The broken friendship between Wagner and Nietzsche is one of the more celebrated in cultural history. The facts of the matter are relatively well known.[1] Wagner and Nietzsche first met in Leipzig in 1868, drawn together by Nietzsche’s increasing admiration for Wagner’s music and by their mutual reverence for Schopenhauer. Between 1869 and 1872, when Wagner lived in Tribschen, Lucerne, and Nietzsche in Basel, about three hours away by train, the young classics professor visited Tribschen twenty-three times and came to regard himself, and be regarded, as a member of the Wagner family. The same age as Nietzsche’s long-dead father, Wagner played the role of his ideal (emotional as well as intellectual) father, while Nietzsche played the role of Wagner’s ideal son. During this period, Nietzsche wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which he dedicated to Wagner. In the foreword, observing that it was written at the same time (and sometimes in the same place) as Wagner’s “magnificent” “Beethoven” essay, he describes the book as the continuation of a “conversation” he could have with no one else.
Nietzsche regarded The Birth as his contribution to raising the money needed to build the Festival Theater in Bayreuth. (He had earlier offered to resign his professorship in order to work as a full-time fundraiser—the offer was rejected—and in the following year would attempt to write pure propaganda, his Warning to the Germans, on behalf of the project.) As propaganda, the argument of The Birth (stated mainly in section 23) is relatively simple. Fifth-century Greece was the acme of Western civilization. The heart of this supreme moment was the tragic festival. Hence, the best hope for rescuing Western modernity from its current anomie, for restoring it to cultural health, is the rebirth of Greek tragedy, something that is promising to happen in the music dramas of Richard Wagner.
The notable feature of this argument is that, although it was the later Wagner with whom Nietzsche became intimate, what it affirms is Wagner’s early, optimistic, “pro-life” philosophy of life and art. Nietzsche takes note of this in the retrospective “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” (section 5) with which he prefaced the 1886 reissue of The Birth. Even in this youthful work, he writes, its author’s “instinct” was to be “the advocate for the instinct of life.” Since, however, the work also affirms his own and Wagner’s “anti-life” Schopenhauerianism—pessimism, idealism, and other-worldly redemption—it is, as he observes (ibid.), a “questionable,” that is, “confused” work (“Attempt at a Self-Criticism” 3).[2] Insofar, however, as it is “pro-life,” one can see, already foreshadowed, the rupture in the friendship.
Nietzsche continued to be fully committed to his conception (or misconception) of the Bayreuth project until 1874, during which year, however, in the privacy of his notebooks, he began to itemize his pros, but more strongly his cons, with respect to the Wagner phenomenon. In spite of such doubts, and increasingly strained personal relations as he attempted to emerge from the shadow of Wagner’s huge ego and intellect, Nietzsche wrote the fourth of his Untimely Meditations, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, which was intended as his contribution to the first Bayreuth Festival of 1876. Halfway through the festival, however, nauseated by what he saw, he walked out. Two years later, in 1878, he published Human, All-too-Human, a work that effectively ended all personal contact between himself and Wagner. Discarding his own former Schopenhauerian idealism and affirming in its place scientific materialism, the work attacked everything later Wagner believed in: pessimism, the ethics of compassion, the cult of artistic genius, and art posing as religion. In the decade between 1878 and his descent into madness at the beginning of 1889, almost every work Nietzsche published contained ever more hostile criticisms of Wagner, culminating, in his final months of at least relative sanity, in an entire book of hostile criticism, The Case of Wagner.
One thing evident from the foregoing narrative is that it was Nietzsche, not Wagner (he was heartbroken at the loss of “my Nietzsche” [Young 2010, 194]), who terminated the friendship. And that raises the question of why he did so. He attacks Wagner from every quarter. He attacks him as a man—he was a personally “tyrannical,” anti-Semitic German chauvinist and was, as both man and artist, an “actor,” that is, a fake. (That these criticisms are hardly consistent indicated the polemical level of a great deal of the critique.) Nietzsche attacks Wagner’s technical competence as a poet—his texts sound like translations from a foreign language—and his technical competence as a composer—he is a mere “amateur” whose pathetic attempts at “development” show he is a mere “miniaturist” with no command of (at least classical) musical form. These, however, are really little more than polemical pinpricks. The central target of Nietzsche’s attack is the product of Wagner’s artistic endeavor, his operas—that is, since Nietzsche takes the operas to be the philosophy “set to verse” (p. xvii above) and music, his philosophy. In what follows I shall attempt to identify the precise character of Nietzsche’s, in the final analysis, philosophical critique of Wagner.
