Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualisation and deepening of cruelty. Cruelty is what constitutes the painful sensuality of tragedy.
Beyond Good and Evil, ‘Our Virtues’, Section 229
The impact of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, has proved far greater than the narrow and time-bound concerns that drove Nietzsche to write it. The book originated partly as a young man’s impassioned attack on the cultural degeneration of his day, and partly as a manifesto for the cultural regeneration of the newly unified state of Germany through the vision of Richard Wagner. It endures as a revolutionary perception of the elusive transactions made between the rational and the instinctive, between life and art, between the world of culture and the human response to it.
The book’s famous opening tells us that, just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, so the continuing development of art and culture down the ages depends on the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Like the two sexes, they are engaged in a continual struggle interrupted only by temporary periods of reconciliation.
He identifies the Apollonian with the plastic arts, particularly sculpture but also painting, architecture and dreams, which, at that pre-Freudian time, did not represent the messy eruption of guilty subconscious effluvia, but still held their ancient significance as prophecy, enlightenment and revelation. The qualities of Apollo can be summed up more or less as the apparent, the describable: in Schopenhauerian terms corresponding roughly to ‘representation’. The world of Apollo is made up of moral, rational individuals, those who exemplify ‘the principium individuationis, whose gestures and gaze speak to us of all the intense pleasure, wisdom and beauty of “semblance”’.1
The arts belonging to Dionysus are music and tragedy. Dionysus the twice-born son of Zeus was perceived in ancient Greece as both man and animal. He represented an enchanted world of extraordinary experience transcending existential boundaries. The god of wine and intoxication, of drink and drugs, of ritual madness and ecstasy, god of the fictional world of the theatre, of the mask, of impersonation and illusion; he is the god whose arts subvert the normal or individual identity of his followers as they are transformed by them.
Music and tragedy are both capable of erasing the individual spirit and awakening impulses which in their heightened forms cause the subjective to dwindle into complete self-oblivion, while the spirit is mystically transported to a transcendent state of bliss or horror. In Attic tragedy one of the names of Dionysus was ‘the Eater of Raw Flesh’. Only through the spirit of music can we understand the ecstasy involved in self-annihilation. One thinks of today’s rock festival-goers, or of Nietzsche describing his response to Tristan as having laid his ear against the heart of the universal will and felt the tumultuous lust for life as a thundering torrent. He illustrates the point to his own contemporaries by a reference with which they would be familiar: the frenzied throngs that had roamed medieval Germany in a mania of singing and dancing, the so-called singers and dancers of St John and St Vitus. (Wagner had referred to them elliptically in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.) In them, Nietzsche recognised the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks. Intoxication, music, singing and dancing were the activities in which the principium individuationis was lost. Here was the Dionysian response to the pain of life.
Where did the Greeks’ pessimism, their attraction towards the tragic myth, towards the fearful, the evil, the cruel, the Eater of Flesh, the orgiastic, the enigmatic and destructive, begin? The genius of Greek tragedy, he tells us, is that through the miracle of the Hellenic will, the Apollonian and Dionysian are coupled. The pre-Socratic Greek playwright is an Apollonian dream artist and a Dionysian ecstatic artist at the same time, and this is achieved through the chorus.
The chorus represents the origin of tragedy and it is a representation of the Dionysian state. The introduction of the chorus is a negation of naturalism. Nietzsche warns against the culture of his own day: ‘With our current veneration for the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole to all idealism, and have landed in the region of waxworks.’2
To understand the death of Greek tragedy, we have only to consider the Socratic maxims: that virtue is knowledge, that all sins arise from ignorance, and that the happy man is the virtuous man.
In this basically optimistic and rational formula lies tragedy’s extinction. In post-Socratic plays the virtuous hero must be dialectical. There must be a necessary and visible bond between virtue and knowledge, between faith and morality. Socrates reduces the transcendental justice of Aeschylus to ‘the flat and impudent principle of poetic justice’.
Socrates is ‘the mystagogue of science’ in whose eye the lovely gleam of madness never glowed. Socrates instigated the ‘unimaginable, universal greed for knowledge, stretching across most of the cultured world, and presenting itself as the true task for anyone of higher abilities. [Socrates] led science on to the high seas, from which it could never again be driven completely … for the first time, thanks to this universality, a common network of thought was stretched over the whole globe, with prospects of encompassing even the laws of the entire solar system.’3
People are held fast by the Socratic delusion that pleasure in understanding can heal the eternal wound of existence. ‘Anyone who has experienced the intense pleasure of a Socratic insight, and felt it spread out in ever-widening circles as it attempted to encompass the entire world of appearances, will forever feel there can be no sharper goad to life.’4
But this is to ignore that the world is more than a replica of phenomena. There also exists the Dionysian, the Will. And so, ‘In this late period of Socratic culture, man … remains eternally hungry.’ Reduced to rationality, Alexandrian man is basically ‘a librarian and proof-reader, sacrificing his sight miserably to book-dust and [printing] errors’.5
Is our flight into science and scientific proof perhaps a kind of fear, an escape from pessimism, a subtle, last resort against truth? Morally speaking, is it a sort of cowardice and falsity?
The problem of science must be faced. Science was a post-Socratic problem in Greece, Nietzsche observes, as it remains a problem in post-Darwinian Europe. By faith in the explicability of nature and in knowledge as a panacea, science annihilates myth. As a result, ‘We fall into a senile, unproductive love of existence.’
