Nietzsche, Wagner and the Philosophy of Pessimism 0203092708, 0415561493, 0415562252, 9780415561495, 9780415562256, 9780203092705

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

NIETZSCHE, WAGNER, AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PESSIMISM

NIETZSCHE, WAGNER, AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PESSIMISM

ROGER HOLLINRAKE Volume 3

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1982 This edition first published in 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd. 1982 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-09270-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 10: 0-415-56149-3 (Set) ISBN 10: 0-415-56225-2 (Volume 3) ISBN 10: 0-203-09270-8 (ebook) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-56149-5 (Set) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-56225-6 (Volume 3) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-09270-5 (ebook) Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

NIETZSCHE, WAGNER, AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PESSIMISM

Facsimile No. 1. A sketch for the poem ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht’, Also sprach Zarathustra, Part III, ‘Das andere Tanzlied’, § 3.

NIETZSCHE, WAGNER, and the philosophy of pessimism by

Roger Hollinrake

London GEORGE ALLEN AND UNWIN LTD Boston Sydney

First published in 1982 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights are reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD 40 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LU This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk © George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd. 1982 ISBN 0-203-09270-8 Master e-book ISBN

Preface

The problems that confront the student of Friedrich Nietzsche are easily defined: they are less easily solved. His neglect by his contemporaries—his ‘untimeliness’—and the difficulties inherent in the presentation of his ideas are among the factors that have combined to erect a barrier between him and his modern readers. At the same time, his representative standing is widely acknowledged, and few would deny him a leading place among those who have shaped the consciousness of the modern age. This study does not offer infallible answers to the more daunting questions of interpretation. Nonetheless, it does claim for its subject a crucial importance for an understanding of Nietzsche’s situation as harbinger and ‘firstling’ of modernity. The personal friendship with Richard Wagner which began in Leipzig in November 1868 and lasted until May 1878, a year before the end of Nietzsche’s residence at the University of Basel, was the most sensational episode in a career largely devoid of external incident. The hopes centring on Wagner’s art expressed in Die Geburt der Tragödie and the storm of controversy that greeted the book in academic circles helped to bring the name of the young professor of classics to public notice. Wagner’s hold persisted long after the first performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen in 1876 and the rift that ensued upon the receipt of the text of Parsifal some ten years after the start of the association. The tormented allusions that fill the notebooks of the mid-seventies reveal the ambivalence of thought and feeling characteristic of Nietzsche’s position. The dissident attitude taken up in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches and still more resolutely defended in other works of the eighties, the composition in Nietzsche’s last active year of a bitter polemical pamphlet, Der Fall Wagner, dealing—now in a spirit of hostility and pent-up resentment—with the Wagner question, and the subsequent compilation of the anthology of extracts from his earlier writings, Nietzsche contra Wagner, testify to an obsession which became, if anything, more tenacious and terrifying as the experiences eliciting it receded into the past. The need for a systematic study of the association has been partly met in countless books, monographs, and articles, as well as in chapters in general studies of the period; but the diversity among the issues involved has impeded progress and remains a serious obstacle to understanding. By its nature, the subject bears upon several different fields. The majority of commentators, approaching it as students of music, literature, cultural history, and the history of ideas, have naturally tended to dwell upon its implications for their own particular factions. From a partisan position, the differences between Nietzsche and Wagner are easier to pin down than the affinities. As a result, even when aiming at an essential impartiality of judgement, the specialists have contrived to separate the two protagonists, forcing them apart instead of drawing them together on common ground. Of course, the distinction between the artist and the speculative thinker, with its long pedigree, is frequently emphasized by Nietzsche: most notably and ambiguously perhaps in the text of Zarathustra, where the poetic style seems to belie the author’s philosophical intentions. Clearly, then, we should be wary in venturing to compare Wagner’s achievement

Preface  ix as an artist with Nietzsche’s achievement as a writer—as we might properly compare works in the same medium by different artists or writers, or even by the same artists or writers. This, however, does not mean that the juxtaposition is totally inadmissible, or that the search for areas of meaningful intellectual interpenetration leads nowhere. For Wagner, it is true, the relationship was limited in its creative consequences. The years that saw the completion of Der Ring des Nibelungen and founding of the Bayreuth Festival were the most momentous in a colourful and turbulent life; but we cannot say that without Nietzsche’s participation the course of events would have been decisively different or the artistic outcome other than it was (it is to be remembered that Nietzsche’s polemic was almost totally unread during his own productive lifetime: only long after Wagner’s death did it become the source from which Wagner’s detractors—always the objects of Nietzsche’s especial scorn—drew their vocabulary). A different picture emerges if we look at the relationship from Nietzsche’s side. It is customary to play down Wagner’s wider interests, and to hold that the ideas he expounded in a shelf-full of books, polemical pamphlets, aesthetic tracts, and letters, if seldom negligible, were derivative, opportunist, and at times dangerously misguided; and that these ideas had little to do with his creative work—more especially his music—which, sui generis and indisputably valid, is best considered apart from them. Now, Nietzsche was not blind to Wagner’s immense distinction as an artist, nor did he fight shy of specifically musical issues; but nor was he indifferent to the messianic pretensions of the ‘art of the future’, with its disturbing blend of nationalist, racialist, and pessimistic assumptions. This is hardly to be adduced to his discredit. On the contrary, as a member of the family circle at Tribschen, he was well placed to appreciate the competing facets of Wagner’s many-sided personality and the objectives to which his efforts were directed. This, if anything, gave his polemic its peculiar slant and force. If in the end he overstated his case (although it is by no means certain that he did), this in no way diminishes the urgency of his attack, drawn as it is from a fund of acute personal observation. To neglect Wagner’s stance and gesture on the platform of the age is to miss something germane to his artistic achievement. In this respect, Nietzsche’s shafts of wit and invective, in all their desperate audacity, restore to Wagner’s art a dimension of significance often extenuated and disguised by more highly qualified, professional spokesmen. From the start, then, Nietzsche was to show an attentiveness to Wagner, a receptivity, and a power of acquisition which can scarcely be overestimated. This is already apparent in his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie, written under Wagner’s immediate tutelage; and it is no less evident in the pages of the later critical writings where the artist is depicted as the embodiment of fin de siècle French Romanticism, ressentiment, and décadence, and finally—in Der Fall Wagner—as modernity personified. Yet Nietzsche’s opposition to Wagner was not registered in critical terms alone. As a spur to his imagination and challenge to his invention, Wagner’s example was at least as decisive. This is not to say that everything that Nietzsche wrote came into existence in response to or in reaction against Wagner. His writing is seen in true perspective, however, only when its Wagnerian—or anti-Wagnerian—orientation is correctly understood. Implicitly as well as explicitly, creatively as well as critically, it is here contended, Wagner was indispensable as a point of reference throughout the period of strenuous intellectual endeavour on the fruits of which Nietzsche’s reputation ultimately depends.

x  Preface Also sprach Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s most famous book; and it is also the book rated most highly by its author. Even so, despite the enormous amount written in elucidation, it is shrouded in mystery and paradox. No studies to date have had much to say about Nietzsche’s creative processes in Zarathustra in so far as they relate to Wagner. Besides this, there are further grounds for the present undertaking. The allusions to Wagner are more elusive than those to other, standard authors; and yet they are especially pervasive, bearing not only on Nietzsche’s thematic design and poetic style, but also—more importantly—on the content of what he wrote. The explanation here under consideration is this: these textual references are not embellishments grafted onto a pre-existing framework; but the book is to be seen as the creative counterpart of the critical campaign prosecuted in all the works of Nietzsche’s maturity—a campaign culminating in the open letter from Turin, Der Fall Wagner, and its sequel at the time of his collapse. A prose poem with a messianic aim, Zarathustra was planned as a whole and from the outset as a reply to Wagner, embodying in its own literary idiom just those qualities Nietzsche believed that Wagner, the artist, theorist, and messianic leader, had betrayed. The recognition of such a polemical motive necessarily affects our response to Nietzsche’s book as a piece of creative writing; and it adds to our understanding of his intransigent attitude towards Wagner: an attitude complicated by the fact that he was bound to Wagner by enduring personal ties, while at the same time Wagner stood exceptionally close to his creative endeavours. For these reasons a comprehensive title seemed justified, since the creative consequences on Nietzsche’s side emerge as the decisive aspect of the association between the two men: the nub of their confrontation, to which other issues were essentially subordinate. This book, then, is concerned with Wagner as one of Nietzsche’s principal sources—and targets—in Also sprach Zarathustra (the Calendar offers a conspectus of the secondary biographical evidence for the benefit of the general reader). Because of this, close attention is given to the stage works, Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal, completed at the time of the friendship, and to the material-some of it only recently to hand—showing how Nietzsche himself regarded them. Had this method of documentation not been preferred—had mere resemblance been deemed a sufficient criterion of assimilation and refutation—the lists of parallels might have been lengthened; but in the process the basis of the argument would have been weakened and made hypothetical, while the polemical intention behind the borrowings might well have been obscured. Since the construction advanced in these pages is unprecedented, every effort has been made to authenticate the principal parallels given for the first time, even at the risk of supererogatory erudition. A number of members of the University and a few personal friends were so kind as to read through and comment on drafts in varying stages of completeness. I am particularly grateful to Professor E.L.Stahl, who from the outset gave me the benefit of his wider knowledge; and to the late Professor Sir Jack Westrup and Dr. F.W.Sternfeld, both of whom over an extended period of time made valuable suggestions. R.H. Oxford January 1980

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgement is gratefully made to the following: Herr Prof. Dr Karl-Heinz Hahn of the Nationale Forschungs—und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar for having provided copies of Nietzsche’s sketches for the poem ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’ (discussed in my article with Manfred Ruter in Nietzsche-Studien, IV (1975), 279–83); Frau Gertrud Strobel and Herr Dr Joachim Bergfeld of the Archiv des Hauses Wahnfried (since 1973 incorporated into the Richard Wagner-Stiftung in Bayreuth) for permission to transcribe Wagner’s letter to Franz Müller of 22 June 1856, for facsimiles and other valuable material; Herr Dr Arthur Hübscher of the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft e.V., Frankfurt a.M., for having personally dealt with my inquiries; Gordon Mapes, Esq., formerly Librarian of the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia, for many courtesies and for facsimiles of documents in the Burrell Collection (since 1978 incorporated into the Richard Wagner-Stiftung); and Otto Haas, Ltd, London, for aid in connection with an exacting bibliography. I further record a personal obligation to Albi Rosenthal, Esq., and Mrs Rosenthal, for placing at my disposal the published and unpublished MSS, books, and memorabilia in the Rosenthal-Levy Collection at Boars Hill, Oxford. I am also indebted to Herr Curt Paul Janz for allowing me to inspect the proofs of his edition of Nietzsche’s musical compositions before publication, and for helping to clarify a number of points in connection with Nietzsche’s biography. Robert Jacobs, Esq., was so kind as to go over the Calendar, and brought to light details which had escaped my notice. I am most grateful for his help. A preliminary version of Part II, ‘Nietzsche and Wagner’s “Parsifal”’, came out in Oxford German Studies, IV (1969), 118–41, ed. E.L.Stahl; the account of Der Ring in Part I is in agreement with my article ‘Carl Dahlhaus and “Der Ring”’ in the Centenary Year book of the English Wagner Society, Wagner 1976, ed. Stewart Spencer, London 1976, pp. 68–82. I express my thanks to the editors of both journals for permission to make use of this material.

Contents

Facsimiles Translations Introduction: Also sprach Zarathustra Part I  Zarathustra and Der Ring 1 Der Ring des Nibelungen 2 Zarathustra’s Going Down s 3 Schopenhauer and Der Ring 4 Two Notes on Der Ring 5 The Convalescent 6 Zarathustra’s Roundelay 7 Zarathustra’s Great Noon 8 Nietzsche’s Affirmation: Summary

page xiii xiv 1 20 32 39 49 61 78 87 94

Part II  Zarathustra and Parsifal 9 10 11 12

Parsifal Zarathustra’s Temptation The Cry of Distress The Dissolution of the Trinity: Summary

100 110 118 123

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis

139

Calendar November 1868—February 1883 Notes Bibliography

163 210 225

   

A Note on Documentary Method A Key to the Titles of Zarathustra’s Discourses

Sources and Abbreviations Select Bibliography

228 237

Facsimiles

No.1

No. 2

No. 3

A sketch for the poem ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’, Also sprach Zarathustra, Part III, ‘Das andere Tanzlied’, § 3 (by kind permission of the Nationale Forschungs— und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur, Weimar). frontispiece The fair copy of Wagner’s amendment to the text of Götterdämmerung, Act III, scene iii: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. VI, pp. 361 ff (by kind permission of the Richard Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth). pages 72 and 73 The first sketch and first fair copy of the poem ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’, Also sprach Zarathustra, Part III, ‘Das andere Tanzlied’, § 3 (by kind permission of the Nationale Forschungs—und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur, Weimar). page 101

Translations

The translations in the text of this book aim at a literal rendering of the German as an aid to the general reader.

Introduction: Also sprach Zarathustra

Innerhalb meiner Schriften steht für sich mein Zarathustra. Ich habe mit ihm der Menschheit das grösste Geschenk gemacht, das ihr bisher gemacht worden ist. (Among my writings, my Zarathustra stands by itself. With it I have given mankind the greatest gift it has ever received.) Ecce homo, ‘Vorwort’, § 4

I Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen dates from 1883–5. The first three parts were published separately as soon as they were finished, but received little attention. In 1887 they were re-issued as a single volume. Nietzsche had this—the first collected edition—in mind when he complained to his later publisher about the preposterous silence that greeted Zarathustra, and urged stringent measures to avoid a repetition of the experience.1 Nach einem solchen Anrufe aus der innersten Seele keinen Laut von Antwort zu hören, das ist ein furchtbares Ertebniß, an dem der zäheste Mensch zu Grunde gehen kann: es hat mich aus allen Banden mit lebendigen Menschen herausgehoben. (To hear nothing in reply after such a cri de coeur—that is a devastating experience which can destroy the strongest man: it has freed me from all ties with the living. N-A3 VIII 1 5[95])

The fourth part was privately printed in a limited edition in 1885; and it was kept secret until Nietzsche’s amanuensis, Heinrich Köselitz—‘Peter Gast’—summoned up the courage to publish it in 1891, after Nietzsche’s collapse. From the notebooks we can see that a tractable mass of material was assembled over an extended period. An outline for a book in four parts centring on the ‘ring of eternity’ is dated 26 August 1881 (N-A3 V 2 11[197]); and some three and a half years—considerably longer than was needed for any of Nietzsche’s other books—elapsed before this plan was carried to completion. The design is anything but arbitrary. Even so, the composition of the individual instalments was remarkably rapid. During solitary walks on the coast roads between Zoagli, Santa Margherita, and Porto Fino in the mid-winter of 1882–3, the first discourses were written down less by choice than of necessity, as a dictation from a higher authority; and the state of possession or ‘enthusiasm’ was to return without abatement at intervals until the apotheosis of Part III was achieved in October 1884. Each instalment was completed in about ten days, Nietzsche recalled in a letter to Brandes of 10 April 1888: ‘Alles unterwegs auf starken Märschen, concipirt: absolute Gewißheit, als ob jeder Satz Einem zugerufen wäre’ (All conceived on strenuous walks: absolute certainty, as if each sentence was being shouted out to one).

2  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism In the winter of 1883–4, a young doctor from the Physiologischen Institut in Vienna, Josef Paneth, while staying at Villefranche near Nice, received an unexpected visit from Nietzsche. His letters tell us a good deal about the critical days just before and after Part III came into being. The composition of the first two Parts, Paneth noted on 3 January 1884, had been almost incredibly swift: ‘[Nietzsche] wollte aber solche Zeiten nicht wieder durchmachen, es sei lebensgefährlich’ (Nietzsche wouldn’t want to live through that again—it might prove fatal). Zarathustra, moreover, was an extremely personal document. Nietzsche had come round to the view that he had written all his books for himself so that he alone knew exactly what was in them, Paneth wrote on 7 March; on the 26th he reiterated ‘So sei [Zarathustra] eigentlich ein Buch für ihn selbst’ (So Zarathustra was really a book for himself).2 In a letter from Venice of May 1884, not long after the last meeting, Nietzsche wrote at some length in an attempt to deter Paneth from a hasty evaluation.3 Nietzsche was not blind to the difficulties presented by the prose-poem. Before it was finished, he began to toy with the idea of writing a companion-piece—‘an integrated structure of ideas’4—in which it would be possible to clarify the insights that were in the process of receiving their ‘poetic’ formulation. This, too, was noted by the vigilant Paneth, whose letter of 3 January 1884 contains one of the earliest references to the plan of elucidation which was to be a constant preoccupation for the rest of Nierzsche’s active life: ‘Zarathustra sei nur die Propyläen zu einem zusammenhängenden philosophischen Werk. Er gebrauchte den Ausdruck, er habe den Zarathustra “gedichtet’” (Zarathustra was only the gateway to a coherent philosophical work. He spoke of it as a ‘poem’). Of the four items listed in the latest drafts for the Umwerthung aller Werthe (Reevaluation of All Values), as the philosophical work was prospectively entitled,5 only one, Der Antichrist, was made ready for publication; and while this tackled on the whole systematically the range of problems suggested by its title, at the last minute by a deft amendment to the title-page it was reconstituted as a separate essay.6 Are we then to conclude that Nietzsche finally came to see that there could be no definitive statement of his position? Certainly, on occasion Zarathustra was described off-handedly as a propylaeum, porch, preparation, preface, and ‘book for edification and encouragement’; but such diffidence is not typical. Indeed it is distinctly at odds with the tenor of the books, notes, and letters in which Zarathustra’s centrality is constantly reaffirmed and the peripheral position of the other books tacitly re-emphasized. The immediately preceding Morgenröthe and the nearly contemporary Die fröhliche Wissenschaft were swiftly designated commentaries written in advance of the text;7 likewise the sequel, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, in a draft for the preface became a kind of glossary ‘in dem die wichtigsten Begriffs—und WerthNeuerungen jenes Buchs—eines Ereignisses ohne Vorbild, Beispiel, Gleichniß in aller Litteratur—irgendwo einmal vorkommen und mit Namen genannt sind’ (in which the most momentous conceptual and evaluative innovations of this book—an event unprecedented, unexampled, and unparalleled in the whole of literature—appear somewhere and are given names. N-A3 VIII 1 6[4]). The sense of achievement showed no sign of flagging, notwithstanding the prodigious mental activity evidenced by all the later publications and the exhilaration each in turn induced. An unpublished letter to E.W.Fritzsch composed while Nietzsche was preparing a second edition of his writings for publication in 1886 is informative:

Introduction: Also Sprach Zarathustra  3 Das Wesentliche ist, daß, um die Voraussetzung für das Verständniß des Zarathustra zu haben (—ein Ereigniß ohne Gleichen in der Litteratur und Philosophie und Poesie und Moral usw, usw, Sie dürfen mir’s glauben, Sie glücklicher Besitzer dieses Wunderthiers!—) alle meine früheren Schriften ernstlich und tief verstanden sein müssen; insgleichen die Nothwendigkeit der Aufeinanderfolge dieser Schriften und der in ihnen sich ausdrückenden Entwicklung. (The essential thing is that in order to understand Zarathustra—an event without rts like in literature and philosophy and poetry and morality, &c., &c., you had better believe me, you lucky possessor of this prodigy!—all my earlier writings must be seriously and deeply understood; also the necessary sequence of these writings and the development taking place in them.)8

Finally, it was in Nietzsche’s autobiography, Ecce homo, completed in his last active year as his vision clarified and the long-awaited ‘Umwerthung aller Werthe’ at last came within sight of achievement, that the most extravagant claims were made. The relevant passages are cited in a recently discovered, contemporary letter to Deussen: [In Ecce homo] wird zum ersten Mal Licht über mein Zarathustra gemacht, das erste Buch aller Jahrtausende, die Bibel der Zukunft, der höchste Ausbruch des menschlichen Genius, in dem das Schicksal der Menschheit einbegriffen ist. (Ecce homo will elucidate my Zarathustra for the first time, the premier book of all millennia, the Bible of the future, the highest manifestation of human genius encompassing the fate of mankind.)9

The fact that Nietzsche upheld Zarathustra’s synoptic character does not in itself guarantee the book’s pre-eminence: on this question opinion remains sharply divided. The author’s stance, ‘der Realität fremd; halb Künstler, halb Vogel und Metaphysicus’ (estranged from reality, half artist, half bird and metaphysician. N-A3 VIII 3 14[1])10 has posed intractable problems for many commentators, who have detected here an element of self-consciousness bordering on affectation, which only briefly and intermittently results in genuine poetic invention and creativity. In many respects the book represents a breach of precedent so singular as to verge upon eccentricity. When he put the imaginary prophet in the centre of the stage, Nietzsche instated him as an alter ego, imbued with many of his own traits of character, yet achieving autonomy as a vehicle for the expression of the most uncompromising views. In a letter of 22 December 1883 on receiving Part I, Rohde did not hesitate to liken Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’ to Plato’s ‘Socrates’; while not infrequently, with a perhaps pardonable display of affection, Nietzsche himself referred to Zarathustra as his natural ‘son’. However, given the didactic slant of many of the discourses and the tenuous plot, the character is more a ‘voice’ than a living person. Although one is led to expect a series of fanciful exploits after the manner of Nietzsche’s beloved Petronius, the appearances of the dwarf, hermit, and acrobat in the prologue, of the spirit of gravity in Part I, of the sailors, disciples, and dancers in Part II, are too fleeting to instil much sense of their identity. After this, Zarathustra’s audience shrinks. In the last discourse of Part II he regretfully abandons his disciples; and in Part III, the most animated part of the narrative, the subsidiary characters fade from the scene almost entirely. Zarathustra is his own audience in the crowning phase of the action where the metaphysical implications of his ministry are finally disclosed. Perhaps this is why in the preface to his autobiography (§ 4) Nietzsche called the book a hymn to

4  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism solitude, and remarked ‘Such things reach only the elect.’ The quest for disciples is replaced by a deliberate rejection of disciples; in Part III the prophet communicates successfully only with the eagle and serpent—the proudest and wisest of ‘animals’, as he dubs them.11 The drastic reduction in the external trappings of the story allows for a more ample treatment of Zarathustra’s inner life. It is above all the intestine struggle that defines the character of the prophet in his terrible isolation (it has been aptly remarked that in his powers of self-revelation Nietzsche ‘exceeded even the most introspective Romantics’).12 All the discourses directly concerned with his teaching—‘Der Wahrsager’, ‘Die stillste Stunde’, ‘Vom Gesicht und Räthsel’—are peopled by terrifying apparitions; in ‘Der Genesende’ the teaching itself—of the literal re-enactment of historical events at enormous intervals of time—comes to life personified as a preternatural monster with whom he is locked in mortal combat. External reality holds no terrors to compare with those of Zarathustra’s imagination. The strands of the narrative either converge upon or radiate from the moment of self-confrontation in Part III when, in a state of dream-like—or deathlike—clairvoyance, he comes to know his fate. In Ecce homo, the passage that recounts the inception of the idea of eternal return beside a pyramid of rock near Surlei in August 1881 is celebrated.13 Nietzsche’s words have a detachment that disguises the nature of the experience whose impact is brought out more strongly in the surviving letters and notes, and above all in the text of the prose-poem for which it provided the inspiration. After the preceding years of uncertainty and unrest, it was here in the solitude of the Swiss Ober-Engadin that Nietzsche found a foothold making possible the ascent into the rarefied atmosphere which the imaginary prophet was to transform with the lightning of an apocalyptic vision. The recent publication of the surviving drafts in chronological order enables us to follow more accurately the processes of gestation from which Zarathustra emerged. Nietzsche’s interest in theories of metempsychosis and cosmological rebirth can be dated back at least as far as his residence in Basel. A brief reference to the Greek theory of eternal return—the —in Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie, § 2, associates it with the astronomical pseudo-science of Pythagoras. Its conjectural links with Heraclitus and the Stoic philosophers, so strongly emphasized in the account of Zarathustra in Ecce homo,14 are plainly hinted at in the notes assembled at Basel in readiness for a comprehensive work on pre-Platonic Greek philosophy. Perhaps even more striking is the reference to Empedocles towards the end of Schopenhauer als Erzieher, § 3; and Empedocles’ ‘great conviction of metempsychosis’ is again mentioned in Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, § 8. These references are particularly important because of their bearing on the fragments, dating from 1870–1, for a drama on the subject of Empedocles’ life and death: a project that, although unrealized, gives a clear indication of Nietzsche’s future activities as a prose-poet. The model here is Der Tod des Empedokles of Hölderlin: a poet, then little read, for whom Nietzsche evinced an intense, precocious enthusiasm,15 and who is regularly cited as one of the more important stylistic influences on Zarathustra:16 Empedokles. Dort öffnen sie das Buch des Schiksaals dir. Geh! fürchte nichts! es kehret alles wieder. Und was geschehen soll, ist schon vollendet.

Introduction: Also Sprach Zarathustra  5 (There they will open destiny’s book for you. Go! Fear nothing! Everything recurs. And what is to come is already completed. Der Tod des Empedokles, third version, II. 328–30)17

These early studies paved the way for the more specialized research of the later period when Nietzsche addressed himself to the discoveries of modern physics, especially to the theory of the conservation of energy. Already in his student years, his scientific reading was extensive. In January 1869, towards the end of his residence at Leipzig, he told Rohde of a possible transfer from classics to science; and it is not without interest that in the spring of 1881, at the time of his visit to Surlei, he had resumed his studies in earnest. If energy is finite in quantity and space is finite in extent—he speculates in his unpublished notes—whereas time is infinite in duration, a point must be reached at which all possible configurations will have been realized and the entire series of configurations will return with the convergence of the same attendant circumstances. Although Nietzsche did not demur from describing his theory as ‘most strictly confirmed and supported by truth and science’ (Eh-GdT § 2), the tenuousness of his ontological demonstration or ‘proof’ is, to say the least, disconcerting. He is not alone, however, in his conception of a cyclic—rather than a rectilinear—progress, nor in that of history as unfolding under the compulsion of an inexorable determinism. In this respect, indeed, he offers a variation on a perennial theme of speculation from ancient Greece to the present day. Yet, if the Nietzschean idea of recurrence remains one of the most unequivocally— and frighteningly—deterministic of all theories of history, Nietzsche’s deductions entirely reverse the trend of the trains of thought initiated by determinists. For while part of the appeal of the cyclic cosmology lies (again in theory) in its demonstrability as a matter of fact rather than of faith, its importance is estimated from the consequences that flow from its acceptance. Herein lies Nietzsche’s real originality. In Zarathustra, little, if anything, is said in the way of scientific substantiation; instead the idea stands at the summit of the side of the argument that deals with wholly authentic, creative freedom. Hence the relentless inquiry into the origin of moral preconceptions and prejudices; hence, too, the attempt to draw up new law-tables transcending the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ brought to the West from the archetypal philosopher, the historical Zoroaster.18 This astounding reversal, as Klages duly noted,19 is crucial for the understanding of Nietzsche’s effect upon thought about ethics. Once we see that his primary concern is the nature and destiny of man, that is to say, the theory of recurrence is almost indistinguishable from a moral imperative—a challenge to responsibility, a co-ordinating principle in a comprehensive system of moral values, and a supreme manifestation of creative striving. ‘So leben, daß wir nochmals leben wollen und in Ewigkeit so leben wollen!—Unsere Aufgabe tritt in jedem Augenblick an uns heran.’ (So to live that we would want to live again and so live again for eternity: our task confronts us at every moment. N-A3 V 2 11[161]). The highest will be he who ‘wills’ that the theory should be true, and thereafter acts on the assumption that his present deeds will be repeated and infinitely repeated: ‘Das ist der höchste Wille zur Macht’ (That is the highest will to power. N-A3 VIII 1 7[54]). In so far as the theory cannot be proved right, his standpoint may be said (to put it mildly) to involve an element of calculated risk; but for Nietzsche this does not affect the main issue: ‘An einer Theorie ist es wahrlich nicht der geringste Reiz, daß sie widerlegbar ist’ (Truly, not the least attraction of a theory is that it is refutable. N-A3 VII 1 5[1:24],

6  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism previously unpublished). Then, since the cyclic process is held to be inescapable and allpervading, he will find the strength to affirm the recurrence of the totality of experience, attaining a position where all correlations of good and evil, joy and pain, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, are comprehended by an attitude of unqualified assent. This second aspect of the theory as a formula of affirmation related to the concepts ‘amor fati’ and ‘Dionysos’ of the final period is as difficult as the first, because it seems to neutralize the finely-drawn evaluative distinctions that abound in Nietzsche’s analytical writings. Hence, as Köselitz correctly asserted,20 Nietzsche’s preoccupation with a hypothetical being, surpassing humanity, who by his own unaided strength would deliver the final affirmation unconditionally. As if to enforce the point, the first discourse in Part I, ‘Von den drei Verwandlungen’, recounts a Lessing-like metamorphosis of the spirit-a progressive education in transcendence—associated with the stages of obeying, willing, and being. Each stage is illustrated by a suitably graphic and playfully oriental image: the camel, the lion, and the self propelling wheel or ‘playing child’ (the last image taken from Heraclitus who associated it with Zeus). The parable, adapted from Goethe’s Novelle, as has recently been shown,21 sheds light upon the personality of Zarathustra’s protagonist, the ‘Übermensch’ (‘superman’): Höher als ‘du sollst’ steht ‘ich will’ (die Heroen): höher als ‘ich will’ steht ‘ich bin’ (die Götter der Griechen). (‘I will’ (the heroes) ranks above ‘You shall’: ‘I am’ (the gods of the Greeks) ranks above ‘I will’. N-A3 VII 2 25[351])

The intention comes across strongly in the sketches for Part III (listed below) in which the interdependence of the twin concepts—eternal return and superman—is strongly underlined.22 In characterizing the ‘Übermensch’ who surpasses man, perhaps physically and certainly spiritually, as man surpasses the ape (Z-Vorrede, § 3), Nietzsche was reacting against Darwin: the focus of a heated controversy led by his colleague Ludwig Rütimeyer in the first year of his professorship at Basel, sorne ten years after the appearance of On the Origin of Species in 1859.23 Like the theory of recurrence, the idea is bound up with recent developments in nineteenth century science. The anti-Darwinian ‘Übermensch’ will carry through a comprehensive programme of reform, restoring a sense of purpose to man and meaning to the earth deserted by the Deity. Now is the time to prepare for his advent. Accordingly, the interests of the few are upheld at the expense of the many; strength of spirit replaces weakness; health of spirit replaces sickness; war of the spirit replaces peace; and a hierarchy, or ‘order of rank’, is envisaged in which the needs of exceptional individuals—whose survival is jeopardized under the law of natural selection—take a decisive precedence. The complacency and inertia of the ‘last men’, ‘Hinterweltler’ (‘afterworldsmen’), scholars, priests, philosophers, and seditious artists in league with Zarathustra’s arch-enemy, the lowering and levelling spirit of gravity, are challenged and replaced by the advocacy of danger, daring, dancing, and intellectual dexterity. It is only fair to say that the inseparability of the notions of eternal return and the ‘Übermensch’, denoting respectively an all-pervading cosmic necessity and a totally unrestricted human freedom, is by no means easy to grasp. Nor is it easy to defend. Yet the dichotomy is present in some of Nietzsche’s earliest essays; and he sticks to it too

Introduction: Also Sprach Zarathustra  7 tenaciously in Zarathustra for it to be possible to dismiss it, as some have proposed, as a sort of miscalculation. The postscript tacked on to the jotting set down under the impact of the experience at Surlei speaks of the attainment of a standpoint ‘6000 feet above the sea and much higher above all human affairs’: an idea carried further in the draft for the first formulation of the theory of recurrence entrusted to a dwarf or devil in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 341, ‘Das grösste Schwergewicht’.24 Not only does this refer to the deterministic implications of the premiss (here there are conjectural links with Heine); but also the premiss is seen as exerting a decisive pressure on moral—or supra-moral— conduct. ‘Wenn jener Gedanke über dich Gewalt bekäme’, he says, er würde dich, wie du bist, verwandeln und vielleicht zermalmen; die Frage bei Allem und Jedem ‘willst du diess noch einmal und noch unzählige Male?’ würde als das grösste Schwergewicht auf deinem Handeln liegen! (If this idea took hold of you as you are now, it would transform and perhaps crush you; the question with regard to each and every thing ‘do you want this again, and again countless times?’ would lay a vast weightiness on your actions.)

Somewhat similarly, § 337, ‘Die zukünftige “Menschlichkeit”’, hints at a transformation of the historical sense; this is echoed in Also sprach Zarathustra, ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’, § 3, just before the second—and most important—formulation. A third, brief formulation in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 56, uses the idea of recurrence as a reply to Schopenhauer, who, in his essay on ethics, pushed the theory of determinism to appalling extremes, resorting to the image of the ‘clock’ which plays a leading part in Zarathustra’s exposition (S-A1 VI 242).25 Once more the idea is stated obliquely as the insight of a hypothetical being, the most passionate, energetic, and world-affirming man, who reconciles the eternal with the temporal as a feat of awesome, super-human strength. Nietzsche is undeniably evasive as well as reiterative about his recurrence theory: of all his major premisses, the ‘great disciplinary thought’—‘der grosse züchtende Gedanke’ (N-A3 VII 2 25[227])—is much the most difficult. Nonetheless his position was remarkably consistent. ‘Unsre Art Seligkeit, als Lehrer der grössten Lehre’ (Our kind of bliss, as the teacher of the greatest teaching. N-A3 V2 11[141]), he wrote at Surlei in August 1881. This is no isolated saying. While this ‘enigmatic’ idea, perhaps concealing something unthought which is impenetrable to thought,26 has proved a stumbling-block to many commentators, we shall have made at least some progress if we see that for Nietzsche it was the keystone of an integrated conceptual edifice. Like the keystone, its intrinsic appeal may count for less than its function in respect of the total structure. In Zarathustra the scale and scope of Nietzsche’s terrible prophetic mission declared itself unequivocally. Here the discovery and conquest of the idea is the emotional focal point of a long and intricate narrative; and its eventual formulation is one of Nietzsche’s most intimate revelations. Evidently his claims for the book’s pre-eminence stemmed from the belief that he had succeeded in his expository task.27 This is not to say the book can be accepted as a flawless literary masterpiece; or that its leading premiss is beyond the need of clarification. In this exceptional case, however, the intention may perhaps be allowed to take precedence over the achievement. Here, in Zarathustra’s monologues, Nietzsche launched a devastating attack on what he saw as the accumulated errors and prejudices of the recent past; here, too, in the dithyrambs at the end of the third and fourth books, the

8  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism near-manic vision of a self-perpetuating universe was intended to transform the law of recurrence from an alien fate to a proper destiny. The dread of determinism is conveyed by the sequence that precedes Zarathustra’s convalescence in Part III: ‘Allzuklein der Grösste!—Das war mein Überdruss am Menschen! Und ewige Wiederkunft auch des Kleinsten!’ (The greatest all too small!—that was my disgust at man! And eternal return even for the smallest!); at the same time the challenge to subjective volition, or ‘will to power’, is registered by the prophecy of a humanity of the future which lays claim to the idea as a personal prerogative. Der Mensch ist das, was überwunden werden muß. Hier halte ich den Hammer, der ihn überwindet! Dieser Gesichtspunkt beseligt Zarathustra am Schluß des III. Theiles er wird dabei reif. (Man is that which must be conquered. Here I hold the hammer that will conquer him! This outlook fills Zarathustra with rejoicing at the end of Part III. So he grows ripe. N-A3 VII 1 21[6])28

The allegorical element in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 341, is now tremendously intensified. The metamorphosis of personality implied by the concept of the ‘Übermensch’ is more radical than anything previously made explicit; while Zarathustra’s teaching is put beyond the reach of the mass of mankind. It has become an enigma imparted in riddles: a truth that cannot be uttered aloud. As a thinker Nietzsche was set on a collision course with his inheritance. The constructive part of the programme enshrined in Zarathustra has been received—as Nietzsche expected and intended—with a profound sense of shock, moral outrage, and intellectual consternation. Being incapable of proof, his so-called ‘scientific’ premiss is hard to see as anything but a metaphysical fantasy, no less extravagant and a good deal more exasperating than the alleged fantasies and psychological ‘forgeries’ it was supposed to replace. It has moreover been insisted by competent authorities that Nietzsche was driven by his sense of epoch-making destiny into a series of abrupt and dangerous generalizations; and that his inferences and deductions were grounded in egoism, cynicism, and Stoical defiance, seasoned by a constant nunc pede libero. Modern writers have shown more sympathy with the trend of his free-thinking in its rejection of the tenets of pessimism; but for the most part they have either stood aghast before his alternatives or, blind to their implications, have brushed them aside as bearing only obliquely on his real significance. In the process they have left out of account his ‘aristocratic radicalism’ (to adopt the apt description coined by Georg Brandes),29 and emptied his writing of much of its actual content. The generally more favourable attitude towards Nietzsche today is thus in large measure just another manifestation of the fatal misunderstanding to which, of all modern writers, he is peculiarly prone; while an essential part of his work still awaits discovery and evaluation. It is here to be shown that such a process demands a reappraisal of the peculiar response elicited by the most crucial, and in a sense most enduring, of all Nietzsche’s personal relationships: the topic of the present study to which we will now address ourselves.

Introduction: Also Sprach Zarathustra  9

II Nietzsche was distinctly reticent about the sources of Also sprach Zarathustra. A letter to Rohde of 22 February 1884 gives Luther and Goethe as precursors. This anticipates Ecce homo, ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, § 6, where Nietzsche with typical effrontery names Goethe, Shakespeare, Dante, and the authors of the Vedas: to the Jewish Heine, living in self-imposed exile in Paris, alone is conceded a comparable mastery of the German language ‘at an incalculable distance from all that “mere Germans” have done with it.’30 Obviously these sayings do less than justice to the textual derivation of the prose-poem, in which none can miss the signs of the author’s wide reading, his observant eye, and his retentive memory. Besides this, the book evidently contains a generous element of autobiography. ‘Im Einzelnen ist unglaublich vieles persönlich Erlebte und Erlittne darin, das nur mir verständlich ist,—manche Seiten kamen mir fast blutrünstig vor’ ([The book] records in detail an incredible number of personal trials and tribulations intelligible only to me— many pages seemed to me to be almost bloodthirsty), Köselitz was notified at the end of August 1883. A letter to Overbeck of 5 August 1886 mentioned an ‘incomprehensible’ book, ‘because Zarathustra draws exclusively on experiences shared with no one’.31 The prologue begins by telling of the imaginary prophet’s retreat to the mountains and ten years’ solitary meditation. This passage, lifted from (or inserted into) Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 342, ‘Incipit tragoedia’, agrees with the traditional account of the birth of the prophet Zoroaster at the lake of Urmi and of the ten years’ solitude during which he prepared for his ministry.32 New light was thrown on the opening when Ernest Newman in his study of Wagner suggested that it might contain an element of autobiography.33 Zarathustra’s ‘home’ and ‘the lake of his home’ might be taken as standing for Tribschen and the lake of Lucerne which Nietzsche relinquished when he was twenty-seven years old; the ten years’ solitude roughly corresponds to the interval between the last visit to Tribschen in 1872 and the conception of Also sprach Zarathustra in 1881. In a letter to Wagner’s friend Mathilde Maier of 15 July 1878, Nietzsche actually specified a period of self-enforced isolation, ‘bis ich wieder, als Philosoph des Lebens, ausgereift und fertig verkehren darf (und dann wahrscheinlich muß)’ (until as a fully-fledged philosopher of life I can—and probably must—return). Newman’s construction was advanced with a disarming show of reticence; but it is certainly defensible to work on the a ssumption that Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s idealized self-portrait or alias. Indeed, if these correspondences are favoured, may we not go further and say that the prophet’s beloved mountains with their distinctive vegetation of yellow and red berries, rosy apples, sweet-smelling herbs, and pine-cones, derive from the landscape of the Swiss Ober-Engadin near Sils-Maria: the ‘promised land’, as Nietzsche called it, and Zarathustra’s birthplace?34 A letter to Köselitz of 14 August 1881 gives a vivid impression of the secluded region near Surlei where Nietzsche came under the spell of his ‘Diktat’: Ich müßte schon nach den Hochebenen von Mexiko am Stillen Ozeane gehen, um etwas Ähnliches zu finden (z.B.Oaxaca), und da allerdings mit tropischer Vegetation.

10  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism (I’d have to go to the tablelands of Mexico by the Pacific Ocean (i.e., Oaxaca) to find anything comparable, although of course the vegetation there would be tropical.)

Reduced to bare essentials, the story that unfolds in Zarathustra, Parts I–III, hinges on two visitations. In Part I, the discourses are delivered at a hospitable town to which the prophet repairs after administering the last rites to the acrobat. A striking precedent for the scene with the acrobat, which has escaped attention, comes in Wagner’s autobiography, Mein Leben, where Wagner recalls his stay in childhood at the home of his step-father’s younger brother in Eisleben. At Basel, Nietzsche took charge of the negotiations for the printing of the first instalments of the autobiography, so that there is no question of his familiarity with this passage: Mein Leben

Z-Vorrede, § 6

Wir wohnten am Markte, der mir oft eigenthümliche Schauspiele gewährte, wie namentlich die Vorstellungen einer AkrobatenGesellschaft, bei welchen auf einem von Thurm zu Thurm über den Platz gespannten Seile gegangen wurde, was in mir lange Zeit die Leidenschaft für ähnliche Kunststücke erweckte. Ich brachte es wirklich dazu, auf zusammen gedrehten Stricken, welche ich im Hofe ausspannte, mit der Balancirstange mich ziemlich geschickt zu bewegen.

Inzwischen nämlich hatte der Seiltänzer sein Werk begonnen: er war aus einer kleinen Thür hinausgetreten und gieng über das Seil, welches zwischen zwei Thürmen gespannt war, also, dass es über dem Markte und dem Volke hieng… Er warf seine Stange weg und schoss schneller als diese, wie ein Wirbel von Armen und Beinen, in die Tiefe.

(We lived in the market-place which often offered strange sights—for example, the performances by a troupe of acrobats who appeared on a rope stretched from tower to tower over the square, which for a long time gave me a passion for such feats. I even went so far as to do the same thing myself with a balancingpole on a rope of twisted cords which I rigged up in the yard. W-A5 14.

Meanwhile the tight-rope walker had started work: he emerged from a little door and was proceeding across the rope which was stretched between two towers so that it hung over the market-place and the people… He threw his balancing-pole away and plummeted into the depths even faster than it, a whirl of arms and legs.)35

In Part II, Zarathustra sets out for the Islands of the Blessed: a longer journey, part of it by sea, from which he returns by a circuitous route in Part III, briefly re-visiting the hospitable town in ‘Von den Abtrünnigen’ and regaining his mountain sanctuary in ‘Die Heimkehr’ (the title, reminiscent of works by Hölderlin and Heine, was used by Nietzsche for a group of five poems in 1863: N-A2 II 262–6). It looks very much as if the first of these two visitations—the journey and the voyage— was modelled on Nietzsche’s Odyssean wanderings in southern Italy and Sicily after the first Bayreuth Festival. On this view, Gustav Naumann identified the hospitable town as Genoa, the city of Columbus, which Nietzsche discovered on the way to Sorrento in 1876.36 References to Genoa and her illustrious son abound in the letters and other writings before Zarathustra. Again, the second expedition might be linked with Nietzsche’s next visit to Italy in March-April 1882, when he went to Sicily by sea from Genoa on the outward journey. In particular, the Islands of the Blessed suggest the Aeolian Islands, which he

Introduction: Also Sprach Zarathustra  11 would have passed on the ship bound for Messina.37 The psychologist C.G.Jung found a totally unexpected source for the scene with the volcano in ‘Von grossen Ereignissen’ in a ship’s log recording a visit to Stromboli in 1686.38 Other details bear out the theory that the book was coloured by experiences around the time of Nietzsche’s resignation from Basel and the crisis in his relationship with Wagner. In view of the autobiographical character of the book, it is curious that Zarathustra has only two identifiable portraits: the soothsayer (Schopenhauer), and the wicked sorcerer (Wagner) who holds sway by the magic of his music, rhetoric, and humorously exaggerated self-depreciation (‘Der Zauberer’, § 2): ‘O Zarathustra, Alles ist Lüge an mir; aber dass ich zerbreche—diess mein Zerbrechen ist ächt!’ (O Zarathustra, everything about me is false; except the fact that I am breaking—this, my breaking, is genuine!). Inevitably the fall of the ‘higher men’, the representatives of modernity, totally demoralized by the combined efforts of these two singular personalities, is a climactic moment in the later part of the narrative. It is not difficult to construe these passages in terms of Nietzsche’s declaration of war on the Wagnerian movement, and on Wagner personally: the ‘Mimomane’ and actor (as he is resolutely characterized in Der Fall Wagner), the incurable (French) Romantic, the purveyor of poison as the antidote to poison. Consider, for example, ‘Von den Fliegen des Marktes’ in Part I: Wenig begreift das Volk das Grosse, das ist: das Schaffende. Aber Sinne hat es für alle Aufführer und Schauspieler grosser Sachen.

  *     *     * Geist hat der Schauspieler, doch wenig Gewissen des Geistes. Er glaubt immer an Das, womit er am stärksten glauben macht,—glauben an sich macht! (The masses have little idea of greatness, that is to say: creativity. But they respond to all showmen and those who feign great things…. The actor has spirit, but little conscience. He always believes in that with which he strengthens belief-belief in himself!)

Zarathustra’s sovereign disdain is registered by his hasty retreat from the market-place and by his defence of a certain kind of solitude (‘Auf dem Oelberge’): Des Einen Einsamkeit ist die Flucht des Kranken; des Andern Einsamkeit die Flucht vor den Kranken. (For one, solitude is the refuge of the sick; for another, solitude is the refuge from the sick.)

Today belongs to the sick. All show symptoms of a common malaise, being bereft of instinct and insight, and content to play unquestioningly almost any role demanded of them by expediency. The leaders, priests and philosophers, scientists and scholars, men of artistic ‘genius’, no less than the led, are servants of popular superstition (‘Von den berühmten Weisen’): Dem Volke habt ihr gedient und des Volkes Aberglauben, ihr berühmten Weisen alle!—und nicht der Wahrheit! Und gerade darum zollte man euch Ehrfurcht. (You have served the masses and their superstitions, all you famous gurus!—not truth! And that is precisely why they have venerated you.)

12  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism One of the most bitter—and cruelly taunting—passages in which Zarathustra inveighs against the casuistry of modern man comes in ‘Von der Erlösung’ in Part II, where a conversation with a hunchback produces the following comment: an excursion into the grotesque possibly related to André Gill’s savage and sinister cartoon of Wagner in L’Éclipse, Paris, 18 April 1869.39 Da traute ich meinen Augen nicht und sah hin, und wieder hin, und sagte endlich: ‘das ist ein Ohr! Ein Ohr, so gross wie ein Mensch.’ Ich sah noch besser hin: und wirklich, unter dem Ohre bewegte sich noch Etwas, das zum Erbarmen klein und ärmlich und schmächtig war. Und wahrhaftig, das ungeheure Ohr sass auf einem kleinen dünnen Stiele-der Stiel aber war ein Mensch! Wer ein Glas vor das Auge nahm, konnte sogar noch ein kleines neidisches Gesichtchen erkennen: auch, dass ein gedunsenes Seelchen am Stiele baumelte. Das Volk sagte mir aber, das grosse Ohr sei nicht nur ein Mensch, sondern ein grosser Mensch, ein Genie. Aber ich glaubte dem Volke niemals, wenn es von grossen Menschen redete-undbehielt meinen Glauben bei, dass es ein umgekehrter Krüppel sei, der an Allem zu wenig und an Einem zu viel habe. (I didn’t believe my eyes, and looked and looked, and finally said: ‘That’s an ear! An ear the size of a man!’ I looked still closer: and indeed beneath the ear something pitifully small, sorry, and slight was stirring. Truly the monstrous ear rested on a thin little stalkonly the stalk was a man! With the aid of a magnifying glass one could just pick out an envious little face; also a puffed-up little soul dangling from the stalk. The people however told me that the enormous ear was no ordinary man, but a great man, a genius. But I have never believed the people when they spoke of great men—and held to my opinion that it was an inverse cripple who had too little of everything and too much of one thing.)40

If we go by the portraits of Schopenhauer and Wagner, Zarathustra brings to a head the process of development begun in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, from which Nietzsche emerged unmistakably as his own master. The hold of the two presiding mentors of his youth, it will be said, relaxed as his own brilliant intellectual gifts asserted themselves until Nietzsche-Zarathustra, setting out on his travels, broke away from the past and all that it signified. If he had baptised his Zarathustra under a different name, zum Beispiel auf den von Richard Wagner, der Scharfsinn von zwei Jahrtausenden hätte nicht ausgereicht, zu errathen, dass der Verfasser von ‘Menschliches, Allzumenschliches’ der Visionär des Zarathustra ist… (for example under Richard Wagner’s name, the discernment of two millennia would not have led one to guess that the author of Human, All-Too-Human is the visionary of Zarathustra… Eh-Warum ich so klug bin, § 4.)

So marked is the difference between the two works that no one would guess that the author of the one was also the author of the other. Only, assuming that Zarathustra contains the proof of Nietzsche’s ‘emancipation’41 from the Wagnerian past, why is Wagner proposed as a candidate for authorship? Can it be that the prose-poem was expected to pass for a work by Wagner: a Wagner who had learned a difficult lesson, who had taken sides against himself, who had learned to laugh at himself, as Nietzsche had recommended? Among the early commentators concerned with Nietzsche’s compositional methods in Zarathustra, a handful detected tantalizing echoes of the idiom of Wagner’s dramatic poems. It is the more surprising that no serious attempt was made to pursue this promising line

Introduction: Also Sprach Zarathustra  13 of investigation so as to isolate the textual parallels (beyond a few borrowings too blatant to admit of concealment) or to give reasons for them. Of course it was acknowledged that study of Wagner’s personality, art, and theoretical writings added weight to Nietzsche’s reflections on Greek drama in Die Geburt der Tragödie and also helped to clarify the arguments advanced in Schopenhauer als Erzieher and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. Evidently the indictment of Der Fall Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner drew freely on that wealth of first-hand information which, to begin with, had made Nietzsche one of Wagner’s most effective champions. Despite this, following the lead of Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, whose influential Wagner und Nietzsche zur Zeit ihrer Freundschaft came to a halt with the breakdown of communications in 1878, the majority of commentators were almost wilfully blind to much the most pertinent feature of the case: the fact that Nietzsche’s later writings had consistently given abundant signs of the very attachment they were concerned to disown. The relationship with Wagner did not terminate abruptly. On the contrary, a new and even more decisive phase began when the precarious balance tilted towards the negative; a closer bond was forged in the course of the ensuing struggle for release. Only a horizon encompassed by myths can unify culture, Nietzsche had written in Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 23, when predicting a rebirth of myth through Wagner’s artistic reforms. Wagner, he declares in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 9, thinks mythically, as the people have always tended to think; and he likens Der Ring des Nibelungen to a huge system of thought untrammelled by the rigidity of concepts (‘ein ungeheures Gedankensystem ohne die begriffliche Form des Gedankens’). On cursory inspection, no doubt, the mythical element in Zarathustra seems about as far removed from the Wagnerian myths as from the myths of Teutonic or classical antiquity.42 The book shows a more than superficial family resemblance on the one hand to the moral fables of the Enlightenment which Nietzsche admired,43 and on the other hand to the works of religion, mysticism, and prophecy which (with some notable exceptions) he did not. Nonetheless, despite the differences, the case Nietzsche makes in favour of the revival of myth, initially in defence of Wagner’s art, is not without its bearing on his own writing; while his claim that in pursuance of his mythological methods Wagner reverted to a stage when language was almost entirely free from the didactic element and was still poetry, imagery, and feeling,44 could be as aptly applied to those passages in Zarathustra in which, to the confusion of critics, the sound of the rhetoric gains a temporary ascendancy over its sense. Later, an angry, antagonistic Nietzsche poured scorn on Wagner’s use of myth, speaking derisively of the lure of the exotic—strange times, customs, passions—exercised on sentimental stay-at-homes, and, in particular of das Entzücken beim Hineintreten in das ungeheure ferne ausländische vorzeitliche Land, zu dem der Zugang durch Bücher führt, wodurch der ganze Horizont mit neuen Farben und Möglichkeiten bemalt war… (the rapture on entering a fabulous, far flung, foreign, prehistoric realm, accessible only through books, where the whole horizon was painted with new colours and possibilities… N-A3 VIII 3 16[34].)