I begin with Nietzsche’s final (at least ostensible) contribution to the Wagnerian cause, the 1876 Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. Nietzsche wrote this work with difficulty because he wrote in a divided state of mind. On the one hand, he hoped the Festival would be a success—his kind of success—but on the other, due to the serious reservations recorded in his notebooks from 1874 onwards, he doubted that it would be. His ingenious solution to the problem of writing in support of Wagner while doubting that he did support him any longer, was to adopt the narrative structure of Wagner’s “Beethoven” essay. As Wagner’s essay does with respect to Beethoven (it portrays Beethoven beginning his career as a cheap, pianistic showman), Nietzsche’s work portrays Wagner’s career as a struggle in which his “higher” self eventually triumphs over various “lower” selves. Beginning as a purveyor of cheap, “hypnotic” effects designed only to win power and fame[3]—never has an artist started out so deeply involved in error or in a more “revolting” form of his art—Wagner then became the socialist revolutionary who shuddered at his former life as a lackey of the bourgeoisie. His art now becomes the “poetry of the people [Volk],” his aim the abolition of dehumanizing capitalism and, in its place, the “resurrection,” through the artwork, of a genuine Volk. With the failure of the 1848 Revolution, Wagner entered, for a time, the spirit of Schopenhauerian world-denial out of which he created Tristan und Isolde, his opus metaphysicum. Here we are presented with “the broken glance of a dying man with his insatiable sweet longing for the mysteries of night and death, far distant from life which, as evil, deception and separation, shines with an uncanny ghostly morning brightness.”[4] But then renewed optimism arrives out of which he creates the “miracle” of Die Meistersinger. Not that Wagner remains any longer the starry-eyed, socialist utopian of his revolutionary days: he no longer believes in any “final order of things.” Yet he does believe in the possibility of “a truly human community” gathered together by the artwork, the “germ” of which is revealed to us in Die Meistersinger. The paradigm of such an artwork is Wagner’s own Ring cycle, that “tremendous system of thought,” thought that is conducted mythologically rather than discursively because the audience is the Volk and that is the way “the people” have always thought (WB 2, 4, 8, 9, 11).[5] Finally, therefore, in his full maturity, Wagner’s “higher” self triumphs over his lower selves. Wagner becomes who he is.
This representation of Wagner’s career as a Bildungsroman culminating in life-affirming optimism is, Nietzsche well knows, exactly that; a Roman—a work of fiction. For although Parsifal had yet to be written, from their days of intimacy, Nietzsche knows all about Wagner’s switch from the Feuerbach to the Schopenhauer ending of the Ring cycle (about to receive its first performance). In The Case of Wagner he observes that while, in 1852, “Brünnhilde was to say goodbye with a song in honor of free love, leaving the world to the hope of a socialist utopia in which ‘all will be well,’” by 1856 she has to do something else: “She has [like Isolde] to study Schopenhauer . . . has to set the fourth book of the World as Will and Representation [Schopenhauer’s account of redemption through “denial of the will”] to verse” (CW 4). The idea that Wagner’s career ends with his “higher” self-affirming life in Die Meistersinger is a conscious fiction designed to make clear to Wagner how his career ought to end. Nietzsche makes this explicit in his final work, Ecce Homo. “At every psychologically decisive point” in Wagner in Bayreuth, he writes, “I am only talking about myself—you can put my name . . . without hesitation wherever the text has the word ‘Wagner’ . . . it does not come into contact with Wagnerian reality even for a moment” (EH III BT 4). The result is that, like the admiring account of a figure he calls “Schopenhauer” in the preceding Untimely Meditation, Schopenhauer as Educator, the essay “basically only talk[s] about me . . . is a vision of my future” (EH III UM 3; emphasis added). In other words, Wagner’s “higher” self is not really Wagner’s self at all. It is, rather, Nietzsche: as Plato used “Socrates” as a “semiotic” for himself, so, says Nietzsche, he uses “Wagner” (ibid.).