Never has there been a period in which culture was more enfeebled. When the disaster that is slumbering in the womb of theoretical culture gradually begins to frighten modern man, the only salvation for culture will be to break open the enchanted gate leading into the Hellenic magic mountain.6
Who holds the key to the magic mountain? Whose power is strong enough to break down the gate? Schopenhauer and, inevitably, Wagner. Opera, in short, with its marriage of words and music presents the new tragic art form in which the Dionysian and Apollonian are reunited.
Wagner’s music of the future is based on the necessary revival of tragic myth (German rather than Greek) and dissonance. His use of musical dissonance reflects and acknowledges the dissonance of man’s soul and the tension within him between Will and Representation, between Apollonian and Dionysian.
Who, Nietzsche asks, can listen to the third act of Tristan und Isolde, ‘this shepherd’s dance of metaphysics’, without expiring in a spasmodic unharnessing of all the wings of the soul? How could anyone ‘fail to be shattered immediately’?7 A Dionysian experience if ever there was one and a fully German one, mythically speaking.
In some hitherto inaccessible abyss the German spirit still rests and dreams, undestroyed and Dionysian in strength, like a knight sunk in slumber; and from this abyss the Dionysian rises to our ears.
In Tristan (here things become complicated) the Dionysian is, in reality, in the service of the Apollonian. The highest goal of tragedy is when Dionysus speaks the words of Apollo and Apollo, finally, the words of Dionysus. Thus is the highest goal of tragedy, and of all art, attained.
Having quoted copiously from the libretto of Tristan, the book concludes with an imagined meeting between a modern man and an ancient Greek who go together to the tragedy to sacrifice to both deities. While The Birth of Tragedy is a book that is more about culture than about how people should lead their lives, it does introduce us to ideas that Nietzsche would return to as his philosophy developed. The concept of human nature’s duality, expressed in The Birth of Tragedy by the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and the crucial need to confront the illusion of certainty provided by science would occupy his thoughts for the rest of his active life.
*
When he had finished the first draft of the book he fled the melting snows of Lugano for Tribschen, surprising Cosima by suddenly appearing at breakfast on 3 April. She remarked that he looked very run-down and she persuaded him to stay for five days. He read aloud his manuscript, which was then entitled The Origin and Aim of Greek Tragedy. Cosima and Wagner were delighted. Much of the text was a drawing together of their exchanges of ideas over the past couple of years. Besides, how could they fail to be captivated by the proposal of national cultural renewal through Wagner’s music?
Suddenly, everyone and everything at Tribschen was Apollonian or Dionysian. Wagner had a new love-name for Cosima: she was now his ‘Apollonian spirit’. He was already Dionysus in the love triangle but Nietzsche’s book had added a new understanding to the role. Wagner incorporated the terms ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’ into the address he was writing ‘On the Destiny of Opera’, which he was scheduled to deliver in three weeks’ time to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. After that, he had an appointment for a private talk with Bismarck. The cultural direction of the German Reich was on its way.
But while this was flattering to Nietzsche, he was discovering himself more of a Burckhardtian, more of a European than Wagner. He could not condone Wagner’s exultation at the sufferings of Paris under Prussian siege. Wagner referred to Paris as ‘that kept woman of the world’ and rubbed his hands in glee that she was at last getting her comeuppance for her mistress-like light-heartedness, her preference for elegance over seriousness and her ‘Franco-Jewish trivialisation of culture’.
‘Richard would like to write to Bismarck requesting him to shoot all Paris down,’8 Cosima noted, but Nietzsche took a different view: he was overcome with pity for the innocents of Paris and horror at his own country for the imposition of such suffering.
The Tribschen soundtrack was unsettling, if not downright disagreeable, to Nietzsche’s ears. The children were singing the catchy new Kaisermarsch that Wagner had composed in honour of the new Emperor, and the Master was reading aloud his new poem in praise of the Prussian army that besieged Paris. What Nietzsche saw as a barbaric tide of cultural erasure, Wagner saw as a tide of cultural renewal. Wagner’s point of view was that if you are not capable of painting pictures again, you are not worthy of possessing them. Shorn of Wagner’s ugly nationalism, this was surely the truly Dionysian, truly creative original viewpoint, compared to Nietzsche’s merely historic, merely Apollonian inclination to preserve the cultural edifice.
We know that while Nietzsche was at Tribschen, he made changes to The Birth of Tragedy at Wagner’s suggestion but we do not know exactly what they were. After ‘making the children happy with a green snake’,9 he departed for Basle to tinker further with the text, to change its title and to add a long dedication to Wagner.
In Basle, only bad news awaited him. The vacant Chair of Philosophy had been filled by a suitable candidate. Nietzsche realised how naïve and inappropriate he had been in putting forward his own Musical Chairs suggestions.
‘What idiocies I committed! And how sure I was in all my schemes! I cannot hide behind the bed-screen of my sickly state; obviously it was an idea born of a sleepless night of fever, and with it I thought I had found a healing remedy against sickness and nerves.’10 Instead of which he must remain one of the wriggling brood of philologists investigating the grammatical minutiae of the ancients without ever confronting the compelling problems of life. His philological duties were a terrible distraction from the greater task. He must place his hopes in the publication of the book finding him recognition as a philosopher. Then he might be able to change direction.
Meanwhile, his anxiety and his health were such that the kindly Basle authorities lightened his teaching load. His sister Elisabeth moved to Basle to look after him. It was no hardship for Elisabeth to leave Naumburg, where she was leading the constrained life of a spinster, living in their mother’s house and devoting herself to good works.