If we ignore the pejorative tone of the passage, he here comes close to describing just his own ‘legendary’45 stance in Also sprach Zarathustra.

14  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Certainly, as we are reminded in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 9, Wagner’s mythical and musical gifts were intimately related. The emancipated artist (Nietzsche paraphrases) has to think in terms of all the arts at once, as intermediary between apparently disparate spheres, reinstating the unity of the artistic faculty, which cannot be reasoned out but which is discovered only in the creative act. Wagner’s point is taken again in Götzen-Dämmerung, ‘Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen’, § 11, where Nietzsche says that the actor, dancer, musician, and lyric poet are fundamentally related by instinct, but have drifted apart to the point of contradiction. Nietzsche’s view of Wagner, the ‘dithyrambic dramatist’ as he calls him, has the merit of allowing that the impact of Wagner’s music surpasses that of Wagner’s verse, while also conceding the heterogeneous nature of the artist’s language and its intended function as an enhanced means of extra-musical communication. As Wagner wrote to Otto Wesendonck on 22 May 1855: ‘Wäre ich allein nur Musiker, so wäre auch alles ganz in der Ordnung: so bin ich aber zum Unglück noch etwas anderes, und dies macht, daß ich so schwer in dieser Welt unterzubringen bin, so daß es an tausend Irrungen dabei nicht fehlen kann’ (If I were only a musician, everything would be all right: but I have the misfortune to be something else, and this is why I am so difficult to place in this world and prey to all sorts of mistakes). Here, Nietzsche says in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 7, the world of sounds incarnates itself as a spectacle. The artist is led in two directions at once—from the world of sounds to the world of visible things and vice versa. Such is the nature of the ‘dithyrambic dramatist’, who has diesen Begriff so voll genommen, dass er zugleich den Schauspieler, Dichter, Musiker umfasst: so wie dieser Begriff aus der einzig vollkommenen Erscheinung des dithyrambischen Dramatikers vor Wagner, aus Äschylus und seinen griechischen Kunstgenossen, mit Nothwendigkeit entnommen werden muss. (taken the concept in its most extended sense to cover equally the actor, poet, and musician—a concept necessarily derived from the only perfect example of the dithyrambic dramatist before Wagner: Aeschylus and his fellow-artists in Greece.)

Fidelity to Wagner’s aims entails the acceptance of the validity of a new composite art in which, by an amazing feat of technical accomplishment, musical, mythological, and mimetic elements were brought together in a unity self-contained and self-informing. Of course, it would be an exaggeration to say that Zarathustra represents a literal synthesis of the arts—or ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’—based on a studious application of the doctrines master-minded in Oper und Drama, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, and other tracts of Wagner’s Dresden and Zürich periods. We should not be misled by the episodes of music-making and dancing that contribute so much to the climaxes, nor by the fairly numerous letters and miscellaneous jottings in which Zarathustra is described as a ‘symphony’ or musical composition, into believing that its musical connotations are greater than they are (this is as fallacious as the attempt to treat Nietzsche’s musical compositions, striking as they may be, on a par with his published books). Still, it is worth remarking that if in accordance with Wagner’s own, frequently reiterated prescriptions, Wagner’s music is seen as a component—albeit a leading component—within the larger synthesis of the so-called ‘drama’ or ‘music-drama’ (for Wagner had great difficulty in devising a suitable name for his new synthetic art form), the distance separating him from Nietzsche is susbstantially reduced. Also sprach Zarathustra,

Introduction: Also Sprach Zarathustra  15 like Der Ring des Nibelungen, qualifies to be regarded as a system of thought untrammelled by the rigidity of concepts; its message, too, is imparted below the articulate surface by a fusion of elements: Welche Sprache wird ein solcher Geist reden, wenn er mit sich allein redet? Die Sprache des Dithyrambus. Ich bin der Erfinder des Dithyrambus. (What language will such a spirit use when it converses with itself? The language of the dithyramb. I am the inventor of the dithyramb. Eh-Z § 7)

Before proceeding to discuss Nietzsche, the self-styled ‘inventor of the dithyramb’, in relation to Wagner, the erstwhile ‘dithyrambic dramatist’ of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 7, it will be helpful to consider a controversial argument advanced by Nietzsche in later years about the works of his Wagnerian apprenticeship. This argument comes to a head in the autobiography, Ecce homo, which dates from Nietzsche’s last active year and contains a cogent summing-up of his intellectual position. The panegyrical comments bearing on the many and extended quotations interspersed throughout this revelatory book leave no doubt that Zarathustra is to be seen as the touchstone of the ideas inculcated in the intervening period (in the chapter ‘Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe’ alone, Zarathustra gets more than double the space allotted to any other work, including Der Fall Wagner). It is noteworthy, therefore, that in precisely this context Nietzsche chooses to dwell on his Tribschen years. The relevant passages come in the section Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 4. The prediction of the imminent re-birth of a ‘Dionysian’ dramatic art in Die Geburt der Tragödie, he says, had nothing whatever to do with Wagner, but was merely the expression of his own pent-up drives and potentialities; and the same goes for his discussion of the art of the ‘dithyrambic dramatist’ in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 7: Man darf rücksichtslos meinen Namen oder das Wort ‘Zarathustra’ hinstellen, wo der Text das Wort Wagner giebt. Das ganze Bild des dithyrambischen Künstlers ist das Bild des präexistenten Dichters des Zarathustra, mit abgründlicher Tiefe hingezeichnet und ohne einen Augenblick die Wagnersche Realität auch nur zu berühren. (One may unhesitatingly substitute my name or the word ‘Zarathustra’ wherever the text has the word ‘Wagner’. The entire picture of the dithyrambic artist is the picture of the pre-existent poet of Zarathustra, drawn in abysmal depth without making contact with the Wagnerian reality for a moment.)

and he proceeds to compare the ‘idea of Bayreuth’—a term expounded in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 8—with the ‘great noon’ of Also sprach Zarathustra: Insgleichen hatte sich ‘der Gedanke von Bayreuth’ in Etwas verwandelt, das den Kennern meines Zarathustra kein Räthsel-Begriff sein wird: in jenen grossen Mittag, wo sich die Auserwähltesten zur grössten aller Aufgaben weihen—wer weiss? die Vision eines Festes, das ich noch erleben werde… (Likewise ‘the idea of Bayreuth’ had transformed itself into something that will not puzzle those who know my Zarathustra: that great noon when the elect pledge themselves to the greatest of all tasks—who knows? the vision of a festival I shall yet live to see…)

The concluding sentences table with page-references five passages in his pro-Wagnerian ‘Festschrift’ which foretell the ‘pathos’, ‘glance’, ‘style’, ‘accent’, and ‘event’ of Also sprach Zarathustra with an incisive certainty.

16  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism To be sure, Nietzsche’s claim that he was never, even for a moment, in touch with the Wagnerian reality is as hard to reconcile with the known facts of his association with the artist as it is with the fidelity of the portrait he paints in the essay in question. Even so, his attempt to apply to himself the critical standards and tenets originally applied to Wagner— wilfully obtuse as it may at first appear—gains plausibility when we remember the central place assigned to Zarathustra in his literary output. It is abundantly clear, that is to say, that in the course of his early deliberations he had come to vest his hopes in a programme of messianic conquest; and that he believed that his fervent expectations had been finally and decisively vindicated in this seminal document. Thus he re-affirms the validity of the task to which he had pledged himself in his formative years while emphatically denying that in Wagner’s art the necessary leadership is to be sought. ‘Die Schrift “Wagner in Bayreuth” ist eine Vision meiner Zukunft’ he writes in the sub-section ‘Die Unzeitgemässen’, § 3: ‘Dagegen ist in “Schopenhauer als Erzieher” meine innerste Geschichte, mein Werden eingeschrieben. Vor Allem mein Gelöbniss!…’ (The essay ‘Wagner in Bayreuth’ is a vision of my future. On the other hand ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ deals with my innermost history, my genesis. Above all my promise!…) Here, then, we are dealing not with a case of creative ‘influence’, but with a gesture of defiance and protest, of calculated repudiation and refutation, which aimed a deadly thrust at the heart of Wagner’s enterprise by means of an appropriation and adaptation of Wagner’s own characteristic methods in a very different area of artistic composition. Hence Nietzsche’s continuing concern with Wagner in the last ten years of his active life; hence, too, the dramatic intensification of that concern in the autobiography and in the manifestos and communiques of the last period when, retrospectively, the most outspoken claims for the prose-poem were made. In this strain, when writing to Brandes on 19 February 1888, Schopenhauer als Erzieher and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth were described in the same breath as self-examinations rather than genuine psychological studies of the two masters to whom he was as profoundly related as he was hostile; and when writing to Köselitz on 9 December of the same year the same two essays were recalled with the words ‘Beide reden nur von mir, anticipando…’ (Both speak only of myself in anticipation…) Of particular interest is the recently published material apparently intended for the adaptation of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 370, included in Nietzsche contra Wagner—Nietzsche’s last printed book—under the title ‘Wir Antipoden’: Die dritte Unzeitgemässe heisst zum Beispiel ‘Schopenhauer als Erzieher’… Lisez: Nietzsche als Erzieher und, vielleicht, als Etwas mehr… Die vierte Unzeitgemässe heisst: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth… Lisez Nietzsche-Zarathustra und das Fest der Zukunft, der grosse Mittag. Lauter welthistorische Accente; die echte Psychologie des echten Dithyrambikers, des Dichters des Zarathustra. (The third of the Untimely Meditations, for example, is called ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’… Read: Nietzsche as educator and perhaps as something more… The fourth of the Untimely Meditations is entitled ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’… Read: Nietzsche-Zarathustra and the festival of the future, the great noon. Nothing but world-historical accents; the genuine psychology of the genuine dithyrambic poet, the poet of Zarathustra. N-A5 57)

In ‘Wir Antipoden’ Nietzsche contented himself with the brusque interpolated sentence: ‘Man sieht, was ich verkannte, man sieht insgleichen, womit ich Wagner und Schopenhauer beschenkte—mit mir…’ (One can see what I misunderstood; one can see too what I bestowed on Wagner and Schopenhauer—myself…)

Introduction: Also Sprach Zarathustra  17

III Der Mensch der Erkenntniss muss nicht nur seine Feinde lieben, sondern auch seine Freunde hassen können. Man vergilt einem Lehrer schlecht, wenn man immer nur der Schüler bleibt. (The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends. One ill repays a teacher if one always remains only a pupil.)46

These lines from the last discourse of Also sprach Zarathustra, Part I, Nietzsche later deduced, were transcribed in the hour of Wagner’s death in Venice. Cited five years later in the preface and again in the first pages of the Zarathustra analysis in Ecce homo, they tacitly acknowledge Nietzsche’s standing as Wagner’s ‘pupil’, but also suggest a new determination, through hard-won independence, to renounce if not to reverse the pupilteacher relationship. The news of Wagner’s death on 13 February 1883 reached Nietzsche by chance when visiting Genoa on the 14th to remit the manuscript of Part I to his publisher. Contrary to his habit, he bought a copy of the evening Cáffaro. He immediately alighted on the telegram from Venice.47 We know that Nietzsche was in Wagner’s mind during his last months in Venice. Shortly after taking up residence in the city in September, he learned of the recent publication of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. On 3 February 1883, he glanced at a review of this book in Schmeitzner’s Internationale Monatsschrift. His aversion to Nietzsche was already firmly implanted. Now Bayreuth’s future policy was irrevocably determined.48 Nietzsche acted promptly on Köselitz’s suggestion that he should write to Cosima.49 His letter of condolence praising Cosima’s devotion to her husband seems to have been burnt along with most of his other Bayreuth papers. It is mentioned in letters to Köselitz and Overbeck later in the month (19 and 22 February), and was his first and only interruption of silence until the strange series of ‘Dionysos’ notes sent to Cosima (‘Ariadne’) from Turin in the first days of 1889.50 Wagner’s death, however, if it did little to soften his intransigent attitude, contributed to a fairer appreciation of the positive side of the partnership. The passages in letters to friends in which Nietzsche rejoices in his breakaway from Bayreuth must be weighed against the singular expressions of gratitude in the last writings. ‘Es hilft nichts, man muss erst Wagnerianer sein…’ (There’s nothing for it, one must first be a Wagnerite…), we read in the last sentence of the preface to Der Fall Wagner; and in the last sentence of the epilogue ‘Diese Schrift ist, man hört es, von der Dankbarkeit inspirirt…’ (That’s right, this essay is inspired by gratitude…). Again in Ecce homo, ‘Warum ich so klug bin’, § 6: So wie ich bin, stark genug, um mir auch das Fragwürdigste und Gefährlichste noch zum Vortheil zu wenden und damit starker zu werden, nenne ich Wagner den grossen Wohlthäter meines Lebens. (Being as I am, strong enough to turn the most questionable and dangerous to advantage and so to wax stronger, I declare Wagner to be the great benefactor of my life.)

We are made aware of his ambivalence which, while intent upon exposing a seditious influence, tends to effect an ever greater intimacy with it—of that strain of criticism and

18  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism censure which, it has been noted, not without justice, in Nietzsche’s writings about Wagner is almost indistinguishable from praise. ‘Jetzt darf ich mich nicht einmal mehr mit [Wagner] vergleichen—ich gehöre einem andern Rang an’ (Now I may not even compare myself with Wagner any more—I am in a different class), Elisabeth was informed on 3 February 1882. No less revealing is an apparently contradictory statement in a contemporary letter to Malwida von Meysenbug: Zuletzt, wenn ich mich über meine Zukunft nicht ganz täusche, wird in meiner Wirkung der beste Theil der Wagner’schen Wirkung fortleben-und das ist beinahe das Lustige an der Sache. (Finally, if I am not completely mistaken about my future, it is through me that the best part of the Wagnerian enterprise will live on—and that’s what is almost droll about the affair.)

Nor was the conflict of loyalties resolved in the letter in which, a year later, as Wagner’s ‘heir’, Nietzsche conveyed to Köselitz his feelings at the unexpected turn of recent events: Ich glaube sogar, daß der Tod Wagner’s die wesentlichste Erleichterung war, die mir jetzt geschafft werden konnte. Es war hart, sechs Jahre lang Gegner Dessen sein zu müssen, den man am meisten verehrt hat, und ich bin nicht grob genug dazu gebaut. Zuletzt war es der altgewordne Wagner, gegen den ich mich wehren mußte; was den eigentlichen Wagner betrifft, so will ich schon noch zu einem guten Theile sein Erbe werden. (I even believe that Wagner’s death was the most considerable relief that could have been afforded me just now. It was hard being for six years the opponent of the person one had venerated most, and I am not coarse enough for that. In the end, it was the elderly Wagner against whom I had to defend myself; as for the real Wagner, I aim to become to a large extent his heir.)51

Part I: Zarathustra and Der Ring

Er widerspricht mit jedem Wort, dieser jasagendste aller Geister; in ihm sind alle Gegensätze zu einer neuen Einheit gebunden. (He contradicts with every word, this most affirmative of all spirits; in him all contradictions are bound together into a new unity.) Ecce homo, ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, § 6

Chapter 1 Der Ring des Nibelungen

I ‘Damit ein Ereigniss Grösse habe, muss zweierlei zusammenkommen: der grosse Sinn Derer, die es vollbringen, und der grosse Sinn Derer, die es erleben’ (For an event to be great two different things must come together: greatness of sentiment in those who bring it to pass, and greatness of sentiment in those who experience it): with these words, Nietzsche opened his ‘Festschrift’, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, on the occasion of the first performance of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in 1876. The student who wishes to establish Nietzsche’s opinion of Der Ring and its bearing on Also sprach Zarathustra is hampered by the dearth of material. In 1873, Nietzsche adjudicated in a prize essay competition on the subject of the trilogy; and four years later he remitted an exegetical study by Otto Eiser to Wahnfried for inclusion in the first issues of the Bayreuther Blätter. References to the music-drama in his own writings are, however, few; and the notebooks in which he poured forth a stream of critical comment about Wagner give it hardly more than perfunctory recognition. Yet it would be to oversimplify in this case if what at first appears to be calculated coolness were to be taken as real lack of interest. Briefly, it is to be remembered that Der Ring des Nibelungen engrossed Wagner’s energies between 1868–76. There are few developments during this momentous period in the artist’s life with which Nietzsche cannot to some extent be associated and identified, so that the history of the first eight years of his friendship with Wagner reads as a sustained commentary on the founding of the Bayreuth Festival. Nietzsche came to Wagner’s music in the spring of 1861, when still a pupil at Pforta, by way of Hans von Bülow’s vocal score of Tristan und Isolde (published in 1860). After this he started to study the music dramas at the piano. When he met Wagner in Leipzig in 1868, Der Ring was unfinished and only two of Karl Klindworth’s vocal scores were to hand. With these scores Nietzsche was thoroughly conversant: he had been introduced to Das Rheingold (vocal score 1861) by Gustav Krug in a paper written for the ‘Germania’ society at Pforta in May 1862; and he had followed Krug’s dissertation with a paper on Die Walküre (vocal score 1865) in 1866. These studies were resumed after he came into residence at Basel in 1869. Siegfried, nearing completion at the time of his first holiday visit to the Vierwaldstättersee, and Götterdämmerung are fairly frequently mentioned in Wagner’s and Cosima’s correspondence; and in the course of his twenty-three visits to Tribschen in the first three years of his tenure of the chair of classics at Basel University, Nietzsche was kept regularly informed of the latest developments, following them with a lively sense of personal participation and regaling his family and friends with news of his latest discoveries.

Der Ring Des Nibelungen  21 The 1870s saw the publication of some of Wagner’s most important speculative writings after a fallow period, as well as of numerous occasional articles designed to woo and influence public opinion. Now, with encouragement from Nietzsche, earlier plans for a music-journal—eventually the Bayreuther Blätter—began to take a more definite shape. Besides this, the compilation of the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, which contained the tracts of the Dresden period for which there was an urgent public demand1 and a revised version of the text of the trilogy (which had not seen the light of day since the first public edition of 1863), gave scope for further research. The new edition of Wagner’s literary works was of particular personal interest. In 1871, at Cosima’s request, Nietzsche prepared for it the text of the ‘Große Heldenoper’, Siegfried’s Tod, by transcribing in longhand the whole of the copiously amended manuscript. Since Siegfried’s Tod corresponds to Götterdämmerung in many respects, the commission could not have failed to bring him close to Wagner’s dramatic conception in Der Ring des Nibelungen. We shall see that before long, probably as a result of the experience, the history of the cycle was recounted to him in some detail. It can therefore be said that in the early years when Nietzsche was most responsive to W agner’s personality and most eager to get to know his works, Der Ring des Nibelungen was the object of sustained study. Considering the zeal Nietzsche had displayed in promoting Wagner’s cause and the frequently appreciative comments in his early letters, the reader may be puzzled by his claim—frequently reiterated in the later writings—that his repudiation of the artist coincided with the première of the cycle. Scholars have pointed out that the account of his violent reaction against Wagner at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 advanced in the preface to Menschliches, Allzwnenschliches, Part II, Ecce homo, Nietzsche contra Wagner, in the open letter to Ferdinand Avenarius the editor of Der Kunstwart in 1888, and elsewhere, is incompatible with the evidence. We are reminded in particular that Nietzsche’s precarious health—which was to give him only twelve more painful years of active life—was at a very low ebb. Nonetheless, it is easy to see why, retrospectively, when attempting to pin down the precise moment that he came to his senses and realized his total antipathy to Wagner, he chose to dwell on the event that marked the fulfilment of the artist’s most extravagant hopes and the attainment of his well-nigh unattainable ambitions. The obvious explanation is that Nietzsche accepted the Festival for what it clearly was: the climax of Wagner’s career; a personal triumph in the face of overwhelming odds; the ‘greatest victory any artist has ever won’ (MA II-Vorrede, § 1). In later years, therefore, when his unspoken misgivings had given way to open defiance, it became imperative for him to re-appraise the historic event which, for some eight years, he had striven to help to bring to pass. A process of rationalization began, and in consequence of this, the first performance of Der Ring assumed a new, strategic place in the story of his progress towards emancipation.

II A golden hoard is a standard subject of the heroic epic; yet the story of the quest for a ring fashioned from the Rhine’s gold and endowed with peculiar properties is essentially an original invention, exploited by Wagner with considerable artistry and daring.

22  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism The first property of Wagner’s ring is that it gives its bearer unlimited power. This property renders the ring desirable and supplies the motivation for each development in the plot, which may be said to be concerned with the lust for power defined in different ways by the different parties-gods, giants, dwarfs, heroes-involved in the struggle for its possession. At the outset, hard upon the theft of the gold, the scenario, Die Nibelungensage (Mythus),2 informs us ‘so ausgerüstet strebt Alberich nach der Herrschaft über die Welt u. Alles in ihr Enthaltene’ (thus equipped, Alberich strives for dominion over the world and everything in it. W-A7 26). Next, the ring is the nub of a savage confrontation between the amphibious Alberich and Wotan, whose ‘will to power’ is the main subject of his long monologue in the second Act of Die Walküre—perhaps the most revealing analysis of the god’s plight: Als junger Liebe Lust mir verblich, verlangte nach Macht mein Muth: (As the joys of young love faded, I began to lust for power.)

Ambition induces the dwarf Mime to rear the infant Siegfried through whom he hopes to win the hoard. Siegfried—a pawn in Wotan’s power strategy, who prizes the ring as a lovetoken and is largely indifferent to its other attributes—finds a counsellor in the woodbird (Siegfried, Act II), whose words he recalls (Götterdämmerung, Act III): doch möcht’ er den Ring sich errathen, der macht’ ihn zum Walter der Welt! (But if he can unriddle the ring, it’ll make him master of the world!)

Nietzsche’s concept of ‘will to power’ is of particular importance. In Also sprach Zarathustra, the concept is for the most part implicitly discussed, being related to the process of self-conquest (‘Selbst-Überwindung’) that is to engender the future humanity of the ‘Übermensch’ and the teaching of eternal return. References to it in the published writings are few—this is true of some of Nietzsche’s most characteristic tenets; and it receives scant attention in Ecce homo, which otherwise offers a fairly comprehensive summary of his thought. Still, the importance of Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 36, and the emphasis that accrues to the term ‘Wille zur Macht’ in the unpublished papers—an emphasis exploited by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and her team of advisers in their presentation of this huge corpus of material—is widely acknowledged. The advocacy of power, like the commendation of strife and friendship, owes much to Nietzsche’s classical studies; but the works of the Basel period show that the association with Wagner also contributed to the codification of the premiss. A letter to Rohde, 29 May 1869, soon after Nietzsche’s first visit to Tribschen, described the creator of Der Ring des Nibelungen as ‘ein verschwenderisch reicher und großer Geist, ein energischer Charakter und ein bezaubernd liebenswürdiger Mensch, von dem stärksten Wissenstriebe u.s.w.’ (a prodigiously gifted and great spirit, a forceful character, and a charmingly amiable man with the strongest thirst for knowledge, &c.). We catch a glimpse of the same unusual strength of personality at the beginning of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 3; and again, most amply, in the discussion of the dithyrambic dramatist in § 8, where Wagner is portrayed as possessed by the single, consuming idea that of all the arts, that of the theatre is the

Der Ring Des Nibelungen  23 best suited to influence society. This lofty conception of the function of drama appeared to Wagner at first as a sort of temptation, ‘als Ausdruck jenes finsteren, nach Macht und Glanz unersättlich verlangenden persönlichen Willens’ (as the expression of that dark personal will, insatiably craving power and glory). Nietzsche says that Wagner wanted to conquer and triumph as no other artist had done, and to reach at one stroke that height of tyrannical omnipotence for which all his instincts secretly craved. He speaks of Wagner’s revolutionary hopes, and his faith in the prospect of change (‘Umsturz aller Dinge’); then he considers his political defeat and the intensification of his creative exertions. Precisely by way of political renunciation the artist finally came to realise his wider ambition: Während er auf Erfolg bei seinen Zeitgenossen, in einsichtigster Schätzung derselben, immer grundsätzlicher verzichtete und dem Gedanken der Macht entsagte, kam ihm der ‘Erfolg’ und die ‘Macht’. (Even as his judicious estimation of his contemporaries made him renounce the hope of success on principle more and more, and abandon the thought of power, ‘success’ and ‘power’ came to him.)

Wagner’s tyrannical and oppressive temperament, his intensity, and his hold on the masses were adversely remarked on in later years. In conversation with Josef Paneth in 1884 at the time of Zarathustra, Nietzsche is on record as saying that the artist was not so greatly talented: the most striking thing about him—the very source of his ostensible talent—was a will to dominate, to be the absolute master of men.3 The ‘demagogic’ character of Wagner’s art is referred to in the notes of this period.4 Yet not only the artist’s personality deserves mention here. In view of the prominence of the concepts of (Wotan’s) ‘will’ and ‘power’ in Der Ring des Nibelungen and the importance of the composite ‘will to power’, and other similar ideas, in Also sprach Zarathustra, it is in the nature of an oversight that there has been no serious attempt to bring the two works together for comparison. The second property of Wagner’s ring is that it is accursed and the ruin of all who possess it. The gods act from idealistic motives. ‘Power’ is sought by them as a means of asserting values. In Die Nibelungensage (Mythus), we read In hoher Thätigkeit ordneten nun die Götter die Welt, banden die Elemente durch weise Gesetze u. widmeten sich der sorgsamsten Pflege des Menschengeschlechtes. Ihre Kraft steht über Allem. (The gods were now governing the world with great diligence, controlling the elements by wise laws, and devoting themselves to the most prudent nurture of the human race. Their strength stands supreme. W-A7 27)

Wotan’s need to bolster his position involves him in the contract for the construction of the citadel; his inflexible will to power drives him on to the desperate expedient of seizing the ring, so that, defeating his own ends, he incurs the penalty imposed on its unlawful possessors. In attempting to appraise the perplexing ‘Götternoth’, it is worth recalling that the scenario, Die Nibelungensage (Mythus), and the poetic text of Siegfried’s Tod were written in an atmosphere of mounting political unrest to which Wagner was no stranger. Wagner was born in the Brühl in Leipzig on 22 May 1813, one day after Napoleon’s victory at Bautzen.

24  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Political ferment was in the air during his youth in Leipzig where reports of Lafayette’s coup d’état in the revolution in Paris of July 1830 led to violent clashes between students and police into which he threw himself with characteristic abandon. In Dresden, the whirlwind of the 1840s culminating in the abortive uprising of May 1849 likewise drew the young court Kapellmeister compulsively into its vortex. The first prose works and the first draft of Der Ring were unavoidably coloured by the events of these turbulent years, during which Wagner enlisted in the Communal Guard and cemented friendships with the Russian aristocrat-anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (one year his junior, living in Dresden under the assumed name of Dr Schwarz), August Röckel (musical director in Dresden and editor of the democratic Sächsische Volksblätter), Gottfried Semper the architect, and other revolutionaries. These allegiances were not lightly relinquished. As late as 2 May 1874, while orchestrating the last Act of Götterdämmerung at Wahnfried, Wagner looked back to the spring of 1848 when the foundations of Germany’s political unity were laid, and remarked to Cosima ‘Ich selbst hätte, glaube ich, den Ring nicht konzipiert ohne diese Bewegung’ (I don’t believe that I should ever have conceived The Ring but for that movement). In the lesser known article which he contributed (in English) to the North American Review in August and September 1879, he again spoke at length of his ideal of ‘a new civilization… which would make men truly free’ (W-A4 241 f). Throughout his life Wagner was fortunate in making contacts that reinforced his creative bent. After his arrival in Paris in 1839, he established friendly relations with the classical scholar Samuel Lehrs, who became his mentor in philosophical matters;5 and also with Heinrich Heine and members of ‘das Junge Deutschland’ to whom he was introduced by his ‘discoverer’ and former associate (also eventually, one of his implacable enemies), Heinrich Laube. Ten years later, at the time of the Dresden uprising, came a major revelation: Ludwig Feuerbach, whose writings were brought to his notice by the German Catholic priest and political agitator Menzdorff (Metzdorf).6 This enthusiasm for Feuerbach is usually seen as a transitional phase in Wagner’s development, overshadowed by later discoveries. Yet Feuerbach’s Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of a Philosophy of the Future) of 1843 touched off Wagner’s speculations about an art of the future: Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft was dedicated to the philosopher in heartfelt terms in the first edition of 1849, and was accompanied by plans for a Leben der Zukunft, a work ‘that surpasses everything’, according to Karl Ritter.7 ‘Mensch der Zukunft’ (man of the future) and similar terms are prominent in the writings of the Dresden period. The catchword ‘Zukunftsmusik’ (music of the future), like the ‘Zukunftsphilologie’ (classics of the future) applied to Nietzsche, was a Feuerbachian coinage minted by Wagner’s detractors,8 although Liszt tried to give respectability to it, and Wagner himself used it ironically as the title of an open letter addressed to Frédéric Villot as a preface to the French translations of four of his dramatic texts in 1860. In December 1851, Wagner, now in the aftermath of the Dresden uprising a refugee and fugitive from justice, and his friend the exiled Schwabian revolutionary poet, Georg Herwegh, tried to get Feuerbach to join them in Zurich.9 As late as June 1853 we find Wagner sending Feuerbach’s Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion to Röckel, recommending the book in his covering letter as a résumé of the author’s work in philosophy. It is customary to rate Wagner’s performance in the political arena—one thinks of his contributions to the Dresden Volksblätter and Anzeiger including the ‘Vaterlandsverein’

Der Ring Des Nibelungen  25 speech published anonymously on 14 June 184810—as incommensurate with his distinction as a creative artist. Above all, his loyalty to the republican cause is impugned by his willing acceptance of the patronage of the autocratic Ludwig II of Bavaria in 1864, to whom finally the score of the ‘revolutionary’ Ring was dedicated. Even at the time, his clarion-call for a new order was in some respects difficult to reconcile with the fanatical and intransigent republicanism of his confrères in Dresden.11 Nevertheless, it reflected a genuine awareness of and sympathy for the movement towards social reform. No doubt his concern was with the role of the artist in society, and with the possibilities of a resurgent national drama as a focus of cultural life. Still, by adopting the guise of total revolutionary, strenuously advocating a new ‘Lebensgemeinschaft’ and the advent of a new élite, the ‘men of the future’ of Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, he helped to fan the flames of socialistic sentiment and made a distinct contribution to an ideological war. Das große Gesammtkunstwerk, das alle Gattungen der Kunst zu unfassen hat, um jede einzelne dieser Gattungen als Mittel gewissermaßen zu verbrauchen, zu vernichten zu Gunsten der Erreichung des Gesammtzweckes aller, nämlich der unbedingten, unmittelbaren Darstellung der vollendeten menschlichen Natur,—dieses große Gesammtkunstwerk erkennt [der Künstler] nicht als die willkürlich mögliche That des Einzelnen, sondern als das nothwendig denkbare gemeinsame Werk der Menschen der Zukunft. (The great synthesis of the arts which must bring all the artistic media together, consuming each, as it were, in the interests of their common aim, i.e., the direct depiction, without concession, of perfect human nature—this great synthesis cannot be understood by the artist as a random achievement, but as the necessary collective achievement of men of the future. W-A, III 74).

III Ill-advised as it is to try to establish too literal a connection between an artist’s life and works, the affinities that relate these pioneering efforts on behalf of German social democracy to the chief artistic project of the Dresden period offer an alluring prospect. The contradictory properties of Alberich’s ring had made the god’s position appear completely untenable. In order to establish his sway, Wotan12 sets about to create a race of heroes whose progeny, Siegfried, will in time take possession of the contaminated Rhinegold and return it to its rightful owners. This was specified in Die Nibelungensage (Mythus) where Wagner enlarged on the god’s strategy and made much of the antithetical standing of his two principal characters: [Wotan] selbst kann aber das Unrecht nicht tilgen, ohne ein neues Unrecht zu begehen… Zu dieser hohen Bestimmung, Tilger ihrer eigenen Schuld zu sein, erziehen nun die Götter den Menschen, u. ihre Absicht würde erreicht sein, wenn sie in dieser Menschenschöpfung sich selbst vernichteten, nämlich in der Freiheit des menschlichen Bewußtseins ihres unmittelbaren Einflusses sich selbst begeben müßten. (Wotan, however, can’t right the wrong without committing another… So the gods rear mankind for this lofty destiny-to annul their own guilt-and their purpose would be fulfilled if in the process they should cancel themselves out: that is, if their immediate influence on the world should be supplanted by free human consciousness. W-A7 27)

26  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism The chief trait of Siegfried’s personality was defined at a late stage. In conversation with G.A.Kietz in Dresden in 1848, Wagner described his interest in the legend of a youth ignorant of the meaning of fear (the folk-tale ‘Von einem, der auszog, das Fürchten zu lernen’ by the brothers Grimm).13 When writing to Uhlig on 10 May 1851, he again mentioned this story, and spoke of his astonishment on recognizing here the ‘fearless’ Siegfried of the Völsunga Saga, § 20, who wins the hoard and wakens Brünnhilde. The subject of Siegfried’s ‘learning of fear’ became a major dramatic theme in the first draft of Der junge Siegfried; and it remains conspicuous in the action of the reconstituted Siegfried in Der Ring, despite some drastic pruning of the original text. The ‘fearless’ Siegfried was no conventional copy of the hero of the Nibelungenlied (to which Wagner resorted chiefly for the names of his characters). Reverting by way of the Icelandic classics to the mythological sun-hero of immemorial antiquity, working backwards ‘in the teeth of the historical material’ (W-A1 IV 382), Wagner endeavoured to create a prototype of the future humanity to which both he and his compatriots aspired. This comes across strongly in the letters to Röckel, his erstwhile companion-in-arms, who having undergone the arrest and trial that Wagner himself had so narrowly eluded was now in captivity at Waldheim, an unrepentant political prisoner.14 In a reflective strain, when writing to Röckel on 26 January 1854, Wagner speaks of Siegfried as the perfect human being whose higher consciousness manifests itself in present life and action; in another letter of 23 August 1856, he recalls that he conceived the trilogy at a time when in his imagination he had constructed an optimistic Hellenistic world, and adds ‘Ich entsinne mich nun, in diesem absichtlich gestaltenden Sinne die Individualität meines Siegfried herausgegriffen zu haben’ (I now recall that it was for this definite creative purpose that I moulded the character of my Siegfried). Penetrating a deep stratum of the national consciousness, the ‘Große Heldenoper’ was to have suggested a total vindication of the artist’s political aspirations. When the poem was read to a group of Dresden friends in December 1848,15 the last scene was envisaged as a moment of unsurpassable climax in which the Nibelungs were released from bondage, and Siegfried, fully armed, was depicted with the Walküre ascending to the citadel: Siegfried führ’ ich dir zu: biet’ ihm minnlichen Gruß, dem Bürgen ewiger Macht! (I present Siegfried to you: greet him lovingly as the guardian of eternal power!)

The history of the completion of Der Ring des Nibelungen has often been recounted by scholars.16 It would exceed the present purpose to discuss their findings in detail; but one complication will be inspected because of its bearing on Also sprach Zarathustra. For two years, Siegfried’s Tod, based on the last two-thirds of Die Nibelungensage (Mythus), was envisaged as a self-contained unity.17 Only by stages after he had taken refuge in Zürich did Wagner retrace his steps through the first third of the scenario in Der junge Siegfried, Die Walküre, and Das Rheingold (in that order). At some time after finishing the text of Siegfried’s Tod, he had second thoughts about the peroration, and in two marginal notes to the third fair-copy of early 1849, replacing the verses quoted above (which are heavily inked out), specified a blessed atonement (‘selige Sühnung’) and then a blessed death-redemption (‘selige Todeserlösung’) for the gods (W-A7, facing 54). It has

Der Ring Des Nibelungen  27 been held by some authorities that these notes represent a decision to invert the sense of the dénouement and to replace the scene of triumph with a scene of catastrophe. This is too sweeping. The prophecy of doom had always played a part in Wagner’s calculations. It followed that when at the end of October 1848, urged on by the veteran theatre régisseur Eduard Devrient, he added an explanatory prologue to Siegfried’s Tod, he elected to transpose a scene from an earlier portion of Die Nibelungensage (Mythus): [Wotan] weicht auf den Rath der drei Schicksalsfrauen (Nornen), die ihn vor dem Unter gange der Götter selbst warnen. (Wotan yields to the counsel of three Fates (Norns), who warn him of the going down of the gods. W-A7 26)

The notes, then, did not radically depart from the original scheme. Nor does it follow that because the theme of the ‘going-down’—‘Untergang’—of the gods was to be taken up in the peroration, this ‘going down’ was to be visibly enacted. On the contrary, the first note specifies a triumphant progress to Valhalla; the second also refers to Siegfried’s taking command: ‘Erbleichet in Wonne vor des Menschen That,/vor dem Helden, den ihr gezeugt!’ (Turn pale in bliss before the human hero whom you begat!). A decisive fact has been discounted. In the amended manuscript, the final tableau is untouched; in the fourth fair copy prepared at Villeneuve early in May 1850, and in the text Nietzsche transcribed for publication, the notes are lacking. What is involved is not a reversal of the implications of the ‘Große Heldenoper’. If Wotan’s prospects are less secure, disaster is averted by his subtle strategy and Siegfried’s scene of triumph is retained intact. This holds good in respect of the bipartite plan that materialized when the poem Der junge Siegfried was written in Zürich between 3–24 June 1851; here the god, hitherto an invisible force behind events, begins to come to the forefront of the action. The first sketch of 3–10 May (a large sheet folded in four, which served as a wrapper for the finished manuscript) outlines a consultation scene between Wotan and a sibyl, reinforcing the idea of the god’s eventual passing: [Wotan] und die Wala: götterende. [Wotan’s]entschluß: die Wala versinkt. (Wotan and the sibyl: the passing of the gods. Wotan’s decision: the sibyl sinks. W-A7 66)

A freely invented, second encounter brings the god into direct conflict with his progeny: [Wotan] und die Wala. Schuld der götter, und ihr nothwendiger untergang: Siegfrieds bestimmung!—Selbstvernichtung der götter. (Wotan and the sibyl. Guilt of the gods and their necessary fall: Siegfried’s destiny!—Selfdestruction of the gods. W-A6 67)18

The literary source of the scene with the sibyl is the Völuspá: the most famous and important of the Icelandic classics, which stands at the beginning of the Codex Regius collection of Old Norse vernacular poetry; and its shorter variant, Baldrs Draumar, to which some of Wagner’s dialogue closely corresponds. Wagner already knew these poems: the inventory of his confiscated Dresden library lists several standard editions of the Poetic Edda.19 Doubtless he excluded them from his deliberations at Dresden because their pessimistic eschatology ran counter to the heroic—or ‘optimistic’—inflection which at that time he wanted to give to the Siegfried epic. His arrival in Zürich coincided with the publication

28  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism of Simrock’s Die Edda with its opening translation of the Völuspá in 1851.20 Study of Simrock and talks with the prolific Icelandic scholar Ernst Moritz Ettmüller who, in 1837, had translated the Edda into German alliterative verse,21 may have reminded him of the description of the Norse apocalypse (‘Ragnarök’) and its value as a compendium of skaldic and Eddaic cosmogony. For all Wagner’s manifest originality, not the least striking feature of Der Ring is its dependence on its literary models. Does it follow that Wagner had decided to alter the ending of Siegfried’s Tod and to do away with Siegfried’s scene of triumph? Admittedly the notes for the oracular consultation scene speak of the gods’ collective ‘guilt’, their ‘necessary going down’, and—more ominously—of their ‘self-destruction’. Yet the correct explanation is surely the opposite. Wagner, despairing of any further compromise with authority, had pinned his hopes on Siegfried as the symbol of regenerate humanity and had set about to strengthen the contrast between his leading characters. By enlarging on the fate of the gods, that is to say, he aimed to enhance Siegfried’s stature and actually to intensify the optimistic connotations of the closing scene. Hence the god’s confession of ‘guilt’ in his interview with the sibyl did not predicate a tragic dénouement; quite the contrary, it had the effect of throwing Siegfried’s ‘destiny’ into relief and of bolstering the Feuerbachian scheme, which all along had been concerned with the transfer of power to a free, emancipated mankind from a harried and ultimately ineffectual ancien régime. When did Wagner decide to revise the ending of Der Ring, and why? The revision, it must be recognized, entirely reversed the message of one of the most sophisticated political allegories ever conceived. After the ignominious failure of the Dresden uprising, Wagner’s flight to Switzerland, and exile, an accumulation of disastrous circumstances began to take its toll; yet the artist’s revolutionary ardour was damped not at all despite every kind of personal misfortune. Indeed it was precisely at this time that he began to contemplate the grandiose scheme for the construction of a special theatre and the inauguration of a special Festival, remarking to Uhlig on 12 November 1851: Mit ihm gebe ich den Menschen der Revolution dann die Bedeutung dieser Revolution, nach ihrem edelsten Sinne, zu erkennen. Dieses Publikum wird mich verstehen; das jetzige kann es nicht. (With this, I shall acquaint the men of the revolution with the meaning of this revolution in its noblest sense. This audience will understand me; today’s hasn’t a chance. W-Br9 783)

The first date of importance is early November 1851 when the prose synopsis of the prologue, Das Rheingold, was written;22 here we learn that the theft of the golden hoard is conditional upon a renunciation of love: Das Gold erglänzt. ‘wie das zu gewinnen?’ ‘Wer der liebe entsagt.’—Alberich raubt das gold.—Nacht. (The gold glows. ‘How can it be taken?’ ‘He who renounces love.’—Alberich plunders the gold.—Night. W-A7 203)

After this, the idea of the attainment of ‘power’ came to be inextricably entangled with the idea of the restitution of love to a world to which it had hitherto been denied. Plans for a

Der Ring Des Nibelungen  29 new peroration in which the guiding hand of Feuerbach and of the Persian poet Hafiz is discernible23 presumably originated at about this time: Nicht Gut, nicht Gold, noch göttliche Pracht; nicht Haus, nicht Hof, noch herrischer Prunk; nicht trüber Verträge trügender Bund, nicht heuchelnder Sitte hartes Gesetz: selig in Lust und Leid läßt-die Liebe nur sein.— (Not possessions, not riches, nor godly glory; not house, not court, nor haughty pomp; not the deceptive bond of murky treaties, not the harsh rule of shallow convention: only through love are joy and sorrow blessed.)

With the expansion of the scheme, Wotan became a figure of the first magnitude, whose predicament could hardly be construed in anything other than a tragic context. Although Siegfried retained much of the vitality of the hero of Siegfried’s Tod, not even he is immune to the destructive spell of the contaminated Rhinegold. The god’s higher purpose, tacitly revealed by Brünnhilde’s solemn and moving proclamation of ‘peace’, is now envisaged as a voluntary act of self-dissolution which even Siegfried’s heroic feats are unable to avert. As Wagner explained to Röckel, Wotan deliberately makes his own destruction—no longer Siegfried’s feats—the precondition of the expiation of the primordial wrong (‘[Wotan] knüpft daher die Bedingung seines gewünschten eignen Unterganges an diese Tilgung eines ältesten Unrechtes.’ 25–26 January 1854).24 In the final version of the poem this gives a symbolic significance to the new closing scene of universal holocaust, replacing the triumphant progress to Valhalla, where the gods are seen in conclave as the flames from Siegfried’s funeral pyre mount to consume them. Der junge Siegfried and Siegfried’s Tod would have to be radically revised in everything concerning the myth of the gods, Uhlig was notified on 2 July 1852. Changes were also forecast in letters to Liszt (9 November 1852) and Uhlig (20 November 1852): ‘[In Siegfried’s Tod] sind zwei Scenen ganz neu zu dichten…vor allem aber auch der Schluß’ (In Siegfried’s Death two scenes have to be completely re-written…also, above all, the ending). Strobel maintained that only after 20 November—less than a month before the poem was finished and some eight years after it was begun—did Wagner settle down to the task of rewriting the last scene (W-A7 60); but this date is far from satisfactory. For although no documentary material of an earlier date survives, it looks as if firm plans were laid well in advance, and contributed a share to the sombre colouring with which the trilogy as a whole is imbued. The final changes may be briefly summarized. In Siegfried’s Tod, Act I, the ‘Waltraute’ scene—one of Wagner’s finest inspirations—replaced material transposed to Die Walküre, Act III; and the prologue was refashioned to include the breaking of the Norns’ rope so as to intensify the premonition of the imminent fall of the gods: ‘Es riß! Es riß! Es riß!/Zu End’ ewiges Wissen!/Der Welt melden/Weise nichts mehr’ (It’s broken! It’s broken! It’s broken! Our eternal knowledge is over! The world shall no more hear wise counsel).25

30  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism In Der junge Siegfried, the confrontation with the sibyl—now Erda—continued to be a definite dramatic crux and a key scene in the development of Wotan’s character. Now, however, an extended passage describing how Siegfried is to inherit ‘life’s eternal power’ from the departing gods was cut, so that the accent fell directly on Wotan’s act of renunciation, itself contrasted with an angry expostulation in Die Walküre, Act II: Um der Götter Ende grämt mich die Angst nicht, seit mein Wunsch es—will! Was in Zwiespalt’s wildem Schmerze verzweifelnd einst ich beschloß, froh und freudig führ’ ich frei es nun aus. (The passing of the gods no longer fills me with dread, since I desire it! What I once despairingly resolved in the raging pain of conflict I shall now carry out joyfully, of my own free will.)

words Wagner tentatively considered setting in recitative (C-Tb, 12 March 1869). The confrontation between Wotan and Siegfried, on the other hand, was lengthened to include a physical combat in which the god is stripped of the last vestige of his authority. Wotan is the collective intelligence of the present, Wagner moralized to Röckel on 25–6 January 1854, wogegen Siegfried der von uns gewünschte, gewollte Mensch der Zukunft ist, der aber nicht durch uns gemacht werden kann, und der sich selbst schaffen muß durch unsre Vernichtung. (whereas Sigfried is the man of the future whom we long for but cannot ourselves bring into being, but who must create himself by means of our destruction.)

Despite his paternal affection and a last flaring-up of self-assertion—‘here before his fall he is so completely human that, contrary to his highest purpose, his ancient pride stirs again’—Wotan’s taunts are aimed at provoking the fearless youth to shatter the spear, the emblem of his authority, with which he bars the path to the Walküre: Wer sie erweckte, wer sie gewänne, machtlos macht’ er mich ewig.— (Whoever wakes her, whoever wins her, makes me eternally powerless.—)26

The myth concerned with the struggle for power came to describe a voluntary renunciation of power; while the prospects for a ‘future humanity’, if not yet completely annulled, were significantly reduced. With this, the god fades out of the action to await the return of the ring which is to bring the final consolation. The necessity of his downfall (‘Untergang’) arises from our deepest convictions, Wagner goes on to say in his long letter to Röckel, adding that Wotan himself rises to the tragic height of willing it (‘er schwingt sich bis zu der tragischen Höhe, seinen Untergang—zu wollen’). This is eloquently rephrased in a less familiar passage in the first pages of Über Staat und Religion, written for Ludwig II of Bavaria in 1864:

Der Ring Des Nibelungen  31 Hier ist Alles durch und durch tragisch, und der Wille, der eine Welt nach seinem Wunsche bilden wollte, kann endlich zu nichts Befriedigenderem gelangen, als durch einen würdigen Untergang sich selbst zu brechen. (Here everything is tragic through and through, and the will that strove to build a world after its own desire finally has no greater satisfaction than to break itself in an act of noble self-dissolution. W-A1 VIII 11)

The unpublished manuscript of this essay was entrusted to Nietzsche during his second stay at Tribschen; it is appreciatively mentioned in his correspondence until as late as 1873. Thus by way of study of Wagner’s theoretical writings, followed presently by his work on the unpublished manuscript of Siegfried’s Tod, Nietzsche began to acquire at first hand that intimate knowledge of Wagner’s purposes which was to have issue in the unprecedented literary activities of 1883–5.

Chapter 2 Zarathustra’s Going Down

I The prologue to Also sprach Zarathustra begins with the passage in which we learn of the prophet’s preparation for his ministry: Als Zarathustra dreissig Jahr alt war, verliess er seine Heimat und den See seiner Heimat und gieng in das Gebirge. Hier genoss er seines Geistes und seiner Einsamkeit und wurde dessen zehn Jahre nicht müde. (When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude and did not weary of this for ten years.)

This leads into Zarathustra’s invocation to the sun rising from the depths of the underworld to the height of his cave. From the outset, the trajectory of the prophet’s thought is likened to the orbit of the sun as it moves about the axis of the earth, creating light and dark, day and night, rising as it sets. Almost imperceptibly, the sun’s unchanging cycle, constantly renewed, inclines the imagination towards the cosmology of the ‘great year of becoming’ and Zarathustra’s teaching of eternal return. The prophet continues Siehe! Ich bin meiner Weisheit überdrüssig, wie die Biene, die des Honigs zu viel gesammelt hat, ich bedarf der Hände, die sich ausstrecken. Ich möchte verschenken und austheilen, bis die Weisen unter den Menschen wieder einmal i hrer Thorheit und die Armen wieder einmal ihres Reichthums froh geworden sind. Dazu muss ich in die Tiefe steigen: wie du des Abends thust, wenn du hinter das Meer gehst und noch der Unterwelt Licht bringst, du überreiches Gestirn! Ich muss, gleich dir, untergehen, wie die Menschen es nennen, zu denen ich hinab will. (See! I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey, I need hands that reach out. I want to bestow and impart until the wise among men once more rejoice in their folly and the poor in their riches. Therefore, I must descend into the depths—as you do in the evening, super-abundant star, when you go behind the sea and bring light to the underworld. Like you, I must go down, as men, to whom I want to descend, would say.)

The terminology defies a literal reading. In the sentence ‘Like you, I must go down’, Zarathustra thinks of the sun’s ‘going down’ or setting—in an extended sense a quest for new areas to illumine—and likens it to his own descent from his mountain and quest for hearers. As the story unfolds itself, it transpires that he does not only seek to gain a hearing: he is involved in a struggle for possession of a treasure of which at first he has only a faint inkling. Like the sun, he must descend to the underworld, obtain by conquest the ‘ring of rings’—eternal return—and claim and propagate this teaching as his own.

Zarathustra’s Going Down  33 Together with these complicated interassociative meanings—the sun-like ‘setting’, the quest for hearers, the descent to the underworld, and the epic conquest—another meaning needs to be reckoned with. Zarathustra’s campaign of enlightenment is bound up with a campaign of destruction. He must apprise mankind of the breakdown of values and even hasten disruption by subjecting each facet of the existing order to his scrutiny. Answerable as he is for the consequences of his own tactics, the premonition of a final self-conquest already lends a tragic inflection to his words Siehe! Dieser Becher will wieder leer werden, und Zarathustra will wieder Mensch werden. —Also begann Zarathustra’s Untergang. (See! This cup wants to be empty again, and Zarathustra wants to be a man again.—So began Zarathustra’s going down.)