That, in 1876, the fictional “higher” self-attributed to Wagner is really Nietzsche’s actual self seems to say that, at least in 1876, it is really Nietzsche who believes in the great artwork as the “poetry of the people” that will foster the “rebirth” of genuine community. And this suggests something important not only about Nietzsche’s fundamental objection to Wagner but also about his own, highest aspirations. What it suggests is that (shorn of its ultra-utopian, socialist elements) Wagner’s early theory, the theory Wagner himself has abandoned, is something Nietzsche affirms. It suggests that Nietzsche’s highest, life-affirming aim is the resurrection of community by means of the community-collecting artwork, and that his fundamental charge against Wagner is one of desertion; desertion of the noble ideal of the “rebirth of Greek tragedy” to which he had once subscribed.
Nietzsche continued to distinguish between the “higher” and “lower,” the “ideal” and actual, Wagner, well into his maturity. In 1878 (the year of Human, All-too-Human) he wrote to Wagner’s friend Mathilde Maier, that
of Wagner’s greatness no one could be more convinced than I—because few know so much about it. But I have developed from an unconditional to a conditional admirer . . . I saw the height of Wagner’s ideal—which is why I came to [the] Bayreuth [Festival]—and hence my disappointment. (KGB II.5 741)
In his notebooks of the same year, he writes that the task for himself and likeminded people is to “become better Wagnerians than Wagner” (KSA 8 30 [82]), to remain, that is, true to the ideal Wagner himself has betrayed. (In Beyond Good and Evil he calls such people “philosophers of the future,” thereby expressing his affinity with Feuerbach and with the Feuerbachian Wagner.)[6] “In the end,” he writes Heinrich Köselitz (“Peter Gast”) in 1883, “it was [not the revolutionary but] the aged [Schopenhauerian] Wagner against whom I had to protect myself” (KGB III.1 381). As late as 1886, in Beyond Good and Evil, while describing Wagner as Schopenhauer’s “most devoted follower” (BGE 47), he also calls this discipleship “his own self-misunderstanding” which “we should not let lead us astray” (BGE 256). In a letter to Franz Overbeck of the same year he explains what this means. “You know,” he writes,
I think, that today I still believe in the ideal in which Wagner believed as firmly as ever—why should it be important that I stumbled over the many human-all-too-human obstacles that R W [Richard Wagner’s actual but “lower” self] placed in the path of his ideal? (KGB III.3 769)
Wagner, then, misunderstood himself because he “mistook” his Schopenhauerian self for his higher, ideal self. The ideal self is the earlier self that had been committed to the redemption of life through the artwork’s resurrection of community—not the self that believed in redemption from life through transport into the Schopenhauerian mist.