At the end of April, Nietzsche sent off the opening part of The Birth of Tragedy to a Leipzig publisher. Months passed without even an acknowledgement. His authorial insecurity was fuelled by the absence of Wagner and Cosima. The gods had deserted the Island of the Blessed and were travelling through Germany in their quest to find a place to build the festival theatre to stage the Ring. There could be no flight to Tribschen for intellectual support. Besides, even had he been to hand, Wagner was in no position to give support to anybody else because he too was in a sustained state of tension and insecurity. Despite Wagner’s strenuous efforts to prevent him, King Ludwig had mounted a disastrous production of Das Rheingold, the first opera in the Ring cycle. Impatient to see it on stage, the King had backed a staging that was premature and desperately badly thoughtout. It fulfilled Wagner’s worst predictions, and the fallout from the hopeless production included the King severing direct connections with Wagner, who now had no idea whether Ludwig would carry on financing the Ring project. This made it peculiarly frustrating that on their trip through Germany, Wagner and Cosima identified Bayreuth as the perfect place to build their opera house, if only they had the money.
A medium-sized town in northern Bavaria, Bayreuth was served by a railway that could deliver the audience to the door. The setting was marvellously, mythically German. It was the highest point on a huge plain fertile with crops and cattle. A historic Baroque palace in a landscaped park represented the triumph of Apollonian intellect, while a good-sized grassy hill dominating the plain was crying out to be crowned by the Dionysian presence of an opera house.
At Whitsuntide, Wagner and Cosima returned to Tribschen full of hope. They summoned Nietzsche to join them. Whitsun was an emotionally charged time for the three of them. It could never pass without the sacramental memory of Siegfried’s birth in 1869, the occasion that had sealed their mystical triumvirate.
Now, a mere two years later, loss loomed. If the cultural project succeeded, which Nietzsche must hope it would, Wagner and Cosima would leave Tribschen permanently for Bayreuth. His days on the Island of the Blessed were numbered. On which day was the ripple of the star dance destined to live only in retrospect? His uncertainty and emotional fragility were aggravated by the publisher failing to make up his mind whether or not to publish The Birth of Tragedy. In June, Nietzsche could stand the tension no longer. He demanded the manuscript back. Without telling the Master, he sent it to Wagner’s publisher, Ernst Wilhelm Fritzsch.
At the beginning of September, Cosima wrote to Nietzsche to ask him to recommend somebody to accompany the son of Princess Hatzfeldt-Trachenberg on a very grand tour of Italy, Greece, the East and America. There were many good reasons for Nietzsche to volunteer. It would see some sort of resolution to a long and tension-filled summer. It might improve his health (his doctors were always recommending warmer climes). It would be a neat escape from the Chair of Philology. It meant that he would at last set eyes on Rome and the classical world. This so excited him that he chattered to his university colleagues about the project before anything was settled. Also – it seemed to be what Cosima wanted, or why had she mentioned it to him? But he had hopelessly misread Cosima, who was never one to hint when she could command. Cosima was scandalised by the idea of him giving up the serious role of professor to take up the frivolous one of cicerone to a princeling. When she communicated this, Nietzsche was consumed with the shame of having made a fool of himself in her eyes and in the eyes of the university. Fortunately the university saw it differently. When he announced his intention to stay, they raised his salary by the considerable sum of 500 francs, to 3,500.
In October he celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday. A month later he wrote a delirious letter to Carl von Gersdorff, his old school friend from Schulpforta, to let him know that ‘the excellent Fritzsch’ had accepted the book and promised to publish it in time for Christmas.
‘The design is settled,’ Nietzsche jubilantly told von Gersdorff, ‘to be modelled on Wagner’s The Object of Opera – rejoice with me! This means there will be a glorious place for a nice vignette: tell this to your artist friend and give him my most amicable regards as well. Take out the Wagner pamphlet, open the title page, and calculate the size which we might give:
The
Birth of Tragedy
from the Spirit of Music
by
Dr. Friedrich Nietzsche
Professor of Classical Philology
Leipzig Fritzsch
‘I have at present the greatest confidence that the book will have tremendous sales and the gentleman who designs the vignette can prepare himself for a modicum of immortality.
‘Now some more news. Imagine, my dear friend, how strangely those warming days of [our] reunion during my vacation came at once to fruition in me in the form of a longish composition for two pianos, in which everything echoes a beautiful autumn, warm with the sun. Because it connects with a youthful memory, the opus is called Echo of a New Year’s Eve: With Processional Song, Peasant Dance, and Midnight Bell. That is a jolly title … At Christmas this music will be a present and a surprise for Frau Wagner … I had composed nothing for six years, and this autumn stimulated me again. When properly performed, the music lasts twenty minutes.’11
His euphoria did not last long. The woodcut artist who was to be immortalised by the vignette botched the job and another artist had to be found. The good Fritzsch set the text in a smaller type than Wagner’s The Object of Opera so the book, at 140 pages, was slimmer and looked less important than Nietzsche had hoped, more like a booklet. Also, Wagner was angry with him for going to his publisher without first asking him. It made it look as if the two of them were colluding, as if Nietzsche were Wagner’s tame propagandist.
He declined the invitation to spend Christmas at Tribschen, giving as his reason that he needed time to think out a new course of lectures on the future of educational institutions, but he could have done that just as well in the Denkstube. In fact, as he admitted confidentially to Erwin Rohde, he needed time to collect himself for Wagner’s verdict on the piece of music he had sent. ‘[I] am excited as to what I shall hear about my musical work.’12
Nietzsche thought of himself as a composer of some talent and he glowed warmly in expectation of Wagner’s admiration. When eventually Hans Richter and Cosima sat down at the Tribschen piano to play the duet to a listening Wagner, the Master fidgeted throughout the twenty minutes it took to perform. The piece was typical of Nietzsche’s piano compositions at this period, a pot-pourri of Bach, Schubert, Liszt and Wagner. Bitty, over-emotional and short on development, his compositions invariably ignite the idea that had he lived later he might have found success as a composer of incidental music for the silent cinema. However much Wagner and Cosima laughed in private, they concealed their small opinion of the piece. She thanked him for the ‘beautiful letter’ accompanying the gift but made no mention of the music itself.