After wending his way past the courteously quizzical hermit’s lair to the market-place of an inhospitable town, Zarathustra, as ‘Untergehender’, proceeds in another strain Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen…/Der Übermensch ist der Sinn der Erde. Euer Wille sage: der Übermensch sei der Sinn der Erde! (I teach you the superman… The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the superman shall be the meaning of the earth! Z-Vorrede § 3)

The exordium is a powerful one, prefacing a discourse in which the prophet speaks of the death of God and tries to impress on his incredulous audience the need for a new concept to replace the present stunted, impoverished, and contingent idea of humanity. Because of its placement so soon after he has announced his ‘going down’, the injunction suggests a psychological rift, a will schismatically divided, torn between opposite extremes. This dichotomy has posed insuperable problems of interpretation: yet not only was Nietzsche well aware of the fact that he had given Zarathustra a ‘double will’ (as he calls it in ‘Von der Menschen-Klugheit’); but also the antitheses ‘above’ and ‘below’, ‘height’ and ‘depth’, become a pervasive feature of his text, infused as it is by a constantly proliferating range of kinetic images which bolster the underlying contrast. The word ‘Übermensch’ is no less difficult to elucidate. In Also sprach Zarathustra, it seems to be a coinage accentuating the dialectic defined by the prefixes ‘über’ and ‘unter’ (Nietzsche uses it sparingly in his later works).1 Just before Zarathustra, however, it had acquired specific, albeit derogatory connotations. In Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, § 164, ‘Gefahr und Gewinn im Cultus des Genius’, we read Es ist jedenfalls ein gefährliches Anzeichen, wenn den Menschen jener Schauder vor sich selbst überfällt…; wenn der Opferduft, welchen man billigerweise allein einem Gotte bringt, dem Genie in’s Gehirn dringt, so dass er zu schwanken und sich für etwas Uebermenschliches zu halten beginnt. (In any case it is a dangerous sign when a man shudders at himself…when the sacrificial incense, properly offered only to a god, infiltrates the genius’s brain, so that he starts to lose control and to take himself for something superhuman.)

Similarly in § 461, ‘Fürst und Gott’, Nietzsche speaks of the cult of genius and of the danger inherent in the attempt to exalt particular men to the super-human (‘in das

34  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Uebermenschliche’). In Morgenröthe, § 548, he speaks cryptically of the ‘superhuman spirit’ of the genius whose integrity he questions, lamenting that it has hitherto required little intelligence to see through it.2 It is well known that the books written after the Festival are packed with recriminations against Wagner, although he is not always mentioned by name. In the paragraph on the ‘Geniekultus’ in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Nietzsche dodges the issue and instances Napoleon (whom he held in high esteem); but when he describes the genius’s feeling of deserving exceptional rights, his belief that association with him confers a favour, and his frantic rage at any comparison with others, one is tempted to make a deft substitution.3 The suspicion that before Zarathustra the term ‘Übermensch’ had acquired specifically Wagnerian—or anti-Wagnerian—connotations is confirmed by a monograph on Bayreuth by the composer Martin Plüddemann, whose acquaintance Nietzsche made at the Festival of 1876.4 Near the end of his book Plüddemann says that in Der Ring Wagner has depicted supermen; and taking his cue from Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 21, discusses the way in which the impact of the stage action is intensified by the musical score. So compelling is the new identity discovered by the performer, that ‘he is transformed and grows to a superhuman stature and strength’. Plüddemann’s study was designed to monitor contemporary opinion. Its subject, therefore, was of immediate concern to Nietzsche, whose standing as Wagner’s foremost champion (in 1877) is acknowledged by perceptive comments on Die Geburt der Tragödie and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth quoted in extenso. The fact that the book—a presentation copy?—is listed in the inventory of Nietzsche’s library5 suggests that it was closely read and prompts us to reconsider the description of the actor transfigured by his art, who ‘stands before us as a superman, menacing and terrible in his power’. It looks very much as if Plüddemann redirected attention to the term ‘Übermensch’, and that this was why Nietzsche used it when disparaging the cult of the genius in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches and Morgenröthe, no doubt expecting that the force of the allusion would not be lost on members of the Bayreuth circle. From here it was carried forward into the prose-poem where it received a new and characteristic—but still markedly anti-Wagnerian—emphasis.

II The main premiss of Nietzsche’s thought is indeed atheism, albeit atheism of a particular brand;6 and the task he prescribes for a future humanity is determined by his denial of the existence of God. Initially the death (or ‘murder’) of God7 is greeted with consternation. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 125, ‘Der tolle Mensch’—the forerunner of ‘Zarathustra’s Vorrede’, §§ 2 and 3—remorselessly lays bare the sequence of collapse, cataclysm, and catastrophe now impending. This trend is soon checked. The sense of loss, so acutely registered by the imaginary spokesman, is for Nietzsche himself chiefly a sense of gain. Even, indeed, in ‘Der tolle Mensch’, the deicide inaugurating a reign of terror, a period of gloom and eclipse, and a fall into nothingness is a spur to creative endeavour and hence a potential source of hope. Shall we not have to become gods ourselves just to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever comes after us will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto. A telling observation in § 285, ‘Excelsior!’, is cast in the form of a parable about a lake that refused to flow away and so rose higher and higher ‘Vielleicht wird der Mensch von da an immer höher steigen, wo er nicht mehr in

Zarathustra’s Going Down  35 einen Gott ausfliesst’ (Perhaps man will rise higher and higher where he no longer drains away into a god). Zarathustra goes on to predict just such a regeneration in which, freed from his subservience to the illusory and harmful metaphysical palliatives of the ‘Hinterweltler’, man will gain for himself the wealth formerly lavished on the concept of the Divine. The idea of a regenerate humanity owes much to Nietzsche’s work at Pforta, Bonn, and Leipzig. His study of Ermanaric (the subject of one of the best of his early tone-poems), Theognis (the subject of his leaving-essay at Schulpforta and first publication in the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie), and the writings of such authors as Goethe, Hölderlin, Byron (as the poet of Manfred), and Rousseau, in varying degrees contributed to it. These and other affiliations have been frequently rehearsed and need not here detain us. In this context we are concerned with a less familiar subject of comparison: Wagner’s campaign for human regeneration and its principal representative, Siegfried—a being of light, who, like the ‘Übermensch’, is closely associated with the image of the sun (Götterdämmerung, Act II, i): Lachend in liebender Brunst brennt er lebend dahin. (Laughing in the fire of love, he burns away as he lives.)8

Wagner’s ‘amazingly vivid portrait of young manhood’ in Siegfried (U IV § 2) was particularly well received by Nietzsche. The instalments of Der Ring that deal with the hero’s exploits were set to music during the most successful years of his friendship with Wagner; his work on Siegfried’s Tod, his talks with Klindworth, Eiser, and Wagner himself during the completion of the score, his private study of the scores and poems, and his attendance at the first Bayreuth Festival made him thoroughly familiar with the character. Nor did he recede from his generally favourable opinion in later years. Just before Zarathustra, in the otherwise adverse Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 99, he identified what he called the essentially Wagnerian trait, ‘in a word the Siegfried trait’ (‘Siegfriedhafte’) in the countenances of Wagner’s heroes, approvingly quoting a sizeable extract from Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, §11, contending dass der freie Mensch sowohl gut als böse sein kann, dass aber der unfreie Mensch eine Schande der Natur ist, und an keinem himmlischen noch irdischen Troste Antheil hat; endlich, dass Jeder, der frei werden will, es durch sich selber werden muss, und dass Niemandem die Freiheit als ein Wundergeschenk in den Schooss fällt. (that the free man can be either good or evil, but that the man who is not free is a disgrace to nature with no share in heavenly or earthly bliss; finally that everyone who wants to be f ree must become f ree by his own exertions, and that freedom falls into no one’s lap as a gift from heaven.)9

Not long after Zarathustra, he wrote in a severely critical memorandum ‘Ich liebte nur den Wagner, den ich kannte, d.h. einen rechtschaffnen Atheisten und Immoralisten, der die Figur Siegfrieds, eines sehr freien Menschen, erfunden hat’ (I loved only the Wagner I knew, that is, an honest atheist and immoralist who invented the figure of Siegfried, a truly free man. N-A3 VII 3 34[205]). An interesting sidelight emerges from the letters exchanged by Nietzsche and Brandes in 1888. Brandes was unaware of any connection between Nietzsche’s ‘Übermensch’ and Wagner’s ‘Über-Held’; but when delivering his historic series of lectures on Nietzsche

36  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism at the University of Copenhagen he was struck by the similarities between Nietzsche’s writings and the Icelandic sagas, remarking that he had found much in the latter to support the theory of a race of masters (23 May 1888). Nietzsche assented to this when telling Köselitz of the brilliant success of Brandes’s lectures—a success he attributed largely to Brandes’s hearers’ knowledge of Old Norse literature; indeed, he went further and, in the ‘Epilog’ to Der Fall Wagner, fastened on the disparity between the pessimistic tenor of Wagner’s later music-dramas and the Icelandic sources that so much inspired them: Nach der Herren-Moral, der vornehmen Moral hinschielen (—die isländische Sage ist beinahe deren wichtigste Urkunde—) und dabei die Gegenlehre, die vom ‘Evangelium der Niedrigen’, vom Bedürfniss der Erlösung, im Munde führen! (To hanker after the morality of masters, the noble morality—of which the lcelandic sagas provide almost the most important documentation—while mouthing the counter-doctrine, the ‘gospel of the lowly’, of the necessory of redemption!)

Certainly there are obstacles in the way of the attempt to instate Wagner’s Siegfried as a precursor of Nietzsche’s superman. Of all the characters in Der Ring, the ‘Waldknabe’ has perhaps the least realistic insight into the concatenation of events in which he is enmeshed. In his surrender to impulse and instinct, he might well be regarded as a descendant of Rousseau’s natural man, ‘le sauvage libre et vertueux’ (a prospect before which Nietzsche stands aghast in GötzenDämmerung, ‘Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen’, § 48, and elsewhere); or even as a belated by-product—hardly more appealing—of the ‘Geniekultus’ with which Schopenhauer and the writers of the Sturm und Drang had challenged the complacency of an epoch. The idea of the perfectibility of man through a reform of social conditions propagated in Du Contrat social held a powerful sway in the nineteenth century. Although this trend was not without its influence on Nietzsche, his ideological bent has little in common with it. Whereas Rousseau and his followers (such as Feuerbach) when advocating a ‘return to nature’ were concerned with an attainable state of human perfection, Nietzsche is concerned with an act of self-conquest of which man as we know him is, even in theory, definitely incapable. Man is not to be ‘enriched’, ‘ennobled’, or ‘perfected’ by reverting to his natural condition. Man is to be conquered. And as Nietzsche maintains in Götzen-Dämmerung, it is not so much the prospect of a ‘return’ as an ‘ascent’ that leads to Zarathustra’s deft adaptation of the prophecy of Isaiah (‘Von der schenkenden Tugend’, § 2): ‘Aus euch, die ihr euch selber auswähltet, soll ein auserwähltes Volk erwachsen:— und aus ihm der ‘Übermensch’ (From you who have chosen yourselves shall grow a chosen people—and from it, the superman). We may concede that Nietzsche was registering a protest against Wagner, and that the super-human triumph of the ‘Übermensch’ was meant to offset the ‘all-too-human’ triumph of the man of the future, Siegfried. It is all the more significant that in order to point the contrast he had recourse to Wagner’s terminology, finally, in conversation with Paneth, accepting it as synonymous with his own ‘Übermensch’.10 Nietzsche first uses the term ‘men of the future’ in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 10: [Wagners] Gedanken sind wie die jedes guten und grossen Deutschen überdeutsch und die Sprache seiner Kunst redet nicht zu Völkern, sondern zu Menschen.

Zarathustra’s Going Down  37 Aber zu Menschen der Zukunft. (Wagner’s ideas, like those of every good and great German, are supra-German, and the language of his art speaks not to particular peoples but to men. But to men of the future.)

This bold statement plainly indicates the provenance of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 337, ‘Die zukünftige “Menschlichkeit”’, where, while engaged on plans for Zarathustra, Nietzsche re-defines the task of a future humanity (the last lines are echoed in the discourse ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’, § 3, just before the secret of eternal return is disclosed). Directly after Zarathustra, a more urgent appeal is made in Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (the Feuerbachian inflection of the sub-title, ‘Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future’, is noteworthy), § 203. Whither must we direct our hopes, he asks? Towards men of the future who today weave the skein that directs the will of millennia onto new paths.’ From this he turns to the calamity concealed behind the absurd guilelessness of modern ideas and modern morality: Die Gesammt-Entartung des Menschen, hinab bis zu dem, was heute den socialistischen Tölpeln und Flachköpfen als ihr ‘Mensch der Zukunft’ erscheint,—als ihr Ideal!…ist möglich, es ist kein Zweifel! Wer diese Möglichkeit einmal bis zu Ende gedacht hat, kennt einen Ekel mehr, als die übrigen Menschen—und vielleicht auch eine neue Aufgabe! (The collective degeneration of mankind down to the level of what today’s socialistic dolts and blockheads regard as their ‘man of the future’-as their ideal!…is undoubtedly possible! Whoever has thought this possibility out to the end knows one kind of loathing more than other men-and perhaps a new task too.)

Wagner’s ‘man of the future’ is found to be limited, provisional, and finally nihilistic: an equivalent of Zarathustra’s ‘last man’ as the embodiment of present-day aspirations. Nietzsche’s ‘man of the future’ on the other hand, holds the promise of a valid future for mankind. This is taken up in Zur Genealogie der Moral, II, § 24, where the contrast is presented with considerable rhetorical force: Dieser [i.e., Nietzsche’s] Mensch der Zukunft, der uns ebenso vom bisherigen Ideal erlösen wird, als von dem, was aus ihm wachsen musste, vom grossen Ekel, vom Willen zum Nichts, vom Nihilismus, dieser Glockenschlag des Mittags und der grossen Entscheidung, der den Willen wieder frei macht, der der Erde ihr Ziel und dem Menschen seine Hoffnung zurückgiebt, dieser Antichrist und Antinihilist, dieser Besieger Gottes und des Nichts—er muss einst kommen… (This [Nietzsche’s] man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the prevalling ideal but also from what it was bound to lead to -from the great loathing, from the will to nothingness, from nihilism—this bell-stroke of noon and great decision, who again liberates the will and gives the earth back its goal and man his hope, this Antichrist and antinihilist, this conqueror of God and nothingness-someday he must come…)

All these passages may be read as commentaries on Also sprach Zarathustra, and the future humanity invoked in ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’, §§ 26 ff, ‘Vom höheren Menschen’, § 15, and elsewhere. They also tie in with a series of injunctions to men of the present—‘Ihr Gegenwärtigen!’—in ‘Vom Lande der Bildung’ (likewise with the summons to ‘gegenwärtige Menschen’ in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Part V, § 382). The decisive factor that brings Zarathustra into alignment with Der Ring is the prospect of a universe cut adrift without direction or aim. What authority can be invoked? What

38  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism values can be instated in a world in which any stabilizing centre has disintegrated? It is not optimism that sets the scene in either case, but a presentiment of the imminent devaluation of values more alarming than the equivocation that preceded it. An appraisal of the concept of power is imperative as the means by which catastrophe may yet be averted. Redress, it is contended, lies in the hands of a regenerate humanity which by its own unaided strength will accomplish the feats denied to the gods. Nietzsche formulates this in one of his memorable obiter dicta: ‘Wer das Große nicht mehr in Gott findet, findet es überhaupt nicht vor und muß es leugnen oder—schaffen—schaffen helfen’ (He who ceases to find what is great in God won’t find it anywhere, and must deny it or—create it—help to create it. N-A3 VII 1 1[86]11). The ‘Übermensch’ will not temporize with the lingering remnants of the traditional order but will seek to hasten its irrevocable collapse. The iconoclastic note is not easily discounted. In Zarathustra and in Der Ring, the ascendancy of the man of the future is played off against the recession of an outmoded authority which freely contrives to bring about its own passing by throwing itself into a self-destructive conflict with its own creation. It is no chance anticipation of the argument of Zarathustra when in a note of 1875 Nietzsche deals with the scene in Siegfried, Act III, where the hero impulsively shatters the spear on which the law-tables are engraved: Wotan’s Verhältniß zu Siegfried ist etwas Wundervolles, wie es keine Poesie der Welt hat: die Liebe und die erzwungene Feindschaft und die Lust an der Vernichtung. Dies ist höchst symbolisch für Wagners Wesen: Liebe für das, wodurch man erlöst gerichtet und vernichtet wird; aber ganz göttlich empfunden! (Wotan’s relationship with Siegfried is something wonderful, like no other poetry in the world: love and enforced enmity and the desire for destruction. This is highly symbolic for the understanding of Wagner’s character: love for that which redeems, judges, and destroys; but splendidly perceived! N-A3 IV 1 11[42])

or when in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 11, he analyses this touching, incongruous relationship, observing how Wotan, full of sympathy and compassion for his victor, rejoices in his own defeat (the use of the image of the setting sun to describe the death of Siegfried is particularly striking here). Seen in this light, the confrontation between Zarathustra (as ‘Untergehender’) and his progeny, the ‘Übermensch’, appears as a free paraphrase of the confrontation between Wotan and his progeny, ‘the man of the future’, in Siegfried, Act III, where Wotan (in Wagner’s own words) rises to the tragic height of willing his own fall. Nietzsche’s attempt to improve on the scene he described as comparable to no other poetry in the world will be evident to the student in the long excursus of ‘Zarathustra’s Vorrede’, § 4, beginning Was gross ist am Menschen, das ist, dass er eine Brücke und kein Zweck ist: was geliebt werden kann am Menschen, das ist, dass er ein Übergang und ein Untergang ist. (What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal. What can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a going-down…)

By availing himself of material culled from the dramatic climax of the trilogy, he prepares to deliver his own answer to the question propounded in both works.

Chapter 3 Schopenhauer and Der Ring

I Why, we may usefully inquire, should the third Act of Wagner’s Siegfried have taken hold of Nietzsche’s imagination? On 1 March 1869, not long after the incognito meeting with the student Nietzsche at the home of Professor Brockhaus in Leipzig on 8 November 1868, Wagner resumed work on Der Ring after an interval of nearly twelve years at precisely the point at which Wotan’s renunciation is unequivocally stated. In a letter to Ludwig II of Bavaria after his return to Tribschen, he spoke of the terror with which he approached this task (24 February): Da treffen wir, wie die Hellenen in der dampfenden Erdspalte zu Delphi, auf den Mittelpunkt der grossen Welttragödie… Hier ist Alles erhabenes Grauen, nur in Räthseln ansprechbar. Seit jener Zeit, wo ich von der wundervollen Hohenschwangau-Woche nach München zurückkehrte, und bange Fragen über Unser Schicksal aufzuwerfen hatte, entstand mir, und verfolgt mich nun das Thema, das Uns sogleich beim Beginne dieses Aktes zu begrüssen hat, und Uns die Entscheidung, die letzte Frage, den letzten Willen des Weltengottes ankündigen soll. (Here, like the Greeks in the steaming fissure at Delphi, we come to the heart of the great world-tragedy… Here everything is sublimely dreadful, utterable only in riddles. Since I returned to Munich from my wonderful week at Hohenschwangau1, and had to face anxious questions about our fate, I have been haunted by the theme introduced to greet us at the beginning of this Act, which announces Wotan’s decision, his last question, his last decree.)

Composition and orchestration, combined with work on Götterdämmerung, were to occupy him until 5 February 1871. We may assume that this section of Der Ring would have cast its spell over the exchanges that ensued when, on 15 May 1869, emboldened by the verbal invitation in Leipzig and a written message of greeting from Lucerne, the young ‘außerordentlicher Professor’ of classics at Basel (as he had since become) presented himself unannounced on Wagner’s doorstep. The moment was inopportune. Because (if Elisabeth Nietzsche’s testimony is to be credited) Wagner could not be disturbed and Nietzsche could not accept an invitation to dine, arrangements were made for a return visit on the 17th: Whit Monday. Elisabeth’s apparently apocryphal story that on arrival Nietzsche overheard Wagner composing a passage which he later connected (rightly or wrongly) with Brünnhilde’s ‘Verwundet hat mich,/der mich erweckt!’ from the last scene of Siegfried, Act III, received unexpected confirmation by a remarkable stroke of good-fortune in 1970, when a previously unknown letter came to light among C.F.Glasenapp’s papers at Wahnfried. It was to Wagner, dated

40  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 15 October 1872—Nietzsche’s twenty-eighth birthday—and gave a full description of the incident. Nietzsche’s first-hand account merits extended quotation: Habe ich Ihnen schon erzählt, dass ich die Stelle wiedergefunden habe, die Sie damals componirten, als ich 1869 im Mai meinen ersten Besuch bei Ihnen in Tribschen machte? Es war ein schwüler brütender und üppiger Maien-Pfingstsonnabend; alles wuchs rings und duftete. Ich wagte lange nicht ins Haus zu gehen, sondern wartete etwas versteckt unter den Bäumen, gerade vor den Fenstern, aus denen mit grösster Eindringlichkeit oft wiederholte Accordfolgen ertönten. Ich will schwören, es sei die Stelle gewesen ‘Verwundet hat mich, der mich erweckt!’ die Klänge sind mit Erz mir ins Gedächtniss geschrieben, und lange spielte und sang ich sie mir vor, bevor ich den Siegfried in die Hände bekam: sie schienen mir so viel zu sagen. (Did I tell you that I have found the passage that you were composing when I first visited Tribschen in 1869? It was a sultry, lowering, lush Whit-Saturday in May; everything around was growing and fragrant. For a long time I didn’t dare to go up to the house, but hung about rather furtively among the trees straight in front of the windows from which came the sound of a chord-sequence, frequently repeated with the utmost urgency. I could swear that it was the passage ‘He who has woken me has wounded me.’ The sounds are etched on my memory, and for a long time before I got hold of Siegfried, I played and sang them to myself. They seemed to say so much. N-Br16 180)

Brünnhilde’s awakening is mentioned by Nietzsche in Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 24, as well as in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 2, where he describes it as containing ‘most moral’ music (inevitably he later withdrew this, remarking in 1878 ‘Ich nannte “sittlichste Musik” die Stelle, wo es am ekstatischsten zugeht. Charakteristisch!’ (I described as ‘most moral music’ the passage that is most ecstatic. Typical! N-A3 IV 3 27[26]). Also in the first discourse of Also sprach Zarathustra, Part II, there is an ingenious play on words when the prophet, distraught, awakens from a frightening dream: Verwundert sahen sein Adler und seine Schlange auf ihn hin… Bin ich nicht verwandelt?… Verwundet bin ich von meinem Glücke. (His eagle and serpent looked at him in amazement… Haven’t I changed?… My happiness has wounded me.)

At the time of Nietzsche’s first visit to the Vierwaldstättersee, Wagner was nearing the end of the composition-sketch of Siegfried, Act III, completed on 14 June, nine days after the birth of his son. This puts out of court Elisabeth’s claim that Wagner frequently remarked that her brother had inspired him to write this music (for Wagner, the earlier encounter at the Brockhaus’s house—if this is what Elisabeth means—was hardly more than a light social occasion).2 Rather, it is Cosima, now permanently united with her future husband, who qualifies to be associated with the scene of Brünnhilde’s awakening. Newman was able to establish that the music that accompanies the words ‘Ewig war ich/ewig bin ich’ comes from an unfinished string-quartet in recollection of the months Cosima spent with Wagner at Starnberg in 1864: here, he conjectured, the two principal themes of the Siegfried-Idyll were written.3 Cosima excepted, however, no one was closer to Wagner at this time than Nietzsche; and it was foreseeable that the artist, whose passion for performing extracts from his works for chosen friends is well attested, would have gone over selections from Siegfried for Nietzsche’s benefit.

Schopenhauer and Der Ring  41 The first recorded performance took place during Nietzsche’s second stay with the family between 31 July and 1 August 1869, a few days before the completion of the orchestral sketch of Siegfried, when he was introduced to extracts from Act II—the dragon-fight and the scene with the woodbird—apparently from the orchestral sketch. Wagner on this occasion was in exuberant high spirits. ‘Alles was ich nun aus dem “Siegfried” kenne, nach dem ersten Entwürfe, ist großartig concipirt z.B.der Kampf Siegfrieds mit dem “Wurm”, das Vogellied usw’ he reported to Krug from Mount Pilatus on 4 August, just before his return to Basel4 (Everything that I now know from the first draft of Siegfried is grandly conceived, i.e., Siegfried’s dragon-fight, the song of the bird, &c.). This performance probably accounts for the oblique references to the scene with the woodbird in Die Geburt der Tragödie, §§ 23 f, as well as for the appearance of Zarathustra’s guardian eagle in ‘Zarathustra’s Vorrede’, § 10: Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 23

‘Zarathustra’s Vorrede’, § 10

Und wenn der Deutsche zagendsich nach einem Führer umblicken sollte, der ihn wieder in die längst verlorne Heimat zurückbringe, deren Wege und Stege er kaum mehr kennt—so mag er nur dem wonnig lockenden Rufe des dionysischen Vogels lauschen, der über ihm sich wiegt und ihm den Weg dahin deuten will. lbidem, § 24 Glaube Niemand, dass der deutsche Geist seine mythische Heimat auf ewig verloren habe, wenn er so deutlich noch die Vogelstimmen versteht, die von jener Heimat erzählen. (And if the German anxiously seeks for a leader to take him back to his long-lost homeland whose ways and paths he scarcely knows any more, let him but listen to the blissfully alluring call of the Dionysian bird who hovers above him, wanting to show him the way. Let no one believe that the German spirit has for ever lost its mythical home when it still clearly understands the voices of the birds that speak of that home.

Denn er hörte über sich den scharfen Ruf eines Vogels… ‘Es sind meine Thiere!’ sagte Zarathustra… ‘Mögen mich meine Thiere führen!’ Z III-Die Heimkehr ‘Oh Zarathustra, Alles weiss ich… Denn, weisst du noch, oh Zarathustra? Als damals dein Vogel über dir schrie, als du im Walde standest, unschlüssig, wohin? unkundig, einem Leichnam nahe:—‘—als du sprachst: mögen mich meine Thiere führen!’ For he heard overhead the sharp cry of a bird… ‘It is my animals!’ Zarathustra said… ‘Let my animals lead me!’ ‘O Zarathustra, I know all… For do you remember when once your bird cried overhead as you stood in the forest undecided, not knowing where to go, beside a corpse-when you said: Let my animals lead me!’) Also drawn from Brünnhilde’s peroration to Götterdämmerung: ‘Alles!/Alles!/Alles weiß ich.’ (All! All! I know all.)

Again, in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Wagner the theorist is compared with the ‘fearless’ Siegfried who, led by the woodbird, breaks through the wall of fire (§ 3): ‘Als Philosoph gieng er nicht nur durch das Feuer verschiedener philosophischer Systeme, ohne sich zu fürchten, hindurch, sondern auch durch den Dampf des Wissens und der Gelehrsamkeit…’ (As a philosopher, he went not only through the fire of diverse philosophical systems without fear, but also through the vapours of science and scholarship…). The all-important performance of the scene of Erda’s awakening from Siegfried, Act III, may now for the first time be dated with certainty following the publication of Cosima’s diaries in 1976. The orchestral sketch of Act III was completed on 4 August, 1869, not

42  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism long after Nietzsche’s second stay with the family. Cosima records that after lunch on the afternoon of 22 August 1869, during Nietzsche’s third stay (21–3 August), Wagner went over this section of the music-drama—perhaps using the manuscript copy of the orchestral sketch he had meanwhile prepared for presentation to Ludwig II on 25 August (Ludwig’s twenty-fourth birthday). Nietzsche wrote enthusiastically to his mother on the 23rd, saying that nothing could have been more congenial than die warme und herzliche Annäherung an Wagner und Frau von Bülow, die völlige Gleichstimmung unsrer Hauptinteressen, W. dabei jetzt gerade in seiner größten Kraft des Genies, die wunderbarsten eben entsprungnen Schöpfungen, das herrliche Tribschen, fürstlich und geistreich eingerichtet—es kommt viel zusammen, um mich hier zu erquicken und mir in meinem Berufe Kraft zu geben. (the warm and affectionate rapprochement with Wagner and Mme von Bülow, the total identity of our main interests, Wagner just now at the greatest strength of his genius, the most wonderful works just completed, glorious Tribschen decked out sumptuously and ingeniously—there is so much to refresh me here and to give me strength in my work.)

The oracular consultation scene was a particular favourite, allowing scope for Wagner’s remarkable gifts as a performer. Cosima singles out several further performances of it during the Tribschen period,5 and notes in her diary that she was always profoundly affected (29 November 1869). Mme Serov in her reminiscences, too, leaves no doubt of the indelible impression made upon her and her husband by Wagner’s rendering of the scene at about this time.6 It is not unreasonable to infer that the performance in question, coming at a time when Nietzsche was particularly susceptible to new impressions of Wagner’s greatness, was a good one. ‘Wenn ich an jene Zeiten denke, wo der letzte Theil des “Siegfried” enstand!’ Nietzsche wrote many years later on learning of Köselitz’s attendance at a production of Der Ring under Angelo Neumann at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice: ‘Damals liebten wir uns und hofften Alles für einander—es war wirklich eine tiefe Liebe, ohne Nebengedanken’ (When I think of the time when the last part of Siegfried was written! Then we loved each other and had the highest hopes for each other—it really was a deep love, without any thought of gain. To Köselitz, 27 April 1883).7 In due course, the third Act of Siegfried became the object of private study. On 17 August 1871, Cosima thoughtfully provided Nietzsche with Klindworth’s new vocal score. Nietzsche’s account of the circumstances of his first visit to Tribschen, in the miraculously recovered birthday letter of 15 October 1872, was touched off by his study of this presentation volume. The same letter conveys his impressions of Act III, which he had studied with endless pleasure again and again (‘Dann habe ich mit nicht endendem Entzücken den letzten Act des Siegfried wieder und wieder vorgenommen.’ N-Br16 180). During his early visits to the Vierwaldstättersee, he had ample opportunity to get to know the rest of Siegfried as well. From Cosima’s and Richter’s diaries, we learn that Wagner played the first Act on the day (Sunday) after Nietzsche’s arrival on 26 November 1870, probably from Klindworth’s as yet unfinished arrangement (Klindworth himself performed the third Act on 16 July in Nietzsche’s absence). A pre-publication off-print of Klindworth’s vocal score of Act I (Wagner’s copy?) was given to Nietzsche by Wagner at Christmas: ‘Etwas ganz Einziges’ (Something entirely exceptional) he noted in a letter to his sister five days later. During the Christmas visit in 1870, the Siegfried-Idyll, Wagner’s

Schopenhauer and Der Ring  43 birthday gift to Cosima, had its first performance. Nietzsche was summoned by telegram to the secret rehearsal in Lucerne on the 24th; and he was the only guest when, on Christmas Day at half past seven in the morning, Wagner conducted the first performance on the interior staircase of the villa. We now know too from Cosima’s diary that during his visit between 31 July and 3 August in the following year, as a special favour, Nietzsche was allowed to inspect the manuscript score in Cosima’s possession. The thematic ties between the Idyll and Brünnhilde’s awakening could have provided a fruitful topic of conversation on either of these occasions; and the subject could also have been raised at the time of Wagner’s concert for the Mannheim Wagner-Society which Nietzsche attended, when, on the morning of 20 December 1871, this jealously guarded, unpublished work was given for the second time before a select audience. The question as to whether or not Nietzsche stayed behind for the rehearsal of Siegfried in Bayreuth on 2 August 1876 has been inconclusively debated. If we assume that he did in fact witness this particular rehearsal, as seems most probable, it follows that the passage in Der Ring that paved the way for his friendship with Wagner at Tribschen also prepared for his apostasy. Siegfried, Act III, would have been his last recollection of Bayreuth before his departure for Klingenbrunn where, at the height of the preparations for the Festival, many of the hostile, anti-Wagnerian paragraphs in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches were drafted. We are entitled to conclude that as a result of the sheer weight of these accumulated impressions centring on Siegfried—especially on Act III—this particular instalment of Der Ring was invested with an intense significance for Nietzsche as his earliest point of contact with Wagner’s creative work. If this construction is accepted, it is not difficult to see why in Also sprach Zarathustra, where he set out to vie with Wagner on his own terms, he should have attached so much importance to it, taking it as his point of departure.

II There was yet another reason for Nietzsche’s particular interest in Siegfried, Act III. It was not only as a student of Wagner’s music and drama that he had made his impromptu visit to the Tribschen estate; it was also in response to Wagner’s suggestion that he should continue the discussion of Schopenhauer that had been the highlight of the first meeting in Leipzig. It is unthinkable that Wagner, having reached the dramatic climax in Der Ring, would not have seized the opportunity to disclose its deeper, philosophical implications to the young professor embarking on the research that two years later, in Die Geburt der Tragödie, would develop the unprecedented ‘Dionysian’ interpretation of Attic drama. ‘Ich lerne sehr viel in seiner Nähe,’ Nietzsche told Rohde on 16 June 1869, ‘es ist dies mein praktischer Kursus der Schopenhauerschen Philosophie.—Die Nähe Wagners ist mein Trost’ (I am learning so much in his company: this is my practical course in Schopenhauerian philosophy. Wagner’s company is my solace). Schopenhauer’s masterpiece of 1818 [1819], Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), written when he was barely thirty years old, was virtually unread in Germany until the appearance of a penetrating article, ‘Iconoclasm in German Philosophy’, by John Oxenford in The Westminster Review in April 1853.8 Oxenford’s article capitalized on the interest aroused by the recent publication of Parerga und Paralipomena. Translated by the English wife of Schopenhauer’s friend E.O.Lindner,

44  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism it was serialized in May in the liberal Jewish Vossische Zeitung of which Lindner was editor. Then, with the waning of interest in Hegel, the philosopher’s rise to fame was rapid. On what did Wagner’s interest in Schopenhauer rest? In Mein Leben, Wagner declares that he was initially intrigued by the philosopher’s musical aesthetics (fable convenue, perhaps, but the letter to Liszt of 7 June 1855 shows that this had registered); but at the time of his reading of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, the teaching of Book IV, ‘Bejahung und Verneinung des Willens’, was totally opposed to his prevailing mood, still suffused by the Feuerbachian fervour of the Dresden period: Für denjenigen, welcher sich aus der Philosophie eine höchste Berechtigung für politische und sociale Agitationen zu Gunsten des sogenannten ‘freien Individuums’ gewinnen wollte, war allerdings hier gar nichts zu holen. (For those who expected philosophy to provide the rationale for political and social propaganda on behalf of the so-called ‘free individual’, this had absolutely nothing to offer. W-A6 604)

A letter to Eiser, which mentions the discovery of Schopenhauer soon after the completion of the poem of Der Ring (i.e. late 1854), recalls that to begin with this philosophy had been antipathetic (‘daß diese [Philosophie] mir anfangs widerstand’);9 a previously unpublished entry in Cosima’s diary for 22 December 1874 represents Wagner as saying that to begin with he totally failed to understand Schopenhauer because he no longer possessed the vital impulse that had enabled him to write the text of the trilogy. In this quandary—under the sway of the Greek optimism of Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft yet compulsively drawn to the philosophy of pessimism—Wagner found a mentor in Herwegh, whose timely elucidation induced a new sense of the value of Schopenhauer’s teaching, and of its relevance to the eschatological myth on which he was currently engaged. Schopenhauer’s theory of tragedy to which Wagner’s attention was now directed is not an extrinsic element in his system: the argument advanced in the last pages of Book III, § 51, and developed in Supplement 37, ‘Zur Aesthetik der Dichtkunst’, is in complete conformity with the conclusions reached in Book IV, which it reinforces in anticipation. All forms of dramatic art, Schopenhauer declares, aim to interpıet human existence. Tragedy, however, belongs by itself, being grounded in the insight that ‘the hero rights not particular wrongs but rather the fundamental wrong that lies at the heart of existence itself’. In Calderon’s lines Pues el delito mayor Del hombre es haber nacido. (For the greatest crime of man Is that he was born.) (S-A1 II 300)

Standing close to the dark springs of life, the tragic hero magnifies them. The tyrannical ‘Will’—the ultimate, irreducible, primeval principle of being—is demonstrated in his suffering, whether merited or unmerited. For Schopenhauer as distinct from Hegel, the great adversary with whom he invites comparison, there is a sense in which knowledge ‘chokes’ understanding. In Supplement 37 he says that characters of authority and esteem are best suited for tragedy; but in a meaningless world there is inherently no need for the dramatist

Schopenhauer and Der Ring  45 to depict tremendous error, accident, misfortune, or men of surpassing wickedness, in order to establish the sway of the grotesque demiurge manifest in all suffering life. The sense of moral purification through the discharge of emotions of ‘pity’ and ‘terror’ imputed by Aristotle to the tragic ‘catharsis’ is merely temporary, if not chimerical: an alleviation that cannot heal the wound of being or still the turning of Ixion’s wheel. If men continually strive to shake off, break through, and escape from the power of the elemental ‘Will’, their efforts are constantly repulsed and frustrated, intensifying in the process the very suffering they are intended to dispel. Faced in tragedy with the most appalling conditions of stress, the spectator finally comes to know the self-defeating nature of all such efforts. Tragedy teaches him the futility of any compromise with the pernicious life-force, and so leads inevitably to the subjugation of the very will to live: Also Aufforderung zur Abwendung des Willens vom Leben bleibt die wahre Tendenz des Trauerspiels, der letzte Zweck der absichtlichen Darstellung der Leiden der Menschheit. (So the challenge to turn the will away from life remains the true tendency of tragedy, and the ultimate purpose of the deliberate depiction of human suffering. S-A1 III 497)

The educative value of tragedy is thus impressively and uniquely emphasized by Schopenhauer. By the act of renunciation—the only wholly authentic act of free will—the tragic hero grasps a higher precept, breaking the fetters that bind him in subservience to the flux and reflux of predestined strife and pain: Was allem Tragischen, in welcher Gestalt es auch auftrete, den eigenthümlichen Schwung zur Erhebung giebt, ist das Aufgehn der Erkenntniß, daß die Welt, das Leben, kein wahres Genügen gewähren könne, mithin unserer Anhänglichkeit nicht werth sei; darin besteht der tragische Geist: er leitet demnach zur Resignation hin. (What gives all tragedy, whatever its form, its peculiar élan is the awakening of the knowledge that the world—that life—can offer no true satisfaction, and hence is not worthy of our attachment. This is the essence of the tragic spirit: it therefore leads to resignation. S-A1 III 495)

These words, transcribed by Nietzsche in a previously unpublished note of early 1884 (N-A3 VII 2 25[86]) and quoted in full in Die Geburt der Tragödie, ‘Versuch einer Selbstkritik’, § 6, where he speaks of the cribbed terminology of his first book, must have given Wagner a good deal of private satisfaction. In classical tragedy, where the conflict usually results from a concern with abstract laws of conduct, Schopenhauer says, the genuine tragedy of renunciation is hardly ever achieved. Precisely that preoccupation with moral responsibility which led Hegel to insist on the supremacy of Greek drama over its modern or ‘Romantic’ counterpart revealed a serious flaw in the classical mentality. Because the Greeks (unlike the teachers of the Orient) failed to discern behind the abstract codes of behaviour and the calamities and crimes that both their omission and commission produces the ‘Erbsünde’— the crime of being itself—they were unable to fathom the problem of existence, attaining neither the goal of tragedy nor the ultimate view of man. Only in more recent times has this been remedied. After presenting a formidable list of classical tragedies that do not, in fact, end in the heroes’ voluntary renunciation, Schopenhauer indicates what is for him the decisive feature of modern drama: its capacity to show a total denial of the world in the knowledge of its worthlessness and nothingness. In the most representative plays of

46  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, and Corneille, the heroes acquiesce not because they see in their downfall the means of redressing the wrongs by which they have been menaced, but because they have transcended the plane of revenge and retributive justice, and have embraced a higher, metaphysical aim as having an ultimate value. In remarking on this contrast, he comes to the inescapable conclusion ‘Ich bin auch ganz der Meinung, daß das Trauerspiel der Neuern höher steht, als das der Alten’ (I am also completely convinced that modern tragedy is superior to classical tragedy. S-A1 III 496). From this standpoint, the conclusions of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Part IV, which had conflicted so sharply with Wagner’s preconceptions, could be seen in a new perspective. After a period of gradual adjustment, we learn in a passage in Mein Leben dictated to Cosima four and a half months before Nietzsche’s first Tribschen visit,10 Schopenhauer won a total ascendancy in Wagner’s deliberations. Thereafter, too, Der Ring gained further meaning: Ich blickte auf mein Nibelungen-Gedicht, und erkannte zu meinem Erstaunen, dass das, was mich jetzt in der Theorie so befangen machte, in meiner eigenen poetischen Konzeption mir längst vertraut geworden war. So verstand ich erst selbst meinen ‘Wotan’, und ging nun erschüttert von Neuem an das genauere Studium des Schopenhauer’schen Buches. (I looked at my Nibelung poem, and saw to my astonishment that what so much embarrassed me theoretically had long been familiar to me in my own poetic conception. So now I understood my Wotan and, deeply moved, went back afresh to the careful study of Schopenhauer’s book. W-A6 604)

It was no author’s whim that at Christmas in 1854 prompted Wagner to get in touch with Schopenhauer personally by sending a copy of the édition de luxe inscribed ‘In veneration and gratitude’, but a mounting sense of identity with the ‘Geistesgenosse’ to whom he now believed his own fortunes to be inseparably allied.11

III Wagner insisted that the poem Der Ring des Nibelungen was finished before he came to grips with Schopenhauer. When the third edition was issued in the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen in 1872, the last scene no longer appeared in its familiar form. In the first edition of 1853, the work had been transformed by the deletion of the revolutionary ending and the substitution of the concept of ‘love’ for the concept of ‘power’: Selig in Lust und Leid läßt—die Liebe nur sein. (Only through love are joy and sorrow blessed.)

In 1854, however, after the study of Schopenhauer, the psychological focus shifted to Wotan’s act of world-denial: Brünnhilde’s redeeming ‘love’ at this point became a distracting element in the plot, seemingly at odds with the teaching of world-renunciation. The answer to the problem came in May 1856 in an entry in one of Wagner’s notebooks, where an attempt was made to remove any residual ambiguity from the closing scene (this notebook also contains a plan for a music-drama, Die Sieger, based on the legendary life of the Buddha, Wagner having meanwhile furthered his research into Schopenhauer’s

Schopenhauer and Der Ring  47 sources).12 Linked with this is an unpublished letter to the Weimar Court Councillor, Franz Müller, which on 22 June 1856 gave the new titles Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (replacing the Der junge Siegfried and Siegfried’s Tod of the first edition of Der Ring). Naturally the ending would stay the same; only the interpretation given by the all-knowing Brünnhilde would have to be more comprehensive and decisive. The letter breaks off abruptly and inconclusively: ‘Sie sehen also, werther Freund, daß mein Werk noch nicht vollendet ist…’ (so you see, my dear friend, that my work isn’t yet at an end…)13 A letter to Röckel of 23 August plainly shows that the problem was the conciliatory or ‘optimistic’ tenor of Brünnhilde’s peroration, which clashed with the ‘pessimistic’ connotations of the Wotan tragedy in its expanded form. Here, Wagner distinguishes between the intuitive and theoretical components in the creative process. Brünnhilde’s ‘tendentious closing words’, manufactured to meet his theoretical needs but at variance with his intuition, he owns, had always irked him, having been artificially grafted on to the poem without, unfortunately, revealing the nature of this ‘love’, which in the unfolding of the myth we have seen as fundamentally destructive. Only after reading Schopenhauer, he says, did he discover the reason for his persistent sense of dissatisfaction, and shape the poetic ‘coping-stone’ (‘Schlußstein’) in keeping with the ideas implicit in the music drama. The letter contains one of Wagner’s most characteristic, Schopenhauerian statements: ‘Kannst Du Dir eine moralische Handlung anders vorstellen, als unter dem Begriff der Entsagung?’ (Can you conceive of a moral action except in terms of renunciation?). The coping-stone developed from the notebook sketch consists of twenty lines of verse replacing thirty lines deleted from the first edition. Identifying herself completely with the god’s enlightened design, the Walküre desires reincarnation neither for herself nor for Siegfried (‘Sie wünscht den Gefallenen keine Wiedergeburt’).14 It is towards a higher, metaphysical solace that the heroine turns: Führ’ ich nun nicht mehr nach Walhall’s Feste, wiss’t ihr, wohin ich fahre? Aus Wunschheim zieh’ ich fort, Wahnheim flieh’ ich auf immer; des ew’gen Werdens off’ne Thore schließ’ Ich hinter mir zu: nach dem wunsch—und wahnlos heiligsten Wahlland, der Welt-Wanderung Ziel, von Wiedergeburt erlös’t, zieht nun die Wissende hin. Alles Ew’gen sel’ges Ende, wiss’t ihr, wie ich’s gewann? Trauernder Liebe tiefstes Leiden schloß die Augen mir auf: enden sah ich die Welt.— (If I no longer travel to Valhalla’s stronghold, do you know where I shall go? I shall set forth from the home of desire, and escape forever from the home of illusion. I shall close

48  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism the open gates of perpetual becoming behind me. Enlightened and redeemed from reincarnation, I shall proceed to the most hallowed chosen land beyond both desire and illusion, the end of the earthly journey. Do you know how I attained the blessed goal of all that is eternal? The deepest pain of grieving love opened my eyes: I saw the world end.)

By means of this amendment, the main strands of the action of the ‘great world-tragedy’ (as Wagner now described it to Ludwig II) were effectively reconciled. ‘Grieving love’ became the means towards the attainment of the self-same end as that invoked by Wotan: ‘Trauernder Liebe/tiefstes Leiden/schloß die Augen mir auf.’ Only here that end was defined more precisely in terms clearly reminiscent of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Redeemed from reincarnation, the enlightened Brünnhilde was to reach the Buddhist nirvana: the ultimate goal beyond grief and pain: ‘Von Wiedergeburt erlös’t,/zieht nun die Wissende hin.’ The allusion to the doctrine of deliverance from the recurring cycles of re-birth and re-death achieved a striking and effortless conformity with Schopenhauer’s system.15

Chapter 4 Two Notes on Der Ring

I What interest, if any, did Nietzsche take in the Schopenhauer-inspired amendment to the closing scene of Der Ring? What connection, besides a predilection for cosmological images, is there between the affirmative theory of recurrence and the pessimistic teaching of ‘redemption from re-birth’ at the end of Wagner’s eschatological myth? The reader is referred in anticipation to Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 56: Wer wirklich einmal mit einem asiatischen und überasiatischen Auge [i.e., the eye of Zarathustra] in die weltverneinendste aller möglichen Denkweisen hinein und hinunter geblickt hat—jenseits von Gut und Böse, und nicht mehr, wie Buddha und Schopenhauer, im Bann und Wahne der Moral—, der hat vielleicht ebendamit, ohne dass er es eigentlich wollte, sich die Augen für das umgekehrte Ideal aufgemacht: für das Ideal des übermüthigsten, lebendigsten und weltbejahendsten Menschen, der sich nicht nur mit dem, was war und ist, abgefunden und vertragen gelernt hat, sondern es, so wie es war und ist, wieder haben will, in alle Ewigkeit hinaus, unersättlich da capo rufend… (Whoever has really gazed down with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye [i.e., Zarathustra’s eye1] into the most world-denying of all possible modes of thought—beyond good and evil, and no longer like Buddha and Schopenhauer under the spell and illusion of morality—perhaps by this very act, without really desiring it, may have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most high-spirited, energetic, and world-affirming man, who has not only learned to come to terms with and to assimilate what was and is, but who wants to have it again as it was and is to all eternity, insatiably calling out ‘Once more!’…)

Soon after coming into residence at Leipzig University in 1865, the student Nietzsche accidentally alighted upon Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in an antiquarian bookshop owned by his landlord.2 The intellectual fever that ensued, intensified by the study of Parerga und Paralipomena and Rudolf Haym’s recent book on Schopenhauer, was communicated to his friends, Rohde, Gersdorff, and Deussen (who was to become editor of Schopenhauer’s works and first president of the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft e.V. in Frankfurt a.M.). In Schopenhauer als Erzieher, § 2, Nietzsche numbers himself among those who on reading the first page of Schopenhauer know they will read all the others, and listen to every word: ‘Ich verstand ihn, als ob er für mich geschrieben hätte’ (I understood him as if he had written for me). At this time, it is unlikely that Nietzsche had any knowledge of Wagner’s interest in Schopenhauer. In 1868, his notebooks give the headings ‘Wagner as Poet, &c.’ and ‘Scho[penhauer] as Writer’ without suggesting any direct connection between the two (N-A2 IV 120). We can easily imagine his delight on finding in Wagner an enthusiast

50  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism whose understanding of Schopenhauer’s precepts matched his own and whose sense of identification with those precepts was as unreserved. A letter to Rohde written a day after the meeting in Leipzig mentioned his joy on hearing Wagner speak of Schopenhauer with indescribable warmth as the only philosopher who had fathomed the nature of music. The future course of the friendship was largely determined by Wagner’s ready appreciation of the discernment Nietzsche brought to the discussion of this favourite topic: Am Schluß, als wir beide [Nietzsche and Windisch] uns zum Fortgehen anschickten, drückte er mir sehr warm die Hand und lud mich sehr freundlich ein, ihn zu besuchen, um Musik und Philosophie zu treiben… (At the end, as we two [Nietzsche and Windisch3] were getting ready to leave, he clasped my hand very warmly and invited me very cordially to visit him in order to study music and philosophy…)

After this, Wagner’s affiliations with Schopenhauer became a constant theme in Nietzsche’s correspondence—and, presumably, conversation. We may sympathize with Hermann Brockhaus who, on visiting Tribschen, pronounced with a magnificent display of feigned exasperation ‘Wenn Nietzsche mit Schopenhauer und mit Wagner fertig ist, dann wird er sich selbst verlieren’ (When Nietzsche has had enough of Schopenhauer and Wagner he will be through with himself).4 Wagner had taken up Schopenhauer in the early ’fifties, won over by the philosopher’s pessimistic teaching and—to a lesser extent—by his aesthetics of music; but before the essay Beethoven of 1870, he had given no official acknowledgement of the fact (of course it was common knowledge within his circle of friends). His silence is to be remarked upon, because it is often held by historians that the achievements of the later ‘fifties were made possible by the upsurge of inspiration released by Schopenhauer; whereas the writings of the period, Über Franz Liszt’s symphonische Dichtungen and ‘Zukunftsmusik’, which move away in some respects from the position maintained in Oper und Drama, make no mention of the philosopher. Also the slightly later Über Staat und Religion, which purports to trace the ‘changes’ since Oper und Drama, keeps well within familiar boundaries, and Schopenhauer’s name is cautiously withheld. Perhaps Wagner thought the subject too personal; perhaps he could not see how Schopenhauer could be made to agree with his pre-existing theoretical scheme (in this case, scholars have given the philosopher too much credit for what, before 1870, was an independent process of development). Whatever the reason for the delay—since a definite ruling has yet to be given—it is much to the point that the public announcement of Wagner’s pact with Schopenhauer came soon after Wagner’s introduction to Nietzsche: a Nietzsche who, as Brockhaus makes clear, was utterly obsessed with the subject of Wagner-Schopenhauer relations. It will be replied that Wagner had no need of prompting, and consequently that the theory that Nietzsche was directly responsible for the philosophical ideas advanced in Beethoven, ‘Über die Benennung “Musikdrama”’, &c., belongs to the realm of legend. Was it not Wagner who brought Schopenhauer’s name into the conversation at Leipzig to Nietzsche’s delight and surprise? A hitherto unpublished entry in his Brown Book for April 1868, several months before the meeting with Nietzsche, reads ‘Music (with reference to Schopenhauer)’ (W-A8 157). Nietzsche himself on 28 September 1869 described Wagner to Gersdorff as ‘thoroughly saturated by and dedicated to’ Schopenhauer’s philosophy. In her diary Cosima mentions Wagner’s ‘sublime words’ on the philosophy of music on

Two Notes on Der Ring  51 Christmas Day in 1869 during one of Nietzsche’s visits: this was taken by her biographer as the starting-point for Beethoven, begun in July of the following year.5 Yet even if a public declaration was inevitable and perhaps already impending, it looks as if the talks with Nietzsche had proved exceptionally rewarding, at least helping Wagner to clarify his thoughts and to cast them into final form. It will be remembered that the manuscript of Beethoven was sent to Basel in 1870, this being the only recorded occasion on which Wagner conferred with Nietzsche over one of his theoretical works before publication; and, moreover, that the importance of this essay is stressed in a dazzling paragraph in Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral, III, § 5, which speaks ironically, but with an acute grasp of the salient facts, of the complete contradiction between Oper und Drama and the prose works written after 1870. Wagner went over selected passages from Götterdämmerung during Nietzsche’s visits to Tribschen. The composition-sketch of the prologue was begun on 2 October 1869 (before the score of Siegfried was complete); it was very probably discussed during Nietzsche’s ten days’ stay with the family at Christmas—most of which passes without comment in Cosima’s diary. Early in February of the following year, Nietzsche sent the text of his lecture ‘Sokrates und die Tragödie’ to Tribschen. Cosima’s acknowledgement of 5 February 1870 gives us the statement linking Nietzsche with the orchestral interlude between the prologue and Act I—‘Siegfried’s Rhine-Journey’—where, after sunrise and an exchange of gifts, the hero descends the fire-girt mountain to the hall of the hostile Giebichungs. This is now corroborated by the entries in Cosima’s diary for 3–5 February: evidence that entitles us to identify the interlude in Götterdämmerung—and not, pace Elisabeth, the conclusion of Siegfried—as in some sense ‘inspired’ by the association (however, the fugato on Siegfried’s horn motif to which Cosima refers was based on sketches drafted in the early 1850s).6 The composition-sketch of Act III was begun on 3 January 1872 in the atmosphere of euphoria induced by Die Geburt der Tragödie. ‘Zu Mittag treffe ich R.sehr auf—und angeregt durch Pr. Nietzsche’s Buch’, Cosima wrote in her diary, ‘er ist glücklich, dies erlebt zu haben’ (At noon I find R very worked up and excited by Professor Nietzsche’s book, he is happy to have lived for this). Evidently Wagner was beside himself with delight. In June-July 1885, Nietzsche noted Die Geburt der Tragödie hat vielleicht im Leben RW’s den größten Glücks-Klang hervorgebracht, er war außer sich, und es giebt wunderschöne Dinge in der Götter-Dämmerung, welche er in diesem Zustande einer unerwarteten äußersten Hoffnung hervorgebracht hat. (The Birth of Tragedy gave RW perhaps the greatest thrill of his life. He was beside himself, and there are wonderful things in Götterdämmerung which he produced in these conditions of unexpected and extreme hope. N-A3 VII 3 38(15])

Extracts from Act II were played by Wagner during Nietzsche’s next visit towards the end of January; and the ‘Waltraute’ scene from Act I was played at the end of March. On 11 April 1872, Nietzsche told Rohde of a projected lecture-tour of Germany on the subject of Der Ring; and he summed up his latest experiences at Tribschen, explaining that the trilogy ‘taucht immer mehr vor meinen erstaunten Blicken auf—als etwas Unglaublich-Gigantisches und Vollendetes, und ohne Gleichen’ (gradually takes shape before my astonished eyes as something unbelievably gigantic, perfect, and incomparable). On 1 May, a few days after his

52  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism last visit to Tribschen, he wrote an admonitory letter to Gersdorff who had recently acquired a piano, expressing satisfaction at Gersdorff’s study of Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger and urging prompt attention to Der Ring, ‘um uns für so unerhörte Dinge würdig zu machen’ (in order to make ourselves worthy of something so unheard of).7 He was to act literally on these injunctions at Flims, Graubünden, in the following year, when he went over the text of the trilogy with Gersdorff during walks in the mountain woods: a pleasant interlude described in Gersdorffs letter to Elisabeth Nietzsche of 18 July 1873. With Wagner’s return to Germany in 1872, and the marked and distressing deterioration in Nietzsche’s state of health, the meetings predictably became far less frequent. Indeed Nietzsche visited Bayreuth only four times before the Festival of 1876—a startling and painfully revealing reduction on the twenty-three visits during the three Tribschen years. There was however no corresponding curtailment of his private studies. Although his notebooks began to fill with adverse comments which prefigure with remarkable clarity and completeness the indictment of the last period, outwardly his attitude to Der Ring—especially to Götterdämmerung—was not merely appreciative but, on occasion, of unbridled enthusiasm. This is shown, for example, by a previously unpublished entry in Cosima’s diary recording the receipt of a splendid encomium from Nietzsche—now lost— on 15 May 1875, shortly after the publication of Klindworth’s concluding vocal score.8 Wagner was moved to remark to Cosima ‘Das muß dir doch Freude machen, daß ich unter deiner Ägide solches geschaffen’, ich erwidere: Er habe ja ohne mich auch schon geschaffen, ‘ja, aber nimmermehr hätte ich das geschrieben, du hast diese Töne aus mir gelockt.’ (‘You must be happy though that I created such a thing under your aegis.’ I reply that he had already created even without me. ‘Yes, but I would never have written that, you drew those sounds from me.’)