Once one knows to look for it (once one knows not to be blinded by the “only-the-exceptional-individual-has-value” interpretation of Nietzsche),[7] his continuing commitment to the Wagnerian, communitarian ideal stands out clearly in his published works. So, for example, in Human, All-too-Human, the very work that pronounces the divorce between himself and (the actual) Wagner final, he still affirms his faith in community:
the branch of a people [Volk] that preserves itself best is that in which most people have, as a consequence of the sameness of their shared, habitual and undiscussable principles, that is to say, as a consequence of their shared faith, a living sense of community. (HH 224)
And so, of course, one will need institutions that will, in early Wagner’s language, “strengthen” the power of this communal ethos. That, Nietzsche still believes, is the task of art. In a section entitled “The Poet as Signpost to the Future”[8] he says the task for the artist of the present is to
emulate the artists of earlier [Greek] times who imaginatively developed the existing images of the gods and imaginatively develop a beautiful image of man; he will scent out those cases in which, in the midst of our modern world and reality and without any artificial withdrawal from or warding off of this world, the great and beautiful soul is still possible, still able to embody itself in the harmonious and well-proportioned, thus acquiring visibility, duration and the status of a model, and in so doing, through the excitation of envy and emulation, help create the future. (AOM 99)[9]
The “artwork of the future” will, that is, present us with new Apollos, Athenas, Agamemnons, and Antigones, a new ethos-embodying communal mythology. Four years later, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that “the greatest danger that hovers and still hovers over [Western] humanity” is its loss of “the universal bindingness of a faith” (GS 76), of, in Hegel’s language, a shared “ethical substance.”[10] And in the famous section announcing that God is dead and that “we” (we natural and human scientists) are his “murderers,” Nietzsche immediately goes on to say that to be worthy of the “magnitude of the deed” we must invent new “festivals of atonement[11] and sacred games” (GS 125), updated versions of the Greek Gesamtkunstwerke. Elsewhere in the Gay Science, Nietzsche asks, rhetorically, in a section entitled “Now and Formerly,”
what do all our art of artworks matter [early Wagner’s art for “connoisseurs”] if we lose the higher art, the art of festivals. Formerly all artworks were displayed on the great festival road of humanity as commemorations and memorials of high and happy moments. (GS 89)
Touching on the Hegelian theme that art “in its highest vocation” is, at least for now, dead, the “great festival road of humanity” refers, I would suggest, to ethical substance. Nietzsche’s point is that in, for example, the Middle Ages, although not all artworks belonged directly to the Gesamtkunstwerk that took place in the cathedral, those that did not—mystery plays and the troubadours’ poetry of courtly love, for example—were intimately related to it within the overarching unity of communal ethos. In his final year, in the Antichrist, Nietzsche praises the “festival cults” that are “a people’s self-affirmation” (A 25), while in Ecce Homo he reaffirms not just the festival but the Bayreuth festival, hoping that “the idea of Bayreuth [will have] transformed itself into . . . that great noon . . . who knows? the vision of a festival that I will live to see someday” (EH III BT 4).
Nietzsche’s fundamental objection to Wagner consists, then, in the charge of desertion, betrayal of the noble ideal of the “rebirth of Greek tragedy.” This leaves Nietzsche himself as its remaining flag-bearer, which is why he calls himself Wagner’s (the “higher” Wagner’s) “heir,” the leader of the promising people who had been led astray by the “aged” Wagner (KGB III.1 381). Wagner betrayed this life-affirming ideal by becoming, in his, as it were, dotage, a life-denying Schopenhauerian. The question arises, however, as to just why this should be regarded as an objection to the trajectory of Wagner’s thought and art. For, as I pointed out earlier (p. 97 above), pessimistic thought and “vanitas” art have a long and distinguished tradition.
Nietzsche’s objection to Wagner’s art is grounded in his endorsement of Wagner’s early conception of artistic greatness (an endorsement with which I agree). Art reaches the (rare) condition of greatness to the degree that it plays a beneficial role within the economy of human life as a whole, and it plays that role to the maximum degree when it “collects” individuals into an articulated and clarified exposition of communal ethos. In Hegel’s language, art fulfills its “highest vocation” to the extent that it possesses “world-historical” significance. As long as this ideal provided (to borrow Deryck Cooke’s word) the “blueprint” (1979, 1)[12] for Wagner’s own works, as long as he continued to conceive the Ring as a “great system of [mythological] thought” that aimed to articulate and clarify communal ethos, what he produced contained the promise of becoming great art. But then he abandoned the ideal in favor of a “life-denying” conception of art, and so his artworks declined accordingly.