Alone in Basle over Christmas, Nietzsche was helped by an unexplained house painter to open a large crate that had arrived from his mother. Franziska was now quite prosperous, having profited from legacies on the death of the aunts, which provided her with the funds to purchase the whole of the Naumburg house and rent out bits of it to lodgers.
This Christmas, in missionary spirit, Franziska had decided to send her religiously wavering son a large Italian oil painting of the Madonna. During the solitude of the long days of Christmas, Nietzsche had plenty of time to compose a letter of thanks that includes a description of how very conventionally he had arranged his living quarters: ‘Naturally the Madonna will be over the sofa; over the piano there will be a picture by Holbein, the big Erasmus … with Papa Ritschl and Schopenhauer above the book table beside the stove. Anyway … I thank you most heartily … it seems as if such a picture were drawing me involuntarily toward Italy and – I almost believe you sent it to me to lure me there. The only answer I can give to this Apollonian effect is through my Dionysian one – through the New Year’s Eve music – and after that, through the Apollonian-Dionysian double effect of my book, which will be published at the New Year.’
The letter goes on to thank her for the good comb, hairbrush, clothes brush, ‘except it is somewhat too soft’, nice socks and large quantity of delicious gingerbread in festive packaging.13 At the same time he wrote another letter in tones of gleeful transgression to his childhood friend Gustav Krug telling him to expect The Birth of Tragedy in the New Year and warning him, in very much the same tone and language that he had used as a seventeen-year-old to warn the friend to whom he had sent his ‘repulsive’ obscene novel Euphorion, ‘Oh! It is naughty and offensive. Read it secretly, closeted in your room.’14
One cannot read his letters this Christmastime without pitying him for the uncertainty that was swirling around him. Nobody was being straightforward. Everybody, including himself, was pretending; everybody was wearing a mask, showing one face to one person, one to another. He had temporarily forgotten the guiding admonition of Pindar that he had adopted during his student days, ‘Become what you are!’
*
At last the book emerged from the publisher’s. On 2 January 1872, he was able to send it to Wagner with an accompanying letter describing it as delayed by ‘the powers of fate, with which no eternal bond can be woven …’
*
‘On every page, you will find that I am only trying to thank you for everything you have given me; only doubt overcomes me as to whether I have always correctly received what you gave.
With the warmest thanks for your love, I am, as I have been and shall be,
Your loyal Friedrich Nietzsche.’
*
It was the most naked, most openly affectionate letter he had ever written. Fortunately, on receipt of the book, Wagner wrote by return of post:
‘Dear Friend!
I have read nothing more beautiful than your book. Everything is superb! … I told Cosima that after her it is you who come next in my heart, and then, after a long distance, it is Lenbach, who has made such a strikingly lifelike portrait of me! Adieu! Come very soon to us and then there will be Dionysian merriment!’
Cosima wrote an ecstatic letter praising the book unreservedly. She found the text profound, poetic and beautiful. She told him that it gave her all the answers to the questions of her inner life. The sentiment she expressed was genuinely felt: in the privacy of her diary she calls the book ‘really splendid’ and describes herself and Wagner almost tearing the volume in two as they vied for physical possession of it.
Nietzsche sent a copy to Liszt, who also responded kindly, saying, among much else, that he had never found a better definition of art. More praise piled up in the shape of letters from ladies and gentlemen of rank, barons and baronesses who did not necessarily understand the book but who wrote an assortment of platitudes to show they were in the camp of Wagner and King Ludwig contra mundum. There was nothing from any professional philosopher or philologist and there was no review in the press. He waited nervously. There spread around the book the most oppressive and uneasy public silence. ‘It feels’, he said, ‘almost as though I had committed a crime.’
However, there was solid intellectual distraction in the task of delivering the lectures on education whose writing had prevented him spending Christmas at Tribschen. The Basle Academic Society had a great tradition of public lectures. Each winter a programme of thirty or forty lectures was open to an audience of all comers. About three hundred people turned up for Nietzsche’s first lecture on 16 January, listened with great approval and came back for more.
The series On the Future of Our Educational Institutions took as its subject the direction that should be taken in the vital field of education in the newly founded Reich. Much ground covered in The Birth of Tragedy was reused in the lectures. Criticism of the sterile culture of the present age was followed by the suggestion it be replaced by a regeneration of ‘the Germanic spirit’ of the past.
Nietzsche structured the lectures like Platonic dialogues between a student and a teacher, making them relevant to his audience by putting current political points of view into their mouths; arguing Marxist theory against a return to the aristocratic radicalism of ancient Greece.
The student argues for the greatest possible expansion of education. The net should be cast as wide as possible. Utility should be made the object and goal of education. The greatest possible enabling of pecuniary gain would equal happiness for all.
The philosopher argues for a return to education for its own sake and for the sake of upholding the highest ethical morals. Expanded education produces enfeebled education. The state’s dilemma is that the bond between intelligence and property demands rapid education so that a money-earning creature may be produced with all speed. Man is allowed only the precise amount of culture which is compatible with the interests of gain.