Again, Nietzsche’s arrival in Bayreuth for the Festival in 1876 coincided with the rehearsals of Götterdämmerung, one Act at a time. On 28 July he reported to his sister that he had seen and heard the whole music-drama: ‘Es ist gut sich daran zu gewöhnen, jetzt bin ich in meinem Elemente’ (It is good to get used to it, now I’m in my element.) His most momentous finding—his most important single discovery in respect of the trilogy—is disclosed by the same newly discovered birthday letter of 15 October 1872 (quoted on pp. 50 and 54 above) that describes in retrospect the circumstances of his first visit to Tribschen in 1869, and his renewed study of Siegfried, Act III, in 1872. In the public edition of Der Ring of 1863, Wagner used the titles Siegfried and Götterdämmerung and made many textual adjustments; but for some reason he withheld the revised text of the peroration. These verses, written out on the last, blank page of a copy of the édition de luxe he used when composing the music,9 were unknown to the public until the poem was reissued in the fifth and sixth volumes of the collected writings in 1872. On 2 November 1873, as if to make up for a setback during the recent meeting of the Patronatsversammlung, which Nietzsche had attended, Wagner made a present of a set of the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen with an amusing dedication in doggerel verse. The birthday letter shows that fully a year before this, Nietzsche had independently alighted upon the amendment and had instantly grasped its implications. ‘Ich fand, zurückkehrend, den sechsten Band Ihrer Schriften vor und gerieth so zufällig auf die

Two Notes on Der Ring  53 wundervolle Schlußstrophe der Brünnhilde, die mir ganz neu war’ (On my return,10 I found the sixth volume of your writings and chanced upon Brünnhilde’s wonderful peroration, which was completely new to me). Nietzsche, who at once dispatched a fair copy to Rohde, and possibly also to Gersdorff,11 goes on Es schmerzt mich recht, sie nicht componirt zu wissen, so sehr ich auch begreife, weshalb sie innerhalb der musikalisch-mythischen Tragödie nicht componirt werden musste. Es wäre so ein Vers für das Sanctuarium der allerprivatesten Hausandacht. (It deeply pains me to know that it hasn’t been set to music, although I quite see why it wasn’t necessary to set it as part of the musical and mythical tragedy. It would be a poem such as for the sanctuary of the most private of private devotions. N-Br16 180)

This letter shows conclusively, and for the first time, the attention Nietzsche gave to the revised peroration to Götterdämmerung; and it an ticipates the many passages in later writings in which, as we shall see, he cited these verses—and not verses included in the musical setting—as a final clarification of the work’s meaning. These impressions must have been decisively strengthened and intensified six months later on the evening of 9 April 1873, during Nietzsche’s next (second) stay with the family in Bayreuth. Cosima’s diary records that on this occasion Wagner dispelled a sombre mood by going over the music for the closing scene: a performance surely prompted by the perceptive comments in Nietzsche’s recent letter.

II Nietzsche wrote two historical notes on Der Ring: the first in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 11, which just preceded the première; the second—some twelve years later—in Der Fall Wagner, § 4. At first glance, these might be thought to be totally distinct, exemplifying at their most extreme the positive and negative phases of his critique of Wagner. On closer inspection, however, they will be seen to cover much the same ground and to draw on a similar store of factual information. The note in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 11, may be regarded as a belated by-product of the wider, unrealized campaign of publicity Nietzsche envisaged when he proposed to lecture to the German Wagner-Societies in 1872. ‘Es ist schwer, solchen Werken sich zu nähern’ he told Rohde on 11 April 1872, ‘weshalb Der, der viel davon empfunden und verstanden zu haben glaubt, davon auch reden muß’ (Such works are difficult to approach; so he who believes that he understands them well and has come to grips with them ought also to impart his knowledge). His remarks are characteristically concise. The putative hero of the trilogy, he says, is Wotan— ein Gott, dessen Sinn nach Macht dürstet, und der, indem er alle Wege geht, sie zu gewinnen, sich durch Verträge bindet, seine Freiheit verliert, und in den Fluch, welcher auf der Macht liegt, verflochten wird. (a god who thirsts for power and who, because he will stop at nothing to get it, binds himself to treaties which deprive him of his freedom and gets entangled in the curse that lies on power.)

This stems from a note of 1875 which discusses the god’s standing in respect of his progeny ‘Der Gott will Macht: Verträge Schuld Unfreiheit/er sucht einen Helden, der frei für ihn kämpfe (gegen ihn), um seine Macht zu behaupten’ (The god wants power: treaties, guilt,

54  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism bondage. He seeks a hero who will freely fight for him—against him—so as to maintain his power, N-A3 IV 1 11[56]: previously unpublished); and ‘Wotan strebt nach Macht, wird unfrei, in Schuld und Fluch verflochten: er bedarf des Freien’ (Wotan strives for power, loses his freedom, and gets entangled in guilt and accursed: he needs the free man. N-A3 IV 1 14[1]: previously unpublished). Yet the god’s defeat in his quest for power is transformed into a moral victory: Wo sind unter euch die Menschen, welche das göttliche Bild Wotan’s sich nach ihrem Leben zu deuten vermögen und welche selber immer grösser werden, je mehr sie, wie er, zurücktreten? Wer von euch will auf Macht verzichten, wissend und erfahrend, dass die Macht böse ist? (Where among you are those who can interpret Wotan’s divine image in their own lives and become ever greater the more that they, like him, retreat? Who among you wants to give up power having learned from experience that power is evil?)

This stems from the notes ‘Wandlung des Willens.—nachher: nur um seine Schuld los zu werden./Als Siegfried stirbt, wird Wotan seine Schuld ledig und wählt den Untergang’ (Change of mind—later: only to get rid of his guilt. When Siegfried dies Wotan is freed from his guilt and chooses destruction. N-A3 IV 1 11 [56]: previously unpublished); ‘Nibelungen—freiwilliges Verzichten der bisherigen Weltmächte: Gegensätze von Weltperioden—mit Umwandlung der Richtung und der Ziele’ (In The Ring—voluntary renunciation of former world powers. Contrasting epochs-with reversal of course and aim. N-A3 IV 1 12[29]); and ‘Der Gott wird immer größer, je mehr er zurück tritt’ (The god becomes ever greater the more he retreats. N-A3 IV 1 14[2]: previously unpublished). The emphasis on power is of fundamental interest, in that it reminds us how consistently Nietzsche identified the concept with Wagner’s adaptation of the Old Norse.12 Most striking, too, is the paradoxical idea of Wotan’s retreat as an ethical advance: this idea, built into the structure of ‘Zarathustra’s Vorrede’, § 4, is almost unintelligible without help from Schopenhauer. Nietzsche’s familiarity with the motivation of the Wotan tragedy is apparent when in the last sentences of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 11, he expounds the closing scene of Götterdämmerung and quotes two lines from the revised peroration: Wo sind Die, welche wie Brünnhilde aus Liebe ihr Wissen dahingeben und zuletzt doch ihrem Leben das allerhöchste Wissen entnehmen: ‘trauernder Liebe tiefstes Leid schloss die Augen mir auf’. (Where are those who, like Brünnhilde, sacrifice their knowledge for love and yet finally gain their life’s highest knowledge: ‘The deepest pain of grieving love opened my eyes’.)

This stems from a note ‘Brünnhilde verliert, durch Liebe, ihr persönliches Wissen, und geräth in das tiefste Leid, aus dem sie sich nicht helfen kann. Aber aus ihrem Schicksal entnimmt ein allerhöchstes Wissen “trauernder Liebe tiefstes Leid schloß die Augen mir auf”’ (Through love Brünnhilde loses her personal knowledge, and lapses into the deepest sorrow in which she cannot help herself. But from her fate a supreme knowledge is obtained: ‘The deepest pain of grieving love opened my eyes’. N-A3 IV 1 14[2]: previously unpublished). This short quotation is not easily discounted since we now know that on perusing the sixth volume of the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen in October 1872, Nietzsche

Two Notes on Der Ring  55 fastened on to the amendment to the closing scene. This discovery, shared at the time with Wagner, Rohde, and possibly Gersdorff, is here made available to a wider public. The compatibility of Wotan’s and Brünnhilde’s attitudes is rightly stressed; and the moral of the work is seen as the message of world-renunciation in the ‘wonderful peroration’. As a manifesto for the Bayreuth Festival, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth sets the seal on the years of Nietzsche’s championship of Wagner; small wonder that as his resistance hardened he should have taken steps to re-appraise the trilogy. Signs of continuing interest in Der Ring in preparation for some sort of critical (and selfcritical) expose are found in a series of notes that swing round into hostility and defiance. ‘Die Kunst und die Vorbereitung des Nihilismus: Romantik (Wagners Nibelungen-Schluß)’ (Art and the preparation of nihilism: Romanticism, the conclusion of Wagner’s Ring) is the last…is the last heading in the inventory of 1885–6 that Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Köselitz used to preface their anthology Der Wille zur Macht (N-A3 VIII 1 2[127]). In another note Nietzsche writes disdainfully ‘Ich bin feindselig …gegen alle Lehren, welche ein Ende, eine Ruhe, einen “Sabbat aller Sabbate” ins Auge fassen…z.B.solche Verse, wie bei R W[agners] “Nibelungen’” (I am hostile to all teachings that set before us an ending, a peace, a ‘sabbath of all sabbaths’13…i.e. such verses as we find in Richard Wagner’s Ring. (N-A3 VII 3 34[90]). Similarly revealing is a note dealing with the function of the tragic genre in different historical periods: In der Zeit der größten Fülle und Gesundheit erscheint die Tragödie, aber auch in der Zeit der Nervenerschöpfung und -Überreizung. Entgegengesetzte Deutung!—Bei Wagner ist bezeichnend, wie er schon dem Ring des Nibelungen einen nihilistischen (ruhe- und endesüchtigen) Schluß gab. (Tragedy appears in times of the greatest prosperity and health, but also in times of nervous exhaustion and overstrain. Contrary interpretation!—It is typical of Wagner that he even gave The Ring of the Nibelung a nihilistic—peace—and end-orientated conclusion. N-A3 VIII 1 2[113]).14

The rather more extended account of Der Ring in Der Fall Wagner, § 4, therefore did not lack preparation. It exhibits the impetuous style of the open letter from Turin of May 1888 (as Der Fall Wagner is described on the title-page), and appears to have been designed as a harsh, critical counterpart to the encomium of the fourth of the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, which it resembles in its outlines. Introducing his second historical note ironically as ‘the story of a redemption’, Nietzsche speaks of Siegfried as the harbinger of a new golden age and of his connection with the ultramodern, revolutionary aspirations of Wagner’s Dresden period: Wagner hat, sein halbes Leben lang, an die Revolution geglaubt, wie nur irgend ein Franzose an sie geglaubt hat. Er suchte nach ihr in der Runenschrift des Mythus, er glaubte in Siegfried den typischen Revolutionär zu finden. (Half his lifetime Wagner believed in revolution as only a Frenchman could have believed in it. He searched for it in the runic writings of mythology, he believed that in Siegfried he would find the typical revolutionary.)

Then he remarks on a startling change of course. The conciliatory tone of the peroration in the first edition of Der Ring—‘Nicht Gut, nicht Gold,/noch göttliche Pracht’ &c.—with

56  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism its rejection of worldly possessions and its prediction of the reign of a beneficent love was wholly incompatible with Schopenhauer. What was in the process of being set to music? Socialism, or at any rate optimism—and, moreover, an optimism for which Schopenhauer had coined an angry epithet: ‘infamous optimism’.15 Nietzsche continues: Endlich dämmerte ihm ein Ausweg: das Riff, an dem er scheiterte, wie? wenn er es als Ziel, als Hinterabsicht, als eigentlichen Sinn seiner Reise interpretirte? Hier zu scheitern—das war auch ein Ziel. Bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci… Und er übersetzte den ‘Ring’ in’s Schopenhauerische. Alles läuft schief, Alles geht zu Grunde, die neue Welt ist so schlimm, wie die alte:—das Nichts, die indische Circe winkt… Brünnhilde, die nach der ältern Absicht sich mit einem Liede zu Ehren der freien Liebe zu verabschieden hatte, die Welt auf eine socialistische Utopie vertröstend, mit der ‘Alles gut wird’, bekommt jetzt etwas Anderes zu thun. Sie muss erst Schopenhauer studiren; sie muss das vierte Buch der ‘Welt als Wille und Vorstellung’ in Verse bringen. Wagner war erlöst… (At last a way out occurred to him: what if the reef on which he had foundered could be interpreted as the goal, as the real point, as the hidden purpose of his journey? To founder here—that was also a goal. ‘I navigate well when I get wrecked!’ And he translated The Ring into Schopenhauerian. Everything goes wrong, everything goes to wrack and ruin, the new world is as bad as the old:—nothingness, the Indian Circe, beckons… Brünnhilde, who originally was to have bade us farewell with a song in praise of free love, consoling the world with the prospect of a socialist Utopia in which ‘all will be well’, now gets something else to do. She must first study Schopenhauer; she must versify the fourth book of The World as Will and Representation. Wagner was saved…)

It is difficult to fault this summary of the final changes, whereby the promise of redemption through love gave way to the frankly metaphysical notion of a redemption from rebirth.16 As in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Nietzsche’s case hangs on the amendment to the peroration. So as to leave no room for uncertainty about the textual basis of his argument, when correcting the proof of Der Fall Wagner he went so far as to seek the relevant page and volume-numbers. ‘Es giebt im Texte des “Rings” eine Variante von Brünnhildens letztem Liede, die ganz buddhistisch ist’ he wrote to Köselitz on 17 July 1888: ‘Ich will nur die Seiten—und Bandzahl haben, nicht die Worte’ (In the text of The Ring there is a variant of Brünnhilde’s last song which is entirely Buddhistic. I want only the page and volume numbers, not the words). Nor was he flagrantly over-playing his hand. Clearly Wagner wanted to consolidate his alliance with Schopenhauer; it is indisputable that his amendment amounts to a verse rendering of the tenets of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Book IV, ‘beckoning’ towards the Indian ‘Nichts’—that is, ‘nirvana’—as Nietzsche declares.17 A comparison of these two histories shows that Nietzsche was thoroughly familiar with the evolutionary process described in the preceding pages: in other words, he unreservedly accepted a Schopenhauerian reading of Der Ring, believing that the insights that the philosopher had vouchsafed were decisive for its completion: Allen Ernstes, dies war eine Erlösung. Die Wohlthat, die Wagner Schopenhauer verdankt, ist unermesslich. Erst der Philosoph der décadence gab dem Künstler der decadence sich selbst— (In all seriousness, this was a salvation. The service for which Wagner is indebted to Schopenhauer is incalculable. Only the philosopher of decadence could give the artist of decadence—himself—)

Two Notes on Der Ring  57 (based on a previously unpublished note of early 1888 ‘Der “Erlöser”—Schop[enhauer]… Der “Ring”, Schopenhauer als Erlöser Wagners’ (The ‘saviour’: Schopenhauer… The Ring: Schopenhauer as Wagner’s saviour. N-A3 VIII 3 16[74]). We begin to see that the intransigence of scholars, forever bent on demonstrating that the magnitude of Wagner’s achievement in Der Ring reduces to insignificance the consideration of external influences, more especially Schopenhauer’s, and the suppression for the best part of a century of so much vital information have combined to create a barrier beyond which the intention of Nietzsche’s Wagnerian polemic in Zarathustra has been barely discernible. With many more of the facts before us, it is not difficult to understand the sense of personal obligation with which at Tribschen, once having recognized Wagner’s debt to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche set about to forge a permanent bond between these two great and representative contemporary figures. ‘RW und Sch[openhauer]’: this heading appears boldly in a notebook of 1868–9, just after the first meeting with Wagner (N-A2 V 241). A later note records that at the age of twenty-one ‘war ich vielleicht der einzige Mensch in Deutschland, der diese Zwei…mit Einer Begeisterung liebte’ (I was perhaps the only person in Germany who loved these two with equal ardour. N-A3 VII 2 26[406]); while the correspondence with Brandes also hints at the crucial part Nietzsche believed that he had played in influencing the deliberations of Wagner’s followers on the Schopenhauer question. ‘Ich war der Erste, der aus Beiden eine Art Einheit destillirte’ he remarked on 19 February 1888 with evident pride in the accomplishment; jetzt ist dieser Aberglaube sehr im Vordergrunde der deutschen Cultur; alle Wagnerianer sind Anhänger Schopenhauers. Dies war anders als ich jung war. Damals waren es die letzten Hegelinge, die zu Wagner hielten, und ‘Wagner und Hegel’ lautete die Parole in den fünfziger Jahren noch. (I was the first to distil a sort of unity out of both; now this superstition is much in the foreground of German culture; all Wagnerians are supporters of Schopenhauer. It was different when I was young. Then it was the last of the Hegelians who attached themselves to Wagner, and even in the ‘fifties ‘Wagner and Hegel’ was the slogan.)18

The trump card in the historians’ hands is the fact that when Wagner came to write the music for the peroration to Götterdämmerung, Act III, in April 1872, he left out the passage in which Schopenhauer’s influence is predominant.19 Cosima seems to have thought that it would strike a forced note. Even without it the peroration was very long. In performance, therefore, the explicit moral is pointed by the lines carried over from the first edition of the poem, underlined by the solemn scoring—lines which were well enough in agreement with the deleted passage to stand in its stead: Alles!Alles! Alles weiß ich: alles ward mir nun frei! *          *          * Ruhe! Ruhe, du Gott!— (All! All! I know all: all is now clear to me. Peace! Peace, Thou god!—)

In his birthday letter to Wagner of 15 October 1872, Nietzsche duly noted the omission of the revised peroration (‘es schmerzt mich recht, [die Schlußstrophe] nicht componirt zu wissen’); despite this, as we have seen, in both exegetical notes he referred to precisely this passage, without attempting to explain its absence from the score.

58  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism

Facsimile No. 2. The fair copy of Wagner’s amendment to the text of Götterdämmerung, Act III, scene iii: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. VI, pp. 361 ff.

Two Notes on Der Ring  59

60  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Wagner’s explanation is given in a note inserted into the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen on 29 July 1872, a week after the completion of the orchestral sketch on the 22nd (W-A1 VI 361 ff). Here the published text of 1853 and 1863 and the amendment of 1856 are displayed side-by-side. The 1853 version, he says, was sacrificed in favour of verses corresponding better to the drama’s musical impact (‘musikalischer Wirkung’). The amendment, too, was then relinquished because its meaning was to be conveyed in the musical setting with the highest exactitude (‘weil ihr Sinn in der Wirkung des musikalisch ertönenden Drama’s bereits mit höchster Bestimmtheit ausgesprochen wird’).20 According to this, Wagner had no wish to contract out of the Schopenhauerian ending: an object which could have been achieved simply enough by withholding the amendment, which was quite unknown to his readers. On the contrary, his motive in publishing and commenting on the revised peroration was to make plain that this version specifically was in his mind when the score was written, and that the sense of these Schopenhauerian verses—and not the Feuerbachian prophecy of redemption by love—was conveyed by the music. It will no doubt be replied that the attempt to read the trilogy as a compendium of the doctrines of pessimism is strained—for the poem, except for the amendment to the peroration, was complete and in print before Wagner is thought to have come to terms with Schopenhauer; moreover that such a reading raises a host of theoretical considerations which get in the way of an unbiased appreciation. This very point—made initially in some of Wagner’s early letters to Röckel—is endorsed by Eiser at the beginning of his exegetical study, where he remarks laconically that neither the intention of the poet nor the exposition of the most competent interpreter can conclusively elucidate the ideas inherent in a work of art.21 If it would be wrong to suppose that Der Ring des Nibelungen could or should be reduced to any single, unambiguous level of meaning, this is not to say that when it came to the point in 1872, Wagner, for his part, could not make up his mind, refused to commit himself, and lapsed into a silence pregnant with possibilities. Accordingly, when Nietzsche in Der Fall Wagner, § 4, tells us that the artist found his bearings as a result of a pact with Schopenhauer he is neither twisting the facts nor injecting extraneous notions into his interpretation. Wagner’s addition to the text of Götterdämmerung of 1872—an addition deftly converted into a subtraction by his exponents—clarifies the internal working of the plot as, in the end, he both understood it and wanted it to be understood. Its counterpart is the passage in Mein Leben where he recalled his early study of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and his astonishment on perceiving the uncanny parallel between Schopenhauer’s theory of tragedy of renunciation and the motivation of the tragic hero of Der Ring: a parallel he thereafter accepted without reservation (see above p. 58). From Cosima’s diary, we now know that this passage was written in January 1869 in the interval between the first meeting with Nietzsche and the commencement of the ‘Erda’ scene in Siegfried, Act III, which divides the action of the trilogy in two. Consequently, it also elucidates Wagner’s intentions when setting the ‘Erda’ scene to music.

Chapter 5 The Convalescent

I We have seen that the governing theme of Zarathustra’s ‘going down’ announced in the prologue to Also sprach Zarathustra—‘Also begann Zarathustra’s Untergang’—and the confrontation between Zarathustra and his progeny, the ‘Übermensch’ or ‘man of the future’, may be construed as adaptations of the opening scenes of Siegfried, Act III, on which Wagner was working at the time of his introduction to Nietzsche. This brings us to the turning-point of the action in Part III where Zarathustra, now appearing as a ‘convalescent’, in consultation with his ‘Ehrenthiere’, the eagle and serpent, comes to know his fate (‘Der Genesende’, § 2): Denn deine Thiere wissen es wohl, oh Zarathustra, wer du bist und werden musst: siene, du bist der Lehrer der ewigen Wiederkunft—,das ist nun dein Schicksal! (For your animals well know, O Zarathustra, who you are and what you must become: see! you are the teacher of eternal return—that is now your destiny!)

It is inherently unlikely that Nietzsche would have allowed his imagination free rein at this juncture; rather we would expect him here to clinch the argument, and to reinforce the element of Wagnerian parody from the beginning implicit in the literary design: Ich sprach mein Wort, ich zerbreche an meinem Wort: so will es mein ewiges Loos—, als Verkündiger gehe ich zu Grunde! Die Stunde kam nun, dass der Untergehende sich selber segnet. Also—endet Zarathustra’s Untergang.— (I spoke my word, I broke upon my word: so my eternal fate decrees—as prophet I perish! Now the hour approaches when the down-goer shall bless himself. So—ends Zarathustra’s going down.)

Initially Nietzsche’s hero is depicted in an almost insupportable dilemma: racked by doubt, anguish, and terror, he constantly resorts to prevarication and subterfuge in a bid to avert the hour of reckoning. The attitude of prevarication is particularly marked in Part II, which bears a cryptic superscription on the title-page in which the prophet specifies a denial of his teaching as the prerequisite for his return. A sense of foreboding pervades the first discourse in Part II, ‘Das Kind mit dem Spiegel’, where he is warned in a dream of the distortion of his doctrine by powerful enemies, and of the loss of his friends and loved ones. Matters come to a head in the concluding ‘Die stillste Stunde’: a nightmarish inward dialogue ‘carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound’ (Plato, Sophist, 263e). Here Zarathustra vainly struggles to ignore the urgent promptings of his own alter ego as the hand of the clock reaches the stillest hour.

62  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Dann sprach es ohne Stimme zu mir: ‘Du weisst es, Zarathustra?’— *          *          * Da sprach es abermals ohne Stimme zu mir: ‘Du weisst es, Zarathustra, aber du redest es nicht!’— Und ich antwortete endlich gleich einem Trotzigen: ‘Ja, ich weiss es, aber ich will es nicht reden!’ (Then, silently, something said to me ‘You know, Zarathustra?’… Then silently in the same way it said to me ‘You know, Zarathustra, but you do not speak!’ And at last I answered defiantly ‘Yes, I know, but I will not speak!’)1

This self-interrogation serves to bring out one of Zarathustra’s more recondite but pervasive concepts, the ‘gift’. This is introduced at the beginning of the prologue when the prophet speaks of his wisdom as a gift, and calls for hands to reach out to receive it (see above, p. 40). A homily on the relative merits of giving and receiving is worked into ‘Von der schenkenden Tugend’ at the end of Part I, where Zarathustra is invested with his symbolic staff of office. From here the image passes to the opening of Part II, ‘Das Kind mit dem Spiegel’, where the vacillating attitude the prophet now affects is conveyed by the idea of a gift held back by the giver: ‘Diess nämlich ist das Schwerste, aus Liebe die offne Hand schliessen und als Schenkender die Scham bewahren’ (This is indeed the most difficult thing: to close the open hand out of love and to preserve one’s modesty as a giver)—an idea taken up in the love-song, ‘Das Nachtlied’, where Zarathustra speaks capriciously of robbing his recipients, and of withdrawing his hand when another’s is already reaching out towards it (‘die Hand zurückziehend, wenn sich schon ihr die Hand entgegenstreckt’). Zarathustra’s gift is the teaching of recurrence to which for the moment he cannot bring himself to accede. Bit by bit, the symbol of the ring, closely identified with his central hypothesis, is used to express the idea of a mystical marriage: the hand is outstretched in order to bestow—and to receive—it. Zarathustra’s marriage is constantly deferred. Only after his conquest of eternal return does he celebrate it in the refrain that brings Part III to a close. The fact that the withholding of the ‘wedding-ring of rings’ was meant as a rejoinder to Der Ring des Nibelungen is shown by a verbal parallel in Götterdämmerung, Act III, scene i, where the Rhinemaidens bargain for the return of the all-powerful ring of the Rhinegold with which Siegfried has symbolically married Brünnhilde. We have seen that Wagner began the music for this scene on 3 January 1872, the same day that he received Die Geburt der Tragödie. Cosima mentioned its completion in a letter to Nietzsche on the 18th; and it was played to him soon afterwards on 19 February. It was played too by Wagner during Nietzsche’s penultimate visit to Bayreuth in August 1874; and Elisabeth says that it met with some success during study of the vocal score in the following year.2 Accordingly it heads the list of scenes which Nietzsche looked forward most eagerly to hearing at Bayreuth;3 and it made a good impression in performance.4 Hence the inflection of the last lines of ‘Die stillste Stunde’ where Zarathustra abjures the latest opportunity to impart his jealously guarded secret:

The Convalescent  63 Götterdämmerung, III i

‘Die stillste Stunde’

Sag’ es, Siegfried, sag’ es uns! Ein gold’ner Ring ragt dir am Finger—

Ach meine Freunde! Ich hätte euch noch Etwas zu sagen, ich hätte euch noch Etwas zu geben! Warum gebe ich es nicht? Bin ich denn geizig?—

               *          *          *

 

Den gieb uns!

 

               *          *          *

 

Bist du so karg?

 

               *          *          *

 

So geizig beim Kauf?

 

               *          *          *

 

               *          *          *

(Ah, my friends! I would have something more Wie schade, daß er geizig ist! (Tell us, Siegfried, tell us!… A golden ring is to tell you, I would have something more to give shining on your finger—Give that to us!… Are you! Why do I not give it? Am I mean?) you so stingy?… So mean with money?… What a pity that he’s mean!)

In Parts I–III, we are frequently reminded that in Zarathustra’s scheme of reference selfannihilation (‘Untergang’) and self-transcendence (‘Übergang’) are part and parcel of the same process. The nightmarish, intestine struggle generated by these two contending yet strangely inseparable impulses is described in a series of discourses dealing, either directly or in passing, with death and rebirth. One recalls the remark in a late collection of notes on the Greeks in which, by a daring attempt at intuitive deduction, Nietzsche identified eternal return as the teaching of the Mysteries. With their probable theme of regeneration and rebirth, the classical Mysteries were a regular subject of his lectures at Basel: ‘Ich habe das Griechenthum entdeckt: sie glaubten an die ewige Wiederkunft! Das ist der MysterienGlaube! (I have fathomed the Greeks: they believed in eternal return! That is the belief of the Mysteries! N-A3 VII 1 8[15]).5 It seems likely that these discourses had their origin in personal experience. The early death of Nietzsche’s father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, after an accident in 1849, was followed by a terrifying dream which foretold the death of Nietzsche’s younger brother Ludwig Joseph. These tragic circumstances, vividly described in the early autobiographical sketch Aus meinem Leben. Die Jugendjahre 1844–1858 (N-A2 1 4 ff), kept a hold on Nietzsche’s memory. Deussen in his recollections says that Nietzsche feared that he might suffer his father’s fate;6 and as late as 23 January 1876, Gersdorff implored him above all to ward off the thoughts induced by the memory of his father’s death.7 The subject, however, was poignantly revived by Nietzsche’s mother just before Also sprach Zarathustra was begun.8 A premonition of Zarathustra’s final ‘going down’ is found in ‘Vom freien Tode’ in Part I (the sequel to ‘Von den Predigern des Todes’ on the thesis ‘life is refuted’), which mentions the deaths of Christ and Socrates.9 In Part II there is the plaintive ‘Das Grablied’ where the prophet crosses the sea to a silent island of tombs and with infinite regret laments

64  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism the passing of the visions and consolations of his youth. Here is one of the more explicit allusions to Wagner whose death preceded the composition of Part II, and the ‘island’10 of Tribschen: Wie ertrug ich’s nur? Wie verwand und überwand ich solche Wunden? Wie erstand meine Seele wieder aus diesen Gräbern? (How did I bear it then? How did I survive and surmount such wounds? How did my soul rise again from those tombs?)

a borrowing from Isolde’s words in Tristan und Isolde, Act II, scene ii, also quoted in ‘Vom Gesicht und Räthsel’: ‘Wie ertrug ich’s nur?/Wie ertrag’ ich’s noch?’ (How did I bear it then? How do I bear it still?). It is possible to trace the associations underlying this solemn, introspective threnody. During Nietzsche’s Christmas visit to Tribschen in 1870, Wagner had read E.T.A.Hoffmann’s fairy-tale, Der goldene Topf, to Nietzsche and Cosima, identifying the family circle with Hoffmann’s principal characters and Tribschen itself with Hoffmann’s ‘Geisterinsel’.11 Also Nietzsche paid a nostalgic visit to the estate with Lou von Salomé not long after he began to prepare for Also sprach Zarathustra. With their sense of unfulfilment, the obsequies of ‘Das Grablied’ bear on the general theme of Part II, which represents a transitional phase in the hero’s progress between the confident setting out of Part I and the conquest won by a supreme assertion of the will in Part III: ‘Only where there are graves are there resurrections.’ The idea of death and rebirth is developed in two highly charged discourses, both related to Nietzsche’s childhood experiences and bearing directly on Zarathustra’s central premiss. In ‘Der Wahrsager’ in Part II, Zarathustra succumbs to a melancholy mood induced by a soothsayer (a thinly disguised portrait of Schopenhauer), and dreams of the arrival of a mysterious funeral cortège: Alpa! rief ich, wer trägt seine Asche zu Berge? Alpa! Alpa! Werträgt seine Asche zu Berge? (Alpa! I cried, who is bearing his ashes to the mountains? Alpa! Alpa! Who is bearing his ashes to the mountains?)12

There is a precedent for this in the many passages in Zarathustra dealing with purification by fire. At the outset the pious hermit asks ‘Then you bore your ashes to the mountains: today will you carry your fire into the valleys?’ In ‘Vom Wege des Schaffenden’, Zarathustra says ‘How would you renew yourself without first becoming ashes!’ Again, in ‘Das Nachtlied’ he likens himself to the sun which sheds light but receives none: ‘I drink back into myself the flames that burst from me!’ In ‘Der Wahrsager’, by analogy, Zarathustra witnesses his own interment. When amid shrieks of laughter the catafalque disgorges its contents—a thousand masks of children, angels, owls, fools, and child-sized butterflies—we see that the prophet himself is to subdue the terror of the grave, transforming the sense of dusk and fatigue into a canopy of super-human laughter.

The Convalescent  65 Much the same idea of death and rebirth is implicit in the terrifying ‘Vom Gesicht und Räthsel’ in Part III, where Zarathustra the airborne comes up against his devil and archenemy, the earth-bound spirit of gravity (‘Geist der Schwere’): the creator of compulsion, dogma, need, consequence, will, purpose, good and evil. The portrait is shadowy and vague; but the spirit of gravity, moralistic, narrow-minded, bigoted, and sectarian, is outstanding in the gallery of characters in Parts I–III, giving by comparison the strongest definition to Zarathustra’s mercurial personality. Zarathustra inveighs against him in ‘Vom Lesen und Schreiben’: ‘Ich würde nur an einen Gott glauben, der zu tanzen verstünde’ (I would believe only in a god who knew how to dance)—a memorable saying belatedly (and somewhat implausibly) attributed by Cosima to the famous discussion of Beethoven’s seventh symphony in Oper und Drama.13 (For Nietzsche’s comment on Zarathustra’s dictum, see N-A3 VIII 3 17[4]). The last lines treat of a range of types of physical movement in defiance of the laws of gravity, culminating in the advocacy of ‘dance’ and ‘flight’ as two of Zarathustra’s distinctive accomplishments. We are reminded of the ‘bird’, light, graceful, and artless in its natural mobility in the three dimensions of space, as one of Zarathustra’s most successful images. Yet the final challenge is directed not against the physical ‘heaviness’ inculcated by the spirit of gravity ‘through whom all things fall’, but rather—metaphorically—against the oppressive tediousness, solemnity, lethargy, and obscurity suggested by this many-sided concept: Nicht durch Zorn, sondern durch Lachen tödtet man. Auf, lasst uns den Geist der Schwere tödten! Ich habe gehen gelernt: seitdem lasse ich mich laufen. Ich habe fliegen gelernt: seitdem will ich nicht erst gestossen sein, um von der Stelle zu kommen. Jetzt bin ich leicht, jetzt fliege ich, jetzt sehe ich mich unter mir, jetzt tanzt ein Gott durch mich. (One doesn’t kill by anger but by laughter. Up! Let’s kill the spirit of gravity! I have learned to walk: since then I have been able to run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move. Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me.)

Similarly, in a parallel passage in ‘Vom Geist der Schwere’ in Part III, Zarathustra blames his antagonist for the burden of outmoded traditions, and introduces a string of kinetic images to suggest his own lightness of heart and absolute freedom of manoeuvre. In ‘Vom Gesicht und Räthsel’ the spirit of gravity appears in person for the first time in the guise of an ungainly dwarf, and proceeds to propound something like Newton’s Law. Pausing beside the rock and gate at the intersection of two infinite paths—perhaps hinting at Nietzsche’s experience at Surlei—Zarathustra challenges him to a battle of wits ‘Halt! Zwerg! Ich! oder du!’ (Halt! Dwarf! I! or you!) The contest—conducted in whispers as Zarathustra’s thoughts turn to the mystery of recurrence—is cut short by a howling dog: the atmosphere darkens and a sense of terror descends once more.14 In a state of trance bordering on hallucination, the prophet thinks that he sees a sleeping shepherd attacked by a snake and makes a desperate effort to avert the peril. Like ‘Der Wahrsager’ before it, ‘Vom Gesicht und Räthsel’ leaves no doubt of the mixture of nausea and dread with which Zarathustra regards the premiss that for so long

66  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism has tried to take possession of him by stealth and is here endowed in his imagination with a physical reality; but the incident has an unexpected outcome. The shepherd heeds the cry of alarm. As he awakens, he bites off the reptile’s head and repels the spirit of gravity with shouts of jubilant laughter: Nicht mehr Hirt, nicht mehr Mensch,—ein Verwandelter, ein Umleuchteter, welcher lachte! Niemals noch auf Erden lachte je ein Mensch, wie er lachte! Oh meine Brüder, ich hörte ein Lachen, das keines Menschen Lachen war,——und nun frisst ein Durst an mir, eine Sehnsucht, die nimmer stille wird. Meine Sehnsucht nach diesem Lachen frisst an mir: oh wie ertrage ich noch zu leben! Und wie ertrüge ich’s, jetzt zu sterben!— (No longer a shepherd, no longer a man-a being transformed, girdled with light, who laughed! Never yet did any man on earth laugh as he laughed! O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter-and now I am parched with thirst, with a longing that is never still. My longing for this laughter parches me: oh, how can I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die now!)

The last lines fuse Tristan’s ‘Sehnen! Sehnen—im Sterben mich zu sehnen,/vor Sehnsucht nicht zu sterben!’ from Tristan und Isolde, Act III (quoted in Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 21), with Isolde’s ‘Wie ertrug ich’s nur?/Wie ertrag’ ich’s noch?’ from Act II (quoted in Cosima’s letter to Nietzsche of 18 January 1872 and in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 4). The pattern of a regeneration mystery is reproduced in ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’—the long, synoptic discourse that draws together the threads of the preceding argument. Here, in § 3, Zarathustra returns to the theme of his sun-like ‘going down’, and combines it in virtuoso fashion with that of the presentation of the ‘gift’: ‘Unter ihnen will ich untergehen, sterbend will ich ihnen meine reichste Gabe geben!’ (I want to go down among them, dying I will give them my most precious gift!). There is a powerful climax in the final § 30, where the prophet, again likening himself to the sun, braces himself against the coming of a ‘great noon’ —ein Stern bereit und reif in seinem Mittage, glühend, durchbohrt, selig vor vernichtenden Sonnen-Pfeilen:— —eine Sonne selber und ein unerbittlicher Sonne-Wille, zum Vernichten bereit im Siegen! Oh Wille, Wende aller Noth, du meine Nothwendigkeit! Spare mich auf zu Einem grossen Siege!— (—a star, ready and ripe in its noon, glowing, transfixed, blissful through annihilating sunarrows15:—itself a very sun, and an inexorable sun-will, ready for annihilation in victory! O will, dispeller of all need, you my necessity! Spare me for one great victory!)

Zarathustra’s request is granted in ‘Der Genesende’, § 2, when he suddenly collapses, the prospect of the imminent fulfilment of his mission carrying him to the verge of death: Kaum aber hatte Zarathustra diese Worte gesprochen, da stürzte er nieder gleich einem Todten und blieb lange wie ein Todter. (No sooner had Zarathustra spoken these words than he fell down like a dead man and remained like a dead man for a long time.)

The Convalescent  67 His collapse is induced by the tremendous invocation with which he commands the idea of recurrence to awaken. Here, embedded in a welter of derivative material, is the most conspicuous adaptation of Der Ring in Also sprach Zarathustra (the hand extended to uplift the ‘abysmal’—or ‘most abysmal’—thought stands out in the last lines): Siegfried, Act III

‘Der Genesende’, § 1

(Am Fuße eines Felsenberges… Nacht, Sturm und Wetter, Blitz und Donner.) Vor einem gruftähnlichen Höhlenthore im Felsen steht der Wanderer Wache! Wache! Wala, erwache! Aus langem Schlafe weck’ ich dich schlummernde wach. Ich rufe dich auf! herauf! herauf! Aus nebliger Gruft, aus nächt’gem Grunde herauf! Erda! Erda! Ewiges Weib! Aus heimischer Tiefe tauche zur Höh’! Dein Wecklied sing’ ich, daß du erwach’st; aus sinnendem Schlafe sing’ ich dich auf! Allwissende! Urweltweise! Erda! Erda! Ewiges Weib! Wache, du Wala! erwache! (Die Höhlengruft hat zu erdämmern begonnen: in bläulichem Lichtscheine steigt Erda aus der Tiefe….) Erda. Stark ruft das Lied; kräftig reizt der Zauber; ich bin erwacht aus wissendem Schlaf: wer scheucht den Schlummer mir?

Eines Morgens, nicht lange nach seiner Rückkehr zur Höhle, sprang Zarathustra von seinem Lager auf wie ein Toller, schrie mit furchtbarer Stimme und gebärdete sich, als ob noch Einer auf dem Lager läge, der nicht davon aufstehn wolle; und also tönte Zarathustra’s Stimme, dass seine Thiere erschreckt hinzukamen… Herauf, abgründlicher Gedanke, aus meiner Tiefe! Ich bin dein Hahn und Morgen-Grauen, verschlafener Wurm: auf! auf! Meine Stimme soll dich schon wach krähen! Knüpe die Fessel deiner Ohren los: horche! Denn ich will dich hören! Auf! Auf! Hier ist Donners genug, dass auch Gräber horchen lernen! Und wische den Schlaf und alles Blöde, Blinde aus deinen Augen! Höre mich auch mit deinen Augen: meine Stimme ist ein Heilmittel noch für Blindgeborne. Und bist du erst wach, sollst du mir ewig wach bleiben. Nicht ist das meine Art, Urgrossmütter aus dem Schlafe wecken, dass ich sie heisse— weiterschlafen! Du regst dich, dehnst dich, röchelst? Auf! Auf! Nicht röcheln—reden sollst du mir! Zarathustra ruft dich, der Gottlose! Ich, Zarathustra, der Fürsprecher des Lebens, der Fürsprecher des Leidens, der Fürsprecher des Kreises—dich rufe ich, meinen abgründlichsten Gedanken! Heil mir! Du kommst-ich höre dich! Mein Abgrund redet, meine letzte Tiefe habe ich an’s Licht gestülpt! Heil mir! Heran! Gieb die Hand—ha! lass! Haha!—Ekel, Ekel, Ekel— wehe mir!

68  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Siegfried, Act III

‘The Convalescent’, § 1

(At the foot of a rocky mountain… Storm, rain and tempest, lightning and thunder. The Traveller stands before the tomb-like mouth of a cave in the rock: Awake! Awake! Sibyl, awake! From your long sleep I awaken you, slumberer. I summon you forth: Up! Up! Up from the misty chasm, from the depth of night! Erda Erda! Immortal woman! From the depth where you dwell rise on high! I sing your awakeningsong so that you will awaken. I sing you up from the sleep of knowledge. All knowing, eternally wise! Erda! Erda! Immortal woman! Wake, thou sibyl! Awake! The cave has begun to glow: in a bluish haze Erda ascends from the depths…. The song calls powerfully, the magic pulls strongly. I have woken f rom the sleep of knowledge; who drives my sleep away?

One morning, not long after his return to the cave, Zarathustra jumped from his bed like a madman, cried with a terrible voice, and behaved as if someone were lying on the bed who wouldn’t get up; and Zarathustra’s voice rang out in such a way that his animals came in terror… Up! abysmal thought, up from my depths. I am your cockerel and dawn, sleepy monster! Up! Up! My voice shall soon crow you awake! Loosen the fetters of your ears: listen! For I want to hear you! Up! Up! Here is thunder enough to make the very graves listen. And wipe the sleep and all dimness and blindness from your eyes! Hear me with your eyes too: my voice is a remedy even for the blind!16 And once you are awake you shal I stay awake for ever. It isn’t my way to awaken great-grandmothers out of their sleep in order to tell them—to go back to sleep! Are you moving, stretching, rattling! Up! Up! You shall not rattle, you shall—speak to me! Zarathustra the godless calls you! I, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle—I call you, my most abysmal thought! Ah! you’re coming—I hear you! My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth into light! All hail! Come on! Give me your hand—ha! Let go! Ha ha!—disgust, disgust, disgust—Woe is me!)

II This adaptation of Wotan’s invocation to Erda in Siegfried, Act III, is hardly an extraneous element in the plot. When we remember that Nietzsche took advantage of the same sequence in Der Ring when stating the terms of the argument in the prologue, we begin to discern a sustained linguistic ploy reinforcing a premeditated programme which now approaches its dénouement. The pivot on which the action of Der Ring des Nibelungen had come to turn was the oracular consultation scene between Wotan and Erda in Siegfried, Act III: here in Wagner’s redaction of the myth, the descending arc of the Wotan tragedy and the ascending arc of the Siegfried epic intersect. Nietzsche derides the typical reaction to the scene when describing Wagner’s Hegelian genius for building cloud castles in Der Fall Wagner, § 10: Sie hören mit Zittern, wie in seiner Kunst die grossen Symbole aus vernebelter Ferne mit sanftem Donner laut werden; sie sind nicht ungehalten, wenn es zeitweilig grau, grässlich und kalt in ihr zugeht. Sind sie doch sammt und sonders, gleich Wagnern selbst, verwandt mit dem schlechten Wetter, dem deutschen Wetter! Wotan ist ihr Gott: aber Wotan ist der Gott des schlechten Wetters…

The Convalescent  69 (Trembling they hear how in his art the great symbols emerge from the misty distance with muted thunder; they are not put out if at times it gets grey, gruesome, and cold. Aren’t they, one and all, like Wagner himself, related to bad weather-German weather! Wotan is their god: but Wotan is the god of bad weather…)

Wagner’s treatment of the consultation is free in a signal respect. In the Eddaic poems—the Völuspá and Baldrs Drawnar—the sibyl alone sees into the future: this is why (in Baldrs Draumar) the god conceals his identity in a bid to ensure her cooperation. In Siegfried, Act III, Wagner keeps within these boundaries, presenting Wotan in disguise as the ‘Traveller’ and stressing the sibyl’s visionary powers. Almost at once, however, the Traveller’ replaces Erda as arbiter. His fate is no longer an obscure destiny imposed by unseen forces beyond the gods. It is a fate of which he is not only cognizant, but actually ‘wills’ to come to pass: Dir Unweisen ruf’ ich’s in’s Ohr, daß du sorglos ewig nun schläf’st.— (I conjure you, foolish one, that you may sleep at peace for ever.)

Yet if Wotan ordains—or ‘wills’—what is to befall, why should he disguise himself, ride out the storm, and awaken the reluctant sibyl only to say that he had no further need of her? Nietzsche had been privileged to hear this newly completed scene at Tribschen on 22 August 1869, some three months after his first visit; and as we now know from his newly discovered letter to Wagner of 15 October 1872, he had studied the last Act repeatedly from Cosima’s presentation copy of Klindworth’s vocal score in 1871–2. The difficulty of the oracular consultation seems to have dawned on him only after the Bayreuth Festival as a result of his talks with the Frankfurt physician Otto Eiser. In a recently discovered letter to Cosima of 10 October 1877, when submitting Eiser’s exegetical study of Der Ring for inclusion in the Bayreuther Blätter, he spoke of his need for informed comment, and asked Cosima to assist with decisive marginal notes. One of the points on which guidance was urgently sought was why Wotan awakens Erda from sleep (N-Br15 601 f: previously unpublished). Cosima, unfortunately, did not deign to elucidate this apparent anomaly in her reply on the 22nd (‘Es ist aber recht schwer für mich ein Ja oder Nein bei den Hypothesen zu setzen, und gar ein “entscheidendes”’): her silence could hardly fail to excite Nietzsche’s vigilant satirical pen. More than once he went back to the consultation scene and made an issue of the inconsequential behaviour of the god ‘der mit ungeheurer Wichtigkeit die alte Erda aus ihrem Schlafe weckt, um ihr zu sagen, daß sie weiter schlafen könne’ (who, with tremendous pomp, awakens old Erda out of her sleep in order to tell her to go back to sleep. N-A3 V 2 12[189]). This observation in a note written in the autumn of 1881, just before Die fröhliche Wissenschaft came out, appears to have been the starting-point for the longest discussion of the scene in Nietzsche’s published writings in Der Fall Wagner, § 9. Wagner, Nietzsche says in this spirited paragraph, writes his music-dramas backwards beginning with the third Act, and fashions them according to the intended quality of the final effect. He feels that the construction of his plots is unimportant as long as he is sure of an irresistible climax: Ich gebe ein Beispiel. Nehmen wir den Fall, dass Wagner eine Weiberstimme nöthig hat. Ein ganzer Akt ohne Weiberstimme—das geht nicht! Aber die ‘Heldinnen’ sind im Augenblick alle nicht frei. Was thut Wagner? Er emancipirt das älteste Weib der Welt, die Erda:

70  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism ‘herauf, alte Grossmutter! Sie müssen singen!’ Erda singt. Wagner’s Absicht ist erreicht. Sofort schafft er die alte Dame wieder ab. ‘Wozu kamen Sie eigentlich? Ziehn Sie ab! Schlafen Sie gefälligst weiter!’ (For example, let’s suppose that Wagner needs a female voice. A whole Act without a female voice—that won’t do! But just now none of the ‘heroines’ is available. What does Wagner do? He sets free the oldest woman on earth, Erda: ‘Up, old grandmother! You’ve got to sing!’ Erda sings. Wagner’s end is achieved. Thereupon he packs the old lady off. ‘Why on earth did you come? Off with you! Just go back to sleep.’)

