His spirit was greatly stirred by the energy of the River Rhine. When pupils entered his classroom they often found him at the open window, mesmerised by its continuous roar. The grinding echo of the river against the tall walls of the medieval streets accompanied his walks through the town where he cut a stylish figure, a little under middle height (the same height as Goethe, he always claimed), stockily built, carefully and elegantly dressed, distinguished-looking with his large moustache and deep-set, rather pensive eyes. His grey top hat must have been part of his ageing strategy as it was the only one to be seen in Basle apart from one worn by a very old state counsellor from Baden. On bad days when his health was plaguing him, Nietzsche swapped the top hat for a thick green eyeshade to shield his sensitive eyes from light.

When Nietzsche had settled into Basle to take up the professorship, Wagner was living in Lucerne at the Villa Tribschen on the shores of the lake. Lucerne was a short train ride from Basle and Nietzsche was eager to take up his invitation to continue the conversation about Schopenhauer and to hear more of Wagner’s Schopenhauerian opera, Tristan und Isolde.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy is chiefly set out in the huge book The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1818) in which he develops earlier thinking by Kant and Plato.

We live in the physical world. What we see, touch, perceive or experience is the representation (Vorstellung) but behind the representation lies the true essence of the object, the will (Wille). We are aware of ourselves, both in the perceptual fashion by which we know external things and, quite differently, from within as ‘will’.

The representation is in a state of endless yearning and eternal becoming as it seeks unity with its will, its perfectible state. The representation may occasionally become one with the will but this only causes further discontent and further yearning. The human genius (a rare being) may achieve wholeness in the union of will and representation but for the rest of the human herd it is an impossible state in life, only to be achieved in death.

All life is yearning for an impossible state and therefore all life is suffering. Kant had written from a Christian standpoint which made the ever-imperfect, ever-yearning state of the empirical world bearable because some sort of happy ending could be anticipated if you tried hard enough. Redemption was always possible through Christ.

Schopenhauer, on the other hand, was heavily influenced by his study of Buddhist and Hindu philosophies with their abnegatory emphasis on suffering, destiny and fate, and on the fact that desires when satiated only give rise to fresh desires. The sense of flux at the noumenal (metaphysical) level of the will is resolved in a yearning for nothingness.

Schopenhauer is known as the pessimistic philosopher but for a young man such as Nietzsche who was finding Christianity increasingly impossible, he provided a viable alternative to Kant, whose influence dominated the German philosophical establishment, not least because Christianity was a vital component of the fabric of German society, enrolled by the State in the service of conservative, nationalist politics. This put both Nietzsche and Wagner in the position of outsiders, which of course they minded not at all.

Nietzsche had not read Schopenhauer uncritically. On the way he had studied F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism and Critique of its Meaning in the Present (Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, 1866), and he had made notes.

Within this free-fall unknowing, Schopenhauer struck a deep emotional need in him, giving him comfort. The proposition that all life is a state of suffering applied to him more than most, with his poor body in a constant state of chronic ill health and often great pain. Naturally it yearned for its ideal state. Likewise, he was in a state of yearning for his ‘true being’ that would make existence seem intelligible and thus justified. At this stage he was particularly confused as to what his ‘true being’ was. Schopenhauer told him that we cannot realise the oneness of our true being because our intellect constantly fragments the world – and how can it be otherwise, when our intellect itself is but a small part, a fragment of our representation?

Nietzsche was feeling this in the most personal way; ‘The most irksome thing of all is that I am always having to impersonate someone – the teacher, the philologist, the human being,’14 he wrote after taking up the Basle professorship, and it was hardly a surprising feeling given that he was a young man dressing like an old man to impersonate wisdom, an undergraduate impersonating a professor, an exasperated son impersonating a good son to his irritating mother, and a loving and dutiful son to the memory of his dead Christian father while in the process of losing his Christian faith. As if these everyday impersonations were not enough, there was the question of his statelessness, the formal identity within which all these impersonations existed. Utterly fragmented, he knew himself in the Schopenhauerian state of striving and suffering: a man far from understanding his true will let alone realising it.

Wagner on the other hand was, at least in his own opinion, such a long way down the road of Schopenhauerian thought as to have attained the status of genius. He felt so confident that his will and representation had become one that he and his mistress Cosima playfully addressed each other by Schopenhauerian love-names. He was Will (Will) and she was Vorstell (Representation).

For Schopenhauer, music was the one art capable of revealing the truth about the nature of being itself. Other arts such as painting and sculpture could only be representations of representations. This put them at two removes from the ultimate reality, the will. Music, however, being formless, in the sense of being non-representational, had the capacity directly to access the will, bypassing the intellect.