He had said the unsayable: that the state did not want brilliant individuals but cogs in the machine, specialists who had been educated just sufficiently to contribute uncritically and subserviently, an inexorable result of which was the perpetuation of intellectual mediocrity. We hear an echo of Nietzsche’s perambulating conversations with Burckhardt in his rant against the newspaper stepping into the place of culture, and his exasperation that even the greatest scholar must avail himself of newspapers: ‘this viscous stratum of communication which cements the seams between all forms of life, all classes, all arts, and all sciences and which is as firm and reliable as the newspaper is, as a rule’.15
The series of lectures was to run to six, but by the time he had delivered the fifth, his health had broken down. This, together with his inability to close the argument by moving in the last lecture from theory to concrete suggestions for educational reform, meant that the series was never completed. All five lectures had been popular and well attended. He received an offer to take up the Chair of Classical Philology in the northern town of Greifswald but the last thing he wanted was another chair in philology. What he wanted was to move to a chair in philosophy.
The enthusiastic students of Basle misinterpreted his ‘No’ to Greifswald. Thinking it signified his undying loyalty to Basle, they visited him with a proposal to hold a torchlight procession in his honour. He turned it down. A few days later the University of Basle raised his salary to four thousand Swiss francs in recognition of his ‘outstanding services’.
Eight days after Nietzsche had delivered the first lecture, Wagner called on him in great distress. He wondered how he could prevent Nietzsche’s book being ‘killed by silence’.16 But even deeper ran Wagner’s concern for himself and for his life’s work. It looked as if his dream was yet again collapsing. First, the town council of Bayreuth had offered him the site on which to build the opera house, then it had transpired that the council did not own the land, and the man who did refused to sell them the plot. And after that, things had gone from bad to worse: King Ludwig’s secretary had checked the sums. Wagner was even worse at finance than he was at singing in tune and the building costs had somehow risen alarmingly from three hundred thousand thalers to nine hundred thousand. The money was to have been raised by the formation of subscription-paying Wagner Societies wherever enthusiasts could be found. Many societies had been formed across Germany and abroad, even as far as Egypt, where the Khedive, flushed with the idea of integration with Europe (he had recently invited Henrik Ibsen among others to the opening of the Suez canal), contributed. The responsibility for coordinating the diverse Wagner Societies’ funds had been taken on by two fine-sounding bigwigs, the Barons Loën from Weimar and Cohn from Dessau, but they had only managed to raise somewhere between twelve thousand and twenty-eight thousand – at least this was what they said, but Wagner was convinced that Baron Cohn, whom he called ‘the Court Jew’, was sabotaging the enterprise for vile, Semitic reasons.
Wagner was in despair; he was almost ready to abandon the whole project. He could not sleep. His digestion was chaotic. He was haunted by the idea that King Ludwig would die or go mad. Then the money would dry up completely and the Ring project and the cultural regeneration of Germany would die with him. Wagner was calling on Nietzsche as his first stop on his final, despairing fundraising tour.
Seeing the Master in such a wretched state, Nietzsche impulsively offered to give up everything to tour the German fatherland, delivering fundraising lectures. Wagner dissuaded him. It was Nietzsche’s job to remain in Basle and consolidate his reputation by completing his lecture series, whose real and important ambition was to effect a change in Bismarck’s education policy. On the back of the successful lectures, which Nietzsche planned to publish as a book, he was secretly preparing a memorandum to send to Bismarck, pointing out the Chancellor’s shortcomings in the field of education and suggesting reforms as a model for cultural renewal, ‘to show how disgraceful it is that a great moment has been missed for founding a truly German educational institution which would regenerate the German spirit …’17 In the event the book was never published and the memorandum never sent. It was an ill-conceived project in the first place; Bismarck never responded positively to a wagging finger.
Wagner continued on his way to Berlin, leaving Cosima alone to console herself with Nietzsche’s book and a tub of caviar that Wagner had sent from Leipzig.18 Had Nietzsche followed his quixotic impulse to throw up the university and roam the Reich for Wagner, he would have found himself redundant within the month. Wagner’s trip was an overwhelming financial success. The victory over France had created a nationalistic mood that made him and his agenda immensely appealing. He was received with acclamation in Berlin and Weimar. Bayreuth offered him an even better piece of land, as well as another large plot close to the opera house, where he and Cosima could build a fine villa to make their home.
Late March, and the snows were melting. Wagner had come back from his triumphant tour and Nietzsche was invited to spend the Easter holiday together with them at Tribschen. Again he was the only guest. He arrived on Maundy Thursday with the burden of a hundred francs weighing down his pockets. It was an Easter betrayal of sorts, smacking of Judas’s thirty pieces of silver. The money had been given him by Hans von Bülow, an expert in emotional manipulation, who would never cease to find exquisite ways of tormenting Cosima and those who loved her. Von Bülow had paid a visit to Nietzsche in Basle just before Easter. He had praised The Birth of Tragedy to the skies before charging him with the embarrassing task of delivering the money as an Easter gift to his daughter Daniela, who was living at Tribschen with Cosima and Wagner.
*
The weather that Easter weekend was as changeable and unsettled as their emotions as they stood at the jagged brink of separation, immersed in regret beyond words. They were leaving the Island of the Blessed. If leaving Tribschen did not actually signify what Wotan calls das Ende, the twilight of the gods, there was no doubt it marked the end of an enchanted period of godlike mutually inspired creativity that had seen the creation of one child and four masterpieces: Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, The Siegfried Idyll and The Birth of Tragedy. They all knew they were at the end of the idyll.