This squares with ‘Der Genesende’, § 1, which glances at the wider implications of Wotan’s interview with Erda. It is in this context that Zarathustra’s words ‘It isn’t my way to awaken great-grandmothers from sleep in order to tell them—to go back to sleepl’ are to be understood. We may note in passing that it is unlikely that Nietzsche was the recipient of a confidence from Wagner, for there were no meetings after 10 October 1877 when he wrote to Cosima and asked ‘weshalb [Wotan] die Wala aus ihrem Schlafe weckt?’ (Why does Wotan awaken Erda?). So there is no reason to accept literally his claim that Wagner always planned his music dramas in reverse (of course this does apply inter alia to the composition of the text of Der Ring, and to the concluding statement of the so-called ‘Motiv der Liebeserlösung’ in Götterdämmerung17). On the other hand, his account of the ‘Erda’ scene as an interpolation in the dramatic action dictated chiefly by musical considerations is by no means far-fetched: the first two Acts of Siegfried entirely lack female characters (discounting the woodbird); and the ‘Erda’ scene makes an invaluable—perhaps indispensable—transition before the last scene, and predestined climax, of Brünnhilde’s awakening. What of that scene’s dramatic function? It might be urged that ‘Der Genesende’, § 1, brings an element of satire into the proceedings, based on a clearly deliberate misunderstanding, which aims to reduce to near absurdity the pretensions of its model in Der Ring. The satire is anything but indiscriminate. The timeless oblivion to which the god consigns the sibyl—‘Zu ewigem Schlaf/hinab! hinab!’—is to all intents and purposes the same as that to which he himself aspires when renouncing his quest for worldly supremacy. Wotan’s summons prepares for the fulfilment of his pessimistic purpose, his longing for blindness, his will to extinction in the bliss of nirvana. Zarathustra’s invocation prepares for the fulfilment of his ‘Machtgelüst’— the creative campaign of self-assertion and striving that culminates in the prospect of an eternally self-perpetuating present through the theory of eternal return. The contrast is pointed by Nietzsche’s use of paraphrase which now becomes a weapon in a personal war: a rallying-point for readers familiar with his role as Wagner’s spokesman and champion in the years in which the trilogy took its final form.18

III Once the thesis behind ‘Der Genesende’, § 1, is grasped, it is easier to discern the comprehensive and centralizing pattern underlying Nietzsche’s book in its entirety. The formula of the invocation or ‘awakening call’, is frequently resorted to, either in anticipation or in recollection of the central exploit of Part III as the nub of the literary design.

The Convalescent  71 Taking ‘Der Genesende’, § 1, as our starting-point, we may return to ‘Zarathustra’s Vorrede’, § 1, and the prophet’s invocation to the ‘great star’ in its perpetual orbit between the antithetical extremities of midnight and noon: Eines Morgens stand er mit der Morgenröthe auf, trat vor die Sonne hin und sprach zu ihr also: ‘Du grosses Gestirn! Was wäre dein Glück, wenn du nicht Die hättest, welchen du leuchtest! Zehn Jahre kamst du hier herauf zu meiner Höhle: du würdest deines Lichtes und dieses Weges satt geworden sein, ohne mich, meinen Adler und meine Schlange. Aber wir warteten deiner an jedem Morgen, nahmen dir deinen Überfluss ab und segneten dich dafür. (One morning he rose with the dawn, appeared before the sun and addressed it thus: ‘Great star! What happiness would you have if you had not those who need your light! You have come up here to my cave for ten years: you would have had enough of your light and of this journey but for me, my eagle and my serpent. But we waited for you each morning, helped ourselves to your abundance, and blessed you for it.)

Here, the description of the prophet’s rising in the prologue, ‘Eines Morgens stand er mit der Morgenröthe auf’ (One morning he rose with the dawn), anticipates ‘Der Genesende’, § 1: ‘[Eines Morgens] sprang Zarathustra von seinem Lager auf’ (One morning Zarathustra jumped from his bed). Zarathustra’s purposeful stance before the mouth of his cave; his invocation recorded in direct speech; his claim that his destiny depends on the intelligence (‘Licht’, ‘Überfluss’) imparted by an intermediary ascending from the underworld: on all these counts there is a convincing correspondence. Notwithstanding all that has taken place between Parts I and III, we see that the ‘ending’ is implicit in the ‘beginning’ of Zarathustra’s going down. The invocation in the prologue and the invocation in ‘Der Genesende’ are interrelated and interdependent, and both have their roots in the ‘Erda’ scene in Siegfried, Act III, and the ‘Traveller’s’ imperious Herauf! herauf! *          *          * Aus heimischer Tiefe tauche zur Höh’! (Up! Up!… From the depth where you dwell rise on high!)

Support for this construction is forthcoming in the new preface added to the second edition of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft in 1886, soon after Zarathustra was completed. The opening section of ‘Zarathustra’s Vorrede’ had appeared entire, and almost verbatim, in the first edition of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 342, under the title ‘Incipit tragoedia’. Now Nietzsche returns to ‘Incipit tragoedia’, and adds a comment that clearly points to its derivation from a pre-existing source: Ach, es sind nicht nur die Dichter und ihre schönen ‘lyrischen Gefühle’ an denen dieser Wieder-Erstandene seine Bosheit auslassen muss: wer weiss, was für ein Opfer er sich sucht, was für ein Unthier von parodischem Stoff ihn in Kürze reizen wird? ‘Incipit tragoedia’—heisst es am Schlusse dieses bedenklich-unbedenklichen Buchs: man sei auf seiner Hut! Irgend etwas ausbündig Schlimmes und Boshaftes kündigt sich an: incipit parodia, es ist kein Zweifel…

72  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism (Ah! It isn’t only the poets and their beautiful ‘lyrical feelings’ upon whom this resurrected one must vent his malice19 who knows what sort of victim he is looking for, what sort of a monster of material for parody will whet his appetite before long? ‘Traged begins’ it says at the end of this scrupulously unscrupulous book: one had better watch out! Something downright wicked and mischievous announces itself: ‘Parody begins’, no doubt…)

If allowances are made for certain modifications in the interests of the development of the plot, the opening discourses in Parts II, III, and IV, will be found to resort to a similar procedure. In Part II, ‘Das Kind mit dem Spiegel’, the prophet prepares for his next ‘visitation’: Eines Morgens aber wachte er schon vor der Morgenröthe auf, besann sich lange auf seinem Lager und sprach endlich zu seinem Herzen: ‘Was erschrak ich doch so in meinem Traume, dass ich aufwachte?’ (One morning, however, he awoke before the dawn, reflected long on his bed, and at last addressed his heart: ‘Why was I so frightened by my dream that I awoke?’)

The storm imagery anticipates the account of Siegfried, Act III, in Der Fall Wagner, § 10. The line ‘Zu meinen Freunden darf ich wieder hinab und auch zu meinen Feinden’ (I can go down again to my friends and to my enemies too) takes up the idea of Zarathustra’s going down—the play on words serving to distinguish the friends and enemies whom Zarathustra accepts from the ‘believers’ he rejects—and reverses the sense of Erda’s recalcitrant and evasive Lass’ mich wieder hinab! (Let me go down again!)

The first discourse in Part III, ‘Der Wanderer’, finds the prophet in the guise of ‘traveller and mountaineer’ on an island not far from the Islands of the Blessed. We are reminded of the declamatory pathos of the discourse on human prudence in Part II, where Zarathustra first speaks of his ‘double will’ and of the agonizing tension between his conflicting aims. As in the cold, clear midnight the ‘traveller’ climbs a promontory so as to get to the other shore of the island with the early morning, he dwells on the subject of his self-conquest. On reaching the summit, he surveys the sleeping sea beneath him and reverts to the subject of his going down: Vor meinem höchsten Berge stehe ich und vor meiner längsten Wanderung: darum muss ich erst tiefer hinab als ich jemals stieg:—tiefer hinab in den Schmerz als ich jemals stieg, bis hinein in seine schwärzeste Fluth! So will es mein Schicksal: Wohlan! Ich bin bereit. (I stand before my highest mountain and before my longest journey: therefore I must first go down deeper than I ever descended!—deeper into pain than I ever descended, down to its blackest stream. So my fate decrees. Very well! I am ready.)

The pursuit of antithetical spatial objectives carries far-reaching implications: the juxtaposition of the contraries ‘mountain’ and ‘sea’, ‘height’ and ‘depth’, ‘summit’ and ‘abyss’, ‘refuge’ and ‘danger’, ‘climbing up’ and ‘climbing down’, looks ahead to the general conjunction of opposites with which at the end of Part III, and again at the end of Part IV, he celebrates his great victory: Woher kommen die höchsten Berge? so fragte ich einst. Da lernte ich, dass sie aus dem Meere kommen.

The Convalescent  73 Diess Zeugniss ist in ihr Gestein geschrieben und in die Wände ihrer Gipfel. Aus dem Tiefsten muss das Höchste zu seiner Höhe kommen. (What do the highest mountains rise from? I once asked. Then I learned that they rise from the sea. This testimony is inscribed upon their stones and the sides of their summits. The highest must rise to its height from the deepest.)

After the prophet’s conquest of the idea of recurrence in Part III the action is transposed onto a new plane. In the first discourse of Part IV, ‘Das Honig-Opfer’,20 as Zarathustra prepares for his third and last ‘visitation’, we are reminded of the consistency of the design by an invocation that carries to its extreme the technique of free, imaginative paraphrase so much in evidence in Nietzsche’s book. Thue dich auf, du Menschen-Abgrund!/Thue dich auf und wirf mir deine Fische und Glitzer-Krebse zu! *          *          * Bis sie, anbeissend an meine spitzen verborgenen Haken, hinauf müssen in meine Höhe, die buntesten Abgrund-Gründlinge zu dem boshaftigsten aller Menschen-Fischfänger. Der nämlich bin ich von Grund und Anbeginn, ziehend, heranziehend, hinaufziehend, aufziehend, ein Zieher, Züchter und Zuchtmeister, der sich nicht umsonst einstmals zusprach: ‘Werde, der du bist!’ (Open up, human abyss! Open up and throw me your fish and glistening crabs!… Until they, by biting on my sharp, hidden hooks have to rise to my height, the most colourful denizens of the deep to the most cunning of all fishers of men. I am he, from the heart and from the start-tugging, trailing, trawling, taking in tow; a teacher, trainer, and taskmaster, who once admonished himself, not in vain: ‘Become what you are!’21

Although Zarathustra again predicts his going down, the emphasis is really on his power of attraction as an anti-Christian ‘fisher of men’: ‘Also mögen nunmehr die Menschen zu mir hinauf kommen…’ (So men may now come up to me…) This paves the way for the discovery of the higher men whose cry of distress in the next discourse rises up to Zarathustra’s cave: ‘Hörst du noch Nichts?…rauscht und braust es nicht herauf aus der Tiefe?’ (Do you still hear nothing?… Doesn’t the sound of rushing and roaring rise up from the depths?) As a prelude to this series of extraordinary encounters, the prophet lapses into a mood of intense introspection, apostrophizing the elements Und was in allen Meeren mir zugehört, mein An-und-für-mich in allen Dingen—Das fische mir heraus, Das führe zu mir herauf: dess warte ich, der boshaftigste aller Fischfänger.

*          *          * Hinaus, hinaus, mein Auge! Oh welche vielen Meere rings um mich, welch dämmernde Menschen-Zukünfte! Und über mir—welch rosenrothe Stille! Welch entwölktes Schweigen! (And whatever in the sea belongs to me as my personal prerogative—fish it out for me, bring it up to me: I, the most cunning of all fishermen, am waiting for it… Gaze out! Gaze out! my eye! Oh how many seas surround me, what dawning human futures! And above me—what rosy stillness! What cloudless silence!)

74  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism

IV Further study of Nietzsche’s prose-poem brings to notice a number of subsidiary passages which through their emphasis on concepts of space and motion, as well as through their use of the formula of the invocation or ‘awakening-call’, help to underline the importance of the paraphrases of Siegfried that mark off all the crucial events in Zarathustra’s ministry (instances could be multiplied: we are here concerned with the more conspicuous ones). An excellent example is found in the discourse on ‘immaculate perception’ (‘Von der unbefleckten Erkenntniss’) in Part II, where Zarathustra derides the disinterested contemplation of the moon as it hangs over the sea, pale and dejected before the dawn (for all the withering anti-religion of the title, the target is a secular one: the aesthetics of Kant and Schopenhauer). In the long concluding paragraph, he compares the moon’s cat-like, nocturnal prowling with the ardour and thirst of the antithetical sun rising on the horizon. The imagery stems from the description of the dithyrambic dramatist in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 7, listed as one of the sources of Zarathustra in Ecce homo, ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie’, § 4: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 7

‘Von der unbefleckten Erkenntniss’

Was er [i.e., Wagner] dann auch für Blicke auf Erde und Leben wirft, es sind immer Sonnenstrahlen, die ‘Wasser ziehen’, Nebel ballen, Gewitterdünste umher lagern. Hellsichtig-besonnen und liebendselbstlos zugleich fällt sein Blick hernieder.

Seht doch hin, wie sie ungeduldig über das Meer Kommt! Fühlt ihr den Durst und den heissen Athem ihrer Liebe nicht? Am Meere will sie saugen und seine Tiefe zu sich in die Höhe trinken: da hebt sich die Begierde des Meeres mit tausend Brüsten. Geküsst und gesaugt will es sein vom Durste der Sonne; Luft will es werden und Höhe und Fusspfad des Lichts und selber Licht! Wahrlich, der Sonne gleich liebe ich das Leben und alle tiefen Meere. Und diess heisst mir Erkenntniss: alles Tiefe soll hinauf—zu meiner Höhe!

(The glances Wagner then casts towards the earth and life are always rays of sunlight which ‘draw water’, form mist, and gather stormclouds. At once clear-sightedly reflective and selflessly loving, he gazes down.

Just look how impatiently it comes over the sea! Don’t you feel the thirst and hot breath of Its love? It would suck at the sea and drink the sea’s depth up to its own height: now the sea’s desire rises with a thousand breasts. It wants to be kissed and sucked by the sun’s thirst; it wants to become air and height and a path of light and light itself! Truly, like the sun do I love life and all deep seas. And this/call perception: All that is deep shall rise—to my height!)

The passage on the dithyrambic dramatist also mentions ‘the craving of the heights for the depths’ (‘die Sehnsucht aus der Höhe in die Tiefe’): a paraphrase of Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, where Wagner speaks of a new, overmastering longing, the longing of the heights for the depths (‘eine neue, unsäglich bewältigende Sehnsucht, die Sehnsucht aus der Höhe nach der Tiefe.’ W-A1 IV 361, cited N-A3 IV 4 140 f). This calls to mind,

The Convalescent  75 if it does not directly anticipate, those passages in Zarathustra which make free play on antithetical images of depth and height, ascent and descent. ‘Oh Himmel über mir, du Reiner! Tiefer! Du Licht-Abgrund!’ the prophet exclaims in his meditation ‘Vor SonnenAufgang’ in Part III: ‘Dich schauend schaudere ich vor göttlichen Begierden./In deine Höhe mich zu werfen—das ist meine Tiefe!’ (O sky above me, pure! and deep! You abyss of light! Gazing into you, I tremble with divine longings. To cast myself into your height— that is my depth!) Erda’s awakening is recalled in ‘Mittags’ in Part IV, when the prophet sinks down in an upland pasture and sleeps in the shade of an ancient tree enveloped by a grape-vine (an incident based in part on the Messenger’s description of the Maenads in Euripides’ Bacchae, discussed in Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 5, and quoted in the essay Die Geburt des tragischen Gedankens). As he drowses, Zarathustra looks back with satisfaction on preceding events as if preparing for the ‘great noon’ in the last discourse. At length he berates himself: ‘Auf! sprach er zu sich selber, du Schläfer! Du Mittagsschläfer! Wohlan, wohlauf, ihr alten Beine! Zeit ist’s und Überzeit, manch gut Stück Wegs blieb euch noch zurück— Nun schlieft ihr euch aus, wie lange doch? Eine halbe Ewigkeit! Wohlan, wohlauf nun, mein altes Herz! Wie lange erst darfst du nach solchem Schlaf—dich auswachen?’ (Up! he said to himself,you sleeper! You midday-sleeper! Come! Cheer up, old legs! It’s high-time, and past high-time-you still have a long way to go. Now you have fully slept— how long? Half an eternity! Come! Cheer up now, my old heart! After such a sleep, how long will it take you fully to wake?)

and with some difficulty overcomes his fatigue as if awakening from a strange drunkenness: ‘Und siehe, da stand die Sonne immer noch gerade über seinem Haupte’ (And behold, there the sun was still standing, straight above his head). A further Wagnerian source suggests itself in view of the textual parallel given on pp. 134–5.) Yet other examples may be taken as representative of the way in which Wagner’s subjectmatter takes on a new life in a context so unlike the original that the connection is easily missed. While Nietzsche’s model is the consultation scene in Siegfried, the theory of eternal return is personified in ‘Der Genesende’ as a preternatural monster with whom Zarathustra is engaged in combat: the theme of the descent to the underworld in search of revelation and prophecy is fused with the idea of the heroic exploit as a further, obligatory component of the heroic epic. This skilful telescoping of mythological elements is seen in ‘Vom Gesicht und Räthsel’, where the shepherd’s—Zarathustra’s—battle with the snake recalls Apollo’s conquest of Python, cited by Wagner in connection with Siegfried’s dragon fight (W-A1 II 170 ff). The ‘Über-Drache’ briefly returns near the end of Part II in ‘Von der Menschen-Klugheit’, where Zarathustra speaks of the enduring need for evil. Then, in ‘Von der Seligkeit wider Willen’ in Part III, when he expounds the hidden meaning of the funeral dream, the anticipation of the encounter with the sleeping dragon in ‘Der Genesende’, § 1, is unmistakable: One of the most garishly dramatic discourses in Part II is ‘Von grossen Ereignissen’: an extravagant satire of the descent to the underworld, which offsets the genuine ordeal which awaits Zarathustra in Part III. The setting, a volcano near the Islands of the Blessed,

76  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism recalls Nietzsche’s travels in southern Italy in 1876 and 1881–2, when he saw Vesuvius from the Villa Rubinacci in Sorrento, Etna on his visit to Messina, and probably Stromboli: the opening paragraph in which the prophet is seen flying across the sea like a spirit to the astonishment of the ship’s company22 is adapted from an extract from a ship’s log describing an incident on Stromboli in 1686: ‘Seht mir an! sagte der alte Steuermann, da fährt Zarathustra zur Hölle!’ (‘Look here!’ said the old helmsman, ‘there’s Zarathustra going to Hell!’).23 Siegfried, Act III Wanderer. Ich rufe dich auf: herauf! herauf!

‘Von der Seligkeit wider Willen’ Ach, abgründlicher Gedanke, derdu mein Gedanke bist! Wann finde ich die Stärke, dich graben zu hören und nicht mehr zu zittern?

*          *          * D’rum schlafe nun du, schließe dein Auge; träumend erschau’ mein Ende!

*          *          * Noch wagte ich niemals, dich herauf zu rufen: genug schon, dass ich dich mit mir-trug! *          *          * Inzwischen treibe ich noch auf ungewissen Meeren; der Zufall schmeichelt mir, der glattzüngige; vorwärts und rückwärts schaue ich—, noch schaue ich kein Ende.

(I conjure you: Up! Up!… So close your eyes Ah, abysmal thought that is mine! When shall and sleep now, in your dreams see my end! I find the strength to hear you burrowing and no longer tremble?… Never have I dared to conjure you up: it was enough that I carried you with me!… Meanwhile I sail on uncharted seas, enticed by the honeyed tongue of chance. I scan the future and the past-still I see no end.)

Ordeals by fire and water are often prerequisite in gaining access to the underworld in mythology. Zarathustra’s encounter with the fire-hound, which is now recounted, invites comparison with a variety of classical sources of which Apollodorus’ description of Heracles and the many-headed hell-hound Cerberus (who chokes) is certainly the best. It is, however, the ‘Erda’ scene as paraphrased in ‘Der Genesende’, § 1, that provides the textual model when Zarathustra tells of his descent into the volcano, and the mock-heroic invocation that roused the dormant monster from its slumber: ‘Der Genesende’, § 1

‘Von grossen Ereignissen’

Herauf, abgründlicher Gedanke, aus meiner Heraus mit dir, Feuerhund, aus deiner Tiefe! rief Tiefe! ich, und bekenne, wie tief diese Tiefe ist! Woher ist das, was du da heraufschnaubst? (Up abysmal thought, up from my depths!

Up with you, fire-hound, up from your depths! I cried, and reveal how deep this depth is. Where do these rantings come from?)

The Convalescent  77 A fierce contest ensues in which, in the spirit of ‘Vom neuen Götzen’ in Part I, Zarathustra makes a valorous attempt to defend his political position, despite persistent hectoring from the erupting volcano (which doesn’t much care for politics either). One is reminded of Schopenhauer als Erzieher, § 4, which—for once—speaks favourably of the socialistic earthquake started by Rousseau, likening it to the activities of the monster Typhon, incarcerated by Zeus under Etna. The same passage cites the Hegelian doctrine of the state as ‘präsenten Gott auf Erden’ as a relapse not into paganism but folly. No less marked are the affinities with Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, § 9, following the attack on Hegel in § 8. The prophet’s most vociferous opponent proves to be one of his least effectual. Throughout, Zarathustra has the upper hand in the contest, so that when he describes the worship of the state, the volcano, choking with vexation and envy, vents its feelings in ever greater exhibitions of turbulent activity: ‘Wie? schrie er, das wichtigste Thier auf Erden?’ (What? he cried, the most important beast on earth?). The satire on the fatuous self-overestimation of the proponents of great events and politically motivated inventors of new noises throws into relief the description of the sublime laughter of the unpolitical treasure-seeker. By analogy with’ Vom neuen Götzen’ (last sentences), we know that Zarathustra is thinking of the ‘Übermensch’: Das Gold aber und das Lachen—das nimmt er aus dem Herzen der Erde: denn dass du’s nur weisst,—das Herz der Erde ist von Gold. (Gold and laughter—these he takes from the heart of the earth. For be it known: the heart of the earth is of gold.)

This is too much for the volcano which, having expended its energies in so much futile vapour, smoke, and roaring, suddenly sinks: Als diess der Feuerhund vernahm, hielt er’s nicht mehr aus, mir zuzuhören. Beschämt zog er seinen Schwanz ein, sagte auf eine kleinlaute Weise Wau! Wau! und kroch hinab in seine Höhle. (When the fire-hound heard this he would hear me no further. Crestfallen, he drew in his tail, gave a subdued ‘Bow-wow’, and crept down into his cave.)24

Chapter 6 Zarathustra’s Roundelay

I It is easily supposed that ‘Der Genesende’ is the culmination of Zarathustra’s quest as the animals descry his destiny as teacher of the great year of eternal return—a monster of a great year which, ‘like an hour-glass’, must constantly turn itself over. There are obvious objections to this. For while Zarathustra personifies his teaching and summons up a lionlike arrogance and playfulness to command it to awaken, no ‘awakening’ takes place. Instead, as he reaches out to grasp the idea, stirring, stretching, and rattling in the depths of his mind, he is instinctively repelled by it: Heil mir! Heran! Gieb die Hand—ha! lass! Haha!—Ekel, Ekel, Ekel—wehe mir! (All hail! Come on! Give me your hand—ha! Let go! Ha ha!—disgust, disgust, disgust— Woe is me!)1

Whereupon he falls down. At the end of the discourse he is lying prostrate, like one asleep. The conversation with the eagle and serpent, who here miraculously rise to articulate speech, if it disperses the repressive gloom of Part II, has something of the quality ofdeath-like clairvoyance associated with the anticipations of the teaching. Even the animals’ ‘So—ends Zarathustra’s going down!’ is more a prediction than a statement of an accomplished fact. In this predicament, Zarathustra is struck by the idea that is to provide the essential element in the next phase of the action: Wie lieblich ist es, dass Worte und Töne da sind: sind nicht Worte und Töne Regenbogen und Schein-Brücken zwischen Ewig-Geschiedenem? (How sweet it is that there are words and sounds: aren’t words and sounds rainbows and intangible bridges between the eternally separated?)2

The eagle and serpent press their advantage. As they disclose the prophet’s task as teacher of eternal return, so, like the voice that admonished the captive Socrates (GdT §§ 14 f), they make two important stipulations: firstly, since Zarathustra’s musical accomplishment is inadequate to his calling, he must learn to sing ‘Geh hinaus zu den Rosen und Bienen und Taubenschwärmen! Sonderlich aber zu den Singe-Vögeln: dass du ihnen das Singen ablernst! Singen nämlich ist für Genesende; der Gesunde mag reden. Und wenn auch der Gesunde Lieder will, will er andre Lieder doch als der Genesende!’ Go out to the roses and bees and flocks of doves! But especially to the song-birds that you may learn to sing! For singing is for convalescents; let the healthy talk. And when the healthy man wants songs, he wants different songs from the convalescent!)

secondly, he lacks a suitable instrument—a lyre—with which to accompany his new song

Zarathustra’s Roundelay  79 —‘Sprich nicht weiter, antworteten ihm abermals seine Thiere; lieber noch, du Genesender, mache dir erst eine Leier zurecht, eine neue Leier! Denn siehe doch, oh Zarathustra! Zu deinen neuen Liedern bedarf es neuer Leiern. Singe und brause über, oh Zarathustra, heile mit neuen Liedern deine Seele: dass du dein grosses Schicksal tragest, das noch keines Menschen Schicksal war!’ (Say no more, his animals again replied; rather, first make yourself a lyre, convalescent, a new lyre! For take heed, O Zarathustra! New lyres are needed for your new songs. Sing and brim over, O Zarathustra, heal your soul with new songs, so that you may bear your great destiny which was never yet the destiny of any man!)

The triad of dithyrambs that brings Part III to a close—‘Von der grossen Sehnsucht’, ‘Das andere Tanzlied’, and ‘Die sieben Siegel’—accordingly deals with the last stage of Zarathustra’s education: his learning of song and its counterpart, his unlearning of belief in words (Z IV-Der Schatten). As the image of the bird appeals to him because of its closeness to the state of ‘weightlessness’ in defiance of the physical laws imposed by the spirit of gravity, so the art of music—also to be learned from the bird—appeals to him because of its transcendence of the quasi-gravitational boundaries of conceptual thought. The two forms of transcendence are almost indistinguishable and all but inseparable, harking back to the descriptions of communal ecstasy in the opening pages of Die Geburt der Tragödie. There is a similar description of Dionysian ‘enthusiasm’ at the end of the section on the ‘dithyrambic dramatist’ in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 7, where Nietzsche speaks of the wild, ecstatic, rhythmical movements of the dance, and of the music of intoxicated speech which is projected into the realm of images and ideas: Thus the greatest benefactor among mortals—the dithyrambic dramatist—comes into being.’ Again in a series of magnificent poetic paragraphs in Morgenröthe and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, ‘flight’—the conquest of space—is likened to the untrammelled mental activity of the intuitive thinker: another idea anticipated in some of Nietzsche’s early writings. It follows that when the prophet speaks of removing boundary-stones and, as an ‘astronaught of the spirit’, says that such boundary-stones are to be sent flying up in the air, he again refers metaphorically to the conquest of his arch-enemy, the spirit of gravity. From here, it is a short distance to the form of transcendence made possible by the universal and immediately intelligible language of sounds, which he now recognizes as the means by which his teaching is to be imparted, or ‘taught’, if not as the source from which it springs. The first of the three dithyrambs in question, ‘Von der grossen Sehnsucht’, looks back to Zarathustra’s nostalgic love-song, ‘Das Nachtlied’: the first of a comparable triad of poetic discourses in Part II.3 The last lines expand into a powerful and protracted evocation of a—non-Wagnerian—‘Zukunftsmusik’, as the prophet invokes as his redeemer his own freedom of will —dein grosser Löser, oh meine Seele, der Namenlose—dem zukünftige Gesänge erst Namen finden! Und wahrlich, schon duftet dein Athem nach zukünftigen Gesängen,— —schon glühst du und träumst, schon trinkst du durstig an allen tiefen klingenden TrostBrunnen, schon ruht deine Schwermuth in der Seligkeit zukünftiger Gesänge!— Oh meine Seele, nun gab ich dir Alles und auch mein Letztes, und alle meine Hände sind an dich leer geworden:—dass ich dich singen hiess, siehe, as war mein Letztes! Dass ich dich singen hiess, sprich nun, sprich: wer von uns hat jetzt—zu danken?—Besser aber noch: singe mir, singe, oh meine Seele! Und mich lass danken!—

80  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism (—your great redeemer, O my soul, the nameless one for whom only songs of the future will find names! And truly, your breath is already fragrant with the songs of the future: already you glow and dream, already you drink thirstily from all deep murmuring waters of comfort, already your sadness finds solace in the bliss of songs of the future! O my soul, now I have given you everything, and even the last thing I had, and my hands have become empty through you:—my bidding you sing, see, that was the last thing I had! My bidding you sing! Say, now say: Which of us now owes thanks? But better still: sing for me! Sing, O my soul! And let me give thanks!)

There are similarities in ‘Die sieben Siegel’: the exultant, concluding hymn to life, which corrects the trend of the threnodic ‘Das Grablied’ in Part II. With its seven sections, each consisting of seven verses, this is the most highly wrought of the poetic discourses as Nietzsche noted in his autobiography (‘Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe’, § 4). The ideas it contains have a mounting intensity of effect, the elimination of the boundary stones that press down upon the concepts of good and evil in § 4 is the necessary preparation for the teaching of flight in § 6, where the prophet demands as his Alpha and Omega that ‘everything heavy should become light, every body a dancer, every spirit a bird’—no doubt a re joinder to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as quoted by Köselitz on 4 September 1882: ‘Es ist der Charakter der Deutschen, daß sie über Allem schwer werden, daß Alles über ihnen schwer wird!’ (It is the nature of the Germans to take everything gravely, and that everything around them becomes gravel). This in turn prepares for the crowning seventh section, which brings Also sprach Zarathustra, Parts I–III, to an end with a passionate evocation of the spirit of music: Wenn ich je stille Himmel über mir ausspannte und mit eignen Flügeln in eigne Himmel flog: Wenn ich spielend in tiefen Licht-Fernen schwamm, und meiner Freiheit Vogel-Weisheit kam:— —so aber spricht Vogel-Weisheit: ‘Siehe, es giebt kein Oben, kein Unten! Wirf dich umher, hinaus, zurück, du Leichter! Singe! sprich nicht mehr! —‘sind alle Worte nicht für die Schweren gemacht? Lügen dem Leichten nicht alle Worte! Singe! sprich nicht mehr!’— (If ever I spread out quiet skies above myself and flew on my own wings into my own sky; if ever I playfully swam into the deep reaches of light, and if bird-wisdom came to my freedom. So says bird-wisdom: ‘Look! No above and no below! Cast yourself about, out, back, weightless one! Sing! speak no more! Aren’t all words made for those who are heavy? Don’t all words dissemble to those who are light? Sing! speak no more!’)

These discourses frame ‘Das andere Tanzlied’, the counterpart of ‘Das Tanzlied’ in Part II.4 Here to the sound of the flute, whip, and castanets,5 Zarathustra as a glorified ring-master executes a flirtatious pas de deux with Life (who slaps his face). ‘Das andere Tanzlied’ shows the same trend towards stylisation as its neighbours, the insinuating, wayward movements of the dance begetting an unusual species of rhyming prose: Nach dem Takt meiner Peitsche sollst du mir tanzen und schrein! Ich vergass doch die Peitsche nicht?—Nein!— (To the beat of my whip you shall caper and cry! Did I forget the whip? No, not I!)6

Here there is a hiatus when the banter of the dancers is interrupted by a distant bell striking the hour of midnight (§ 3).

Zarathustra’s Roundelay  81 Zarathustra’s rhetoric is seldom far removed from poetry. Despite this, the song ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’ with its terse sentences, flawless metrical pattern, and intricate and original rhyming scheme, is his first formal attempt at poetic composition. The cogency of statement sets the song apart from the free, improvisatory style of the discourses as, with an exclamation of terror and expectation, Life registers Zarathustra’s long deferred, aweinspiring confidence: ‘Du weisst das, oh Zarathustra? Das weiss Niemand.—’ (You know that, O Zarathustra? No one knows that.—)7 Eins!

Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!

Zwei!

Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?

Drei!

‘Ich schlief, ich schlief—, ‘Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:— ‘Die Welt ist tief, ‘Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht. ‘Tief ist ihr Weh—, ‘Lust—tiefer noch als Herzeleid: ‘Weh spricht: Vergeh! ‘Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit—, ‘—will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!

Vier! Fünf! Sechs!

Sieben! Acht! Neun! Zehn! Elf! Zwölf!

(O man! Mark well! What does deep midnight say? ‘I slept I slept—I have woken from a deep dream:—The world is deep, and deeper than day imagined. Its pain is deep, but joy is even deeper than grief. Pain says: ‘Pass away!’ But all joy wants eternity-wants deep, deep eternity!’)

The two earliest, unpublished sketches for the poem have been made available (facsimile No. 3, a and b); and comparison with a later fair copy (frontispiece) and with the received text (above) enables us to follow the process of composition stage by stage.8 The principal speaker is a new character, ‘Midnight’, whose words, recorded in direct speech, have the character of an oracular edict or prophecy. Clearly the personification of Zarathustra’s sibyl as ‘Midnight’ is due to the pervasive spatio-temporal image of the orbiting sun introduced in the opening words of the prologue, and afterwards linked with a range of images and concepts concerned with the measurement of time—among them the clock with rotating hands on the dial in ‘Die stillste Stunde’; the ‘great year’ and the revolving hour-glass in ‘Der Genesende’; and the (Zoroastrian) Hazar of a thousand years ‘Das Honig-Opfer’. The encounter with the sibyl ‘Midnight’ at the hour of midnight marks

Facsimile No. 3, a and b. The first sketch and first fair copy of the p0o m ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’, Also sprach Zarathustra. Part III, ‘Das andere Tanzlied’, § 3

Zarathustra’s Roundelay  83 with all desirable clarity the precise moment at which Zarathustra’s sun-like ‘going down’ or ‘setting’ ends and a new era begins. ‘Von dem Augenblicke an, wo dieser Gedanke da ist, verändert sich alle Farbe, und es giebt eine andere Geschichte’ Nietzsche wrote after the experience at Surlei (From the moment that this thought comes into its own, everything changes and there is a new history. N-A3 V 2 12[226]). The idea occurs time after time in the correspondence and writings of the last years. An indispensable, anticipatory gloss comes in a ‘Germania’ paper of 1862 in which the young Nietzsche described the dawn of historical epochs: Hat dies ewige Werden nie ein Ende? Was sind die Triebfedern dieses großen Uhrwerks? Sie sind verborgen, aber sie sind dieselben in der großen Uhr, die wir Geschichte nennen. Das Zifferblatt sind die Ereignisse. Von Stunde zu Stunde rückt der Zeiger weiter, um nach Zwölfen seinen Gang von Neuem anzufangen; eine neue Weltperiode bricht an. (Has life’s perpetual flux no end? What are the springs of this great mechanism? They are hidden; but they are the same as in the great clock called history. The events are the clockface. From hour to hour, the hand moves on so as to recommence its progress at twelve: a new epoch dawns. N-A2 II 56)

The sketches show that the final descent to the hour of midnight was carefully contrived. For example, the tenacious, eight-fold hold on the word ‘tief’ (‘deep’), interpolated in lines 2 and 4 of the first draft (facsimile No. 3 a), is a singular feature of the poem considering its brevity. The effect, however, is cumulative rather than merely repetitive, plummeting downwards to the hour of twelve and the ‘deep, deep eternity’ of the last line. ‘Midnight’ herself is characterized by the bell, whose twelve strokes punctuate the lines of the stanza. Here, too, the sketches are instructive: both the handwriting and the placement of the lines show that the bell-strokes were superimposed on the original scheme of the poem, and were therefore directly responsible for the unusual, asymmetrical form of the final version. In the first draft (facsimile No. 3 a), that is to say, the poem consisted of two regular, linked quatrains—eight lines in all—agreeing in the main with the received text but beginning with the present line 3: the words of the sibyl recorded in direct speech ‘Ich schlief—ich schlief Und bin erwacht:— (I slept—I slept and have woken:—)

Only as an afterthought did Nietzsche supply the opening couplet and last line so as to make up a complement of eleven lines alternating with the twelve bell strokes (facsimile No. 3 b; and facsimile No. 1, where the eleven lines and twelve bell-strokes alternate). The second feature of the poem that bears on this investigation is the fact that ‘Midnight’ literally awakens. Admittedly, the awakening-call in ‘Der Genesende’, § 1—‘Up! Up! My voice shall soon crow you awake!’, &c.—is widely separated from the reply ‘I slept—I slept/and have woken’ (amended to ‘I have woken from a deep dream’ in the received text*). If, however, we remember the fact that the original sketch of the poem began with *

The amendment to line 4 for the sake of scansion, if it destroyed the metrical alignment with Siegfried that may have been intended, had the effect of reinforcing the wider parallel: for it is from a ‘dream’ that Wagner’s sibyl awakens: ‘Mein Schlaf ist Träumen,/mein Träumen Sinnen…’ (My sleep is dreaming, my dreams knowledge…’).

84  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism the words of the awakening sibyl, the intention is clear. ‘Das andere Tanzlied’, § 3, is the literal answer to ‘Der Genesende’, § 1: the two discourses are mutually supportive, and both correspond to the text of Siegfried, Act III, where the Traveller’s ‘Sibyl, awake!’ is answered by Erda: ‘I have woken from the sleep of knowledge’ (see above, pp. 85 f). Once more, then, we return to Siegfried as the germinal cell from which Zarathustra grows. It may perhaps be thought that the superimposed, introductory couplet breaks the thread of continuity and disguises the paraphrase of Siegfried that the rest of the poem is supposed to support and enhance: Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!

Eins!

Zwei! Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht? (O man! Mark well! What does deep midnight say?)†

Unquestionably, however, these lines have the character of an invocation, bringing us back to the many comparable, exhortatory passages that infuse the text. More than this: they register a decisive advance. Up to now, the theory of eternal return has been approached through mysterious, bleak, and appalling presentiments against which the prophet in his isolation has made strenuous efforts to defend himself; but here, with his awakening-call to humanity at large (and not only to the sleeping sibyl), he comes forward as the sponsor of a teaching whose universality he believes that he comprehends in advance. If, on these counts, the culminating sequence in Part III may be considered a replica of the consultation scene in Der Ring, it also predictably contrives to deliver a sharp and homiletic attack on the pessimistic precepts enshrined in the dramatic centre of Wagner’s music-drama. Grief and pain—‘Weh’, ‘Herzeleid’—are not evaded as the traveller descends deeper than ever before; but the betrayal of life through capitulation in the doctrines of pessimism is summarily derided and dismissed: ‘Weh spricht: Vergeh! (Pain says: ‘Pass away!’)

Neun!

and the teaching of recurrence in the ensuing, last lines is, as it were, polemically pitted against it. Zarathustra, the advocate of life, suffering, and the circle (as he dubs himself in ‘Der Genesende’, § 1), does not passively acquiesce in or submit to the prospect of an inflexible determinism. That prospect is ‘redeemed’ (to revert to Zarathustra’s use of the term in ‘Der Genesende’) by an overmastering ‘joy’ (‘Lust’) in terms of which the whole of experience is perpetuated and affirmed. His attitude is no longer interrogative or optative, but indicative. The ‘ring of rings’ is wrought by the creative will, the ‘dispeller of all need’, which here at the climax of Nietzsche’s book, through the prophecy of the sibyl, for the first time fully asserts itself: †

Originally ‘Eins! Horch! Was spricht die Mitternacht!—’ (One! Listen! What does Midnight say!—): see facsimile No. 3 a. The sketch shows that the lines of the opening couplet were written in reverse order.

Zarathustra’s Roundelay  85 Zehn! ‘Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit—, ‘—will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!

Elf!

Zwölf! (But all joy wants eternity—wants deep, deep eternity!)*

II The accomplishment of ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’, and the appeal of the poem, frequently anthologized and quoted out of context, should not be allowed to obscure its representative character. This is shown by a parallel in Also sprach Zarathustra, Part IV, ‘Gespräch mit den Königen’, § 1: Einstmals—ich glaub’, im Jahr des Heiles Eins— Sprach die Sibylle, trunken sonder Weins: ‘Weh, nun geht’s schief! ‘Verfall! Verfall! Nie sank die Welt so tief! ‘Rom sank zur Hure und zur Huren-Bude, ‘Rom’s Caesar sank zum Vieh, Gott selbst— ward Jude!’ (Once upon a time—I think in the first year of Grace—the sibyl spoke, drunk without wine: ‘Woe! Things are in a bad way! Disaster! Disaster! The world has never sunk so low! Rome has sunk to a whore and a whore-house, Rome’s Caesar has sunk to a beast, and God himself—became a Jew!’)

By comparison with ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’, this short, gnomic poem is an occasional piece.9 On the face of it, its chief claim to fame consists in the fact that here, for the second—and only subsequent—time, Zarathustra expresses himself in metrical, rhyming verse. This is no accident. If we discount the stanza’s pretentious pentameters, it will be seen that its structure presents a clearly deliberate parallel with ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’. In a strain of self-parody, then; the prophet sums up the cataclysmic historical events that herald the birth of modern civilization. The discourse ‘Gespräch mit den Königen’ recounts the progress of two kings and an ass through Zarathustra’s mountain demesne in search of the higher man, ‘the man who is higher than we, although we are kings’. It is based on the biblical story of the journey of the Zoroastrian Magi to Bethlehem, and in this captures the markedly irreligious tone of Zarathustra, Part IV. Stirred by the wisdom of the kings’ dispirited observations on the follies and foibles of the modern ‘Mischmasch’ (which he overhears surreptitiously from behind a bush), the prophet at length introduces himself: Was hörte ich eben? antwortete Zarathustra; welche Weisheit bei Königen! Ich bin entzückt, und, wahrlich, schon gelüstet’s mich, einen Reim darauf zu machen:— (What do I hear? Zarathustra replied; what wisdom in kings! I am over-joyed, and truly I already feel the urge to compose a rhyme about it.) *

Originally ‘—Die tiefe tiefe Ewigkeit!—’ (facsimile No. 3 a).

86  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Like ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’, the poem describes an oracular consultation. The edict of the sibyl of Rome (a quatrain in direct speech) is prefaced by a rhyming couplet that acquaints the reader with the principal speaker, drunk without wine: that is, in a state of euphoric auto-intoxication (it is to be remarked that when Zarathustra recapitulates ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’ in the penultimate discourse of Part IV, he, too, is said to be in a state of euphoria, his eyes dim, his tongue faltering, his feet unsteady). Sharing to the full the worst fears of the kings, which Zarathustra has just overheard, the sibyl descries the fall—dereliction and derangement—of the ancient world. This ‘going down’ (like that spelt out by the reiteration of the adjective ‘tief’ in ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’) is conveyed by the verb ‘sinken’: ‘Verfall! Verfall! Nie sank die Welt so tief!’

and then ‘Rom sank…’; ‘Rom’s Caesar sank…’10 In both poems the effect is cumulative, reaching its climax in the last lines. Zarathustra’s teaching holds the promise of an authentic consummation; whereas the Incarnation is seen as the last in a series of wanton and indefensible historical disasters which by degrees have eroded and erased the values asserted in a higher phase of cultural and political life. Considerable point is lent to this oblique tribute to the imperium Romanum by Zur Genealogie der Moral, I, § 16, and Der Antichrist, §§ 58 and 59.11

Chapter 7 Zarathustra’s Great Noon

I With the invocation in ‘Der Genesende’, the learning of song, and the encounter with Midnight in ‘Das andere Tanzlied’, the action of Nietzsche’s book is transposed onto a new plane. As he recovers his health, we see a change in Zarathustra’s outward demeanour: his words, which have so far acted divisively, polarizing the elements of thought and experience, are now to bring about a new sense of unity between things formerly separated and deliver the final verdict of unconditional assent. The intention is spelt out in Ecce homo, where we learn that Also sprach Zarathustra is primarily concerned with the dualism propounded by the historical Zoroaster between Ormazd and Ahriman, Light and Dark, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (‘Warum ich ein Schicksal bin’, § 3). Zoroaster’s invidious distinction, Nietzsche declares, has become ingrained in Western habits of thought, which largely concentrate upon the propagation of grotesque error. He speaks of Zoroaster’s honesty and courage, and approvingly quotes the Persian maxim ‘Speak the truth and shoot straight with the bow’.1 The relentless search for truth on which modern man is intent is destined to imperil the notion of absolute ‘truth’, and hence to call into question the very values that inspire it. Zarathustra is himself admonished by the Pope in ‘Ausser Dienst’ that his excessive honesty will eventually carry him ‘beyond’ good and evil.2 His work as ‘destroyer of morals’ (‘Vom Biss der Natter’) is therefore the necessary continuation and completion of that of his predecessor and namesake. ‘Warum “Zarathustra”?” Nietzsche asks in a previously unpublished note of 1888: ‛Die große Selbstüberwindung der Moral’ (Why ‘Zarathustra’? The great self-conquest of morality. N-A3 VIII 3 18[15]). This is taken up by the self-styled ‘immoralist’ in Ecce homo: Versteht man mich?… Die Selbstüberwindung der Moral aus Wahrhaftigkeit, die Selbstüberwindung des Moralisten in seinen Gegensatz-in mich-das bedeutet in meinem Munde der Name Zarathustra. (Am I understood?… The self-conquest of morality out of truthfulness, the self-conquest of the moralist into his opposite—into me—that is what the name Zarathustra means on my lips.)

The transcendence of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ was Nietzsche’s initial philosophical concern;3 and it is a major theme of his writing, giving ready access to his theory of a re-evaluation of values. In pursuing the development, poetic rather than didactic, of this theme in Zarathustra, Parts I–III, we become aware of an accumulation of antithetical spatial (or geographical) images reinforcing the main conceptual contrast, and of frequent descriptions of physical movement charting the passage and commerce between them, which at the most extreme—

88  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism in the discourses dealing with the learning of dance, flight, and song—suggest the total elimination of gravitational norms. As the prophet descends his mountain, he is likened to a dancer. On his arrival in the market-place, he moralizes on the performance of an acrobat with a balancing-pole on a tightrope suspended between two opposite towers (see Introduction, p. 12). Like the ‘ladder’ of ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’, § 19, and ‘Vom Geist der Schwere’, § 2, the tightrope (or ‘bridge’) simultaneously defines and harmonizes diametrical extremes. The disaster that befalls the acrobat amid the derisive and threatening laughter of the assembled multitude sets in relief Zarathustra’s final feat of intellectual daring whereby, uniting ‘first’ to ‘last’, ‘Alpha’ to ‘Omega’, ‘furthest’ to ‘nearest’, ‘summit’ to ‘abyss’, his triumph over the historical Zoroaster is celebrated. It is appropriate that Zarathustra’s closest associates should include an eagle, a symbol of height, light, and unrestricted movement, whose friendship with an antithetical serpent is a propitious omen;4 and that in ‘Von grossen Ereignissen’, § 1, he is hurtling through the air before incredulous witnesses. ‘Mein Magen—ist wohl eines Adlers Magen?’ (My stomach—is it perhaps an eagle’s stomach?), he asks in the strategically placed ‘Vom Geist der Schwere’, § 1, in Part III, bringing out the difference between the downward pull of gravity and his own bird-like buoyancy and freedom from constraint.5 As if in tribute to Orpheus and Amphion, who could move inanimate objects as well as men and animals by the power of their performances on the lyre,6 he says Wer die Menschen einst fliegen lehrt, der hat alle Grenzsteine verrückt; alle Grenzsteine selber werden ihm in die Luft fliegen, die Erde wird er neu taufen—als ‘die Leichte’.

*          *          * Wahrlich, ich lernte das Warten auch und von Grund aus,—aber nur das Warten auf mich. Und über Allem lernte ich stehn und gehn und laufen und springen und klettern und tanzen. Das ist aber meine Lehre: wer einst fliegen lernen will, der muss erst stehn und gehn und laufen und klettern und tanzen lernen:—man erfliegt das Fliegen nicht! (Whoever one day teaches men to fly will have removed all boundary stones; all boundary stones themselves will go flying up in the air. He will re-baptize the earth as ‘the weightless’… Truly from the very heart I too have learned to wait—but only to wait for myself.7 And above all I have learned to stand, walk, run, jump, climb, and dance. This then is my teaching: he who wants to learn to fly must first learn to stand, walk, run, jump, climb, and dance—one cannot learn to fly by flying!)