Since discovering Schopenhauer in 1854, Wagner had been studying how to compose what Schopenhauer calls ‘suspension’. A piece of Schopenhauerian music must be like a life: moving from discord to discord, only resolved at the moment of death (in music, the final note of the piece).

The ear, like the shuddering soul, is endlessly yearning for the final resolution. Man is dissonance in human form; therefore musical dissonance must be the most effective artistic means of representing the pain of individual existence.

Composers who had gone before were wedded to observing musical form and obeying the ancestral rules: the formal, formulaic structure of the symphony for instance, or the concerto. Listening to them made you conscious of their individual contribution to music’s historical continuity and development. If you knew the language you could easily place them on the historical line.

But Schopenhauer challenged the very idea of history, calling ‘time’ only a form of our thought. This freed Wagner from recognisable representation. Nietzsche described Wagner’s Zukunftsmusik (‘Music of the Future’) as the triumphant culmination of all art because it was not concerned, like the others, with the images of the phenomenal world but rather spoke the language of the will directly. From the deepest source of its being, music was the will’s most quintessential manifestation. And of all music, Wagner’s exercised a spell over him that was becoming ever stronger; he could not keep a cool head when he listened to it, his every fibre quivered, his every nerve vibrated. Nothing else produced such a penetrating and lasting feeling of ecstasy in him. Surely what he was experiencing was the sensation of direct access to the will? He longed to renew his acquaintance with the Master.

When Nietzsche had been in Basle for three weeks, he felt he had university business sufficiently under control to be able to pay Wagner a visit. No matter that Wagner was more than twice his age and a world-famous figure whose casual invitation to visit had been extended some six months previously. On Saturday 15 May 1869, Nietzsche caught the railway train to Lucerne, got out and walked the path along the edge of Lake Lucerne leading to Wagner’s house.

Built in 1627, Tribschen was, and is, thick-walled and imposing, an ancient manor house, almost a watchtower. Numerous symmetrical windows peer out from beneath a steep-sided pyramidal red roof. Sitting atop a rise, it dominates a triangular knuckle of rock that pushes bonily into the lake. Like a robber’s castle it commands all approaches. Nietzsche could not scuttle up unseen but must arrive, like all visitors, discomfited beneath the windows’ blank scrutiny. From within the house he could hear an agonising, soul-wrenching chord repeated again and again on a piano: the Siegfried chord. He rang the bell.

A servant appeared. Nietzsche presented his visiting card and waited, feeling increasingly awkward. He was walking away when the servant came hurrying after him. Was he the Herr Nietzsche whom the Master had met at Leipzig? Yes indeed. The servant disappeared, reappeared. The Master was at his composition and could not be disturbed. Might the Herr Professor come back for lunch? Unfortunately, he was not free for lunch. The servant disappeared, reappeared. Might Herr Nietzsche come back the following day?

Nietzsche had no classes on Whit Monday. This time as he trod the intimidating approach, the Master himself came out to greet him.

Wagner adored fame and he adored clothes. He well understood the value of the image as vehicle for ideas. Today, greeting the philologist whose discipline was the understanding and continuity of the antique, he was dressed in his ‘Renaissance painter outfit’: black velvet jacket, knee breeches, silk stockings, buckled shoes, sky-blue cravat and Rembrandt beret. His welcome was warm, and genuine, as he led Nietzsche through the dazzling succession of rooms furnished in the opulent taste that the composer shared with his royal patron King Ludwig.

Many visitors commented that they found Tribschen too pink and over-endowed with cupids, but such an interior was something quite new and intoxicating to Nietzsche, whose life had been spent in self-denying, Protestant rooms. Tribschen’s walls were covered in red and gold damask, or in cordovan leather, or in a special shade of violet velvet that had been carefully chosen to set off to best advantage the dazzling white marble busts of Wagner and King Ludwig. There was a carpet made of breast feathers of flamingos bordered with peacocks’ feathers. Exalted high on a plinth stood a ridiculously fragile, elaborately curlicued beaker of ruby Bohemian glass presented to Wagner by the King. Mementoes of glory were hung like hunting trophies on the walls: fading laurel wreaths, autographed programmes, paintings of a muscle-bound, golden-haired Siegfried getting the better of the dragon, of breastplated Valkyries storming the skies like thunderclouds and of Brünnhilde bursting with joy as she awakened on her rock. Bibelots and precious objects lay trapped behind glass in vitrines, like pinned butterflies. Windows were muted by drifts of pink gauze and shimmering satin. The perfume of roses, tuberoses, narcissi, lilacs and lilies hung heavy on the air. No scent was too narcotic, no price too extravagant to pay for attar of roses from Persia, gardenias from America and orris root from Florence.