Wagner took Nietzsche out for what would turn out to be their last walk through the Tribschen landscape. In the evening Nietzsche read them his fifth lecture. The following day while Wagner worked, Nietzsche and Cosima set out for a walk along the Robbers’ Path. For such walks, Cosima was wont to wear pink cashmere richly trimmed with lace and, to protect her fair complexion, a large Tuscan hat decorated with pink roses. Behind her paced the gigantic coal-black Newfoundland dog Russ, dignified, heavy, and inevitably reminiscent of the familiar spirit in the Faust legend. As they traced the shore of the silver lake, they spoke of the tragedy of human life, of the Greeks, the Germans, of plans and aspirations. Like the brush of a great wing, a cold wind signalled the arrival of a sudden storm that chased them back indoors, where they read fairy tales by the fire.
On Easter Sunday, Nietzsche helped her hide eggs in the garden for the children to find. In their pale Easter dresses, the children looked like a clutch of cygnets scuttling about the shoreline, searching the emerald reeds for the concealed eggs, and emitting little cries on making a discovery. Cradling the decorated eggs in interlocked fingers, the children bore them back to Cosima.
In the afternoon, Nietzsche and Cosima played duets at the piano. A rainbow rose in the sky. Universal symbol of hope and blazing aspiration, the rainbow was of even deeper personal significance to the two of them, for in the Ring Wagner uses the rainbow as the bridge that connects the world of mortals to the realm of the gods. Only by passing over the rainbow bridge can the transition be made from one world to the other.
At lunchtime the three of them talked of a different connectivity between gods and mortals: the fashionable pastime of spiritualism. Cosima was privately a great believer in the supernatural. She writes in her diary of lying in bed at night hearing creaking and knocking sounds in the old house and interpreting them as signals from the spirit world: messages from mortals that she once knew or from dead dogs that she once loved. But in Wagner’s presence she pretended a greater scepticism so as not to look foolish in his eyes. Wagner himself was not interested in signals sent via the expansion and contraction of bits of wood, but he did pay heed when the gods tried to catch his attention by grander means such as a rainbow, or a thunderclap, or the moon struggling to get clear of a black ribbon of flying cloud, or the Northern Lights spreading their luminous curtains over Tribschen’s sky. Over lunch, Wagner gave them the rational refutation of spiritualistic manifestations and Cosima declared it all a fraud. Nevertheless, in the evening they all had a go at table turning. It was a conspicuous failure.
On Monday morning Nietzsche had to return to his university duties. After the Professor had left them they both felt out of sorts, ill and depressed. Even the irrepressible Wagner expressed himself in the grip of disgust, sorrow, worry and fear of not being equal to the tremendous task ahead. Cosima retired to bed.
A series of misunderstandings, or maybe fate, dictated that Nietzsche should turn up at Tribschen to bid his farewell to the Master three days after the Master had finally left for Bayreuth. He found Cosima in the middle of packing up a house that was no longer the place that had changed his entire perception of how a life could be lived. The rooms had lost their heavy enchantment: the atmosphere, once narcotic, now smelled fresh, alpine and faintly of lake water. The rouged air of their private world had turned bright with sunlight. Flowing spaces that had been dematerialised by muffled light entering through rose-coloured gauzes had lost their soft mystery and now were harsh, sleek and solid. Windows that had been given the rapture of fantasy by curtains bunched and swathed, caught in the chubby hands of gilded cherubs and garlands of delicate pink silk roses, had reverted to flat glass rectangles. Wagner’s apocalyptic vision which had transformed every domestic interior into a stage set had been replaced by mere fresh-looking cubes harbouring no mystery at all. The rich wall-coverings of violet velvet and stamped leather wore ugly mouse-coloured shapes where the icons of their faith had once hung. Blurred U shapes marked the ghosts of laurel wreaths. Blank rectangles memorialised the pictures of breastplated Valkyries, of King Ludwig looking young and noble, of scaly corkscrewing dragons, and of Genelli’s Dionysus Sporting with the Apollonian Muses that Nietzsche had contemplated so often during the time he was developing his thoughts into The Birth of Tragedy.
Nietzsche could not cope with the emotion. Just as on the overwhelming occasion when he had found himself overcome with horror and anguish in the brothel, he fled to the grand piano. He sat at the keyboard improvising, while Cosima moved with majestic solemnity through the rooms, supervising the servants in the melancholy task of packing up Tribschen’s treasures. Extemporising, he poured out his poignant love for her and for her husband, for the radiance they had created together and shared over the period of three years, for rapturous memory and for the long forever of future yearning.
His loss was not yet complete but nothing could prevent it slipping away. It felt, he said, like walking among a future ruin. Cosima talked of ‘eternal times now past’. The servants were all in tears; the dogs followed the humans about like lost souls and refused to eat. Nietzsche left the piano stool only to assist Cosima in sorting and packing the objects that were too precious to entrust to the servants: letters, books, manuscripts and, above all, the musical scores.
‘Tears hung heavily in the air. Ah! it was desperate! These three years that I have spent in close relationship to Tribschen, and during which I have made twenty-three visits to the place – what do they not mean to me! If I had not had them, what should I now be!’19 And in Ecce Homo, he added: ‘None of my other personal relationships amounts to much; but I would not give up my Tribschen days for anything, days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime chance, of profound moments … I do not know what other people’s experience of Wagner has been: no clouds ever darkened our skies.’
It was said that afterwards he could never speak of Tribschen without a break in his voice.
*
On return to Basle, he became ill with shingles in his neck and was unable to write the sixth and final lecture. There was no new book for Fritzsch to publish and the fog of silence continued to envelop The Birth of Tragedy.