Nietzsche’s criterion of artistic greatness begs the question, of course, against Platonists and Schopenhauerians who believe that, as an “error or mistake,” life does not merit the (futile) attempt to improve it. In reality, however, if only because the “will to live” is part of our biological inheritance, it is axiomatic for nearly all of us that life is not a “mistake.” As Camus dramatizes the point, whatever the mind may decide about the merits of suicide, “the body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s and the body shrinks from annihilation” (1975, 15). For nearly all of us, therefore, the objection that Wagner’s final philosophy, and his art, too, to the extent it embodies that philosophy, is “life-denying” really is an objection. Life is good, and can be made better. Life-denying thought and art is therefore the pernicious purveyor of a false and action-inhibiting account of our existence. This, no doubt, is the reason why nearly all directors and interpreters of Wagner’s later operas “blink”—in one way or another evade the meaning that, so I have argued, he clearly intended them to have.
This, however, leaves us with an artistic paradox. It is arguable that of all Wagner’s operas, early as much as late, only Das Rheingold really satisfies, in its totality, the prescriptions of Opera and Drama. Only of Rheingold, with its driving narrative that leaves no time for the gorgeous music of later installments of the Ring, does it seem plausible to argue that the drama embodied in the words and action is the “end” and the music the “means.” But this means that only after the Schopenhauerian thesis of the primacy of music had released Wagner from the, as one might suggest, “straightjacket” of textual supremacy, was it possible for him to write the consistently wonderful music of the later parts of the Ring, of Tristan, and of Parsifal.[13] And the truth is that, for most Wagner lovers, it is the glorious music that draws us to him. But if it is the earlier theory that provides the “blueprint” for great art, should we not then prefer, attend, and hope for the creation of the musically more austere kind of opera of which Das Rheingold is a paradigm? In general, I think, we should. But does this mean that we should give up listening to the remainder of Wagner’s art? It can be argued, I think, that it does not.
The ultimate term of abuse Nietzsche applies to Wagner’s operas is “narcotic” (EH III HH 3).[14] Wagner is a “drug dealer” (in Zarathustra, Nietzsche calls him a “sorcerer”) catering to an audience of drug users. The word “narcotic” is, of course, taken over from Wagner himself, from early Wagner who, as we saw, uses it to contrast the triviality of nineteenth-century Franco-Italian opera with the art of Greek tragedy (OD, 43, 46, 372). Whereas the latter preserved and invigorated a “joyful” existence, the former merely provides a work-weary audience with a brief escape from the stress and boredom of its existence (p. 16 above). What makes “narcotic” such an effective insult for Nietzsche is that, given its Wagnerian provenance, it encapsulates perfectly the charge of self-betrayal, betrayal of Wagner’s original ideal. For what the insult claims is that what Wagner ends up producing is precisely what he sought to abolish; that Wagner becomes, in the end, indistinguishable from what he had opposed. When the bourgeoisie attend Wagnerian opera, writes Nietzsche, they do so in order to “anesthetize feelings of hunger [Schopenhauerian “stress”] and monotony [Schopenhauerian “boredom”].” They crave the Wagnerian “opiate” so that they can “forget themselves . . . lose themselves for a moment . . . What am I saying! For five or six hours” (EH III HH 3).
As we saw, when Wagner applies “narcotic” to Rossini et al., what he refers to is the music (above all, the aria) for which the thin and implausible drama is a mere excuse. And so when Nietzsche calls Wagner’s works “narcotics” he, too, refers almost exclusively to the music. What the Wagner-lover seeks, he suggests, is a brief—or not so brief—moment of musical transport out of the stress and boredom of everyday life.