The creation of Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art integrating drama, music and spectacle, was itself a Gesamtkunstwerk involving Wagner’s every physical sense, for, as he saw it, ‘… if I am obliged once more to plunge into the waves of an artist’s imagination in order to find satisfaction in an imaginary world, I must at least help out my imagination and find means of encouraging my imaginative faculties. I cannot then live like a dog. I cannot sleep on straw and drink common gin: mine is an intensely irritable, acute and hugely voracious, yet uncommonly tender and delicate sensuality which, one way or another, must be flattered if I am to accomplish the cruelly difficult task of creating in my mind a non-existent world.’15

The room from whose window Nietzsche had heard the Siegfried chord floating was the Green Room, Wagner’s composition room, a surprisingly small, masculine and workmanlike space within Tribschen’s heavily operatic atmosphere. Two walls covered in bookshelves reminded one that Wagner was as much a man of words as of music who composed as many books, pamphlets and libretti as musical works. The piano was specially designed with drawers for pens and a table-like plane on which the sheets of the latest composition could be flung while the ink was drying on the paper. Visitors madly coveted these sheets and Wagner knew the value of autographing them and giving them out to the favoured influential. Over the piano hung the large portrait of the King. For some reason in Tribschen it was bad form to refer to King Ludwig by name. He was ‘the royal friend’. He visited Tribschen alone and incognito, even spending the night, after which his bedroom was kept ever ready for his return. Tribschen was Ludwig’s Rambouillet, his Marie Antoinette dairy. It took on much the same role for Nietzsche. He was the only person, apart from the King, to be given his own room in the house. During the course of the next three years he would visit Tribschen twenty-three times, and it would live in his thought forever as the Island of the Blessed.

King Ludwig, who was paying the bills, had given Wagner carte blanche to settle wherever his imagination might be free of all practical considerations as he concentrated solely on finishing the Ring cycle, which was the King’s passion. Wagner had settled on this spectacularly picturesque site that took full advantage of Kant’s principle of the sublime; ‘a function of the extreme tension experienced by the mind in apprehending immensity and boundlessness, transcending every standard of sense and which rouses a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror which, accomplished through a transcendent scale of reference, a greatness comparable to itself alone … its effect is to throw the mind back upon itself – and thus we soon perceive that the sublime is not to be looked for in the things of nature but in our own ideas.’16

On this principle, the transcendent views from Tribschen’s every window might trigger sublime inspiration in both Wagner and Nietzsche wherever they looked. Through the west-facing windows, where the sun set, rose the eternal snows of Mont Pilatus, originally a pre-Christian Nibelheim of legendary dragons and hobgoblins, renamed in a later, Christian age for Pontius Pilate who, banished from Galilee after the crucifixion of Christ, fled to Lucerne. Here, overcome by remorse, he climbed the seven-thousand-foot peak of the Pilatus, from which he flung himself into the little ink-black tarn that you can see below. Here lives his ghost, in silence and stillness complete. Local guides will tell you that the water itself is dead, pointing out as proof that its surface is always motionless and quite incapable of being ruffled by even the highest wind. Black pines surround the cursed spot. For centuries, no woodcutter dared venture there for fear of provoking the spirit to whom so many calamities were attributed, and so the pine trees grew up in tall peaks pressing round the little water and, incidentally, keeping the wind out and the water unruffled. In the fourteenth century a brave priest waded into Pilate’s dark suicide lake and performed an exorcism. Nevertheless, locals remained wary and the numerous thunderstorms that bang and clatter round the mountain and swell sudden storms on Lake Lucerne remained attributed to Pilate’s ghost. It was only after the 1780s that the Frühromantiker, pale young men with their minds in paroxysms of poetic metaphor, who valued Kantian sublimity and ‘poetry of the heart’ above all else, ventured onto the ill-omened mountain, where Pilate’s pool surely made the ultimate suicide spot for many a young Werther hopelessly crossed in love.

By the time Wagner was inviting Nietzsche to join him on refreshing all-day hikes up the Pilatus, enterprising peasants had constructed a hostelry and were hiring out ponies for the ascent. Wagner and Nietzsche scorned this service. They conquered the rocky crags on foot, singing and philosophising all the way.