Nietzsche had written a letter to his beloved teacher Professor Ritschl, the classical philologist whom he had followed from the University of Bonn to the University of Leipzig and whose portrait now hung above his book table by the stove. ‘You will not grudge me my astonishment that I have not heard a word from you about my recently published book,’20 began his ill-judged letter, which continued in the same juvenile tone.
Ritschl had not written because he could not find anything agreeable to say. He thought Nietzsche’s letter displayed megalomania. He thought The Birth of Tragedy was ingenious claptrap. He peppered the margins of his copy with exclamations like ‘megalomania!’, ‘rakish!’ and ‘dissolute!’ But he worded his reply so tactfully that Nietzsche took no offence at the suggestion that the text was less scholarly than dilettante and the observation that he did not regard the individualisation of life as retrogressive, when the alternative would seem to consist of dissolving the sense of self into self-oblivion.
The other father figure whose opinion mattered was Jacob Burckhardt, who was equally tactful and elusive in his response. So much so that Nietzsche apparently believed that Burckhardt was thrilled and fascinated by the book, but in fact Burckhardt was offended by the book’s thesis, its intemperance, its stridency of tone and by its proposal that the serious post-Socratic scholar was nothing more than an indiscriminate collector of facts.
And still there was silence! ‘People have kept quiet now for ten months, because all actually think they are beyond and above my book, that it is not worth talking about.’21
*
The Wagners had not been gone from Tribschen a month before he received an invitation to join them for the laying of the foundation stone of the opera house in Bayreuth. Things had moved forward at an impetuous speed. Cosima had quickly put Tribschen behind her. Here in Bayreuth she was flourishing as never before. ‘It is as though all our lives before were only a preparation for this,’ she wrote. Wagner crowned her sentiment by kneeling at her feet while bestowing on her a new name: the Markgräfin (Margravine) of Bayreuth.
Cosima had always been a snob. They were living in the Hotel Fantaisie, which was owned by Duke Alexander of Württemberg and bounded by the gracious grounds of his castle, Schloss Fantaisie. The pages of her diary begin to read like the Almanach de Gotha. Double-and treble-barrelled dukes, princes and princesses swarm the pages. Her favours were curried by all. Lesser aristocrats, counts and countesses, pushed themselves forward by whatever means they could. Count Krockow presented Wagner with a leopard he had shot in Africa. Countess Bassenheim embroidered little blouses for the infant Siegfried. Cosima accepted every tribute with Markgräfin-like graciousness.22
The ceremony of the laying of the foundation stone took place on 22 May, Wagner’s fifty-ninth birthday. Nearly a thousand musicians, singers and guests descended on the small town of Bayreuth, which had never seen such numbers. Guesthouses, inns and restaurants ran out of food and drink. The usual supply of horse-drawn carriages was soon exhausted. Odd vehicles belonging to the fire brigade and sports clubs were pressed in to help transport the distinguished up to the Green Hill. The sky bulged low grey clouds. Rain came in torrents. Soon, horses and pedestrians were toiling ankle-deep in oily brown mud. It was fortunate King Ludwig was not present.
The King was seen more and more infrequently these days. His day was wont to start with breakfast at seven in the evening in a tiny room lit by sixty candles, after which his night was usually spent gliding through his moonlit gardens in his swan-carved sleigh to snatches of Wagner’s music performed by concealed musicians. He was still nursing the tiff with Wagner over premiering Das Rheingold without the composer’s approval, but he did send a message of gracious approbation to Bayreuth. Wagner placed it in a precious casket which, with due ceremony, was laid into the foundation while the band played the Huldigungsmarsch, the march of homage that Wagner had written for King Ludwig some years earlier.
Like the god Wotan who smote the ground three times in the Ring, summoning fire and all sorts of fateful consequences, Wagner smote the foundation stone three times with a hammer. After pronouncing a blessing, he turned away moist-eyed and pale as death according to Nietzsche, who was given the great honour of riding back to town with him in his carriage.
Nietzsche was still on tenterhooks for artistic judgement on the piano duet he had sent Cosima at Christmastime. Neither Cosima nor Wagner had said a word, and he decided to send it to von Bülow.
On the occasion in Basle when von Bülow had given Nietzsche the hundred francs to deliver to Daniela, the conductor had told him that he was so impressed by The Birth of Tragedy that he carried it about everywhere and recommended it to all and sundry. Might he, von Bülow requested, dedicate his next book to Nietzsche? How could the young professor not accept such flattery? Surely this exchange might assure him of some degree of praise from von Bülow when he sent him the piece of music, which had now been orchestrated and entitled the Manfred Meditation.
At the very least, Nietzsche could expect von Bülow to favour him with the usual assortment of platitudes that professionals dole out when amateurs seek their opinion. But Schadenfreude ran deep and strong in the conductor and he delivered his verdict with unsparing cruelty. He wrote that he made no secret of his embarrassment at having to pass judgement on the Manfred Meditation. It struck him as ‘the most extreme in fantastical extravagance, the most unedifying and least uplifting, the most anti-musical thing that I have come across in a long time in the way of notes put down on paper … More than once I had to ask myself: is this all some awful joke? Did you perhaps intend a parody of the so-called Music of the Future? Is it with conscious intent that you express an uninterrupted scorn for all the rules of tonal connection, from the highest syntax to the usually accepted orthography? … Of the Apollonian element I have not been able to discover the smallest trace; and as for the Dionysian, I must say frankly that I have been reminded less of this than of the day after a bacchanal [i.e. a hangover].’23
Both Wagner and Cosima thought von Bülow had been unnecessarily cruel but they felt no inclination to console their dear friend by sending him a few lines that might impugn their devotion to pure truth. When Cosima relayed von Bülow’s words to her father Liszt, he shook his white head sadly and said that the judgement seemed despairingly extreme, but he too felt disinclined to soften the blow.