It is appropriate, too, that Zarathustra’s impending triumph should be acknowledged by the homage of a flock of doves crowding round his head, in conjunction with an (approximately) antithetical lion who licks the tears of joy that fall on his hands (modelled on the salutation of Jupiter’s animals in Heine’s Die Götter im Exil8). In the beginning, in ‘Von tausend und Einem Ziele’, Zarathustra concedes the importance of the Zoroastrian dualism. The discourse introduces the term ‘will to power’, fully fledged, into Nietzsche’s published writings. The coupling of values and power is important: these terms go together in Zarathustra’s framework of reference, and are generally developed side by side. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’, for him, are not metaphysical standards, external laws, or inner commands, but strategic manifestations of the will to power which hold sway by dint of familiarity. In short, they are ‘appearances’, but appearance here is ‘the very thing that

Zarathustra’s Great Noon  89 lives and acts’ (frW § 54). Indeed, when Nietzsche speaks of the one as engendered by the other and asserts that every god is fathered by a devil—a bland inversion of theological dogma9—one begins to doubt whether he thought any exact differentiation possible. Lacking a criterion of values except for the ‘scientific’ notion of the eternally selfperpetuating present, ‘good’ is that which enhances life, ‘evil’ that which impoverishes it. In an intellectual atmosphere conditioned by the quasi-Christian, quasi-Buddhist pessimism of Schopenhauer reinforced by Wagner, the order of priorities is reversed: affirmative values are negated; negative values are affirmed. Hence the deliberately outrageous ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’, § 26: ‘Bei Welchen liegt doch die grösste Gefahr aller MenschenZukunft? Ist es nicht bei den Guten und Gerechten?’ (Who poses the greatest threat to the future of humanity? Isn’t it the good and just?).10 It is not only that Zarathustra thinks of evil as the alternative to good. In his teleology of values the one actually needs the other as its accompaniment, because neither would exist if either were eliminated. In order to dance up into the air, must there not be spirits of gravity waiting to be overcome? The co-existence is fundamental; and in his later writings Nietzsche constantly comes back to it. Here he was profoundly affected by the discussion of Heraclitus and Parmenides in the sketches for his unfinished book on the pre-Platonic Greek philosophers (§§ 5 ff). The notion of evolution as the product of contention between opposed forces that constantly seek to reunite (§ 5), and the notion that everything opposing ‘converges into one harmony, invisible to the common human eye’ (§ 7) contain in embryonic form some of the most distinctive tenets of his later thought, brought to fruition in the discourses that anticipate the ‘great noon’ of Zarathustra. Since the theory of universal recurrence disallows that any single event can be taken out of sequence, suppressed, or eliminated, it follows that in the nature of things, opposites, too, cannot be dispensed with. Of necessity, and ad infinitum, lightness will be accompanied by heaviness, height by depth, above by below, ascent by descent, light by dark, midnight by midday. Qualitative distinctions arise within a continuum that admits of antithesis as permanently reciprocal forces; the strife that sets antitheses apart is merely the external aspect of the law that binds them inseparably to one another. It would be pressing the case too far to draw attention to the extension of the theory of opposites into the sphere of ethics by Plato (whose outburst of scholastic ire against Heraclitus and Parmenides is well known). For despite the obvious points of affinity, it is here that Nietzsche comes most fully into his own métier, and strikes his most controversial, if characteristic, attitude. Already in Part I, ‘Vom Baum am Berge’, we read Aber es ist mit dem Menschen wie mit dem Baume./Je mehr er hinauf in die Höhe und Helle will, um so stärker streben seine Wurzeln erdwärts, abwärts, in’s Dunkle, Tiefe,— in’s Böse. (Now, with a man it is as with a tree. The more he wants to rise to the height and light, the more strongly his roots drive down earthwards into the dark, into the depths—into evil.)11

With an inflexible logic the prophet postulates the necessity of evil, placing it on a par with— in his more strident (illogical) passages some way ahead of—good as a factor conditioning what he calls the ‘great economy’ which cannot do without evil (N-A3 VIII 3 14[185]). The matter is well expressed in a note of 1888: ‘NB!! Zarathustra, der auf eine heilige Weise allen heiligen Dingen Muth und Spott entgegenstellt und seinen Weg zum Verbotensten,

90  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Bösesten mit Unschuld geht—’ (N.B.!! Zarathustra, who with an air of sanctity opposes all holy things with courage and mockery, and innocently goes on to the most forbidden and most evil. N-A3 VIII 1 2[166]). Likewise, in ‘Der Genesende’, § 2, Zarathustra innocently observes that man has for too long appeared in the guise of ‘penitent’ (‘Büsser’), and demands that he become ‘better and wickeder’ (‘besser und böser’): ‘Das allein lernte ich bisher, dass dem Menschen sein Bösestes nöthig ist zu seinem Besten,—/—dass alles Böseste seine beste Kraft ist’ (So far I have learned only that a man’s worst is necessary for his best, that all that is most evil in him is his true strength). In this way, at the climax of his argument in Zarathustra, where his poetical—or ‘mystical’—proclivity for once seems inescapable, Nietzsche in fact sets out to strengthen a largely empirical theory, rejoicing in the fatalism implicit in his concept of necessity, which freely and gladly accedes to the prospect of a Godless, Graceless universe. In his later works, he makes the most of the opportunity for disturbing what he calls the somnolence of his readers. This is true of Jenseits von Gut und Böse—the ‘glossary’ to Zarathustra as the title immediately suggests12—Zur Genealogie der Moral,13 and Götzen-Dämmerung, where he is most forthright in ‘Die “Verbesserer” der Menschheit’, § 1, enjoining philosophers to place themselves beyond good and evil, and well above what he calls the ‘illusion’ of moral values. Far more extreme statements are found in the unpublished books (that is, Der Antichrist and Ecce homo) and notes, where he becomes on occasion wilfully provocative, indulging to the full his taste for ingenious paradox. These passages may be read as commentaries on the most characteristic and significant exploit of the new Zarathustra, who at the end of Part III celebrates his marriage to and with the ‘ring of rings’ by wedding Alpha to Omega, joy to sorrow, the most wicked to the most benevolent, good to evil, and rejoicing in himself as his own offspring: Oh wie sollte ich nicht nach der Ewigkeit brünstig sein und nach dem hochzeitlichen Ring der Ringe,—dem Ring der Wiederkunft? Nie noch fand ich das Weib, von dem ich Kinder mochte, es sei denn dieses Weib, das ich liebe: denn ich liebe dich, oh Ewigkeit! Denn ich liebe dich, oh Ewigkeit! (O how should I not lust after eternity and the wedding ring of rings—the ring of recurrence? Never yet did I find the woman by whom I wanted children, unless it be this woman who m I love: for I love you, O eternity!)14

II Against this background, we may look ahead to Part IV, ‘Das Zeichen’, and the summons to the great noon with which Nietzsche’s book ends following the recapitulation of ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’ in the penultimate discourse, ‘Das Nachtwandler-Lied’.15 In order to make a convincing case for ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’ as the new song demanded by the eagle and serpent in ‘Der Genesende’, § 2, and the definitive formulation of the teaching of recurrence, we have yet to establish that the song is, in fact, sung; and also that it is accompanied on the lyre. The matter is settled in ‘Das Nachtwandler-Lied’, after the banqueting scene with the higher men. Zarathustra still entertains the hope of converting his recalcitrant guests to his teaching: so they, too, must learn to sing, exchanging the conceptual language of speech

Zarathustra’s Great Noon  91 for the non-conceptual language of sounds. The discourse describes a second music-lesson: this time a rehearsal and performance over which the prophet himself presides. The lyric is broken up and taught piecemeal to the higher men; then in § 12, at Zarathustra’s bidding, it is put together and sung in concert: Lerntet ihr nun mein Lied? Erriethet ihr, was es will? Wohlan! Wohlauf! Ihr höheren Menschen, so singt mir nun meinen Rundgesang! Singt mir nun selber das Lied, dess Name ist ‘Noch ein Mal’, dess Sinn ist ‘in alle Ewigkeit!’ singt, ihr höheren Menschen, Zarathustra’s Rundgesang! (Have you learned my song? Have you guessed its meaning? Well, come on! you higher men, now sing to me my roundelay! Now you yourselves sing the song whose name is ‘Once More!’, whose meaning is ‘to all eternity!’ You higher men, sing Zarathustra’s roundelay.)

Besides this, ‘Das Nachtwandler-Lied’ clarifies the question of the song’s accompaniment. As in ‘Das andere Tanzlied’, § 3, the rehearsal takes place against the background of the chime of the distant midnight bell, whose twelve strokes are simulated here by the twelve, numbered sections of the discourse. By an imaginative poetic touch, the ‘bell’ is identified as Zarathustra’s accompanimental ‘lyre’ in § 6 Süsse Leier! Süsse Leier! Ich liebe deinen Ton, deinen trunkenen Unken-Ton!—wie lang her, wie fern her kommt mir dein Ton, weit her, von den Teichen der Liebe! Du alte Glocke, du süsse Leier!… (Sweet lyre! Sweet lyre! I love your sound, your drunken, croaking sound. From how long ago and how far away does your sound come to me, from afar, from the pools of love. You ancient bell, you sweet lyre!)

and § 8: Was bin ich! Eine trunkene süsse Leier,—/—eine Mitternachts-Leier, eine Glocken-Unke, die Niemand versteht, aber welche reden muss, vor Tauben, ihr höheren Menschen! Denn ihr versteht mich nicht! (What am I! A drunken, sweet lyre, a midnight lyre, a croaking bell that no one understands, but which must speak to the deaf, you higher men! For you do not understand me!)

The demands of the animals are fully satisfied by this performance of the new song with its instrumental accompaniment. The ingenious dual role of the bell furnishes additional support for the theory (advanced in Chapter 6) that ‘Der Genesende’ and ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’ came into being as complementary parts of closely-knit, continuous, antiWagnerian pastiche: ‘Der Genesende’, § 1 Herauf, abgründlicher Gedanke, aus meiner Tiefe!… ‘Das Nachtwandler-Lied’, § 2 Aus der Tiefe aber kam langsam der Klang einer Glocke herauf… (Up! Abysmal thought out of my depths…. Out of the depths the sound of a bell slowly came up…)

92  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism ‘Zarathustra’s Rundgesang’—Zarathustra’s roundelay—as the song is now called, sets out a series of antitheses: wakefulness and sleep, day and night, sorrow (‘Weh’) and joy (‘Lust’). Only, Zarathustra is not making available a series of simple alternatives and inviting a choice between them (as did the historical Zoroaster); nor does he aim to reconcile warring factions (‘Von der Erlösung’). Indeed the whole trend of the thought of this most discriminating of thinkers is here directed towards the act of unqualified assent that eliminates the possibility of an exclusive ruling in favour of one or other side. The chime of the bell, simultaneously announcing midnight and noon, is the cue for an unrestrained poetic outpouring which explores the wider implications of this final ‘Yes and Amen’ (§ 10): Sagtet ihr jemals Ja zu Einer Lust? Oh, meine Freunde, so sagtet ihr Ja auch zu allem Wehe. Alle Dinge sind verkettet, verfädelt, verliebt,— —wolltet ihr jemals Ein Mal Zwei Mal, spracht ihr jemals ‘du gefällst mir, Glück! Husch! Augenblick!’ so wolltet ihr Alles zurück! —Alles von neuem, Alles ewig, Alles verkettet, verfädelt, verliebt, oh so liebtet ihr die Welt,— —ihr Ewigen, liebt sie ewig und allezeit: und auch zum Weh sprecht ihr: vergeh, aber komm zurück! Denn alle Lust will Ewigkeit! (Did you ever say yes! to a single joy? O my friends, then you said yes to all pain too. All things are ensnared, entwined, enamoured. If ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said ‘You please me happiness! instant! moment!16 then you wanted everything back—everything from the start, everything for ever, everything enmeshed, entwined, enamoured. O that is how you loved the world! You eternal ones, love it always and for ever: and say even to pain ‘Pass away, only return!’ For all joy wants eternity!)

The last discourse, ‘Das Zeichen’, is introduced by a compressed quotation from the first section of the prologue; the book ends as it began with an invocation to the rising sun at the dawn of a new day. The discourse is full of pitfalls. In the next sentences dealing with the fate of the higher men, Nietzsche makes an oblique allusion to Plato’s Symposium (his ‘Lieblingsdichtung’ at Pforta according to an early curriculum vitae: N-A2 III 68), which he had described affectionately in Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 13. Zarathustra’s departure on the morning after the banquet is roughly analogous to Socrates’ departure from his drowsy companions after the drinking-party. ‘Mein Schritt—ist für sie kein Weckruf’, he observes, Sie schlafen noch in meiner Höhle, ihr Traum käut noch an meinen Mitternächten. Das Ohr, das nach mir horcht,—das gehorchende Ohr fehlt in ihren Gliedern. (My step is no awakening-call for them. They still sleep in my cave, chewing over my midnights in their dreams. The ear that hears me—the obedient ear—is totally lacking.)

The final incursion into the field of ethics in Zarathustra is effected not so much by rational suasion as by an unremitting attention to the all-pervading poetic imagery in its dependence on Der Ring. Having withstood the wiles of the higher men, the prophet awakes to reaffirm the message of ‘Midnight’. His emergence as ‘advocate of the circle’ ushers in the meridian

Zarathustra’s Great Noon  93 splendour of a ‘great noon’ reversing the first day of creation when light was divided from darkness (‘Das Nachtwandler-Lied’, § 10): Eben ward meine Welt vollkommen, Mitternacht ist auch Mittag,—/ Schmerz ist auch eine Lust, Fluch ist auch ein Segen, Nacht ist auch eine Sonne… (Now my world has just become perfect, midnight is also midday, pain is also joy, a curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun…)

As the temporal antitheses ‘midday’ and ‘midnight’, ‘sun’ and ‘moon’, ‘light’ and ‘dark’, ‘past’ and ‘future’, ‘formerly’ and ‘one day’, are transcended by the prospect of an eternity immanent in time, so the ethical antitheses ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, are transcended by the gesture of unconditional affirmation. The final invocation, which promises a perpetuation of opposites in a timeless nunc stans, completes a design wrought with a full comprehension of art and erudition. With this, his last paraphrase of Wagner’s Siegfried, Act III—and last utterance—Zarathustra proclaims his everlasting ‘today’, and presses home his challenge: Wohlan! Der Löwe kam, meine Kinder sind nahe, Zarathustra ward reif, meine Stunde kam:— Dies ist mein Morgen, mein Tag hebt an: herauf nun, herauf, du grosser Mittag!— (Now then! The lion has come, my children are near, Zarathustra has ripened, my hour is at hand. This is my morning, my day breaks: Up! Up! great noon!)17

Chapter 8 Nietzsche’s Affirmation

I It is the task of the artist in words to win his readers over to his creative vision; and a successful work of art has an aesthetic validity that is sui generis, and that may—or even must—be considered apart from the question of the validity of its exegetical content. Is its content then a matter of indifference? The foregoing analysis does not pretend to treat exhaustively of the substance of Nietzsche’s book; although, by elucidating its structure in so far as it stems from Wagner, it furnishes material that may assist the commentator in his exacting task. Nonetheless, it should be made clear, if only for future reference, that the ideas in Zarathustra present serious difficulties, if they do not raise profound misgivings in the minds of many impartial readers. Plainly, it would be foolish and mischievous to discount the actual terms of the argument as poetic circumlocutions bearing only obliquely on the content of Nietzsche’s message (whatever that may be). Nietzsche’s attempt to transcend conventional notions of good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, and the collective standards they have engendered, and to replace them with a hierarchy or order of rank based on subjective volition or ‘will to power’, is one of the most alarming enterprises embarked upon by a major thinker, and an enterprise made all the more dangerous by the forensic skill, psychological acumen, and literary artistry displayed in its achievement. It will be replied that the premisses of the traditional ethical systems are in many cases no more demonstrably true than Nietzsche’s terrifying scepticism is demonstrably false. His presentiment of the imminent devaluation of traditional values, at the time so difficult to distinguish from reckless iconoclasm, is acclaimed as pioneering a breakthrough that helped to revolutionize the atmosphere of the age and create the climate in which progress was possible. The root of the trouble, it will be said, lies not in Nietzsche’s intentions but in a superficial reading of those intentions, now a mere episode in recent history. We are invited to consider that the great campaign of destruction was to have been accompanied by a greater campaign of creation; that Nietzsche, after all, was concerned with re-evaluating—not abolishing—values; that his order of rank was founded on strenuously defended principles; and that he was guided by unusually penetrating, diagnostic insight, even if the extremity of his situation, faced with the ruin of almost everything he considered exemplary, led him to express himself fairly frequently in grandiloquent, fulsome, and wilfully ambiguous language. It is of course unclear that Nietzsche’s order of rank can be instated without maintaining that some levels in the order are ‘better’ and some ‘worse’ than others. To this extent, then, he sticks to traditional evaluative customs, for all his concern to disown them, and his self-styled ‘immoralism’ may be said to have an intensely moral motivation. In amplification of this, it will be urged that the idea of recurrence—‘the

Nietzsche’s Affirmation  95 great disciplinary thought’—was envisaged as a regulative criterion, the contemplation of which alone would exert an almost (in some passages, a literally) unbearable pressure on behaviour. What is before us, then, is neither an abdication from responsibility, nor the charter for anarchy supplied by Zarathustra’s ‘Doppelgänger’ the shadow in the dictum ‘Nothing is true, all is permitted’1, which the will to power, deprived of its authoritarian bias, would seem to bring rapidly closer to hand. It is more nearly the reverse: a heightened sense of responsibility as the accompaniment to a heightened sense of freedom, which in the achievements of exceptional individuals—precursors of the supermen of the future— will ensure the liberation and fulfilment of human potentialities. While much in this is heroic and inspiring much more is unclear, tenuous, and open to abuse. Because the recurrence theory is inaccessible to all but a very small, elect minority, while the vast majority supporting the pyramid of an enlightened autocracy are condemned to exist in an interregnum bereft of any prospect of authentic self-realization, it can hardly be said that Nietzsche is on humanity’s side save in a very few, exceptional—even hypothetical— cases.2 In itself, this would not matter so much if those whom he (jestingly?) instances as measuring up to his high standards—Cesare Borgia, and others—inspired confidence in the practical outcome of his policies.3 As it is, his thinking tends to bestow a deification on emotion and fanaticism, and to encourage egoism and self-will to masquerade as if they were objective norms. Certainly many of the innovations that have most decisively altered the course of history to the benefit of mankind have originated in the insurrections of the few against the cherished beliefs and assumptions of the many. In extreme circumstances, the qualities of independence, self-determination, and self-assertion so highly esteemed by Nietzsche may offer perhaps the only hope of redress against a blind, misguided, and unyielding orthodoxy propagating values that are manifestly corrupt and untrue. Yet if human authority is fallible, and progress hard won, this does not mean that insurrection at all times is necessarily desirable: that ‘the good war sanctifies every cause’ (‘Vom Krieg und Kriegsvolke’). While Nietzsche seldom fails to impress with the brilliance and vehemence of his pronouncements, in the end it is difficult to condone the element of affectation behind such a ruthless, terrifying, and seductive gesture of protest aimed against the modern world.

SUMMARY At this juncture, we may return to this book’s proper element, and summarize the main points that have emerged from study of Zarathustra and Der Ring in juxtaposition. It would be an exaggeration to say that Zarathustra’s significance is directly proportionate to its success as a Wagnerian parody (the term Nietzsche uses of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 342). Yet the parallel between the quest for the ring of the Rhinegold and Zarathustra’s quest for the ‘ring of rings’ provides the basis of a comparison that discloses marked similarities. These similarities inhere not only in the mythological style and messianic stance of Nietzsche’s book, but also—more importantly—in its conceptual scheme, which at every decisive stage elicits pointed allusions to Wagner’s trilogy, Der Ring, in its dependence on two linked scenes at the start of Siegfried, Act III: scenes where Wotan, in Wagner’s words, ‘rises to the tragic height of willing his going down’.

96  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Common to both works is the prospect of the imminent ‘going down’, or fall, of an outmoded system foretold by the principal character (Wotan, Zarathustra), and of the emergence of a new world-order whose harbinger is a heroic being, surpassing humanity, created according to a premeditated strategy. We have seen that Wagner began the music for Siegfried, Act III, a few months after meeting Nietzsche in Leipzig, and that the consultation scene with Erda and the encounter between Wotan and Siegfried engaged his attention at the time of the first exchanges at Tribschen. In this light, Zarathustra’s ‘Reich der Zukunft’, ‘Mensch der Zukunft’, ‘Mensch der Gegenwart’, &c., can be seen to derive from the ‘Mensch der Zukunft’, of Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft and other Feuerbachian tracts of Wagner’s revolutionary period, which Nietzsche studied avidly at the time of the early conversations. The more distinctive term ‘Übermensch’—the antithesis of ‘der Untergehender’—with its special bearing on the layout of Zarathustra, moreover, has a precedent in Plüddemann’s study of the first Bayreuth Festival, listed in the inventory of Nietzsche’s library. Certainly many other considerations entered into this attempt to depict a super-human type: the final conception is neither copied exclusively from Wagner nor in opposition exclusively to him. For all that, Nietzsche’s lifelong, love-hate relationship with Wagner’s Siegfried—which we shall have reason to consider again—was a major determinant factor in the composition of Also sprach Zarathustra; while his contemptuous rejection of modernity and his demand for a re-evaluation of values, too, echo—and implicitly take issue with—some of Wagner’s most characteristic concerns. The action of Zarathustra, Parts I–III, falls into two contrasted phases. The first fifty-six discourses, loosely strung together as they are, form a unity, psychologically at least. They describe an epic, sun-like ‘going down’ as the prophet prepares to do battle with a sleeping monster: a being of the underworld, darkness, and deep midnight: ‘So began Zarathustra’s going down’. In large measure, this struggle for self-mastery is enacted in the recesses of Zarathustra’s mind. Yet at the turning-point of the narrative in ‘Der Genesende’, § 1, it is to Siegfried, Act III, that Nietzsche returns in the awakening-call ‘Up! abysmal thought, up from my depths’, which precedes the ‘animals’ ‘prophecy of the imminent termination of the sun-like ‘setting’ announced in the opening passages: ‘Now the hour approaches when the down-goer shall bless himself. So—ends Zarathustra’s going down.’ The impact of the adaptation of Wotan’s invocation to Erda at this crucial moment is heightened by a series of anticipations skilfully worked into the text. Taken by themselves, these might be thought trifling; taken together, they build up into a substantial infrastructure impressing on the reader’s imagination the coherence of the literary design that culminates in the last four discourses of Part III. Here, the encounter with the sibyl ‘Midnight’ in the song ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’ to the accompaniment of the bell-lyre tolling the hour of twelve comes as the predestined climax. The ‘awakening’ of the sibyl answers the awakening-call ‘Der Genesende’, and simultaneously marks the end of Zarathustra’s epic descent, his recovery of health, and his newly-acquired mastery of song—that is his emergence as teacher of eternal return—in accordance with his animals’ prediction: ‘See! You are the teacher of eternal return—that is now your destiny!’ The synoptic character of ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’ is brought home by a self-parody, developing the theme of the oracular consultation, in the poem addressed to the kings in Part IV; and it is made explicit

Nietzsche’s Affirmation  97 at the end of the book in the sleep-walker’s song, when Zarathustra teaches his ‘roundelay’ to the higher men assembled in his cave, and expounds it line by line before its final, concerted performance. Zarathustra’s ultimate triumph is signalled by his invocation to the ‘great noon’ in ‘Das Zeichen’ in Part IV: the third really decisive event in his ministry, which elicits the third really decisive reference to Siegfried, Act III, in the last lines, enclosing the action within a circle of Wagnerian paraphrases ‘Up! Up! great noon!’

The origin of the teaching of eternal return has been frequently debated with inconclusive results. Strategic and experimental as it is, scholars have shown that the theory is no sudden inspiration, but relates to the humanistic and idealist traditions to which Nietzsche was heir and which he brought to a kind of culmination. In the present context, however, the familiar line of investigation proves to have limited usefulness. When allowances have been made for a fairly large number of analogies and parallels, both classical and post-classical, should we not concede that Nietzsche’s insight by the rock at Surlei was unprecedented and unique? Another question may then be substituted. What precisely is the point of its sophisticated and derivative presentation in Also sprach Zarathustra? Zarathustra’s affirmation in the three closing dithyrambs of Part III, which fulfils the cryptic intimations of ‘Der Wahrsager’, ‘Die stillste Stunde’, ‘Vom Gesicht und Räthsel’, and other discourses, is a moment of spiritual awakening and re-birth. As such it presents the strongest contrast to the scene in Der Ring where Wotan in consultation with the sibyl, Erda, renounces his ambition for power, and freely consigns himself and his progeny, Siegfried, to a serene and timeless oblivion. Once we see the tenacity with which Nietzsche holds to his model and the ingenuity with which he refurbishes it, the idea of recurrence stands here as a rejoinder to the teaching of redemption from re-birth, ‘this ancient teaching of the oldest and noblest peoples’ as Schopenhauer described it, which Wagner after his discovery of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Book IV, § 63, had worked into the last scene of the trilogy. It will be remembered that in the two published accounts of the trilogy in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth and Der Fall Wagner respectively, Nietzsche discussed Der Ring essentially in terms of the concept of power; and also that he saw a glaring contradiction between the heroic conception of the music-drama and the reconstruction epitomized in the peace—and end-orientated peroration quoted in the one and satirized in the other. These two widely spaced historical notes shed a revealing light on a process of evolution only recently documented in full; and they authenticate a Schopenhauerian reading of the Wotan tragedy, and by doing so tell us much about Wagner’s view of the work when it was completed. Support for this line of reasoning comes in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 56 (quoted on p. 61). This passage has not lacked attention; but a new importance accrues to it when it is read not as an independent formulation of the theory of recurrence, but rather, as the recently published notebooks show was originally intended, as an explanation of the birth of Also sprach Zarathustra.4 By means of a really determined attempt to fathom the nature of pessimism and to free it from the half-Christian, half-German simple-mindedness and narrowness that impairs Schopenhauer’s and Buddha’s (not to mention Wagner’s)

98  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism ostensible pessimism, Nietzsche says, we may open our eyes to the opposite ideal of a totally unqualified assent to reality beyond good and evil, and envisage the being who has not only learned to come to terms with history but who insatiably ‘wills’ its infinite recapitulation: ‘Wie? Und dies wäre nicht—circulus vitiosus deus?’ (What? And this would not be—a vicious circle deified?). This, then, is the contrast defined by Also sprach Zarathustra. Read as an anti-Wagnerian manifesto, the creative counterpart of the polemical campaign conducted later on in Der Fall Wagner, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and elsewhere, the book asserts the magnitude of Wagner’s historical role and artistic achievement with much greater conviction than do many works of complacent adulation. Finally, when after completing Part I, Nietzsche spoke of himself as Wagner’s ‘heir’, and when in his autobiography he expressed satisfaction at the way in which he had transformed the ‘idea of Bayreuth’ (defined and defended in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 8) into Zarathustra’s ‘great noon’, and called the latter the vision of a Festival that he might still live to see, he made the comparison not only legitimate but inescapable. His reply is all the more telling because its touchstone is Wagner’s most ambitious enterprise, the trilogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, in which he believed that the doctrines of pessimism, eliciting a response in the mind of an artist of genius, had found their representative embodiment.

Part II: Zarathustra and Parsifal

Ich habe als ‘Versuchung Zarathustra’s’ einen Fall gedichtet, wo ein grosser Nothschrei an ihn kommt, wo das Mitleiden wie eine letzte Sünde ihn überfallen, ihn von sich abspenstig machen will. (In ‘Zarathustra’s Temptation’, I devised a situation in which a great cry of distress reaches him, as pity tries to attack him as a last sin that would entice him away from himself.) Ecce homo, ‘Warum ich so weise bin’, § 4

Chapter 9 Parsifal

I There is a certain irony in the fact that Wagner’s Parsifal, the music-drama with which Nietzsche is most closely associated in the popular mind, should be the major work with which he had least familiarity in performance: so much so that when in December 1886 he heard the prelude for the first (and only) time in Monte Carlo, it came as something of a revelation, eliciting in his notes and correspondence some of the most appreciative comments on Wagner that he ever set on paper.1 Despite this, he was certainly no stranger to the work, and his observations have a consistency frequently absent from his other polemical writings about Wagner. Rather than consummation, Nietzsche here saw only acquiescence and defeat; rather than victory only another attitude of the inveterate attitudinizer, the more insidious because of the refinement of the language in which it was expressed. ‘Was Goethe über Wagner gedacht haben würde?’ he asks in Der Fall Wagner, § 3: Goethe hat sich einmal die Frage vorgelegt, was die Gefahr sei, die über allen Romantikern schwebe: das Romantiker-Verhängniss. Seine Antwort ist: ‘am Wiederkäuen sittlicher und religiöser Absurditäten zu ersticken.’ Kürzer: Parsifal— (What would Goethe have thought of Wagner? Goethe once asked himself what the danger was that hovered over all Romantics: the Romantics’ fate. His answer was ‘to stifle by ruminating over moral and religious absurdities.’ In short: Parsifal—)2

From Cosima’s diary we know that on Christmas Day in 1869, Nietzsche was present at a reading of the extended prose synopsis Wagner had prepared in response to a request from Ludwig II of 21 August 1865.3 The project was under constant review in the years that followed; and it must surely have been discussed in Sorrento, shortly after the first Bayreuth Festival of 1876, when Nietzsche for the last time found himself in Wagner’s proximity. During the next six months, Nietzsche on leave of absence from Basel University was putting his period of recuperation in Italy to good use. Already plans for Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, incorporating material dictated to Köselitz in Basel and notes drafted at Klingenbrunn during the Bayreuth rehearsals were well advanced. By adopting a defiant attitude, all but attacking Wagner and Cosima personally, Nietzsche would seem to have accepted an estrangement from the family as a foregone conclusion. His motives, however, are by no means easy to determine, and it is extremely difficult to prove that Menschliches, Allzumenschliches was actually intended as the brazen affront it seems to be, let alone that he had any idea of the reception that awaited it at Wahnfried. With hindsight, of course, the title might be taken as a provocative, cynical goad; the fact that for a time Nietzsche thought of publishing the book under a pseudonym and finally suppressed all mention

Parsifal  101 of Wagner’s name suggests anxiety at the construction his reflections invited. Yet the Bayreuth Festival had occasioned little perceptible coolness; and in the intervening period friendly relations with the Wagners had been assiduously preserved. It would surely argue almost incredible effrontery if, a few months after receiving a handsome, inscribed copy of the text of Parsifal from Wagner in Basel, Nietzsche should have sent his own latest book (two copies) to Bayreuth anticipating a hostile response. The chances are, then, that he had not yet fully come to terms with the situation, and had misjudged the stridency of his pen as well as the devastating accuracy of his aim and his power to wound. ‘Von Bayreuth aus ist [das Buch] in eine Art von Bann gethan: und zwar scheint die große Excommunikation über seinen Autor zugleich verhängt’ he wrote in some perplexity to Köselitz on 31 May, adding ‘Wagner hat eine große Gelegenheit, Grösse des Charakters zu zeigen, unbenutzt gelassen’ (The book has been practically banned by Bayreuth: and what is more, the great excommunication seems to have been pronounced upon its author as well… Wagner has let slip a great opportunity for showing greatness of character).4 Another letter of 11 June to Seydlitz as the implications of Wagner’s silence began to register was more realistic in its assessment of his diverging trend and showed something of the tangle of loyalties characteristic of the polemical writings of the later period. ‘Seine und meine Bestrebungen laufen ganz aus einander’, he remarked, Wü­ßte er übrigens, was ich alles gegen seine Kunst und seine Ziele auf dem Herzen habe, er hielte mich für einen seiner ärgsten Feinde,—was ich bekanntlich nicht bin. (His aims and mine are beginning to run in quite opposite directions…. After all, if he knew everything that I have against his art and aims in my heart, he would think me one of his worst enemies—which as everyone knows I am not.)

Whatever chance there may yet have been of a reconciliation giving Wagner an opportunity to show ‘greatness of character’ was nullified in August 1878 by a number of oblique allusions to Nietzsche’s book in the third of three articles, ‘Publikum und Popularität’, which appeared under Hans von Wolzogen’s editorship in the newly founded Bayreuther Blätter.5 Wagner’s comments are so muted as to pass unnoticed by all but the most perceptive readers; but their implications were not lost on Nietzsche, already piqued by what he saw as his friend’s wilful lack of magnanimity. ‘W.’s bitterböse Polemik gegen mich im Augustheft der Bayr.Bl. habe ich nun auch gelesen’ he told Overbeck on 3 September ‘es that mir wehe, aber nicht an der Stelle, wo W.wollte’ (I have now also read Wagner’s angry polemic against me in the Bayreuther Blätter: it grieved me, but not at the place where Wagner intended it to). The volte-face was again in mind when he wrote to Malwida von Meysenbug on 14 January 1880—this time not perhaps without a trace of self-congratulation: Hören Sie Gutes von Wagners? Es sind drei Jahre, daß ich nichts von ihnen erfahre: die haben mich auch verlassen, und ich wußte es längst, daß Wagner von dem Augenblicke an, wo er die Kluft unsrer Bestrebungen merken würde, auch nicht mehr zu mir halten werde. Man hat mir erzählt, daß er gegen mich schriebe. Möge er damit fortfahren: es muß die Wahrheit auf jede Art an’s Licht kommen! (Have you had good news of the Wagners? For three years I have heard nothing from them. They, too, have given me up, and I realized long ago that as soon as Wagner noticed the rift between our endeavours, he too would no longer stand by me. I gather that he is writing against me. Let him continue: the truth must come to light by every means!)

102  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Later, the roughly simultaneous completion of the two incompatible works was seen very much as an act of fate. When reviewing in his autobiography the circumstances surrounding the receipt of the text of Parsifal and the sending of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Nietzsche availed himself of a suitably expressive image: ‘Klang es nicht, als ob sich Degen kreuzten?’ (Didn’t it sound as if swords crossed?). The realization that his strictures in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches had driven Wagner into an act of deliberate repudiation may have helped to set Nietzsche on his future course, breaking down whatever reservations he may yet have entertained about discussing the artist openly in print (the explicit attack begins in Nietzsche’s next book, Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche, § 134, which came out in March 1879). Not only is it significant that Wagner’s name appears in all the later prose works without exception, as the anthology Nietzsche contra Wagner was to demonstrate to a largely incomprehending reading public. As we shall see, the possibility that Parsifal decisively affected Nietzsche’s attitude to Wagner in the months before Also sprach Zarathustra also carries serious implications for students of his intellectual development as well as of his thought intrinsically. It will be remembered that the plans for Also sprach Zarathustra were drawn up at the time of the tumultuous success of the première of Parsifal, which was attended by unprecedented publicity. Nietzsche had made no secret of his feelings; but it was inevitable that many friends would be present for the historic occasion, and far from raising objections he accepted this with patience and equanimity.6 Elisabeth, whose untimely defence of her brother had already met with a sharp rebuff from a defiant Cosima retreating into the hardness of frosty pride, must have expressed an understandable reluctance to attend; for we find him writing indulgently to her on 30 January 1882 Es ist mir sehr lieb, daß Du dort sein willst Du wirst alle meine Freunde dort finden. Ich aber—Verzeihung!—komme gewiß nicht hin, es sei denn, daß Wagner mich persönlich einladet und als den geehrtesten seiner Festgäste behandelt. (I am very pleased that you want to be there. You will find all my friends there. But I am— do forgive me—certainly not coming. That would be possible only if Wagner personally invited me and treated me as the most honoured of his Festival guests.)

A few days later (3 February), a terse, cogently worded letter to his sister revealed the now acknowledged division of loyalties, and with its gradually rising tide of righteous indignation showed how strained his position had become. Nonetheless, it was largely at Nietzsche’s instigation that Elisabeth went to the Festival with her fiancé to be, Bernhard Förster, and Lou von Salomé whom Nietzsche had recently met during her stay at Malwida’s house in Rome. Not only did Nietzsche reside throughout the Festival at the nearby resort of Tautenburg, but three days before the première he made an excursion to Naumburg, where he went over some of the music with Elisabeth from Josef Rubinstein’s recent vocal score: an episode retailed to Köselitz in a letter full of farfetched, cryptic innuendo on 25 July 1882 (it is unclear that Nietzsche ever again studied the vocal score, as distinct from the poem, on his own initiative). Wagner’s next move in this delicate situation was easier to predict. Nor was his attitude purely adventitious. Nietzsche’s ‘treason’7 had driven such wedges of dissaffection between them that he had no alternative but to accept the futility of compromise. As he marshalled the evidence with some emotion in conversation with Gobineau’s biographer,

Parsifal  103 Ludwig Schemann, he had come to believe that his former companion’s behaviour all along was quite without sincerity, and that his breakaway was symptomatic of a fatal flaw of character.8 Cosima’s biographer mentions that Nietzsche’s defection haunted him even in his dreams.9 This intransigence was not slow to communicate itself to other, potentially more sympathetic members of the Bayreuth circle, quite overshadowing Nietzsche’s contribution to the success of Wagner’s cause: ‘Es ist mir keine große Ehre, daß dieser mich gelobt’ (It isn’t much of a compliment to have been praised by this person).10 Thus Lou AndreasSalomé recorded that in response to Malwida’s intercession during the Parsifal season, Wagner peremptorily forbade that Nietzsche’s name should ever again be uttered in his presence, and left the room in great agitation.11 Elisabeth accordingly found in Wagner’s disparagement a convenient explanation for the marked deterioration in her brother’s relations with Lou, skilfully disguising her own part in causing this estrangement.12 From a posthumously published letter to Overbeck of 15 October 1883, it can be deduced that Elisabeth was not received at Wahnfried during the Festival performances, although she may have spoken privately to Cosima.13 Certainly there is no mistaking the defensive irony of Parsifal’s conductor, Hermann Levi, when Köselitz called on him in Munich with a bundle of his musical compositions and a verbal message of greeting from Nietzsche early in 1883: ‘Nun, Sie wissen, eigentlich sind Nietzsche und ich jetzt Feinde’ (Well, you know, Nietzsche and I are really enemies now).14 Another biographical circumstance deserves brief mention. In August 1884, Nietzsche living in almost total isolation at Sils-Maria, was tracked down by Heinrich von Stein: a young, aristocratic friend of Malwida von Meysenbug, who in 1879 had taken up his own projected post in Bayreuth as tutor to Siegfried Wagner. Stein’s work, like that of his teacher, Eugen Dühring, was known to Nietzsche, who had come across Die Ideale des Materialismus. Lyrische Philosophie (pseudonym Armand Pensier) in the winter of 1877–8. At the end of 1882 he had sent Stein a copy of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, receiving in exchange the proof sheets of Stein’s latest book: a series of dramatic dialogues entitled Helden und Welt (Wagner’s last published work was an introduction to this book in the form of an open letter from Venice dated 31 January 1883). Stein, moreover, was introduced to Lou von Salomé by Nietzsche’s long-standing friend Paul Rée at the second Bayreuth Festival, and was in touch with Lou in Munich immediately before leaving for Sils, although Nietzsche was unaware of this.15 The first two days of Stein’s brief visit (26–8 August) were marred by Nietzsche’s illhealth; but the meeting made a deep impression. The news of Stein’s premature death three years later as it is received in letters to Elisabeth, Köselitz, Malwida, and Overbeck, came as a profound, personal shock. Evidently Stein wanted to enlist support for his proselytizing activities on Wagner’s behalf. When forwarding translations of poems by Giordano Bruno on 17 May 1884 in exchange for the first three Parts of Zarathustra, he made bold to suggest that Nietzsche should attend a performance of Parsifal; ‘une gaucherie d’une charmante candeur’ as Andler tactfully put it.16 As Stein had resided in Bayreuth at the time of Parsifal’s completion, it may be assumed that the work played at least some part in the Engadin discussions. The fact that this unexpected visit just preceded the composition of Also sprach Zarathustra, Part IV, led Halévy to compare it with the visits of the higher

104  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism men to Zarathustra’s mountain lair.17 May we not go further and say that Stein’s advocacy of Parsifal contributed to the design of the last instalment of Nietzsche’s book, which on closer inspection will be found to be intimately related to that of Wagner’s music-drama?

II Parsifal is the exception among Wagner’s works in that, in view of its sacred character, its performance was at first restricted to the stage of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus for which it was specially written. When petitioning Ludwig II on 28 September 1880 for the necessary modification in the terms of his contract, Wagner, fearful of censure by the ecclesiastical authorities, inquired Wie kann und darf eine Handlung, in welcher die erhabensten Mysterien des christlichen Glauben’s offen in Scene gesetzt sind, auf Theatern, wie den unsrigen, neben einem Opernrepertoir[e] und vor einem Publikum, wie dem unsrigen, vorgeführt werden? (How can and may a work in which the most sublime mysteries of the Christian faith are graphically depicted be performed in theatres like ours, alongside an operatic repertoire and before an audience like ours?)

In Wagner’s redaction, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s chivalric romance had come to resemble an extended morality play. The ostentatiously religious character of the music-drama was not unprecedented in Wagner’s works. In Tannhäuser, the conflict between the Venusberg and the Wartburg (on which Baudelaire remarked in his famous panegyric in La Revue européenne) anticipates the struggle between Klingsor’s infernal castle and Amfortas’s Monsalvat; in Lohengrin there is a similar conflict between the knight of the Grail and the pagans Telramund and Ortrud—precursors of the more complex characters of Klingsor and Kundry. Nonetheless, in Parsifal the religious strain is greatly intensified. In an effort to impose a Christian bias on the legend, Wolfram’s lapsit exillîs is identified as the ‘cup’ in which Joseph of Arimathea preserved the blood of the Crucified, and the lance as the ‘spear’ with which Longinus pierced the side of the Saviour on the Cross; simultaneously the secular processions and banquets of Wolfram’s Munsalvaesche are transformed into sacred rites of bread and wine drawing freely on the liturgy of the Eucharist: at the time an unprecedented innovation in the theatre. Although Wagner’s religious opinions in his early theoretical tracts had never approached a tolerable orthodoxy, a collection of sketches entitled Jesus von Nazareth18 shows that in 1848, a few months after finishing Lohengrin and the first poetic version of Siegfried’s Tod, he became absorbed in the idea of a spoken drama treating freely (in a revolutionary context) of the main events of Christ’s Ministry and Passion. The project may be connected with the choral cantata Das Liebesmahl der Apostel, which prefigures not only the subject but also the choral and orchestral writing in the Grail scenes in Parsifal. If Parsifal represented the fulfilment of an early ambition, the discovery of Schopenhauer and oriental thought had radically altered Wagner’s perspective since the holiday in Bohemia in 1845 when he first feasted himself on Wolfram’s poem. In the light of this research it can be seen that the music-drama embodies certain less familiar assumptions. A clear indication of Wagner’s programme is found in the essay Die Wibelungen. Weltgeschichte aus der Sage of 1848–9, where the legends of the Nibelung’s hoard and the stories of the quest for the Grail are reviewed in sequence. Accepting the then-current

Parsifal  105 theory of an Aryan race, Wagner relegates the Grail (for Wolfram an undifferentiated cult object) to a mountain in India, and interprets Christianity as the recrudescence of a religious impulse originating in the Far East. Here the legends of the hoard and the Grail are represented as variants of the archetypal story of a sacred quest19: Das Streben nach dem Grale vertritt nun das Ringen nach dem Nibelungenhorte, und wie die abendländische Welt, in ihrem Inneren unbefriedigt, endlich über Rom und den Papst hinausging, um die ächte Stätte des Heiles in Jerusalem am Grabe des Erlösers zu finden,—wie sie selbst von da unbefriedigt den geistig-sinnlichen Sehnsuchtsblick noch weiter nach Osten hineinwarf, um das Urheiligthum der Menschheit zu finden,—so war der Gral aus dem unzüchtigen Abendlande in das reine, keusche Geburtsland der Völker unnahbar zurückgewichen.— (The quest for the Grail now replaces the story of the struggle for the Nibelungs’ hoard, and as the occident, inwardly discontent, journeyed beyond Rome and the Pope to find the true shrine at the Redeemer’s sepulchre at Jerusalem—as, still discontent, it looked with spiritual and sensuous longing still further east for the primordial shrine of the human race—so the Grail was withdrawn from the profane western world into the inaccessibility of the pure, chaste birth-place of all peoples. W-A1 II 195)

This teleological argument gained a measure of support from Wolfram and Albrecht von Scharfenberg, whose writings described distant journeys and whose accounts of the demesne of the Grail suggested an exotic, eastern background. Many of the scholars whom Wagner consulted, tracing the narrative back to Greek, Persian, and Vedic sources, concurred in the opinion that the scene is laid in the East and that most of the names are of oriental origin. A more drastic process of conflation began after study of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, when Wagner set about to effect a fusion of the oriental and occidental traditions on the ground prepared in his Dresden essay. Primitive Christianity, despite its close ties with the optimistic, life-affirming dogmas of Judaism, he says, still recognized the vanity and nothingness of this world, and longed for the cessation of individual existence—the great teaching of the ancient religion of the Brahmins transformed and brought to perfection in Buddhism. As we know it, he continues in his revealing letter to Liszt of 7 June 1855 from London, Judaised Christianity remains a distorted, contradictory phenomenon, wogegen es der heutigen Forschung gelungen ist, nachzuweisen, daß das reine, ungemischte Christenthum, nichts andres als ein Zweig des ehrwürdigen Buddhaismus ist, der nach Alexanders indischem Zuge auch seinen Weg bis an die Küsten des Mittelmeeres fand. (whereas modern research has shown that pure, unalloyed Christianity is nothing but a branch of venerable Buddhism which after Alexander’s Indian campaign spread as far as the shores of the Mediterranean.)

A contemporary letter from Regent’s Park to Röckel (the sixth of the Röckel set) also echoes Schopenhauer and adduces recent research as having established the Aryan as distinct from the Semitic origin of Christianity beyond dispute. From here it was a short step to the emotive statement in Religion und Kunst that at the time of Parsifal directly questioned Christ’s Jewish descent (W-A1 X 299): a statement which, E.F.Podach noted, was to be influential in the campaign of Nietzsche’s brother-in-law, the fanatical pan-German anti-Semite, Bernhard Förster.20 As Paneth recorded on 26 March 1884, ‘Als [Nietzsche] bei [Wagner] verkehrte, wäre von Christenthum nie anders als ironisch die Rede gewesen’ (When Nietzsche was on visiting terms with Wagner, talk of Christianity was invariably ironic).21

106  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism The appeal of Buddhist thought is shown by a synopsis entitled Die Sieger based on the story of Prakrĭti and Ânanda which Wagner found in Eugène Burnouf’s Introduction a l’histoire du bouddhisme indien.22 This project, roughly contemporary with Tristan und Isolde and outlined in the same notebook as the prose sketch of the revised peroration of Götterdämmerung, was on the verge of being carried out for many years although other schemes progressed further from the literary point of view. As late as 1865, the work was listed in a prospectus prepared for Ludwig II, the date of the first performance being given as 1870.23 Considering Wagner’s thoroughness it would be surprising if copious drafts for Die Sieger did not at one time exist. As far as can be deduced from the short surviving synopsis, from the Wesendonck correspondence, and from Mein Leben, his genius was kindled by the favourite doctrine of reincarnation, which he felt offered exceptional scope for dramatic and musical treatment: Vor dem Geiste des Buddha liegt nämlich das vergangene Leben in früheren Geburten jedes ihm begegnenden Wesens offen, wie die Gegenwart selbst, da. Die einfache Geschichte erhielt nun ihre Bedeutung dadurch, dass dieses vergangene Leben der leidenden Hauptfiguren als unmittelbare Gegenwart in die neue Lebensphase hineinspielte. (Before the Buddha, the past incarnation of every individual stands as plainly revealed as the present. The simple story is significant in that it shows that the previous lives of the suffering principal characters directly affect them in the new phase of life. W-A6 627)24

Kundry is often cited as one of Wagner’s most impressive characters psychologically. Her personality is composite—the servant of the Grail in Parsifal, Act I, and the abject penitent in Act III appears transformed as the temptress of Klingsor’s magic garden in Act II—and it has been conjectured that in reducing Wolfram’s narrative to manageable proportions, the arch-dramatist fused his Grail messenger, Cundrie la sorcière, with his temptress, the Lady Orgeluse. This is only part of the story. The key to Kundry’s strange metamorphosis is given when she arrives with Arabian balsam for the wounded Amfortas ‘Hier lebt sie heut’,—/vielleicht erneu’t,/zu büßen Schuld aus früher’m Leben,/die dorten ihr noch nicht vergeben’ (Here she now lives, perhaps re-born to expiate the sins of a previous life from which she has not yet been absolved). In Act II, where the sorcerer, Klingsor, identifies her as Herodias in a previous incarnation,25 Kundry confesses that she is compelled to wander the world to seek redemption from the Saviour whom she has derided in a past life: here Parsifal’s identification with Christ reborn is made virtually explicit: Ich sah—lhn—lhn— und—lachte… da traf mich sein Blick.— Nun such’ ich ihn von Welt zu Welt, ihm wieder zu begegnen. (I saw Him—Him—and laughed… Then He looked at me. Now I journey from world to world that I may meet with Him again.)

There are grounds for associating the anti-heroine of the Good Friday, feet-washing scene in Parsifal, Act III, with the Magdalene of Jesus von Nazareth, Act IV. Comparison with Die Sieger discloses another contributory factor. Kundry’s admission into the fraternity of the knights of Monsalvat resembles one of Wagner’s most striking innovations in the

Parsifal  107 Buddhist drama: Prakrĭti’s expiation of the sins of a previous existence, and her admission into the Buddha’s flock to unite with Ânanda as brother and sister. Should one wish to make the highest truths widely accessible, Wagner says in the sixth of his letters to Röckel, this is possible only by means of pure Buddhist teaching, such as the doctrine of reincarnation as the basis of a truly human life: ‘Wie herrlich sind Buddha’s Lehren, die uns durch unser Mitleiden Eins mit allem Lebenden machen!’ (How glorious are Buddha’s teachings, which through our pity make us one with all that lives!).26 His last written words in the unfinished sketch ‘Über das Weibliche im Menschlichen’ on the morning of his death once more returned to Prakrĭti’s reincarnation. The significance of the parallel handling of Kundry’s redemption in Parsifal was not lost on Nietzsche, who gave careful attention to it in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 47. How is the denial of the will possible? he asks; how is the saint possible? Das scheint wirklich die Frage gewesen zu sein, bei der Schopenhauer zum Philosophen wurde und anfieng. Und so war es eine ächt Schopenhauerische Consequenz, dass sein überzeugtester Anhänger (vielleicht auch sein letzter, was Deutschland betrifft—), nämlich Richard Wagner, das eigne Lebenswerk gerade hier zu Ende brachte und zuletzt noch jenen furchtbaren und ewigen Typus als Kundry auf der Bühne vorführte, type vécu, und wie er leibt und lebt. (That really seems to have been the question with which Schopenhauer began and became a philosopher. And so it was a genuine Schopenhauerian consequence that his staunchest supporter—perhaps also his last as far as Germany is concerned—namely Richard Wagner, ended his own life’s work just here, and finally put this terrible, eternal type on the stage in the flesh as Kundry.)

III The doctrine of reincarnation is no less strongly invoked in the episode that forms the fulcrum of the plot of the music-drama: Parsifal’s temptation. Here the chaste youth ‘learns’ the meaning of pity in fulfilment of a mysterious, divine prophecy (much as in Der Ring des Nibelungen, the unsuspecting Siegfried has to ‘learn’ the meaning of fear). The concept of pity is only a secondary element in Wolfram’s Parzival; nor is it one of the cardinal theological doctrines of Christianity, although it may well be regarded as a Christian virtue. In the Upanishads and Schopenhauer’s neo-Buddhist philosophy, on the other hand, it holds a pre-eminent position.27 Of its appeal for Wagner, following everdeeper immersion in Brahmanism and Buddhism, there is plenty of evidence. In his Venice Diary on 1 October 1858, he gives pity as his strongest moral impulse and as possibly also the source of his art. The passage shows with what assurance the plans for Parsifal were forming in his imagination: Wenn daher dieses Leiden einen Zweck haben kann, so ist dies einzig durch Erweckung des Mitleidens im Menschen, der dadurch das verfehlte Dasein des Thieres in sich aufnimmt, und zum Erlöser der Welt wird, indem er überhaupt den Irrthum alles Daseins erkennt. (Diese Bedeutung wird Dir einmal aus dem dritten Akte des Parzival, am Charfreitagsmorgen, klar werden.) (If such suffering has a purpose, this is only through the awakening of pity in man, who thereby takes the animals’ incomplete existence upon himself and becomes the world’s

108  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism saviour in that he fully recognizes the error of all existence. This meaning will become clear to you some day from the third Act of Parzival28 on Good Friday morning.)

These considerations—rather than the fanciful orientalism of the medieval sources of the legend—help us to follow the complicated processes of reasoning that gave the Buddhist teaching of pity its central position in Wagner’s de-Judaized version of the legend of the Grail. The first incident in Parsifal, Parsifal’s slaying of the swan, calls attention to the hero’s naivety, especially to his indifference to suffering (by characterizing Parsifal as the ingenuous or ‘pure’ fool, ‘Knappe’ rather than knight, on the basis of an assumed etymological derivation from the Arabic, Wagner enhanced the internal, psychological growth of his hero from simpleton to king29). This is not fortuitous. Parsifal’s thoughtlessness appears again in his seemingly callous disregard of the incurably wounded Amfortas when, guided by Gurnemanz, he is admitted to the hall of the Grail for the first time. The episode recalls Wolfram’s description of the boy Parzival’s exploits in the forest (Parzival, Book III, §§ 118 ff); and Wagner’s biography, too, may have something to do with it.30 Yet the passage is set in relief by its ethical consequences. Here Wagner’s principal source is the life of Bodhisattva, whose first encounter with evil is said to have occurred in similar circumstances.31 The inclusion of the animal world in the scheme of redemption is peculiar to Buddhism. The doctrine is alluded to in Gurnemanz’s outraged ‘Sag’, ‘Knab’! Erkennst du deine große Schuld?’ (Say! Boy! Do you know your great offence?), as well as in Kundry’s rhetorical question which, by a deft dramatic stroke, precedes the hero’s inauspicious entry ‘Sind die Thiere hier nicht heilig?’ (Aren’t animals sacred here?) The Buddhist element is intensified in the episode that forms the pivot of Parsifal, Act II, if not of the music-drama as a whole: the seduction scene between Parsifal and the flower-maidens who inhabit Klingsor’s magic castle. Contrary to design, Kundry’s lascivious embrace, to which the wondering youth submits in stunned passivity, awakens a sense of pity. In a paroxysm of remorse, Parsifal realizes the identical circumstances of Amfortas’s fall from Grace at the hands of the sorcerer, and simultaneously hits on the ‘question’ that escaped him on his visit to the Gralsburg. Repulsing Kundry’s blandishments, he springs up Amfortas!— Die Wunde!—die Wunde!— Sie brennt in meinem Herzen.— (Amfortas!—The wound! the wound! It burns in my heart.) Literary analogies for this temptation-seduction scene are not far to seek. Homer’s account of Odysseus’ temptation by Circe is ironically cited by Nietzsche himself in Der Fall Wagner, ‘Nachschrift’. Also the flower-maidens’ episode in Pfaffe Lamprecht’s Alexander and the sorcerer-seduction episode in Rudolf von Ems’s Christianized account of the Buddha’s enlightenment in Barlaam und Josaphat have aroused speculation.32 Again, however, the main source of Wagner’s inspiration was the legendary life of the Buddha. Klingsor—a minor character for Wolfram—becomes terrifyingly dominant for Wagner because of his affinities with Māra, ‘le démon de l’amour, du péché et de la mort’, as he is described in Burnouf’s Introduction à l’histoire du bouddhisme indien.32 By the diabolical art of the eunuch sorcerer, the desert adjoining the realm of Monsalvat

Parsifal  109 is transformed into a garden and the maidens in the likeness of flowers are conjured into existence as the instruments of Parsifal’s supreme trial: ‘[Einzelne] kommen jetzt, ganz wie in Blumengewändern, selbst Blumen erscheinend, wieder zurück’ (Now some of them return in flowery garments, like flowers themselves). The garden reverts to a desert when Parsifal exorcises the spell, grasping the miraculously deflected, sacred spear poised over his head. Nietzsche adapts this climactic episode in Also sprach Zarathustra, Part II, ‘Das Kind mit dem Spiegel’: Parsifal, Act II

‘Das Kind mit dem Spiegel’

[Klingsor] schleudert auf Parsifal den Speer, Der Speer, den ich gegen meine Feinde schleudere! Wie danke ich es meinen Feinden, welcher über dessen Haupte schweben bleibt. dass ich endlich ihn schleudern darf!… Wahrlich, einem Sturme gleich kommt mein Glück und meine Freiheit! Aber meine Feinde sollen glauben, der Böse rase über ihren Häuptern. (Klingsor hurls the spear at Parsifal, which The spear I hurl at my foes! How grateful I am to my foes that I can hurl it at last!… hangs poised over his head. Truly, my joy and my f reedom come like a storm! But I want my foes to think that the Devil rages over their heads.) Compare the discourse ‘Mittags’ in Part IV, where the sun stands still: Und siehe, da stand die Sonne immer noch gerade über seinem Haupte (And behold, there the sun was still standing, straight above his head).