Nietzsche’s intention, of course, is that we Wagnerians—we “bad” Wagnerians—should become ashamed of our “drug”-using habit. “Romanticism in art and knowledge”[15] whose “most famous and prominent” representatives are Wagner and Schopenhauer, he writes, caters
to those who suffer from an impoverishment of life and seek quiet, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and insight [Parsifal], or else intoxication, paroxysm, numbness, madness [Tristan]. (GS 370)
We, we Wagner lovers, are (like the “aged” Wagner) pitiful, low-energy types who cannot cope with the hurly-burly of life and so seek to escape it. We are life’s failures, its “décadents” (CW 5); the species would be better off without us. And, of course, to the extent we really are Wagner addicts (such people are by no means unknown) we are indeed pathetic. Yet not all drug users are drug addicts. We may use drugs from time to time, not to escape but rather to enhance life; to enhance it by allowing ourselves a momentary pause in the hurly-burly that will return us to it, refreshed and reinvigorated, more able to cope with life’s slings and arrows than we were before. Of course, were we to possess the “overflowing” “superabundance of life” (ibid.) that Nietzsche admires, we would have no need of even momentary escape from the slings and arrows. We would, on the contrary, positively welcome them as yet further occasions for combat, “overcoming,” and growing “stronger” (ibid.). Yet as Nietzsche himself emphasizes, such an impregnably and perfectly “healthy” human being (in other language, “the superman”) represents a vision and ideal that has never yet been fully instantiated (GS382, KSA 12 10 [17]). We are all, to one degree or another, less than completely healthy. And so, from time to time we stand in need of the “stress relief” provided by a “narcotic.” We would, to be sure, be more splendid human beings without such need, but, given that we have it, we should not be ashamed of, from time to time, making use of a narcotic, that, compared with the alternatives, is conspicuously devoid of deleterious side-effects.
A blow-by-blow account can be found in Young 2010.
On its youthful author’s heroic, ingenious, but tortuous and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reconcile its “pro-life” and “anti-life” elements see Young 2010, ch. 7.
The reference is to Wagner’s operas of the 1840s such as Rienzi and Tannhäuser. In retrospect, Wagner himself describes Rienzi as a “grand opera” that, as such, he now finds “repugnant” (Millington 1999, 10).
Schopenhauer speaks of the world of individuality and pain as, for the enlightened one, “a light morning dream through which reality already shines” (WR I:390–91).
Recall the sixth of the defining conditions of the “artwork of the future” discussed in chapter 2 (pp. 30–31 above).
The very subtitle of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,” is an evocation of the spirit of Feuerbach that is rarely commented on by Anglo-American Nietzsche scholars.
As I have argued at length in Young 2006 and Young 2010, it is not that Nietzsche doubts that the exceptional individual has exceptional value. It is rather that this value (Walter von Stolzing’s value to the mastersingers, for instance) is derived from the individual’s value to the community, his value as, in Wagner’s language, the finder of “new pathways” (p. 7 above). Partial cultural analogues of Darwin’s “random mutations,” Nietzsche’s exceptional individuals—those “free spirits” (of the “first rank”) who are “the seed bearers of the future [and] the spiritual colonizers and shapers of new states and communities” (GS 23)—represent a community’s ability to survive and thrive in an ever-changing environment.
Notice, once again, the allusion to Feuerbach: along with “music of the future” and “philosophy of the future” we now have “signpost to the future.”
This assigning to art the task of creating and deploying “role models” mirrors the task assigned to culture in general in The Birth of Tragedy (especially in section 23), to education in the unpublished On the Future of our Educational Institutions, and to historiography in the second Untimely Meditation. The preservation of culture and community, Nietzsche argues in these earlier works, depends on the educative power of such models.
Nietzsche speaks of “danger” here because, I believe, he is again thinking in quasi-Darwinian terms: without a clear and coherent as it were “game plan” to which nearly everyone subscribes, a community cannot be expected to thrive, or even survive, in a competitive environment.
In classical times, a “festival of atonement [Sühnfeier]” seems to have consisted in the sacrifice of a virgin to Artemis in a time of exceptional need, a sacrifice, for example, such as that performed by Agamemnon.
Cooke calls Opera and Drama the “blueprint” for the text of the Ring.
The early theory will, of course, tolerate the occasional prominence of beautiful music given that it occurs at a dramatically appropriate moment; the song contest, for example, or an occasion on which, as with Siegmund’s “aria” in act I of Die Walküre, passion overcomes thought.
He has many variants on this: “opiate” (ibid.), “intoxicant” (GS 370), “hypnotic” (CW 7), “hashish,” “betel” (GS 86).
What Nietzsche really means here is “neo-Romanticism.” As earlier observed (p. 88) the original Romantic movement was long past by the time of Schopenhauer and Wagner.