WAGNER & NIETZSCHE - What Really Happened

Taken from episodes 36 & 37 of The Nietzsche Podcast. Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/untimelyreflections

After meeting Wagner by happenstance in 1868, Nietzsche began a ten-year friendship with the older man, who was a rising star in the music world, on track to becoming one of the most famous living composers. Nietzsche was himself a fan, and described the chain of events leading to his friendship with Wagner as a kind of "fairytale". Soon, Wagner embarked upon the idea of a music festival that would serve as a cultural spearhead for the movement Wagner wished to create in Germany. The town was settled upon: Bayreuth. Construction began on a new theater house to accommodate the festival. Nietzsche aided Wagner in founding it. The first year was a financial disaster but an artistic success, reverberating throughout Europe. But the young Nietzsche left the festival troubled, reporting in a letter that it was then he decided to retreat into the mountains of Interlaken, where he composed the first third of Human, All Too Human.

Nietzsche writes, in his personal correspondence, and in his reflections in Ecce Homo, of the liberating freedom he felt when he left Bayreuth and moved up to the Alps, and how this turning away from Wagner represented a completely new chapter in his life. Indeed, the break corresponds with Nietzsche's departure from academia, and his uprooting of his entire established life, up to that point. Where Wagner was once a trusted friend, mentor, and likely surrogate father-figure for Nietzsche, he begins to write with utter scorn against the old composer. We'll examine the biographical aspect of the break. For the remainder, we consider Nietzsche's charges in The Case of Wagner, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner - works written/compiled in 1888, a time of retrospection for Nietzsche - that Wagner capitulated to everything that Nietzsche despised, that he was ultimately a world-despairing Christian, and that maybe Wagner's transformation was not even genuine. That he was, at heart, nothing more than an actor. As a man with an immense artistic power, he debased music by using it simply as a means of moving people's feelings, while never truly challenging or subverting German culture. Music became sick - yet another form of mere entertainment, another enhanced, rarefied sense pleasure of the late-stage of a society. Whereas once Nietzsche believed Wagner to be perhaps the opponent of modernity, he now writes of him as modernity personified: the epitome of the decadent artist who loses himself in the crowd.

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