The source is a famous passage in Buddhist scripture summarized in C.F.Koeppen’s Die Religion des Buddha (188 ff), which Wagner read in 1858. Here Māra prevails on his seductive daughters in a desperate last bid for domination over Bodhisattva. By a process of conflation overriding considerations of doctrine, Wagner contrived to turn to account that consuming interest in Buddhism which had found its most representative expression in the outline for Die Sieger some twentyfive years before.

Chapter 10 Zarathustra’s Temptation

I With the statement of the theory of recurrence in Also sprach Zarathustra, Part III, Nietzsche’s immediate object was accomplished. ‘Nun habe ich zum ersten Male meinen Hauptgedanken in eine Form gebracht’, he told Overbeck on 14 February 1884, ‘—und siehe da, wahrscheinlich habe ich mich selber dabei erst “in eine Form gebracht”’ (Now for the first time I have knocked my main premiss into shape—and, indeed, as a result I have probably knocked myself into shape for the first time). On the 22nd, he wrote with evident satisfaction to Rohde, describing the new book as eine Art Abgrund der Zukunft, etwas Schauerliches, namentlich in seiner Glückseligkeit. Es ist Alles drin mein Eigen, ohne Vorbild, Vergleich, Vorgänger; wer einmal darin gelebt hat, der kommt mit einem andern Gesichte wieder zur Welt zurück. (a sort of abyss of the future, something thrilling, particularly in its ecstasy. Everything in it is my own, without prototype, parallel, precursor; whoever has once lived in it returns to the world changed.)

The fact that Zarathustra was not actually complete in its three Acts is clear from mysterious hints about the hero’s progress. In the first discourse of Part I, ‘Von den drei Verwandlungen’, the prophet prescribes the three stages of obeying, willing, and being, associated respectively with the images of the camel, the lion, and the ‘playing child’ or ‘self-propelling wheel’. In ‘Der Genesende’, it is true, he attains to the lion’s voice for command (that is, the second stage of metamorphosis); and in the concluding dithyrambs with their tone of super-human exultation it is fair to assume that he approaches the third stage. In the last discourse of Part I, however, three ‘visitations’ are also specified; and by the end of Part III, two visitations only—to the hospitable town and to the Islands of the Blessed—have taken place. As for the third visitation, he enigmatically declares in ‘Von der schenkenden Tugend’, § 3: Alsda wird sich der Untergehende selber segnen, dass er ein Hinübergehender sei; und die Sonne seiner Erkenntniss wird ihm im Mittage stehn. (Then the down-goer shall bless himself, for he will be going beyond; and the sun of his knowledge will stand at noon for him.)

and in ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’, § 1 Wann kommt meine Stunde?/—die Stunde meines Niederganges, Unterganges: denn noch Ein Mal will ich zu den Menschen gehn. Dess warte ich nun: denn erst müssen mir die Zeichen kommen, dass es meine Stunde sei,—nämlich der lachende Löwe mit dem Taubenschwarme.

Zarathustra’s Temptation  111 (When will my hour come?—the hour of my going under and going down: for once more I want to go amongst men. That is what I am waiting for: first, the signs that it is my hour must come to me—namely the laughing lion with the flock of doves.)

The impending ‘sign’ and ‘great noon’ are moreover predicted elsewhere: the former in the last discourses of Parts I and II; the latter in ‘Von der verkleinernden Tugend’, ‘Von den drei Bösen’, and especially ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’, § 30, in Part III. Because these statements are not amplified, it is easy to disregard them as transient, insubstantial portents within the design that culminates in the convalescent’s return to health at the end of Part III (it will be remembered that Nietzsche himself published a second, ‘collected’ edition of the first three Parts of Zarathustra as a self-contained work in 1887). It will then be appreciated that the fourth book, which ends with the miraculous appearance of the lion and the doves, the sign for Zarathustra’s invocation to the ‘great noon’, winds up a carefully conceived and executed programme. This is why, when forwarding Part II to Overbeck on 11 November 1883, Nietzsche spoke of it as the second of four instalments, remarking that the intention of the component parts would become apparent only in terms of the larger sense of the whole. Nietzsche’s reticence in respect of Part IV is therefore an enigma. By the end of 1884, his publisher Schmeitzner—responsible also for the Internationale Monatsschrift and more recently for the Bayreuther Blätter—was facing a financial crisis, and withheld his services. On 12 February 1885 when requesting Gersdorff’s help in meeting the cost of a limited, private edition, Nietzsche was particularly concerned with the confidential nature of the fourth (and last) Part— eine Art sublimen Finale’s, welcher gar nicht für die Öffentlichkeit bestimmt ist… Aber dieser Theil soll und muß jetzt gedruckt werden: in 20 Exemplaren, zur Vertheilung an mich und meine Freunde, und mit jedwedem Grade von Diskretion. (a sort of sublime Finale, which is not meant for the general public… But th is instalment shall and must be printed now in twenty copies for distribution between me and my friends with every degree of discretion.)

In the same strain he wrote to Köselitz on 21 March explaining that he had been unable to find a publisher and had therefore decided to have the book printed at his own expense, asking him neither to write nor to speak of its existence. In a letter of April 1885, he whimsically proposed to send the ‘colourful Persian edition’ of Zarathustra to his sister and her husband along with two copies of Part IV, on condition that the last instalment should be kept secret ‘as if it did not exist’. These statements agree with a note on the verso of the title-page of the manuscript: ‘Nur für meine Freunde, nicht für die Öffentlichkeit’ (Just for my friends, not for the public. N-A1 VI(1895 edn.), 522 f). Eventually, thanks to Gersdorff, some forty-five copies1 were privately printed in the same format as Schmeitzner’s earlier issues. Only eleven copies are known to have passed into private hands2; yet even this restricted circulation gave rise to anxiety. Gersdorff was again cautioned to secrecy in a covering letter of 9 May: the enclosed copy is inscribed ‘Ein verbotenes Buch, Vorsicht es beißt!’ (A forbidden book. Watch out, it bites! G-Br IV, n. 255); and a very late letter to Köselitz of 9 December 1888 once more stipulated measures to ensure that the work was totally suppressed:

112  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Jetzt eine ernste Sache. Lieber Freund, ich will alle Exemplare des vierten Zarathustra wieder zurückhaben, um dies ineditum gegen alle Zufälle von Leben und Tod sicherzustellen (—ich las es dieser Tage und bin fast umgekommen vor Bewegung). Wenn ich es nach ein Paar Jahrzehnten welthistorischer Krisen—Kriege!—herausgeben werde, so wird es erst die rechte Zeit sein. Strengen Sie, bitte, Ihr Gedächtniß an, wer Exemplare hat. (Now a serious matter: dear friend, I want to have back all the copies of Zarathustra, Part IV, so as to protect this unpublished book from all the hazards of life and death (I read it the other day and was quite overcome with emotion). If I publish it later, after a couple of decades of epoch-making crises—wars!—then that will be the right time. Please rack your brains to remember who has copies.)

To the end of his life, then, Nietzsche was determined to disfigure the design by prohibiting publication of the last instalment.

II Since its publication by Köselitz in 1891 in defiance of Nietzsche’s wishes,3 Part IV has come in for a good deal of criticism. Despite its taut structure and its revival of the dramatic unities of action, time, and place (conventions commended in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, § 221), it is much the most extended of the four instalments—the discourses being frequently twice the length of those in Part I; while its narrative character contrasts with the spontaneous mythopoeic invention of the three preceding Parts, which introduce all the book’s main ‘metaphysical’ ideas. The description ‘Satyrspiel’ seems justified on the basis of Nietzsche’s letter to Köselitz of 14 February 1885, which speaks of Part IV as ‘vielleicht Undruckbar: eine “Gotteslästerung”, gedichtet mit der Laune eines Hanswursts’ (perhaps unpublishable: a ‘blasphemy’ versified with the caprice of a clown). This discrepancy in substance and style is scarcely explained by the passing of time: Zarathustra, aged forty in the prologue, is here an elderly man with white hair supporting himself on a stick, put to good use in his skirmishes with the leach and the sorcerer. Particularly conspicuous is the irreligious tone of Part IV. In the first discourse, the prophet is discovered seated on a stone before the entrance to his cave tracing his shadow on the ground. As ‘fisher of men’, he consorts with twelve disciples (the eagle and serpent are listed together with the nine higher men and the ass in ‘Die Begrüssung’ and ‘Die Erweckung’). In the discourse with the voluntary beggar the setting recalls the Sermon on the Mount (an excuse for further New Testament paraphrases). The action culminates in Zarathustra’s banquet: a function that, with its staple basis of lamb’s flesh and wine, and its chronic shortage of bread, comes across unmistakably as a pungent satire of the Eucharist. Passing mention has been made of the biblical echoes in Parts I–III. Despite the atmosphere of oriental make-believe, a studied attempt is made to capture the inflections of Luther’s Bible; and the stylistic ties are reinforced by frequent paraphrases and occasional quotations in the text. When remitting the manuscript to the printer on 14 February 1883, Nietzsche called it a poem, or a fifth Gospel, ‘or something that as yet has no name’4; when writing to Malwida a month later he said ‘Wollen Sie einen neuen Namen für mich? Die Kirchensprache hat einen: ich bin – – – – – – – – – – – der Antichrist’ (Do you want a new name for me? Theology has one: I am—the Antichrist).5

Zarathustra’s Temptation  113 Nietzsche grew up in a conventional Lutheran home and on both his paternal and maternal sides was descended from respected clerical families. In his recollections, Deussen described the Confirmation service at Pforta when he and Nietzsche knelt side-by-side on the chancel steps.6 The Pforta leaving report of 1864, in which the highest praise was given to Nietzsche’s religious studies, is no less revealing.7 The dismissive brag in Ecce homo, ‘Warum ich so klug bin’, § 1, ‘“Gott”, “Unsterblichkeit der Seele”, “Erlösung”, “Jenseits” lauter Begriffe, denen ich keine Aufmerksamkeit, auch keine Zeit geschenkt habe, selbst als Kind nicht’ (‘God’, ‘immortality of the soul’, ‘redemption’, ‘hereafter’: all notions to which I have given neither attention nor time, not even as a child) hardly fits the facts. As his examiners understood him, there must have been a distinct probability that he would follow his father’s footsteps into the Ministry. Nietzsche’s enrolment in 1864 at the University of Bonn as a student of theology and classics was therefore a prudent and predictable step. Admittedly a certain rebelliousness asserted itself when he abruptly transferred to the philosophy faculty for the second Term.8 Still, the bent of his writing at Bonn, and afterwards at Leipzig, testifies less to a strong reaction against the traditions of his family and his sturdily Protestant upbringing than to the hold of his studies under Ritschl, which inculcated a growing desire to achieve an impartial view of classical antiquity. Also we should not neglect the widening if curiously divided interests that, before long, drew him simultaneously to Schopenhauer’s philosophy and to F.A.Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus—an almost equally crucial discovery of 1866, which was to result over the next few years in the study of the writings of a very large number of contemporary scientists. The first publication to treat intensively of religious questions was the essay David Strauss, der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller. In Der Antichrist, § 28, Nietzsche says that at the age of twenty like every young scholar he savoured the work of the incomparable Strauß. The work in question was Strauß’s chef d’oeuvre, Das Leben Jesu, which he read with Deussen at Pforta9 and discussed in some notes ‘Zum Leben Jesu’ written at Bonn (N-A2 III 100–3). The idea for this brilliant diatribe—the first of a projected series of some thirteen Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen—came from Cosima Wagner, who on 12 February 1873, after her return from Berlin, mentioned the enthusiasm she had encountered for Strauß’s recent Der alte und der neue Glaube. This book, the principal subject of Nietzsche’s essay, was also discussed by Wagner, Nietzsche, and Rohde in Bayreuth at Easter. Since the early ’fifties, Strauß had made no secret of his total opposition to Wagner as he later numbered himself among Schopenhauer’s more vocal critics. Wagner had retaliated with derisive comments in Aufklärungen über das Judenthum in der Musik, Über das Dirigiren, and elsewhere.10 Malwida must have been in error in saying that Nietzsche was reprimanded for his candour.11 Perhaps sensing that his hand had been swayed, Nietzsche came to regret the timing of his onslaught on the doyen of German free-thinkers, fearing that it might have proved fatal to Strauß.12 All the same, he relished the havoc he had wrought in the ranks of Strauß’s adherents, and spoke more than once of the impact of his performance in this quarter. For all its wit and erudition, Nietzsche’s ‘Straußiade’ is mute on questions of doctrine. It launches a vigorous offensive against a commanding reputation, and in so doing seeks to bring down the self-satisfaction of the champions of progressive thought who sided with the ‘Bildungsphilister’—a preexisting term given wider currency by Nietzsche’s essay—in

114  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism his suburban gospel. Nietzsche seems to have sensed little incongruity when he presented Overbeck with a copy of his polemic bound together with Overbeck’s contemporary Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie. When asking Wagner to intercede with the publisher Fritzsch on Overbeck’s behalf, his justification was Overbeck’s concern with the Strauß problem13; and the effect of the exchanges between the two professors is made plain in a quotation from Goethe inscribed in the presentation volume: ‘Das Leben ist kurz; man muß sich untereinander einen Spaß zu machen suchen’ (Life is short: let us try to have some fun together).14 Until the appearance of ‘Das religiöse Leben’ in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Part I, at the time of Parsifal, then, it would have been difficult to predict the emergence of the long-prophesied ‘Antichrist’, the author of Also sprach Zarathustra, who in a letter to Overbeck of 28 August 1883 remarked Seit Voltaire gab es kein solches Attentat gegen das Christenthum—und, die Wahrheit zu sagen, auch Voltaire hatte keine Ahnung davon, daß man es so angreifen könne.— (Since Voltaire there has been no comparable assault on Christianity—and to tell the truth, even Voltaire had no idea that it could be attacked like this.)

Once it is recognized that Wagner’s Parsifal is likely to have been of particular importance in persuading Nietzsche to drop the façade of tolerant if ironical reserve he had hitherto maintained on the religious issue, an interesting construction presents itself. Inherently it is unlikely that having written the first three Parts of Zarathustra as a creative reply to his former mentor, Nietzsche would have lost sight of Wagner in the last instalment. How far, then, is the polemical link preserved here? Could it be that what at first appears as an offensive against Christianity was also if not primarily intended to register a protest against the messianic pretensions of the second Bayreuth Festival? The answer to this question might go some way towards resolving the problems that for so long have plagued literary commentators: the integrated design of Part IV, with its closely-knit, continuous narrative, as well as the air of mystery surrounding Nietzsche’s decision to limit circulation to a group of chosen friends.

III In his later works Nietzsche’s preoccupation with pity is conspicuous. To begin with, he seems to have been content to follow Wagner’s lead, describing Christianity in a previously unpublished note for the second of the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen as a legacy from oriental antiquity: ‘Jetzt bricht mehr die alexandr[inisch] hellenische Wendung wieder an’s Licht’ (Now the turn in the direction of Alexandrian Hellenism comes to light once more. N-A3 IV 4 395). In 1875, however, when writing to Gersdorff, who under Wagner’s tutelage had started to take an almost inordinate interest in the subject, he remonstrated in a new strain, advising his friend to give more attention to ‘sympathy’ or ‘rejoicing with others’ (‘Mitfreude’), calling it rarer and nobler than pity (‘Mitleid’).15 It is this militant, antiWagnerian tone that characterizes his later deliberations on this subject. It is worth remarking here that Nietzsche categorically rejects the theory of the ‘Aryan’ basis of Christianity, maintaining its Semitic origin during a period of savage Roman persecution—his quarrel with Wagner’s, Cosima’s, and Schopenhauer’s anti-Semitism goes back at least as far as

Zarathustra’s Temptation  115 Menschliches, Allzwnenschliches, § 475. A note of 1880, for example, describes Christian pity as entirely different from that of Buddha and Schopenhauer (N-A3 V 1 3[106]), in stark contrast to Schopenhauer’s Supplement 48: ‘Darum also sage ich, daß der Geist der christlichen Moral mit dem des Brahmanismus und Buddhaismus identisch ist’ (Therefore I maintain that the spirit of Christian morality is identical with that of Brahmanism and Buddhism). Again in Der Antichrist, § 20, he contradicts Wagner and Schopenhauer, and differentiates sharply between the oriental and occidental religions: Mit meiner Verurtheilung des Christenthums möchte ich kein Unrecht gegen eine verwandte Religion begangen haben, die der Zahl der Bekenner nach sogar überwiegt, gegen den Buddhismus. Beide gehören als nihilistische Religionen zusammen—sie sind décadence-Religionen—, beide sind von einander in der merkwürdigsten Weise getrennt. (With my indictment of Christianity I do not wish to have been unjust to a related religion with an even larger number of followers, namely Buddhism. Both belong together as nihilistic religions—they are religions of decadence; each differs from the other most markedly.)

The essential distinction in Nietzsche’s case is drawn between what he calls Christian ‘decadence’, contrary to both the personality and teaching of Christ,16 and the affirmative, life-enhancing spirit of the Old Testament prophets. Nonetheless, as his first target in Der Antichrist, § 7, is the ‘Christian’ doctrine of pity—‘Man nennt das Christenthum die Religion des Mitleidens’ (Christianity is called the religion of pity)—it must be admitted that both his attack on Christianity and the distinction he draws in favour of Buddhism lose some of their force through a pervasive and typically Wagnerian confusion of doctrinal elements. Nietzsche’s quarrel with ‘pity’ begins in earnest with a penetrating comment on La Rochefoucauld’s autobiography in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, § 50. This paragraph, cutting directly across the grain of Parsifal, can hardly have been missed by Wagner when he received Nietzsche’s book in 1878. Besides this, stylistically at least, the inquiry into the provenance of moral attitudes owed much to Paul Rée’s anonymous collection of aphorisms entitled Psychologische Beobachtungen. Aus dem Nachlass von 1875), and Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (1877): a debt fully acknowledged by a fierce attack in §§ 4 and 7 of the preface to Zur Genealogie der Moral, where Nietzsche gives Rée a large share of the credit for his own interest in moral philosophy (Rée’s second book actually begins, pp. 2f, with a discussion of pity). In the gestatory period of Zarathustra, the misgivings aroused by his recent experiences17 asserted themselves in an acute form when on 25 December 1882 he described pity to Overbeck as ‘a kind of Hell’. On 14 September 1884, in the aftermath of the disastrous entanglement with Rée and Lou, he admitted to a singular vulnerability to pity, adding that his recent encounter with it had led to a very interesting theoretical reassessment of its value.18 If it is impossible to discount Nietzsche’s position as one of purely theoretical interest, it is important to remember that the problem of pity had already come to the fore in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Morgenröthe, and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft: the three books written in the atmosphere of tension induced by his mounting antagonism to Wagner just before and just after the receipt of the text of Parsifal. A statement in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 99, plainly points to Wagner’s syncretism and its philosophical derivation:

116  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Schopenhauerisch ist der Versuch Wagner’s, das Christenthum als ein verwehtes Korn des Buddhismus aufzufassen und für Europa, unter zeitweiliger Annäherung an katholischchristliche Formeln und Empfindungen, ein buddhistisches Zeitalter vorzubereiten. (Schopenhauerian is Wagner’s attempt to interpret Christianity as a seed blown away from Buddhism, and to inaugurate a Buddhist era in Europe under a temporary approximation to Catholic-Christian formulae and sentiments.)19

To be sure, Nietzsche numbered intellectual courage and hardness among the cardinal virtues (which he was not beyond re-defining).20 Nor can it be denied that the admired strength of spirit is fairly consistently played off against the pathological squandering of feeling induced by the ‘parasite’ and ‘infection’ of pity, a disgrace to both giver and receiver.21 ‘Die “Religion des Mitleidens”, zu der man uns überreden möchte—oh wir kennen die hysterischen Männlein und Weiblein genug, welche heute gerade diese Religion zum Schleier und Aufputz nöthig haben’ (The ‘religion of pity’ to which people would like to convert us—oh we know well enough the hysterical, petty men and women who today need this particular religion both as a veil and as a form of finery), he laments in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 377, after the appearance of Wolzogen’s articles, ‘Die Religion des Mitleidens’ (i.e., on Wagnerian Christianity), in the Bayreuther Blätter.22 The subject is under review in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, §§ 202, 222, 225, 269 ff, and 293; it is revived in its most clamant form in §§ 5 and 6 of the preface to Zur Genealogie der Moral, where, as if preparing the reader for the discussion of Parsifal in the last of the three essays, Nietzsche approvingly instances Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant, ‘four totally dissimilar minds in accord in one respect: in their condemnation of pity’;23 and continues Dies Problem vom Werthe des Mitleids und der Mitleids-Moral (—ich bin ein Gegner der schändlichen modernen Gefühlsverweichlichung—) scheint zunächst nur etwas Vereinzeltes, ein Fragezeichen für sich; wer aber einmal hier hängen bleibt, hier fragen lernt, dem wird es gehn, wie es mir ergangen ist:—eine ungeheure neue Aussicht thut sich ihm auf, eine Möglichkeit fasst ihn wie ein Schwindel, jede Art Misstrauen, Argwohn, Furcht springt hervor, der Glaube an die Moral, an alle Moral wankt. (This problem of the value of pity and the morality of pity—I am an opponent of the shameful modern softening of feeling—at first seems only a matter of detail, an isolated question-mark. But whoever sticks with it and learns to question it will have the experience I have had: a vast new horizon opens up before him, a prospect affects him like vertigo, every sort of mistrust, suspicion, and fear breaks out, belief in morals—in morality itself— wavers.)

‘Zarathustra’s Temptation’, as Also sprach Zarathustra, Part IV, is entitled in a large number of notes and letters,24 sets the questions of the ancestry and palpable intent of this investigation in a new perspective: Versuchungen zur Rückkehr vor der Zeit—durch Erregung von Mitleid. (Temptations to return prematurely by arousing pity. N-A3 VII 3 29(23])

This précis of the action is enlarged upon in Ecce homo, ‘Warum ich so weise bin’, § 4, where Nietzsche again gives the projected title ‘Versuchung Zarathustra’s’. The last instalment of Also sprach Zarathustra was to consist of a series of temptations in the course of which the prophet was to be assailed by a collection of fantastic characters who materialize out of thin air in the environs of his mountain sanctuary, each the

Zarathustra’s Temptation  117 imaginary embodiment of some representative modern trend. The conviction underlying his affirmation in ‘Die sieben Siegel’ was to be impugned; the authenticity of his teaching was to be called into question. This original twist in the plot might perhaps be traced back to the Avesta which offers many parallels with Buddhist and Christian scripture in treating of the rivalry and warfare between the competing supremacies of good and evil. The fact that in both Parsifal and Zarathustra, Part IV, the action hinges on a ‘temptation-seduction’ scene—or series of temptation-seduction scenes—is, to say the least, suggestive, as is the fact that both works have a strongly religious—or anti-religious—bias. However, the case for a deliberate, inverse parallel finally rests on the fact that the temptation in the one results in the learning and acceptance of ‘pity’, in the other in the learning and repudiation of ‘pity’. The fury of Nietzsche’s attack falls upon the syncretism peculiar to Parsifal, where Buddhism and allegedly ‘authentic’ Christianity are regarded as all but indistinguishable. We shall therefore consider more closely the resemblance between Klingsor’s infernal ‘flower-maidens’ in Parsifal and the band of the higher men in Zarathustra, Part IV, conjured up at a crucial moment in the story with the aim of diverting the hero from his sterner purpose (Der Fall Wagner, ‘Nachschrift’): Die Musik als Circe… Sein letztes Werk ist hierin sein grösstes Meisterstück. Der Parsifal wird in der Kunst der Verführung ewig seinen Rang behalten, als der Geniestreich der Verführung… Ich bewundere dies Werk, ich möchte es selbst gemacht haben; in Ermangelung davon verstehe ich es… Wagner war nie besser inspirirt als am Ende. (Music as Circe… In this respect, his last work is his greatest masterpiece. In the art of seduction Parsifal will always retain its rank as the stroke of genius in seduction… I admire this work, I would like to have written it myself; in default of which I understand it. Wagner was never better inspired than at the end.)

Chapter 11 The Cry of Distress

I The theory that Wagner’s last moral teaching—the teaching of pity enshrined in the temptation scene in Parsifal—was responsible for the story of Zarathustra’s temptation to his ‘last sin’ of pity in Zarathustra is supported by the superscription on the title-page of Part IV (taken from ‘Von den Mitleidigen’ in Part II): Ach, wo in der Welt geschahen grössere Thorheiten, als bei den Mitleidigen? Und was in der Welt stiftete mehr Leid, als die Thorheiten der Mitleidigen? Wehe allen Liebenden, die nicht noch eine Höhe haben, welche über ihrem Mitleiden ist! Also sprach der Teufel einst zu mir: 'auch Gott hat seine Hölle: das ist seine Liebe zu den Menschen.' Und jüngst hörte ich ihn diess Wort sagen:'Gott ist todt; an seinem Mitleiden mit den Menschen ist Gott gestorben.' (Ah! Where in the world have there been greater follies than among those who pity? And what in the world has done more harm than the follies of those who pity? Woe to all lovers who have nothing higher than their pity! So said the Devil to me once: ‘God, too, has His Hell: it is His love for man.’ And lately I heard him say ‘God is dead: God has died of His pity for man.’)

With its allusion to the follies of the compassionate and its warning to lovers with no aim beyond their pity, this passage invites comparison with the prophecy (‘Verheißungsspruch’) which in Parsifal, Act I, sets out Wagner’s essential theme: ‘Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Thor: harre sein’, den ich erkor.’ (‘The pure fool made wise by pity: wait for him whom I have chosen.’)

The superscription also explains the death of God as a result of a surfeit of pity for men. The circumstances of the demise of the Deity are spelled out during the interview with the Pope, when Zarathustra learns that He was a ‘hidden God’,1 full of secrets; and again when Zarathustra in rapt mood accuses the ugliest man of the murder of the shamelessly prying, importunate, intrusive, pitying God (‘Der hässlichste Mensch’): Du ertrugst Den nicht, der dich sah,—der dich immer und durch und durch sah, du hässlichster Mensch! Du nahmst Rache an diesem Zeugen! (You couldn’t abide Him who saw you—who always saw you, through and through, you ugliest man! You took revenge on this witness!)

a construction substantiated when the ugliest man, grasping the hem of Zarathustra’s garment, confesses

The Cry of Distress  119 Aber er—musste sterben: er sah mit Augen, welche Alles sahn,—er sah des Menschen Tiefen und Gründe, alle seine verhehlte Schmach und Hässlichkeit. Sein Mitleiden kannte keine Scham… (But He had to die: He saw with eyes that saw everything—He saw man’s depths and dregs, all his hidden infamy and ugliness. His pity knew no shame…)

It is generally accepted that the description of the aged, neglected God in his chimney corner was modelled on Heine’s Die Götter im Exil where the passing of Jupiter is described.2 Only, pity, for Heine, is hardly the cause of which the death of God is the effect. In Nietzsche’s book a more personal contrast is intended. Parsifal relates how a sense of suffering awakened in the course of the hero’s temptation by the sorcerer and his minions elicits the only adequate moral response in pity; Also sprach Zarathustra, Part IV, relates how a will to creative self-mastery beyond good and evil, which accepts suffering as a necessary if not desirable contingency, demands the conquest of pity. Already there are grounds for saying that Wagner’s poem was Nietzsche’s exemplum. The inverse parallel becomes stringent when we find that ‘Zarathustra’s Temptation’ uses subsidiary material from Wagner’s ‘Bühnenweihfestspiel’ (‘Dedicatory Festival Drama’) adapting it so as to strike a blow in defence of the constrasted moral. In the second discourse ‘Der Nothschrei’ (as in the first discourse ‘Das HonigOpfer’), we find the prophet seated on a stone in front of his cave awaiting the return of his questing animals.3 Here he is startled by his ‘Doppelgänger’, the soothsayer. The first of Zarathustra’s tempters is easily identified (as in ‘Der Wahrsager’ in Part II) as Schopenhauer, the diagnostician of suffering, whose reappearance provides a valuable element of continuity. Now infiltrating as a leading contender, the soothsayer brings to his notice a terrible, distant cry: ‘Hörst du noch Nichts?’ (Do you still hear nothing?). Arousing his curiosity and directing his steps, this cry, reiterated at intervals, leads to the discovery of the nine higher men and the ass, whose abject supplications and pitiful extremity prompt Zarathustra to offer shelter to each in turn: ‘Dorthin führt der Weg, da liegt die Höhle Zarathustra’s’ (Yonder leads the way; there lies Zarathustra’s cave). Only in ‘Die Begrüssung’, when the cave has been turned into a kind of sanatorium, is he able to identify the extraordinary plaint: Und, erstaunlich! diess Mal kam derselbige aus seiner eignen Höhle. Es war aber ein langer vielfältiger seltsamer Schrei, und Zarathustra unterschied deutlich, dass er sich aus vielen Stimmen zusammensetze: mochte er schon, aus der Ferne gehört, gleich dem Schrei aus einem einzigen Munde klingen. (And, incredible! this time the cry came from his own cave. It was a long, manifold, peculiar cry, however; and Zarathustra could clearly tell that it was made up of many voices, although from a distance it sounded like a cry from a single throat.)

It is of course entirely appropriate that the anguish of the higher men should be registered by a pathetic, collective cry of distress. If, however, we see the similarity of the theme of the temptation (or seduction), and the learning of pity (Parsifal) and unlearning of pity (Zarathustra), it seems less likely that this quasi-expressionistic feature of Nietzsche’s book was arrived at independently. For what is more striking than the despairing, hysterical cry of Wagner’s temptress Kundry: a cry that harks back to her blasphemous mockery of the Saviour in a former life? From Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 47, we know that Nietzsche gave particular attention to this, the most singular of Wagner’s heroines.

120  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Moreover, with his customary acuity, he immediately picked out the ‘hysterical’ Kundry in his letter to Seydlitz on receiving Wagner’s presention copy of the poem: ‘Dann mag ich hysterische Frauenzimmer nicht’ (Moreover, I can’t stand hysterical females). Certainly, Kundry is hardly the most communicative of characters. In Act III, for example, she is a focus of attention while reiterating only a single word: an economy which testifies to the later Wagner’s technical accomplishment. Yet if we accept similarity of intention, rather than extensive textual correspondence, as a basis for comparison, the parallel emerges clearly enough. The lachrymose cry of the higher men is to be set against Wagner’s stagedirections at the point at which the temptress, in terrible agony, awakens in response to the sorcerer’s magic incantation: Parsifal, Act II

‘Der Nothschrei’

Man hört sie einen gräßlichen Schrei ausstoßen, wie eine aus tiefstem Schlafe aufgeschreckte Halbwache. (She is heard to cry out terribly, like someone half awakened from the deepest sleep.) Kundry's Gestalt läßt ein Klagegeheul, von größter Heftigkeit bis zu bangem Wimmern sich abstufend, vernehmen. (Kundry utters a piercing cry of distress sinking to a frightened wail.)

Zarathustra schwieg abermals und horchte: da hörte er einen langen, langen Schrei, welchen die Abgründe sich zuwarfen und weitergaben, denn keiner wollte ihn behalten: so böse klang er. (Zarathustra kept quiet again and listened: then he heard a long, long cry, which the abysses tossed to and fro, and handed on, for none of them wanted to keep it: it sounded so evil.)

When Zarathustra asks for the explanation, he gets an enigmatic and sinister answer Kundry: Mitleid! Mitleid mit mir! Nur eine Stunde mein,— nur eine Stunde dein—: und des Weges— sollst du geleitet sein! (Sie will ihn umarmen. Er stößt sie heftig von sich.) (Pity! Pity for me! Mine for just an hour—thine for just an hour—and you shall be directed on your way! She tries to embrace him. He forcibly spurns her.

*

Mitleiden! antwortete der Wahrsager aus einem überströmenden Herzen und hob beide Hände empor—oh Zarathustra, ich komme, dass ich dich zu deiner letzten Sünde verführe!

‘Pity’ answered the soothsayer from an overflowing heart, and raised both hands aloft—‘O Zarathustra, I come to seduce you to your last sin!’)*

Among other incidental parallels, the following are worthy of consideration: Kundry’s ‘Ich bin müde’ (I am tired) in Act I. Nietzsche often uses the idea of fatigue, i.e., in ‘Der Zauberer’, § 2: ‘Oh Zarathustra, ich bin’s müde, es ekelt mich meiner Künste…’ (O Zarathustra, I am tired of it, my arts disgust me…). This leads to a play on words in ‘Vom Lesen und Schreiben’: ‘Ich bin muthig’ (I am brave). In Act II, Kundry refuses to submit to Klingsor: ‘Ich—will nicht!’ (I—will not!). Zarathustra, too, in ‘Die stillste Stunde’ refuses to obey his alter ego: ‘Endlich aber sagte ich, was ich zuerst sagte: “Ich will nicht”’ (But finally I said what I first said ‘I will not’). See above, p. 77.

The Cry of Distress  121

II Following the pattern of the flower-maidens’ scene in Parsifal, Act II, each of the tempters in turn importunes Zarathustra, trying to seduce him by the intensity of his appeal for pity (to be precise in one case: the ugliest man, the self-confessed murderer of God, is trying to escape from pity and therefore solicits protection). The closest analogue is the spirit of gravity as the symbolic repudiation figure in Parts I–III; but in Part IV Nietzsche goes further in the delineation of personality. Evidently the aim was to scan the gamut of modernity, describing the age by means of a series of interviews which Zarathustra interprets (N-A3 VII 3 31[2]). This was enlarged on in an addendum to a letter to Köselitz of 23 July 1885, which defended the situations and settings in Part IV as ‘actual and not arbitrary’. Yet these parasitic creatures also embody an autopsychological element, reflecting their author’s complex personality in a series of grotesquely distorted mirror-images or caricatures, ‘vielleicht ein wenig trübe, ein wenig air pessimiste, in der Hauptsache aber gefräßig, schmutzig, beschmutzend, sich einschleichend, einschmiegend, diebisch, krätzig,—und unschuldig wie alle kleinen Sünder und Mikrobien’ (perhaps a bit downcast, a bit pessimistic; but in essence greedy, dirty, sullying, furtive, ingratiating, light-fingered, mangy—and innocent, like all petty sinners and microbes. N-A3 VIII 1 7[17]). Nonetheless, they are anything but inconsequential opponents. To start with they even command a measure of respect, and Zarathustra’s questions show a real concern for the predicament in which each individually finds himself. In the case of the soothsayer suffering from hunger and the wicked sorcerer suffering from cold, an element of farce enters into the proceedings; but this is mitigated as the story unfolds itself. Only after an exhaustive series of tests does Zarathustra really get to grips with the situation. The predicament to which his guests collectively testify is that of the spiritually alienated and dispossessed. In seeking to delay the onset of nihilism, they become the victims of a morbid hunger that is never satisfied—taking refuge in the leadership of the prophet (whom they utterly fail to understand); then when his back is turned in the hideous sophistries of the ugliest man’s ‘Ass Litany’; then in something like the teaching of eternal return when the ugliest man, the murderer of God, quoting Zarathustra’s words in ‘Vom Gesicht und Räthsel’, § 1, for a blissful instant thinks he has found a way to salve his consciousness of guilt: Parsifal, Act III

  Amfortas.

‘Das Nachtwandler-Lied’, § 1

Schon fühl’ ich den Tod mich um                              [nachten,— und noch einmal sollt’ ich in’s                          [Lebenzurück?

‘War Das—das Leben?’ will ich zum Tode sprechen. ‘Wohlan! Noch Ein Mal!’

(Already I feel death closing in on me—and must I return to life once more?

‘Was that—life?’ I will say to death. ‘Very well! Once more!’)

With their shallow, wavering, contradictory loyalties, the higher men collectively illustrate one of the book’s most distinctive themes, revealing as they do among the representatives of modernity a state of chronic indecision, and a corresponding lack of purpose and achievement. Succumbing after the banquet to stupefied slumber, oblivious to the import

122  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism of the discourses with which they have been regaled, the guests find their true satisfaction in their own afflictions which, in the end, only Zarathustra takes seriously. Regarded in this light, Zarathustra’s conquest of his ‘last sin’—the sin of pity—is an apt rejoinder to Parsifal’s ‘learning of pity’. At the last moment, perceiving the significance of the trial he has undergone and the enormity of the danger from which he has so narrowly escaped, he jumps up Parsifal, Act II

‘Das Zeichen’

[Parsifal] springt jetzt vollends auf, und Plötzlich sprang [Zarathustra] empor,— stößt Kundry heftig von sich. 'Mitleiden! das Mitleiden mit dem höheren Menschen! ([Parsifal]…now jumps up and spurns schrie er auf, und sein Antlitz verwandelte sich in Erz. Kundry forcibly. Wohlan! Das—hatte seine Zeit!’ Suddenly Zarathustra jumped up: ‘Pity! Pity for the higher man!’ he cried, and his face set hard. ‘All right! that has had its time!’) [Compare the note N-A3 VII 3 35[49]: ‘Was RW betrifft: so gab es einen Augenblick meines Lebens, wo ich ihn mit Heftigkeit von mir stieß.’ (Concerning RW: there came a point in my life when I forcibly spurned him.)]

Chapter 12 The Dissolution of the Trinity

I A further selection of borrowings may be inspected as, with a frightening inevitability, the fourth book proceeds towards its predestined climax in Zarathustra’s banquet. In analysing this section, it will be helpful to consider more closely Nietzsche’s letter to Seydlitz on receiving Wagner’s inscribed presentation copy of the text of Parsifal in Basel in the early days of 1878: Gestern kam, von Wagner gesandt, der Parsifal in mein Haus. Eindruck des ersten Lesens: mehr Liszt, als Wagner, Geist der Gegenreformation; mir, der ich zu sehr an das Griechische, menschlich Allgemeine gewöhnt bin, ist Alles zu christlich zeitlich beschränkt; lauter phantastische Psychologie; kein Fleisch und viel zu viel Blut (namentlich beim Abendmahl geht es mir zu vollblütig her), dann mag ich hysterische Frauenzimmer nicht; Vieles, was für das innere Auge erträglich ist, wird bei der Aufführung kaum auszuhalten sein: denken Sie Sich unsere Schauspieler betend, zitternd und mit verzückten Hälsen. Auch das Innere der Gralsburg kann auf der Bühne nicht wirkungsvoll sein, ebensowenig der verwundete Schwan. Alle diese schönen Erfindungen gehören in’s Epos und, wie gesagt, für’s innere Auge. Die Sprache klingt wie eine Übersetzung aus einer fremden Zunge. Aber die Situationen und ihre Aufeinanderfolge—ist das nicht von der höchsten Poesie? Ist es nicht eine letzte Herausforderung der Musik? (Yesterday Parsifal came, sent by Wagner. First impression: more Liszt than Wagner, spirit of the Counter-Reformation. For me, all too accustomed as I am to Greek human universality, it is all too Christian, temporally limited; nothing but fantastic psychology; no flesh and much too much blood (especially the Eucharist is too bloody for me). Moreover, I can’t stand hysterical females. Much that the inner eye can tolerate will be almost unbearable in performance—just imagine our actors praying, quivering, with necks craning in ecstasy. The interior of the Grail castle, too, can’t work on the stage—any more than can the wounded swan. All these fine inventions belong to epic poetry and, as I have said, to the inner eye. The language sounds like a translation from a foreign tongue. But the situations and their sequence—isn’t this the most sublime poetry? Isn’t it an ultimate challenge to music?)

The most arresting of the secondary characters in Part IV is the wicked sorcerer, discovered in a state of seizure, wildly gesticulating (conjuring magic from an imaginary orchestra?), and finally collapsing on the ground: ‘Und wie sehr sich Zarathustra mühte, dass er ihn aufrichte und wieder auf seine Beine stelle, es war umsonst’ (And however hard Zarathustra tried to raise him and set him on his feet again, it was useless). Here Wagner is likened to his own principal tempter in Parsifal, the wicked sorcerer Klingsor (Der Fall Wagner, ‘Nachschrift’): Ah dieser alte Zauberer! Dieser Klingsor aller Klingsore! Wie er uns damit den Krieg macht! uns, den freien Geistern! Wie er jeder Feigheit der modernen Seele mit Zaubermädchen-Tönen zu Willen redet!

124  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism (Oh this old sorcerer! This Klingsor of Klingsors! How he makes war on us—us the free spirits! How he indulges every cowardice of the modern soui with magic maidens’ music!)1

The sorcerer’s two songs in ‘Der Zauberer’, § 1, and ‘Das Lied der Schwermuth’, § 3, consist of irregular lines of free verse full of tortured introspection and self-questioning, and present an obviously intentional contrast to the classical style of Zarathustra’s own song ‘Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!’. Nietzsche, however, appears to have held a high opinion of them, since he revised them in his last productive months along with the after-dinner psalm of the shadow, ‘Die Wüste wächst: weh Dem, der Wüsten birgt!’ (‘The Desert Grows: Woe to Him Who Harbours Deserts!’), for inclusion in the Dionysos-Dithyramben. The shadow who uses the sorcerer’s harp to accompany his preposterous rhapsody is evidently spurred on by a spirit of competition. If some of the shadow’s material comes from Zarathustra’s exchange with ‘Life’ in ‘Das andere Tanzlied’, the poet’s flirtation with Dudu and Suleika beneath the palm-tree at the oasis is reminiscent of the flower-maidens’ scene in Parsifal. The recurring expletive ‘Ha!’ certainly echoes Wagner’s Klingsor, at whose behest—as Gurnemanz relates in Act I—the desert beyond the Grail’s demesne is transformed into an exotic, tropical paradise: Die Wüste schuf er sich zum Wonnegarten, d’rinn wachsen teuflisch holde Frauen. (He turns the desert into a pleasure-garden where devilishly beguiling women grow.)2

It is at once apparent that the portrait of Wagner as the wicked sorcerer, drawn with all the acuteness of disappointed veneration, embodies many features taken directly from life. The sorcerer’s appeal to the ‘Unknown God’ (a reference to St. Paul’s sermon to the Athenians?), for example, derides the destructive possessiveness which was familiar to Wagner’s circle: Wer wärmt mich, wer liebt mich noch? Gebt heisse Hände! Gebt Herzens-Kohlenbecken! (Who warms me, who still loves me? Give hot hands! Give hearts hot as live coals!)3

while his histrionic talent is shrewdly observed: Parsifal, Act III

‘Der Zauberer’, § 1

               Amfortas. Heraus die Waffe! Taucht eure                                    [Schwerte tief—tief hinein, bis an’s Heft!           Ihr Helden, auf! Tödtet den Sünder mit seiner Qual, von selbst dann leuchtet euch wohl                                   [der Gral!

Triff tiefer! Triff Ein Mal noch! Zerstich, zerbrich diess Herz! Was soll diess Martern Mit zähnestumpfen Pfeilen? Was blickst du wieder, Der Menschen-Qual nicht müde, Mit schadenfrohen Götter-Blitz                                   [Augen?

The Dissolution of the Trinity  125 (Out with your weapons! Drive your swords in deep—deep, up to the hilt! Up! you heroes! Kill the sinner with his pain, then the Grail will truly shed its light on you!

Nicht tödten willst du, Nur martern, martern? Strike deeper! Strike once more! Pierce, break this heart! Why this torture with blunt arrows? Why do you look on, unwearied of human pain, with godlike, flashing eyes that take pleasure in cruelty? Will you not kill, only torture—torture?)

It is tempting to connect this poem with the message Wagner is supposed to have consigned to Elisabeth at a specially requested interview during the first Parsifal season ‘Sagen Sie es Ihrem Bruder, seit er von mir gegangen ist, bin ich allein’ (Tell your brother that since he left me I am alone): words Elisabeth mentioned in connection with the celebrated ‘Sternen-Freundschaft’ in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 279.4 Or might it not relate to the letter to Overbeck of 19 October 1879, in which Wagner untypically expressed his regret at his enforced separation from Nietzsche?5 A recently discovered table of contents for Nietzsche contra Wagner shows that the ‘Sternen-Freundschaft’ paragraph does indeed have something to do with Wagner.6 Yet Wagner’s conciliatory attitude is not easy to substantiate; and Nietzsche’s open hostility, too, mounted rapidly as he recovered from the wound inflicted by Wagner’s ‘Publikum und Popularität’. The occasional nostalgia in letters and writings where Nietzsche laments the passing of the halcyon years at Tribschen, is singularly absent in Zarathustra. On the contrary, in Part IV the wicked sorcerer’s talent for versifying serves to point his remoteness from the prophet, whom he imitates in the garbled lines: Haha! Du schleichst heran? Bei solcher Mitternacht Was willst du? Sprich! (Ha ha! You are creeping up? What do you want at such a midnight hour? Speak!)

Although Zarathustra frequently vents his contempt for the fraudulent masquerading of poets—and by implication artists in general—in this way a perilous contradiction is set up between his condemnation of poetry and his own marked poetic propensity. The indispensable background to the ‘song-contest’ between Zarathustra, the sorcerer, and the shadow in Part IV, is provided by the discourse on poets in Part II. ‘Seit ich den Leib besser kenne’, Zarathustra here remarks to a disciple, ‘alles das “Unvergängliche”—das ist auch nur ein Gleichnis’ (Since I have known the body better…everything ‘permanent’— that, too, has been only an ‘image’). To which the disciple replies, quoting a saying Zarathustra has already stolen from Homer So hörte ich dich schon einmal sagen…und damals fügtest du hinzu: ‘Aber die Dichter lügen zuviel.’ Warum sagtest du doch, dass die Dichter zuviel lügen? (I heard you say that once before…and then you added: ‘But poets lie too much.’ Why did you then say that poets lie too much?)7

Superficially, the parody of the ‘Chorus mysticus’ from the last scene of Faust, Part II, in ‘Von den Dichtern’ seems to be directed against Goethe ‘Ach, wie bin ich all des Unzulänglichen müde, das durchaus Ereigniss sein soll!’ (Oh how tired I am of all the mediocrity that is advanced as nothing less than momentous!). It should be remembered, though, that Wagner

126  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism had expounded Goethe’s poem in a memorable passage in Beethoven, linking Goethe’s ‘eternal-womanly’ with the spirit of music which leads the poet to redemption: a passage certainly familiar to Nietzsche. Still earlier, in Oper und Drama, which Nietzsche is also known to have studied, Wagner had described a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Court-theatre of Potsdam and its effect on the audience: Oper und Drama

Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie, § 5

Das ‘ewig Weibliche zog’ sie nicht ‘hinan’, sondern das ewig Weibische brachte sie vollends Aber wie gesagt, es ist ein Geschlecht von Eunuchen… Und da euch das Ewig-Weibliche nur herunter!— nie hinanziehen wird, so zieht ihr es zu euch herab und nehmt, als Neutra, auch die Geschichte (The ‘eternal-womanly’ did not ‘draw’ them als ein Neutrum. But, as I said, they are a race of eunuchs… And since the eternalwomanly could ‘up’, but the eternal old-womanly brought them completely down! never draw you up, you draw it down to you, and being neuter yourselves, regard history as W-A1 IV 80 neuter also.) Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II, ‘Vorrede’, §3 Solche Musik entnervt, erweicht, verweiblicht, ihr ‘Ewig-Weibliches’ ziehtt uns—hinab! (Such music weakens, softens, feminizes. Its ‘eternal womanly’ drags us—down!) [Compare also VMS § 134, 'Wie nach der neueren Musik sich die Seele bewegen soll', where, when discussing Wagner, Nietzsche again speaks of the 'all-too-womanly' nature of music.]

On this showing, it is reasonable to conclude that Wagner is also implicated in Zarathustra’s attack. The fact remains that all along Zarathustra’s stance as a grand rhetoriqueur brings him within range of his own critical fire: ‘Doch was sagte dir einst Zarathustra? Dass die Dichter zuviel lügen?—Aber auch Zarathustra ist ein Dichter…wir lügen zuviel’ (But what did Zarathustra once say to you? That poets lie too much? But Zarathustra is a poet too…we lie too much). This confession wrung from Zarathustra by his disciple in ‘Von den Dichtern’ in Part II is all but indistinguishable from the confession Zarathustra, in due course, extracts from the sorcerer in Part IV. The reader is made aware that the margin separating the characters is a narrow one. Did not Nietzsche admit as much when he wrote to Rohde on 22 February 1884, saying that he had remained a poet in the most radical sense of the word, although he had tyrannized himself a great deal with the antithesis of poetry? The quarrel between the prophet and the wicked sorcerer, then, results not so much from their divergence as from the repulsion of an all too close resemblance. Even Zarathustra’s self-depreciatory ‘we lie too much’ finds a responsive echo in the refrain of the sorcerer’s self-lacerating ‘Das Lied der Schwermuth’: Der Wahrheit Freier? Du?—so höhnten sie— Nein! Nur ein Dichter! Ein Thier, ein listiges, raubendes, schleichendes, Das lügen muss,

The Dissolution of the Trinity  127 Das wissentlich, willentlich lügen muss: Nach Beute lüstern, Bunt verlarvt, Sich selber Larve, Sich selbst zur Beute— Das—der Wahrheit Freier? Nein! Nur Narr! Nur Dichter! (You? the wooer of truth?—so they scoffed: No! just a poet! An animal, cunning, rapacious, fawning, that has to lie, that wittingly, willingly has to lie: lusting for prey, motley-masked, its own mask, its own prey—That the wooer of truth? No! Just a fool! Just a poet!)

The glib tongue, the simulated passion and pathos, the empty posturing, are the stock-intrade of the poet’s art before which Zarathustra stands warily on guard. During the first encounter there is an effect of bathos when his adversary gives in with a scandalized and contrite air, exclaiming that he is acting only in jest Solcherlei gehört zu meiner Kunst; dich selber wollte ich auf die Probe stellen, als ich dir diese Probe gab! Und, wahrlich, du hast mich gut durchschaut! (Such things belong to my art; it was you yourself I wanted to test when I presented you with this test-piece! And truly you have seen right through me!)

Not that this satisfies the prophet who rightly sees in the querulous counterfeit, playing with truth, a very real threat: So schminktest du eben vor mir deine Lüge, als du sprachst: ‘ich trieb’s also nur zum Spiele!’ Es war auch Ernst darin… (So you disguised your lie before me when you said ‘I was doing it only in jest!’ There was seriousness in it too…)

Is not the sorcerer’s professed insincerity as much a ruse as his cleverly simulated sincerity? Here, then, is one of the more intractable difficulties presented by Nietzsche’s book: a difficulty bearing directly on its derivation from Wagner. For it is an inscrutable paradox that while generally defending the primacy of aesthetic values in his prose writings, Nietzsche here in his prose-poem represents the artist—the creator of aesthetic values par excellence—as morally suspect.