Nietzsche took three months to recover. Eventually he managed a letter to von Bülow: ‘Well, thank God, that is what you have to tell me. I know quite well what an uncomfortable moment I have given you and to compensate for it let me tell you how useful you have been to me. Just think, since my music is self-taught, I have gradually lost all discipline in it; I have never had the judgement of a musician on it; and I am truly happy to be enlightened in such a simple way as to the character of my latest period of composition.’
He excuses his presumption in entering the ‘dangerous, moonstruck region’ of emotional turmoil, ascribing it to his impulse to honour Wagner, and he pleads with von Bülow not to put down this ‘kind of otium cum odio, with this altogether odious way of passing my time’ to Nietzsche’s infatuation with the Tristan music. ‘The whole thing, as a matter of fact, is a highly instructive experience for me … I shall try, then, to take a musical cure; and perhaps I shall remain, if I study Beethoven sonatas in your edition, under your tutelage and guidance.’24
A brighter note was struck when the first article appeared on The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche’s friend Erwin Rohde managed to place a favourable piece in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. It can hardly be called a review. It simply repeated Nietzsche’s argument concerning the death of the sacred and the mystical through the cruel consistency of Socratic thought, his concern at the creeping cultural vandalism by socialist barbarians and the mantra that Wagner’s reinvention of the pantheon of Germanic gods was providing the firm foundation for the cultural revival of the German nation.
Nietzsche was ecstatic. ‘Friend, friend, friend, what have you done!’ He ordered fifty printed copies of the article but he had little time to enjoy it. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, an old Pfortean and a fellow philologist, quickly knocked out a thirty-two-page pamphlet satirically entitled Zukunftsphilologie! (Philology of the Future!), a play on Wagner’s term Zukunftsmusik (‘Music of the Future’). Headed by a punchy quotation from Aristophanes which implicitly condemns The Birth of Tragedy as a delicacy for a catamite, it goes on to condemn the book as a bad piece of philology and a piece of Wagnerian fluff. Wilamowitz puts forward the case for strict interpretation of the past through the ‘scientific’ means of philology rather than Nietzsche’s approach as a ‘metaphysician and apostle’. Wilamowitz upholds the common view of the Greeks as ‘eternal children, innocently and unsuspectingly enjoying the beautiful light’. The idea that the Greeks needed tragedy was ‘a pile of rubbish! What a disgrace! … Nietzsche knows less about Homer than a Serb or a Finn.’ The concept of an artistic alliance between Apollo and Dionysus was as ridiculous as a union between Nero and Pythagoras. The cult of Dionysus rose not from consciousness of the tragic but from ‘the wine harvest, the crushing of grapes, the cheerful consumption of the new, rousing beverage’. He goes on to discuss the music of ancient Greece, a subject on which Wilamowitz is on as shaky ground as Nietzsche himself. Neither of them could have any idea what ancient Greek music sounded like. His summing up attacks Nietzsche for gross ignorance, gross errors and lack of devotion to truth. He demands that Nietzsche step down from the teaching of philology.
Cosima dismissed the whole dispute as ‘not suitable for the public’ but Wagner quickly leapt to Nietzsche’s defence in an open letter published in the same newspaper on 23 June. His entirely predictable article was enlivened by the terrific observation that Wilamowitz-Möllendorff wrote like ‘a Wisconsin stock-market news-sheet’, a comment that surely sheds an interesting light on Wagner’s own reading habits.
Nietzsche had taken two mortal hits from von Bülow and Wilamowitz-Möllendorff. Together they were enough to destroy his future prospects as a composer, as a classicist and as a philologist but the last was the least important. He had long been seeking an escape from philology. Maybe, amongst the diverse existing interpretations of The Birth of Tragedy, the book can be read as the suicide note of a philologist.
Eventually, The Birth of Tragedy became one of Nietzsche’s bestselling books. But of the eight hundred copies printed and published in 1872, only 625 sold over the next six years.25 The damage had been done to his reputation. When the new academic year started, Nietzsche discovered that only two students had enrolled for his course of lectures on philology, and neither was a philologist.
1 The Birth of Tragedy, Section 1.
2 Ibid., Section 7.
3 Ibid., Section 15.
4 Ibid., Section 15.
5 Ibid., Section 18.
6 Ibid., Section 20.
7 Ibid., Section 21.
8 Cosima Wagner, Diary, 18 August 1870.
9 Ibid., 8 April 1871.
10 Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, 1871.
11 Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff, 18 November 1871.
12 Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, 21 December 1871.
13 Nietzsche to Franziska and Elisabeth Nietzsche, Basle, 27 December 1871.
14 Nietzsche to Gustav Krug, Basle, 31 December 1871.
15 ‘On the Future of Our Educational Institutions’, first lecture, delivered 16 January 1872.
16 Cosima Wagner, Diary, 16 January 1872.
17 Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, Basle, 28 January 1872.
18 Cosima Wagner, Diary, 31 January 1872.
19 Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff, 1 May 1872.
20 Nietzsche to Friedrich Ritschl, Basle, 30 January 1872.
21 Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, 25 October 1872.
22 Cosima Wagner, Diary, 22 May 1872.
23 Walker, Hans von Bülow, p. 5.
24 Nietzsche to Hans von Bülow, draft letter, probably 29 October 1872.
25 William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon, A Publication History and Bibliography, University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 203–4.