Should Nietzsche look through Tribschen’s lake-facing windows, his eyes would sweep down the ‘Robber’s Park’, a grassy, bouldery headland grazed by Wagner’s horse Fritz, his chickens, peacocks and sheep, who dotted the ground sloping down to the lake’s edge. Wagner and Nietzsche were both fond of swimming from the bathing ladder that cut the pale reflections of the run of snowy mountains on the far shore of the lake. The Rigi, at six thousand foot, is a little lower than the Pilatus but just as famous for being painted by J. M. W. Turner and for the curious lighting effect known as the ‘Rigi ghost’. In particular conditions requiring brightness and mist, you can see the ghost clearly. It takes the shape of an enormous human figure like the silhouette of a giant in the vaporous sky above you. The giant is surrounded by a rainbow nimbus; in fact it is no ghost but your own figure projected onto the mist, as you discover when you stretch your arms out in wonder, upon which you see your movements gigantically reflected in the mist as in a magnifying mirror. Wagner used to dance and cut capers at his heavenly mirror image until the mist moved, and the puppet show was gone.17

On the lake’s edge to the right of Wagner’s bathing ladder was a little chalet roofed with wooden shingles, housing the boat. When Wagner needed to let off steam he would get his faithful servant Jacob to row him through the flocks of white Lohengrin swans that sailed the lake, far out to the echo spot where William Tell taunted his evil adversary Landvogt Gessler by shouting insults that rang round the mountains in endless mockery. Wagner liked to bellow obscenities in his rough Saxon accent. It made him roar with laughter when the echo shouted them back at him.

If the mood was still on him after Jacob had rowed him back, he’d shin up a pine tree and yell some more. Once he somehow scaled the smooth facade of the house and shouted from the balcony but that was an exceptional occasion because he wasn’t raging against an enemy but against himself for having done something he was ashamed of.18

*

Wagner’s domestic situation was in a muddle when Nietzsche paid his visit. His birthday was looming the following weekend and King Ludwig wanted to be with him on that significant day but Wagner was torn between spending the day with the King or with his mistress Cosima. Though she and Wagner had been together long enough for her to bear him two daughters and she was now pregnant by him for the third time, Cosima had only very recently left her husband to come to live with Wagner at Tribschen. Wagner was concealing her from the King for various reasons. The King was an ardent Roman Catholic who disapproved of adulterous relationships. He was a pale creature who adored Wagner more than anyone on earth. It was obviously never a physical relationship in any way beyond each of them falling to their knees to sob hot tears in tribute to each other, but it was a highly romantic one, at least on Ludwig’s side.

Ludwig was jealous and possessive; he saw no reason why he should not be first-and-only to the genius he elevated to a sort of fetishistic idolatry while supporting him financially to a degree beyond reason, whipping his ministers and his subjects into a state of anxiety and suspicion that Wagner’s Music of the Future, while emptying the State coffers, was hoodwinking their sweet, handsome, naïve young king and dressing him in the laughable garb of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Wagner and his mistress were already at the centre of a complicated emotional network of suppressed homo-and heterosexual loves, longings and social tensions into which Nietzsche would be swept. Cosima was the second of three illegitimate daughters born to the composer Franz Liszt and the Comtesse Marie d’Agoult. Wagner’s own paternity was decidedly misty and when he needed a father figure, Liszt had filled the void both musically and practically. In 1849, Liszt had provided the money for Wagner to flee Dresden and helped him obtain a false passport. Since then he had stepped in financially to support Wagner’s revolutionary new music over a sustained period. Liszt was both music-father and money-father to Wagner.

While Wagner was the better conductor, Liszt was the infinitely better pianist, effectively inventing the profession of international concert performer. He was worshipped as a demigod of the keyboard from Paris to Constantinople and most points between. Heinrich Heine coined the term Lisztomania for the mass hysteria he engendered. Women swooned and swayed like cornfields in his presence. They stole his cigar-ends from ashtrays and kept them as holy relics. They sneaked the flowers that adorned his concert platforms. Though there can never be any doubt of Wagner’s vigorous heterosexuality (much to both his wives’ fury there was practically a new young mistress for every opera) he would break into tears as he knelt to kiss Liszt’s hand. In terms of sentiment and sentimentality, Wagner conformed to the conventions of an age of male-to-male hero-worship and unashamed emotion.

Cosima was not Liszt’s favourite daughter. A gawky duckling of powerful personality, she was a long-faced belle laide, the physical image of her father. She shared his astonishing charisma, his height, his distinctive Roman nose and his etiolated looks which, handsome on a man, lent her a goddess-like unapproachability that was irresistible to certain intellectual men of short stature, including Wagner and Nietzsche.

At this Whit Monday lunch with Nietzsche, Cosima was still married to Hans von Bülow. Previously von Bülow had been one of Liszt’s most promising pupils. Now he was Wagner’s chief conductor. He was also, in this intimate tangle of musico-erotic relationships, King Ludwig’s Kapellmeister.

Cosima had committed herself to marriage with von Bülow when she was still in her teens and had been swept away by a concert in Berlin conducted by him. The concert programme had included the first Berlin performance of Wagner’s Venusberg music from Tannhäuser. Von Bülow had proposed to her on the same night. Both of them were in love with Wagner and completely transported by his glorious music; one wonders who he was wooing and who she was accepting. Numerous accounts of von Bülow cast question on his sexuality. They seem to be borne out by the unusual letter he wrote to her father Lizst on the occasion of his engagement to Cosima:

‘I feel for her more than love. The thought of moving nearer to you encloses all my dream of whatsoever may be vouchsafed to me on this earth, you whom I regard as the principal architect and shaper of my present and future life. For me Cosima is superior to all women, not only because she bears your name but because she resembles you so closely …’19

A year after their marriage, Cosima was in despair. She had made a grievous mistake. She requested one of her husband’s close friends, Karl Ritter, to kill her. When Ritter refused, she threatened to drown herself in the lake and was only deterred when he said that if she did, he would have to do the same. The marriage continued with her making repeated attempts to contract fatal illnesses.20 Both Cosima and von Bülow were passionate admirers of Wagner’s music and one evening, Wagner noticed that she ‘was in a strangely excited state which showed itself in a convulsively passionate tenderness towards me’.21

At that time Wagner was still married to his first wife, Minna, but on her death the situation unravelled itself. In the interval Cosima had borne von Bülow two daughters but that was no barrier to her bearing Wagner two more, while maintaining the sham marriage and becoming pregnant for a third time by Wagner.

When Nietzsche came to lunch at Tribschen, Cosima was eight months into expecting their third child, a fact of which the unworldly Nietzsche seems to have been totally unaware as he enjoyed the social sportiveness of the large household comprising Cosima’s four daughters, a governess, a nursery maid, a housekeeper, a cook and two or three servants, young Hans Richter who was then Wagner’s secretary, musical copyist and maître de plaisir in charge of organising concerts and entertainments, Wagner’s huge, black Newfoundland dog, Russ, who now lies buried next to his master in Bayreuth, Cosima’s grey fox-terrier to which she had given the name Kos so that nobody should shorten her own name to ‘Cos’, the horse Fritz, sheep, hens and cats, a pair of golden pheasants and a breeding pair of peacocks named Wotan after the father of the gods in German mythology who is the cause of all the trouble in Wagner’s Ring, and Fricka after Wotan’s shriekingly possessive wife, who had a certain amount in common with Cosima.

Notes

1 Förster-Nietzsche, The Life of Nietzsche, Vol. I, p. 144.

2 Ibid., pp. 143–4.

3 Gilman (ed.), Conversations with Nietzsche, p. 20.

4 Chambers’ Encyclopedia, 1895, Vol. IV, p. 433.

5 Nietzsche to Elisabeth Nietzsche, 11 June 1865.

6 Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff, Naumburg, 7 April 1866.

7 Heinrich Stürenberg, fellow-student at Leipzig University. See Gilman (ed.), Conversations with Nietzsche, p. 29.

8 Pythian Odes, 2:73.

9 Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, Naumburg, 3 November 1867.

10 Nietzsche to Jacob Burckhardt, 6 January 1889.

11 Carl Bernoulli quoted in Hollingdale, Nietzsche, the Man and His Philosophy, p. 48.

12 Gilman (ed.), Conversations with Nietzsche, p. 62.

13 Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff, August 1866.

14 Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, February 1870.

15 Richard Wagner to Franz Liszt, 15 January 1854, quoted in Barry Millington, Richard Wagner, The Sorcerer of Bayreuth, Thames and Hudson, 2013, p. 144.

16 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, 1790, trans. James Creed Meredith, Oxford University Press, 1928, p. 28.

17 It is most probably the Rigi ghost that contributed certain supernatural elements to Wagner’s Ring: the rainbow bridge leading to Valhalla the home of the gods, the pair of giants who loom enormous and threatening through the mist at Valhalla’s windows, and the specific stage direction in Rheingold that reads: ‘The cloud suddenly lifts, revealing Donner and Froh. From their feet a rainbow bridge of blinding radiance stretches out across the valley to the castle, which now glints in the glow of the evening sun.’

18 Judith Gautier, Wagner at Home, trans. Effie Dunreith Massie, John Lane, 1911, p. 97.

19 Alan Walker, Hans von Bülow, A Life and Times, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 98.

20 Richard Wagner to Eliza Wille, 9 September 1864.

21 Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, 4 September 1858, cited in Walker, Hans von Bülow, p. 110.