II The element of contention within the trinity of intimately related yet profoundly dissimilar figures—Nietzsche, Wagner, Schopenhauer—is most fully exploited in the last four discourses in Part IV when, after the series of individual encounters and interviews with the tempters, Zarathustra faces his guests collectively. At this point in the story, the higher men, seeking a replacement for the dead God, with one accord prostrate themselves before the anointed ass (‘Die Erweckung’, § 2): Amen! Und Lob und Ehre und Weisheit und Dank und Preis und Stärke sei unserm Gott, von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit! —Der Esel aber schrie dazu I—A. (Amen! And blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and power and might be unto our god for ever and ever.8 To this the ass brayed ‘Hee-haw’.)

128  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism With this Christianized festum asinorum amid the vapour and incense of burning pinecones, the process of spiritual impoverishment, deterioration, and exhaustion reaches its lowest ebb. The mise en scène recalls the adoration of the Lamb in the Revelation of St. John from which Nietzsche quotes; Naumann was probably the first of the many to suggest a comparison with the defection of the Children of Israel to the golden calf in Exodus 32 (only, here the ‘calf’ would have to be a Christian and not a pagan symbol).9 Explicable as this profanity may be in terms of the biblical satire—the twelve ‘disciples’ are listed in full—the question is whether Nietzsche would have arrived at it but for the Grail scene in Parsifal, Act III, where, in a similar atmosphere of religious euphoria, Parsifal, the newlyanointed King, is proclaimed Saviour: Parsifal, Act III                Alle. Höchsten Heiles Wunder: Erlösung dem Erlöser! (Miracle of highest Grace: Salvation to the Saviour!

‘Die Erweckung’, § 2 Aber, Wunder über Wunder! was musste er da mit seinen eignen Augen sehn! ‘Sie sind Alle wieder fromm geworden, sie beten, sie sind toll!’ But miracle of miracles! What did he then have to behold with his own eyes! ‘They have all turned pious again, they are praying, they have gone mad!’)10 The last words in Parsifal are often echoed in Zarathustra’s discourses, most literally in Part II, ‘Von den Priestern’: Ach, dass Einer sie noch von ihrem Erlöser erlöste! (Oh, that someone would save them from their Saviour). There are further references in Nietzsche’s correspondence, and in the first postscript to FW, apropos of the wreath laid upon Wagner’sgrave by the Munich Wagner Society whose president was Nietzsche’s friend Seydlitz: ‘Erlösung vom Erlöser!’ (Salvation from the Saviour!)

In the letter dispatched to Seydlitz the day after receiving the text of Parsifal, Nietzsche immediately made the Grail scene the focal point of his attack: ‘No meat and much too much blood: especially the Eucharist is too bloody for me.’ This comment provides the rationale for the inclusion of the two lambs captured by the eagle in ‘Der Genesende’, § 2, in addition to the wine supplied by the two kings on the menu of Zarathustra’s banquet. The effectiveness of the scenes in the Gralsburg was questioned; and the actors’ obeisance as Parsifal reinstates the Eucharist at Monsalvat was unsparingly pilloried: ‘Just imagine our actors kneeling, quivering, and with necks craning in ecstasy.’ One recalls, too, Nietzsche’s frequent expressions of anguish at the fate of the great artist, apparently all-conquering, who in the moment of triumph fell helpless and broken at the foot of the Cross. In a previously unpublished note of 1887, he launches into the diatribe Ich bin der Enttäuschteste aller Wagnerianer; denn in dem Augenblick, wo es anständiger als je war, Heide zu sein, wurde er Christ… (I am the most disappointed of all Wagnerians; for at that moment when it was more respectable than ever to be pagan, he turned Christian… N-A3 VIII 2 9(65])

The Dissolution of the Trinity  129 In his autobiography, he writes ‘Unglaublich! Wagner war fromm geworden…’ (Incredible! Wagner had turned pious… Eh-MA § 5). Nietzsche did of course remark to Seydiltz on the situations and the sequence of the action, calling them ‘most sublime poetry’ and the ‘ultimate challenge to music’. The antiphonal form of the Ass Litany intoned by the ugliest man in Zarathustra’s cave may have been suggested by Wagner’s antiphonal choruses of knights and acolytes at Monsalvat; the processions of the higher men in ‘Gespräch mit den Königen’, § 1, and ‘Das Zeichen’, too, recall the processions of knights to and within the Gralsburg. It will not escape remark either that Zarathustra witnesses the scene surreptitiously, as Parsifal steals unnoticed into the hall of the Grail during Amfortas’s last, terrible outcry of remorse and despair (adapted in the sorcerer’s first song): Parsifal, Act III

‘Die Erweckung’, § 2

Parsifal ist, von Gurnemanz und Kundry begleitet, unvermerkt unter den Rittern erschienen, tritt jetzt hervor… (Parsifal, who with Gurnemanz and Kundry has mingled unobserved among the knights, now steps forward…

[Zarathustra] schlich zum Eingange heran, dass er seinen Gästen, unvermerkt, zusehn könne. [Zarathustra] stole to the entrance so that he might see his guests unobserved.)*

Even the healing of Amfortas and the concluding incident of the bleeding spear may have provided the idea for the discourse in which Zarathustra encounters the leach with blood pouring down his arm: Parsifal, Act III

‘Der Blutegel’

(Alles blickt in höchster Entzückung auf den empor gehaltenen Speer, zu dessen Spitze aufschauend Parsifal in Begeisterung fortfährt:) Oh! Welchen Wunders höchstes Glück!:— Die deine Wunde durfte schließen, ihr seh’ ich heil’ges Blut entfließen… (All gaze in rapture at the spear held aloft, as Parsifal, looking at its point, continues as one inspired: Oh! What a miracle of utter bliss! From this that healed your wound, I see Holy Blood flowing forth.

‘Aber was treibst du doch!’ rief Zarathustra erschreckt, denn er sahe, dass über den nackten Arm weg viel Blut floss.

*

‘Whatever are you up to!’ cried Zarathustra in alarm, for he saw that a great deal of blood was flowing down the bare arm.)

Compare Parsifal, Act I [Kundry] sinkt hinter dem Gebüsch zusammen, meinem Reiche?’ sprach Zarathustra erstaunt zu seinem Herzen und versteckte sich und bleibt von jetzt an unbemerkt. geschwind hinter einem Busche. ([Kundry] sinks down behind the bush and (‘What do these kings want in my kingdom? from now on remains unnoticed.) said Zarathustra to his heart in astonishment, ‘Gespräch mit den Königen’, § 1 and quickly hid himself behind a bush.) ‘Was wollen diese Könige in

130  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Against this background, the resemblances between Zctrathustra, Part IV, and Parsifal are so plentiful and the context is so apposite that it would be carrying scepticism too far to refuse to draw the obvious conclusion. The subject of Zarathustra’s banquet is raised in the intemperate harangue of the soothsayer in ‘Das Abendmahl’: a satire on Schopenhauer’s well-known fondness for the pleasures of the table: ‘Eingerechnet das Verdursten, fuhr der Wahrsager fort…ich—will Wein!’ (Speaking of dying of thirst, the soothsayer went on… I-want wine!). Hence, after the promised repast, we are told that the soothsayer danced for joy being ‘full of sweet wine’—a scarcely perceptible adaptation of Acts 2:13 (‘Das Nachtwandler-Lied’, § 1). The way for the higher men’s defection is then paved by the wicked sorcerer who, as if possessed, takes advantage of Zarathustra’s withdrawal to show off his histrionic ability (‘Das Lied der Schwermuth’, § 2): Schon fällt mich mein schlimmer Trug—und Zaubergeist an, mein schwermüthiger Teufel, —welcher diesem Zarathustra ein Widersacher ist aus dem Grunde: vergebt es ihm! (Already my evil spirit of deceit and sorcery possesses me, my melancholy devil who is this Zarathustra’s adversary from the depths: forgive him for it!)

For the moment, the wicked sorcerer’s ascendancy is complete. Playing the virtuoso Aaron to Zarathustra’s Moses, gaining the ear of the higher men who are drawn ‘unwittingly as birds into the net of his cunning and melancholy wantonness’, he emerges here as Zarathustra’s most formidable rival. Only the conscientious man puts up a show of resistance; his furious, involuntary protest brings to mind the drubbing inflicted upon the sorcerer by Zarathustra on the occasion of their first meeting (‘Von der Wissenschaft’): ‘—du alter schwermüthiger Teufel, aus deiner Klage klingt eine Lockpfeife, du gleichst Solchen, welche mit ihrem Lobe der Keuschheit heimlich zu Wollüsten laden!’ (You old, melancholy devil, an alluring piping sounds in your lamentation. You are like one of those whose praise of chastity covertly entices to wantonness.)*11

and he rounds on his companions Und nicht die Führer aus der Gefahr gefallen euch am besten, sondern die euch von allen Wegen abführen, die Verführer. (And it isn’t those who lead you away f rom danger who appeal to you most, but those who lead you astray from all paths: the mis-leaders.) *

Compare Parsifal, Act III   [Gurnemanz baptizes Parsifal] Gesegnet sei, du Reiner, durch [das Reine! (Be blessed, you pure one, [through the pure water!) Du—Reiner,—mitleidvoll [Duldender… (You—pure one, sufferer [full of pity…)

‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’, § 14 ‘Dem Reinen ist Alles rein’—so spricht das Volk. (To the pure all things are pure’—so say the people.) ‘Vor Sonnen-Aufgang’ ‘Du Reiner!’ (You pure one! [addressed to the sun.])    

The Dissolution of the Trinity  131 Yet he too is unable to withstand the seditious magic, and soon gives in to the hysteria fomented by the demagogue. Not only the wicked sorcerer earns a reproof when in the middle of the solemnities, unable to restrain himself, catapulted from his hiding-place and dragging the worshippers up from the ground, Zarathustra makes his frantic bid to forestall the higher men’s secession: a passage recalling Wagner’s stage-directions where Amfortas, in the extremity of his despair, plunges headlong among his recoiling knights (a telling paraphrase of the opening of Wolfram’s Parzival, Book XVI): Parsifal Act III

‘Das Eselsfest’, § 1

Amfortas. (in wüthender Verzweiflung auf-springend, und unter die zurück-weichenden Ritter sich stürzend). Nein!—Nicht mehr!—Ha!

An dieser Stelle der Litanei aber konnte Zarathustra sich nicht länger bemeistern… und sprang mitten unter seine tollgewordenen Gäste. *          *          * —‘Und du, sprach Zarathustra, du schlimmer alter Zauberer, was thatest du! Wer soll, in dieser freien Zeit, fürderhin an dich glauben, wenn du an solche Götter-Eseleien glaubst? Es war eine Dummheit, was du thatest; wie konntest du, du Kluger, eine solche Dummheit thun!’ (Amfortas, jumping up in a paroxysm of despair, At this point in the Litany, however, Zarathustra and hurling himself among his recoiling knights: could restrain himself no longer…and jumped into the midst of his demented guests…. ‘And ‘No—no more! Ha!’ you’, said Zarathustra, ‘you wicked old sorcerer, what have you done! Who in these enlightened days shall believe in you henceforth if you believe in such divine asininities? What you did was folly; how were you, you clever man, capable of such folly!’)*

*

Compare Götterdämmerung, Act III Zarathustra und wandte sich gegen den Gunther und die Mannen. hässlichsten Menschen, der immer noch Hagen! was thu’st du? Was thatest du? auf dem Boden lag, den Arm zu dem (Gunther and the vassals: Esel emporhebend… Was thatest du?… Hagen! What are you doing? Du selber dünkst mich aufgeweckt: was What have you done?) thatest du?’ [The outraged response to Siegfried’s murder, as (‘And you yourself, finally’, said adapted in the musical setting.] Zarathustra, and turned towards the ugliest ‘Das Eselsfest’, § 1 man who was still lying on the ground, —‘Und du selber zuletzt, sprach raising his arm up to the ass … ‘What have you done?… You seemed awakened: what have you done?’)

132  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism For each of the tempters (‘flower-men’) is culpable in his own way Parsifal, Act II (conclusion)

‘Das Eselsfest, § 3

Die Mädchen liegen als verwelkte Blumen am Ihr seid wahrlich Alle aufgeblüht: mich dünkt, solchen Blumen, wie ihr seid, thun neue Feste Boden umher gestreut. noth. (The maidens lie like withered flowers strewn on Truly you have all blossomed forth: it seems to the ground. me that for flowers like you, new festivals are needed.)

and each stands charged by Zarathustra’s final admonition: Parsifal, Act I (Grail scene)

‘Das Eselsfest’, § 3

‘Nehmet hin mein Blut um unsrer Liebe Willen! Nehmet hin meinen Leib auf daß ihr mein’ gedenkt’ (‘Take my blood for the sake of our love! Take my body in remembrance of me.’

Und feiert ihr es abermals, dieses Eselsfest, thut’s euch zu Liebe, thut’s auch mir zu Liebe! Und zu meinem Gedächtniss! And if you celebrate this Feast of the Ass again, do it for love of yourselves, do it also for love of me! And in remembrance of me!)

III If Zarathustra’s repudiation of pity is meant to establish his superiority over the dead God who has succumbed to a surfeit of pity, it is a negative accomplishment, leading in the penultimate discourse to an extended re-affirmation of the teaching already announced in the last discourses of Part III. In preparation for this, however, an unforgettable passage in the synoptic ‘Vom höheren Menschen’ is particularly well in tune with the spirit of the work in its entirety. Here Zarathustra consecrates ‘laughter’; and as if emulating the ugliest man in his crown and purple sashes (borrowed from one of the kings), exultantly sets a crown of roses on his own head (§ 18): Diese Krone des Lachenden, diese Rosenkranz-Krone: ich selber setzte mir diese Krone auf, ich selber sprach heilig mein Gelächter. Keinen Anderen fand ich heute stark genug dazu. (This crown of laughter, this crown of roses: I myself have set this crown on my head, I myself have sanctified my laughter. I have found no other strong enough for this today.)

in the last paragraph he boldly proffers his crown (§ 20): Wie Vieles ist noch möglich! So lernt doch über euch hinweg lachen! Erhebt eure Herzen, ihr guten Tänzer, hoch! höher! Und vergesst mir auch das gute Lachen nicht! Diese Krone des Lachenden, diese Rosenkranz-Krone: euch, meinen Brüdern, werfe ich diese Krone zu! Das Lachen sprach ich heilig; ihr höheren Menschen, lernt mir—lachen! (How much is still possible! So learn to laugh at yourselves! Lift up your hearts, you fine dancers, high! higher! And don’t forget to laugh heartily too! This crown of laughter, this crown of roses: to you, my brothers, do I toss this crown! I have sanctified laughter: you higher men, learn—to laugh!)

Zarathustra’s ‘crown’ is reminiscent of the crown of thorns with which Christ assumed sovereignty (‘Von den Erhabenen’): ‘Auch viele Dornen hiengen an ihm—aber noch sah

The Dissolution of the Trinity  133 ich keine Rose./Noch lernte er das Lachen nicht und die Schönheit’ (Many thorns adorned him too—yet I saw no rose. As yet he has not learned laughter and beauty). Undeniably, too, the figure of Dionysos crowned with ivy lurks in the shadows in this moment of transport. At the same time, the crown of roses, a symbol of fecundity and beauty, is one of the most striking of the many ‘ring’ images that find their way into the pages of Also sprach Zarathustra. A symbol for eternal return, the ‘ring of rings’, must not this be literally Zarathustra’s ‘gift’: the legacy prophesied in the prologue, ‘Das Kind mit dem Spiegel’, ‘Das Nachtlied’, ‘Die stillste Stunde’, and elsewhere? Besides this, the injunction ‘learn—to laugh!’—taking a step further the learning of dance, flight, song, &c., in the earlier instalments—sets the seal on the parody of Wagner: here, the ‘learning of pity’ in Parsifal, matched by the ‘learning of fear’ in Der Ring, is skilfully adapted and directed towards an original end. In its context it grows naturally out of § 16, where there is a trenchant comment on Luke 6:25, transcribed in a note of 1884 as ‘der Fluch auf die, welche lachen—’ (the curse on those who laugh. N-A3 VII 2 25[150], previously unpublished). It also recalls a paraphrase of Chamfort’s Maximes, No. 48, suggested by a letter of 13 April 1871 from Cosima Wagner, in ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’, § 23: Und verloren sei uns der Tag, wo nicht Ein Mal getanzt wurde! Und falsch heisse uns jede Wahrheit, bei der es nicht Ein Gelächter gab! (And let the day when there was no dancing at all be lost to us! And let every truth that did not give occasion for laughter be accounted false.)12

And there are glosses in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, §§ 223 and 294, where Nietzsche takes issue with a saying attributed to Hobbes. Nonetheless, we have to opt for Wagner as the model and centre of attraction in this passage. In particular, one remembers Zarathustra’s campaign against the spirit of gravity in Part I, ‘Vom Lesen und Schreiben’: ‘Nicht durch Zorn, sondern durch Lachen tödtet man’ (One does not kill by anger but by laughter). In Part II, Zarathustra’s triumph is foreshadowed in the thousand peals of laughter issuing from the thousand masks of children, angels, owls, fools, and child-sized butterflies in ‘Der Wahrsager’, and in the laughter that envelops him after his third denial of his teaching in ‘Die stillste Stunde’. In Part III, there is the laughter of the shepherd—Zarathustra himself—in ‘Vom Gesicht und Räthsel’, § 2; and the cryptic comment on his return journey from the Islands of the Blessed, when he asks whether doubts about God have not long since been silenced (‘Von den Abtrünnigen’, § 2): Mit den alten Göttern gieng es ja lange schon zu Ende:—und wahrlich, ein gutes fröhliches Götter-Ende hatten sie! Sie ‘dämmerten’ sich nicht zu Tode,—das lügt man wohl! Vielmehr: sie haben sich selber einmal zu Tode—gelacht! (For the old gods, after all, matters came to an end long ago:—and truly they had a good, glad, godly end! They didn’t ‘twilight away’ to death—that really is a lie! On the contrary: one day they laughed themselves to death!)

and the characteristic remark in ‘Die sieben Siegel’, § 6: ‘Im Lachen nämlich ist alles Böse bei einander, aber heilig—und losgesprochen durch seine eigne Seligkeit’ (In laughter, of course, all evil is present, but sanctified and absolved through its own bliss).

134  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism In Part IV, there is the ludicrous jubilation of the higher men in ‘Die Erweckung’, § 1, where we learn of the recoil and flight of the spirit of gravity ‘Dieser Tag ist ein Sieg: er weicht schon, er flieht, der Geist der Schwere’ (This day is a victory: already he recoils, he flees, the spirit of gravity). Here, too, laughter is symbolized by Zarathustra’s mascot, the laughing lion, whose noble roar (the antithesis of the inane braying of the ass) providentially breaks up and disperses the procession of the higher men ominously assembling in Zarathustra’s cave (‘Das Zeichen’): ‘Als sie ihn brüllen hörten, schrien alle auf, wie mit Einem Munde, und flohen zurück und waren im Nu verschwunden’ (When they heard it roar, they all cried out as with one voice and fled back and vanished in a trice).13 Cumulatively the effect is considerable. The sublime laughter taught in ‘Vom höheren Menschen’, § 20, answers the pathetic cry of distress near the beginning of Part IV. The two antithetical sounds stress the polarities of the action, reinforcing the dualistic design in an original way, and widening the gulf between the prophet and his neophytes. Preceding this in § 17, a particularly ingenious and graphic transformation of the image of the ‘self-propelling wheel’ delivers a no less radical challenge to the authority of the genius gravitationis, and suggests Zarathustra’s eventual attainment of the third degree of metamorphosis: Erhebt eure Herzen, meine Brüder, hoch! höher! Und vergesst mir auch die Beine nicht! Erhebt auch eure Beine, ihr guten Tänzer, und besser noch: ihr steht auch auf dem Kopf! (Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high! higher! And don’t forget your legs too! Lift up your legs, too, you fine dancers, and better still: stand on your heads!)

The inspiration may have been the life of the historical Zoroaster who, according to a tradition sanctioned by Pliny, laughed when he was born. It is a fair assumption that Nietzsche would have wanted to give this proverbial incident prominence in his supraZoroastrian tract by weaving it into the early discourses in readiness for the counter-subject in ‘Der Nothschrei’. In a typically hubristic letter of April 1883, he told Malwida that he had taken issue with all religions and produced a new sacred book: ‘Und, in allem Ernste gesagt, es ist so ernst als irgend eines, ob es gleich das Lachen mit in die Religion aufnimmt—’ (And in all seriousness, it is quite as serious as any of the others, even though it incorporates laughter into religion).

SUMMARY From this standpoint, a new approach to Part IV is indicated. By those who do not share Nietzsche’s acerbic sense of humour, his handling of Zarathustra’s banquet has been received with dismay as an attempt to hasten the ruin of Christianity: that great drama in a hundred Acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe, as he calls it, ‘the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also most hopeful of all spectacles…’ (ZG III § 27). The comparison with Parsifal shows that other compelling reasons lay behind Nietzsche’s choice and treatment of his material. The somewhat laboured New Testament pastiche with the curiously intrusive concept of pity, which seems to invite criticism, may therefore be reinterpreted; for while Nietzsche’s relentless attack on Christianity is of almost irresistible force, the biblical and liturgical references that loom so large on the horizons of Part IV

The Dissolution of the Trinity  135 adorn the story of a temptation to pity taken not from the Bible but from Wagner. The sophisticated narrative and conceptual framework of the book, that is to say, is imbued with a spirit of parody akin to that in the preceding instalments, and bearing as directly on their specific polemical intention. Only, here in Part IV the parody is, if anything, more literal, and the narrative and conceptual scheme is more completely conditioned by it. The first sixteen discourses, recounting Zarathustra’s temptations by the higher men, develop material from the second Act of Parsifal from Kundry’s awakening ‘cry of distress’ and Parsifal’s temptations by the flower-maidens, derived from Buddhist legend, up to Kundry’s attempt at physical seduction. Nietzsche’s characterization of his principal tempter as the wicked sorcerer—a fanciful caricature of Wagner, the ‘actor’, ‘musician’, and ‘magician’, in the likeness of his own Klingsor, the instigator of Parsifal’s temptation— clearly refers to this sequence in the music-drama; as does also the concluding allusion to Zarathustra’s tempters collectively as ‘flowers’: a far-fetched piece of imagery almost unintelligible outside the context of a Wagnerian parody. Wagner’s tempters inadvertently disclose the cause of Amfortas’s suffering and, by arousing Parsifal’s pity, bring closer the fulfilment of the divine prophecy about the ‘pure fool made wise by pity’ who is to come forward as protector of the Grail and its Mysteries. Nietzsche’s tempters, by contrast, are foiled in their attempt to arouse pity, and so inadvertently prepare for the reaffirmation of Zarathustra’s teaching and his final, exultant proclamation of the advent of the ‘great noon’. The inverse parallel here is particularly compelling. In the last four discourses in Part IV, the scene shifts to the inner sanctum of Zarathustra’s cave where the higher men assembled for a banquet are discovered performing a complicated, quasi-religious rite. The model—established by Nietzsche’s letter to Seydlitz of 4 January 1878—is the Grail scenes in Parsifal, Acts I and III, in the inner sanctuary of the Gralsburg, with their processions and choruses, elevated religious feeling, and references to the liturgy of the Eucharist on which Zarathustra himself—apparently idiosyncratically but in fact in parody—also eventually draws. Given the difference in Nietzsche’s source-material, Part IV inevitably contrasts with the earlier instalments derived from Der Ring, with their predominantly mythological or ‘legendary’ atmosphere. Despite the greater length of the discourses, the action is compact and sustained with mounting tension; whereas Parts I–III, spread over a much wider timespan, tend to be diffuse and strangely devoid of incident. The characters of the higher men are amply drawn and more clearly differentiated; they have a variety and credibility noticeably lacking from most of the wraith-like, featureless creatures in the preceding pages. Although they still qualify to be regarded as self-projections—figments of Zarathustra’s tormented imagination—they now enter into disputation with each other; and the prophet’s homilies are geared more directly to the circumstances of the plot. The rhetorical accents of ‘Die sieben Siegel’ and other dithyrambic discourses that give poetical expression to the raptures of heightened subjective awareness in Part III are briefly recaptured, for example in ‘Mittags’, ‘Vom höheren Menschen’, and the penultimate ‘Das Nachtwandler-Lied’, thereby achieving stylistic cohesion; but overall the mood of Part IV is lighter, the wit more caustic and overtly satirical. In particular, the débâcle of ‘Das Eselsfest’, construed as a parody of Wagner’s Grail scenes, has a stunning concentration and audacity; while Zarathustra’s injunction ‘Learn to laugh!’, answering Siegfried’s learning of fear and Parsifal’s learning of pity, is a

136  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism masterstroke of literary and psychological calculation. The effect of this element of highspirited, if bitter, comedy as a foil to the introspective monologues and soliloquys of Parts I–III is of course deliberate. Here, if anywhere, Nietzsche gives point to the pun on Horace that he inscribed a few years later on the title-page of Der Fall Wagner: ‘ridendo dicere severum…’ (laughingly to say what is serious).14 The interpretation of Part IV as a travesty of Parsifal also helps us to unriddle one of the enigmas of Nietzsche’s biography. It may be thought that in withholding Zarathustra, Part IV, from wider circulation Nietzsche was motivated by the fear of ecclesiastical censure because of the work’s abundant religious overtones and undertones (just such a fear had played a part in restricting Parsifal to Bayreuth). The collapse of negotiations with Schmeitzner, the publisher of the first three Parts, certainly may have increased his anxiety on this score. Yet underlying all his subsequent deliberations with publishers and friends, one readily detects the private sense of confident expectation. Nietzsche’s high opinion of Zarathustra, has been mentioned elsewhere in this study. It is hard to believe that he withheld Part IV because he was in any way dissatisfied with it as a literary composition, thought it ‘unpublishably blasphemous’—a description as apt for Der Antichrist which was clearly destined for publication—or felt that its contents would be less palatable than the teachings disclosed in the last pages of Part III. We are led therefore towards the construction that he thought the work in some sense ‘too personal’: the words he used in 1876 when justifying to Köselitz his decision (later retracted) to withhold the unfinished encomium, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, too, from the public. The existence of a strain of satire, provoked by a text received as a parting gift from Wagner in 1878, and whose development (since as early as Christmas 1869), musical setting, and performance at the second Bayreuth Festival he had witnessed at close quarters, finally under the extreme stress of his public repudiation of Wagner, plausibly provides the missing link in this curious chronicle of events. One comes back to the conversation with Paneth in March 1884, just before Part IV was begun, when Nietzsche remarked that he had written Zarathustra ‘for himself’, and that he alone knew what his books actually contained. An inscrutable enigma is hinted at again in Ecce homo, ‘Der Fall Wagner’, § 1, at the height of his public campaign against Bayreuth: ‘Ich hielt alles Entscheidende in dieser Sache bei mir zurück,—ich habe Wagner geliebt’ (Everything decisive in this matter I kept to myself: I loved Wagner). In other respects, Nietzsche’s attack on the creator of Parsifal was less guarded. Outwardly, his attitude to the music-drama in the works that followed Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Part I, was one of un-deviating, indeed almost mischievous hostility. His firm stand here led inevitably to a reappraisal, including Der Ring (of which, ambiguously, he had formerly been a staunch champion); and in comparison of these two works whose development he had followed most intimately, he arrived at one of his most memorable judgements. The comparison of Parsifal and Der Ring was sanctioned by Wagner’s Die Wibelungen, ‘Aufgehen des idealen Inhaltes des Hortes in den “heiligen Gral”’ (Assimilation of the Ideal Meaning of the Hoard in the ‘Holy Grail’), where the progression from the legends of the Nibelung’s Hoard to those of the Grail is conceived as underlining a definite historical sequence in the evolution of the story of the ‘quest’. In both works, the hero is unschooled and ignorant of his origins and aims. Youthful freedom and purity are played off against the ineffectual authority represented in the one by Wotan ‘the least free of all!’, and in the other by Amfortas ‘the only sinner among you all’.15 Certainly, Parsifal emerges as the

The Dissolution of the Trinity  137 uncontested hero of Wagner’s last music-drama. Not only is his triumph more complete than Siegfried’s; but also Amfortas’s despair totally lacks the composure that (to Wagner’s way of thinking) had rendered triumphant Wotan’s tragic renunciation in Der Ring. Nonetheless, when in conversation with Paneth, Nietzsche described Parsifal as a sorry parody (‘eine traurige Parodie’) of Siegfried,16 and in a draft for a poem about Wagner spoke of a Siegfried ‘caricature,’17, he made it abundantly clear that he regarded the knight of the Grail, who throws away his bow and arrows and comes of age by repulsing the temptress, as a character of a very distinctive type. The point is made initially in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 99: perhaps Nietzsche’s most complete summary of the ways in which Schopenhauer, through his anti-Semitism and his neo-Buddhism, contributed to Wagner’s downfall: ‘Der Unsinn vom Mitleide…als der Quelle aller Moralität’ (The nonsense about pity…as the source of all morality). The problem, he says here, lay not so much in the artist’s intuition, enhanced by the study of Feuerbach in the 1840s, as in the fallacious loyalties that a decade later led him to sacrifice true instinct to false pretensions when he started to read Schopenhauer’s philosophical doctrines between the lines of his characters. This brings an important qualification into Nietzsche’s account of Wagner’s indebtedness to Schopenhauer, the recognition of which had played so large a part in cementing the friendship in its early stages. The philosophy of pessimism, he now contends, in fact ran counter to Wagner’s natural bent. The coalition therefore served to hinder the development it was supposed to help. It induced a rift in Wagner’s reasoning scarcely concealed in any of the works of his maturity and finally laid bare in his artistic testament. The attempt to disengage the disputants is not relinquished after Also sprach Zarathustra, where the incongruous trio, Zarathustra, the sorcerer, and the soothsayer gives dramatic expression to the contrast. In Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Wagner’s ‘man of the future’ is under attack in § 203; and the discussion of ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’ in § 260 ensues upon criticism of Parsifal in § 256. In this passage, which ends with the devastating satirical poem ‘Ist das noch deutsch?’ (Is That Still German?)—a rejoinder to Wagner’s article ‘Was ist deutsch?’ in the first issue of the Bayreuther Blätter 18—Nietzsche humorously derides Siegfried as Wagner’s sin against Romanticism and reviews the situation with a sombre irony: Wagner hat diese Sünde reichlich quitt gemacht, in seinen alten trüben Tagen, als er…mit der ihm eignen religiösen Vehemenz den Weg nach Rom, wenn nicht zu gehn, so doch zu predigen anfieng. (Wagner amply atoned for this sin in his sad old days when…with the religious vehemence peculiar to him he began if not to walk at least to preach the way to Rome.)

Overall, however, Nietzsche’s consistency is best exemplified by the thoughtful excursus in the essay on the meaning of ascetic ideals in Zur Genealogie der Moral, written soon after the performance of the prelude to Parsifal at Monte-Carlo in 1886. In the opening pages, the ethical teaching of Parsifal is played off against a supra-moral standpoint, which Nietzsche (going to extremes) here associates with ‘the magnificent blond beast on the prowl in pursuit of spoil and conquest’.19 Beneath the surface mixture of humour, pathos, and vituperation, the argument is tenaciously sustained. In so far as modern pessimism, whether Schopenhauerian or quasi-Christian, stands in contempt of life, and denigrates

138  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism man in the interests of the pure fool or ‘idiot’,20 it has become imperative to challenge and replace it in order to recover an endangered sense of dignity and self-respect. To Nietzsche, the element of ‘bad conscience’ inherent in contemporary philosophy and religion is so patently self-evident that we find him for a moment doubting the seriousness of Wagner’s ‘ascetic ideal’. Describing as the finest, strongest, happiest, most courageous period in Wagner’s life the years preceding the resumption of work on the third Act of Siegfried,21 he says (§ 3): War dieser Parsifal überhaupt ernst gemeint? Man könnte nämlich versucht sein, das Umgekenrte zu muthmaassen, selbst zu wünschen,—dass der Wagner’sche Parsifal heiter gemeint sei, gleichsam als Schlussstück und Satyrdrama, mit dem der Tragiker Wagner auf eine gerade ihm gebührende und würdige Weise von uns, auch von sich, vor Allem von der Tragödie habe Abschied nehmen wollen, nämlich mit einem Excess höchster und muthwilligster Parodie auf das Tragische selbst. (Was this Parsifal meant seriously anyway? One might be inclined to suppose the opposite, and even to wish it—that the Wagnerian Parsifal was meant as a joke, as a kind of epilogue and satyr-play22 with which the tragedian Wagner wanted to take leave of us, also of himself, above all of tragedy, in a manner worthy of himself: namely with an extravagant and wanton parody of the tragic itself.)

Was Parsifal such a secret, exultant laugh signalling the artist’s final emancipation, his artistic non plus ultra? So wäre es, wie gesagt, eines grossen Tragikers gerade würdig gewesen: als welcher, wie jeder Künstler, erst dann auf den letzten Gipfel seiner Grösse kommt, wenn er sich und seine Kunst unter sich zu sehen weiss—wenn er über sich zu lachen weiss. (This, as I have said, would have been worthy of a great tragedian who, like every artist, first attains the ultimate summit of his greatness when he clearly sees himself and his art beneath himself-when he knows how to laugh at himself.)

Such a triumph was not to be expected; but in probing the reasons for Wagner’s self-defeat and self-betrayal, Nietzsche makes a distinction that, correctly understood, strikes home. This passage in which he cites Feuerbach’s cry of ‘healthy sensuality’23 as of paramount importance for the young Wagner, bent on the highest spiritualization and sensualization of art and life, instates the artist in the forefront of Nietzsche’s mature thought. For, in shielding Wagner from the consequences of his later mésalliance with Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, not only does Nietzsche draw the dividing line between Wagner and Schopenhauer more precisely; but beyond this he identifies a promise latent in Wagner’s early works: a promise brought to fulfilment, he believed, in his own creative endeavours.

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis

Aus dieser Schrift redet eine ungeheure Hoffnung. Zuletzt fehlt mir jeder Grund, die Hoffnung auf eine dionysische Zukunft der Musik zurückzunehmen. (A tremendous hope speaks from this work. In the end, I have no reason at all to renounce the hope of a Dlonysian future for music.) Ecce homo, ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie’, § 4

I In 1886, after completing Also sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche authorized the third edition of his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, under the amended title Die Geburt der Tragödie, Oder: Griechenthum und Pessimismus. In a specially written preface, ‘Versuch einer Selbstkritik’ (An Attempt at Self-Criticism), inserted before the original dedicatory address to Wagner, he weighed up his achievement with objectivity and candour. Stylistically the book was uneven, ‘a youthful work, full of youthful elation and desolation’;1 it was spoiled by terminology cribbed from Schopenhauer and Kant;2 and its confidence in Wagner was sadly misplaced: ‘It exercised a fascination through what was wrong with it—its Wagnerism’ (Eh-GdT § 1). Notwithstanding its signs of immaturity and its occasionally derivative features, the investigation provided some important lessons. Especially the discussion of the nature of tragedy, set against and balancing the historical outline of the birth and death of the drama, gave a clear indication of the independent drift of the argument. We shall see that Nietzsche was well aware of his audacity when his book was written. When recounting the circumstances that led up to Die Geburt der Tragödie, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche defensively alleged that the concluding §§ 16–26, where Wagner is extolled as the heir of the Greek tragedians and as the harbinger of a new tragic age— passages that scandalized Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, Hermann Usener, and others of Nietzsche’s colleagues in the early ’seventies—were added as an afterthought, if not under direct pressure from Wagner. Her claim was that during a visit to Tribschen on his return from Lugano in the first week of April 1871, her brother came to see that Wagner was expecting the book to be in some way a glorification of his art; and so, after his return to Basel, he made a series of revisions intended to bring out a parallel between the art of antiquity and the ‘art of the future’ (W-Br3 72). This claim, uncorroborated by Cosima’s diary which gives no hint of disappointment at the contents of the manuscript,3 is not entirely convincing. Nietzsche’s interest in the theory of tragedy was of long standing. Admittedly, in Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 16, he gives Wagner’s account of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music in Beethoven as his starting-point; and he follows this up by quoting two sizeable extracts from Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, §§ 51 and 52, dealing with music, in Die Geburt der Tragödie, §§ 5 and 16 respectively. Yet he had already pointed to the indissoluble ties between poetry and music in Attic drama some seven years earlier in one

140  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism of the most substantial products of his residence at Bonn University, the essay Oedipodis regis carmen choricum.4 At the time of the flowering of tragedy in the art of Aeschylus and Sophocles, he here observed, the musical element pervaded the entire plan of the drama. Sophocles’ successors, by enforcing an unnatural separation of the musical and poetical media, unwittingly prepared for the dissolution of the tragic art. Thus we reach the conclusion that the first tragedians—the Greeks— zu dem Unsinn herabgekommen wären, in dem sich unsre Oper bis auf diese Tage—die genialen Reformpläne und Thaten R.Wagners abgerechnet—befindet, zu dem ungeheuerlichen Mißverhältniß zwischen Musik und Text, zwischen Ton und Empfindung. (had reached the same absurd situation as that in which our contemporary opera finds itself—discounting the inspired theoretical reforms and works of R.Wagner—with its monstrous incongruity between music and text, between sound and sentiment. N-A2 II 375 f)

Nietzsche discovered Schopenhauer in 1865; and he read Wagner’s Beethoven five years later. Since his essay on Sophocles came before both events, Schopenhauer’s contribution to it must have been nil, and Beethoven’s influence on Die Geburt der Tragödie was correspondingly less than Nietzsche diplomatically made it out to be. The theory he advances about the musical source of tragedy and the revival of a genuine music-drama in Wagner’s art appears to have resulted independently from a spontaneous fusion of his early study of Greek literature on the one hand and Wagner’s music on the other. This theory, too, remained in the background of his later research: the essay on Oedipus rex was not casually laid aside, for he lectured on the subject repeatedly during the tenure of his professorship.5 All the same, many details of the argument in Die Geburt der Tragödie were clarified after Nietzsche’s transfer to Switzerland. Here it should be remembered that Wagner’s campaign of artistic reform was persuasively reasoned by analogy with Greek drama: a fact that before long the specially constructed, neo-classical amphitheatre at Bayreuth was to demonstrate and embody. In his open letter to Nietzsche in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, dealing with the hostile reception of Die Geburt der Tragödie, Wagner modestly disclaimed any particular distinction as a classicist.6 Still, the affinity of interests naturally provided a bond between the two friends; and Nietzsche lost no opportunity to confide in Wagner and Cosima by sending or taking copies of his latest articles, essays, and lecture notes to Tribschen after gaining access to Wagner’s library with its prodigious collection of books on classical, oriental, literary, and philosophical subjects. His letters regularly affirm a tutelary connection and express gratitude for the insight afforded into his scholarly work. ‘Was ich dort lerne und schaue, höre und verstehe, ist unbeschreiblich’ he told Rohde on 3 September 1869 at the start of the friendship, ‘Schopenhauer und Goethe, Aeschylus und Pindar leben noch, glaub es mir’ (What I learn and see, hear and understand there is indescribable. Schopenhauer and Goethe, Aeschylus and Pindar still live, believe me). The tribute is echoed in the dedication to Die Geburt der Tragödie, where Wagner is hailed as ‘pioneer’; and again in the ‘Versuch einer Selbstkritik’, where the book is said to have been addressed to Wagner ‘as in a dialogue’. Cosima was not slow to appeal to him to combine his private interest in music with his professional interest in Greek literature: interests that despite the founding of the Germania Society at Naumburg in defiance of the narrow scholastic regimen at Schulpforta had for the most part been relegated to sharply separated spheres. In a touching letter of 17 January

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis  141 1870, she mentioned her husband’s first concert in Leipzig after the granting of his amnesty, and expressed the hope that Nietzsche would refer to the event next day when lecturing in public on the subject of Greek music-drama. The idea of a full-length book on tragedy came personally from Wagner in his letter of 4 February 1870, following the arrival of the manuscript of a second lecture, ‘Sokrates und die Tragödie’, in early February. Cosima, to whom the two lectures had meanwhile been dedicated, too, at once saw the promise of Nietzsche’s research. ‘Machen Sie aus Ihrem Vortrag ein Buch’ (Make your lecture into a book) she suggested on the 5th. The first lecture, ‘Das griechische Musikdrama’, was also read and discussed with Wagner and Rohde during a visit to Tribschen in the following June. In a letter of 19 June 1870, after his return to Basel, Nietzsche spoke of taking up residence with the family in Bayreuth. On the 24th, Cosima responded eagerly ‘Sie schreiben in Bayreuth das Buch, und wir machen dem Buche Ehre!’ (You must write the book in Bayreuth, and we will do honour to it!). Her injunctions, however, were disregarded or resisted for a time; and a year later on 17 September, on receiving a printed copy of the pamphlet Sokrates und die griechische Tragödie—a privately printed extract from the unpublished Die Geburt der Tragödie—she chided Nietzsche gently ‘Sie wurden ja so böse, wenn man von einem Buche sprach!’ (You really were so cross when anyone mentioned a book!). Evidently a good deal of tact was exercised in getting him to tackle his daunting subject. As Nietzsche remarked to Rohde on 15 February 1870, Wissenschaft, Kunst und Philosophie wachsen jetzt so sehr in mir zusammen, daß ich jedenfalls einmal Centauren gebären werde. (Science, art, and philosophy coalesce so much in me at present that one day in all probability I shall give birth to centaurs.)

In what ways, we have now to ask, is Nietzsche’s ‘centaur’ in fact in line with Wagner’s ideas? Wagner’s frequently discussed theory of the synthesis of the arts, evolved initially in Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft in the five years’ interval between Lohengrin and Der Ring (in which it is most strictly applied), concerned a fusion of music, myth, and mime on equal terms. Any comparison with Greek tragedy was set in jeopardy by the advance of Western music; and almost from the start Wagner had trouble in deciding on priorities. Certainly the synthesis was envisaged as a new medium of expression, distinct from conventional opera in which, he contended in an emphatic sentence in the preface to Oper und Drama, a means of expression—music—had obscured the objective, the drama: a statement Nietzsche was to use to good effect in Der Fall Wagner, § 10: ‘Thatsächlich hat er sein ganzes Leben Einen Satz wiederholt…’ (In fact, he repeated a single proposition all his life…). In practice, however, those very modifications that were meant to ensure the subordination of music to the collective, dramatic purpose of the synthesis were received as innovations of unprecedented power and originality, which opened up new vistas of musical technique and deflected the purposes that inspired them. For the artist, feeling his way towards a satisfactory explanation of his creative practice, the discovery of Schopenhauer was timely. Although the full impact of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics of music was not registered until the essay Beethoven in 1870 (whereas the conversion to the teachings of pessimism was rapid), an isolated remark in a letter to Liszt of 7 June 1855 is fully in keeping with Wagner’s later speculations: ‘Music is actually the artistic proto-image of the world itself; no error is possible here for the initiated’. One cannot

142  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism altogether blame Nietzsche for making merry at Wagner’s expense in Zur Genealogie der Moral, III, § 5, where he speaks of the ‘complete contradiction’ between Oper und Drama and the theoretical works written after 1870: [Wagner] begriff mit Einem Male, dass mit der Schopenhauer’schen Theorie und Neuerung mehr zu machen sei in majorem musicae gloriam,—nämlich mit der Souverainetät der Musik, so wie sie Schopenhauer begriff: die Musik abseits gestellt gegen alle übrigen Künste, die unabhängige Kunst an sich, nicht, wie diese, Abbilder der Phänomenalität bietend, vielmehr die Sprache des Willens selbst redend, unmittelbar aus dem ‘Abgrunde’ heraus, als dessen eigenste, ursprünglichste, unabgeleitetste Offenbarung. Mit dieser ausserordentlichen Werthsteigerung der Musik, wie sie aus der Schopenhauer’schen Philosophie zu erwachsen schien, stieg mit Einem Male auch der Musiker selbst unerhört im Preise: er wurde nunmehr ein Orakel, ein Priester, ja mehr als ein Priester, eine Art Mundstück des ‘Ansich’ der Dinge, ein Telephon des Jenseits,—er redete fürderhin nicht nur Musik, dieser Bauchredner Gottes,—er redete Metaphysik: was Wunder, dass er endlich eines Tags asketische Ideale redete?… (Wagner suddenly realized that more could be done for the greater glory of music with the Schopenhauerian theory—that is, with the theory of the sovereignty of music, as Schopenhauer conceived it: music set apart fram all the other arts, the autonomous art as such, not offering copies of phenomena like the others, but rather speaking the language of the ‘Will’ itself, directly out of the ‘abyss’,7 as its most authentic, elemental, non-derivative revelation. With this extraordinary rise in the value of music that seemed to accrue from Schopenhauerian philosophy, the musician himself all at once acquired an unheard-of prestige: now he became an oracle, a priest, indeed more than a priest, a kind of mouthpiece of the [Kantian] ‘in itself’ of things, a telephone from the beyond—henceforth he uttered not only music, this ventriloquist of God—he uttered metaphysics: was it surprising that one day he finally uttered ascetic ideals?)

Schopenhauer’s theory of music (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, III, § 52, and Supplement 39) is best approached by means of a comparison with Plato’s theory of Ideas and its modern adaptation in Kant’s philosophy. The so-called ‘real’ world has an apparent rather than an absolute reality. For Plato, the world consists of imperfect or partial copies of abstract models or Ideas; for Schopenhauer, of objectifications of the irreducible ‘Will’, the primary motive force behind the whole of phenomenal reality. The works of the poet, painter, and sculptor, because they represent the external appearances of the phenomenal world, are doubly removed from the noumenal or ‘Ideal’ order. However skilfully executed, a poem, picture, or statue can be no more than a copy of what itself is already only a ‘copy’ or an ‘objectification’. Now, Schopenhauer observes, it is a peculiarity of music that it has no external counterpart. Not only does it not depend on the phenomenal world, but it ignores it unconditionally, and (in theory) could continue to exist even if the world were not there. These observations paved the way for one of Schopenhauer’s most memorable strokes of reasoning. Since music is not dependent on external appearances—a copy of a copy, a metaphor of a metaphor, like the other arts8—he concluded that its source must lie behind appearances in the primordial Will itself, the fount of all external reality. Compared with the representational arts, he remarked in substantiation, its effect is stronger, quicker, more inevitable, more infallible. They, subservient to the principium individuationis, might be said to speak in shadows; music in essentials. Therefore, if the language of music could be rationalized, it would afford an insight into reality surpassing not only the other arts

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis  143 but also philosophy in its comprehensiveness and depth. Correcting Leibniz, he writes ‘Musica est exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosophari animi’ (Music is the subconscious practice of metaphysics in a mind unaware that it is philosophizing).9 The truth of this theory, he conceded, could not be demonstrated, but he made the best of his case in one of the most arresting of all discussions of its important subject: Die Musik ist, wie gesagt, darin von allen andern Künsten verschieden, daß sie nicht Abbild der Erscheinung…sondern unmittelbar Abbild des Willens selbst ist und also zu allem Physischen der Welt das Metaphysische, zu aller Erscheinung das Ding an sich darstellt. (As we have said, music is distinguished from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of phenomena…but is the direct copy of the Will itself, and therefore represents the metaphysical counterpart of everything physical in the world, the ‘thing-in-itself’ of every phenomenon. S-A1 II 310)

This passage, quoted in full by Nietzsche in Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 16, taken to task in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, § 215, and ridiculed in Zur Genealogie der Moral, III, § 5 (quoted above), was to bring about a drastic modification in Wagner’s theoretical programme. In Beethoven, and its lesser sequels Über Schauspieler und Sänger and ‘Über die Benennung “Musikdrama”’, he applies it with an assurance almost equal to that of Schopenhauer to the theory of the artistic synthesis: a notion altogether alien to the philosopher’s scheme. Schopenhauer, he says, had interpreted music in Plato’s terms as an ‘Idea’ of the world, so that the composer could be said to have an access to the innermost nature of things surpassing the other arts, and even philosophy, whose perceptions were dependent on finite concepts or ‘objectifications’. The rhythmic patterns of verse and the poet’s play on the sonorous relations of words, however, plainly indicated an underlying allegiance to music. The controlled movements of dancing also looked to music for their inspiration. It was to the condition of music that poetry and dance, the two most widely divergent art forms, aspired; having reached the limit of their independent development, they now await rescue from their long enforced, unnatural isolation. The original unity of the artistic faculty could be reinstated by locating the point at which the laws governing the individual media might coincide (W-A1 IX 131). Nowhere is Wagner more eloquent than in Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, II iv. Beethoven’s seventh symphony is here described as the ‘apotheosis of the dance’ (W-A1 III 113); the ninth symphony, in which Beethoven had fused musically idealized dance with poetry and song, is seen as a landmark in the history of art, pointing to the greater dramatic synthesis Wagner himself envisaged, and had, he believed, in large measure actually achieved. The fact that in combination with the other arts music acquired an unexpected prominence could now be readily explained. Despite their points of similarity, music, poetry, dance, and the visual arts (which for Wagner meant chiefly dramatic action and stage spectacle) had been shown by Schopenhauer to be governed by different laws. The musical element took precedence because it originated directly in the springs of being, which the other arts must be content to describe at a double remove. Whatever the scene, action, or event depicted on the stage, music would be able to disclose its meaning, commenting like the chorus in ancient tragedy from a vantage-point at once more detached and more deeply involved. Under the sway of its elucidating and clarifying power, the dream-like apparitions of the stage, the concepts of the poetry, the movements of the actors would be found to take on a new life as if directly from nature. This is why

144  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism the greatest post-classical dramatists—Shakespeare, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller—had taken so much interest in music, and had even theorized about the possibility of a fusion of the arts, without however grasping that the inherent limitations of conceptual language (as expounded by Schopenhauer) made impossible a satisfactory literary solution: Eine Vereinigung der Musik und der Dichtkunst muß daher stets zu einer solchen Geringstellung der letzteren ausschlagen, daß es nur wieder zu verwundern ist, wenn wir sehen, wie namentlich auch unsere großen deutschen Dichter das Problem einer Vereinigung der beiden Künste stets von Neuem erwogen, oder gar versuchten. (A union of music with poetry must therefore always result in such a subordination of the latter that one can only be surprised at seeing how our great German poets deliberated upon the problem of a union of the two arts, or actually tried to bring it about. W-A1 IX 126)

An intuitive understanding of music, he concludes, is as much the a priori qualification for the dramatist as a knowledge of the laws of causality is prerequisite for the scientist (W-A1 IX 128). The parity between Wagner’s Beethoven and Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie two years later (but already in gestation) is easy to see. It is also easy to see why, despite Nietzsche’s reaction against Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the interim, more than a trace of the philosopher’s theory of music lingers in Also sprach Zarathustra. ‘Mein Stil ist ein Tanz’, Nietzsche told Rohde on 22 February 1884 after completing Part III, ‘ein Spiel der Symmetrien aller Art und ein Überspringen und Verspotten dieser Symmetrien. Das geht bis in die Wahl der Vocale’ (My style is a dance; a play of symmetries of every kind, and an overleaping and mockery of these symmetries. This goes even for the choice of the vowels). Hence Zarathustra fulfils his destiny by learning to sing in a prose poem, ‘Das andere Tanzlied’, whose dancing words break away from rational discourse; while his ‘tragic’ affirmation in ‘Das Nachtwandler-Lied’ is delivered in a state of euphoria transcending the bounds of reason: a state even in the latest writings associated with musical inspiration, possession, and afflatus (G-‘Streifzüge’, § 10). Building on the foundation laid down in his essay on Oedipus rex, Nietzsche accepts the non-conceptual language of music as generically distinct from that of the other arts; and he envisages a hierarchy of the arts ascending through lyric poetry (interpreted in an original way) towards the summit of tragedy: a hierarchy drawn up according to each individual art’s closeness to or remoteness from the mystical musical element. Like Wagner— and unlike Schopenhauer—he sees Greek tragedy as a fusion of media, inseparable and mutually enhancing: an emanation ‘from the spirit of music’ (‘aus dem Geiste der Musik’)—a phrase lifted unashamedly from Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde where, before reading Schopenhauer, Wagner had discussed his activities as a poet (W-A1 IV 386 ff), and from the more nearly contemporary, post-Schopenhauerian Beethoven (both Die Geburt der Tragödie and Beethoven justify the expression with reference to Schiller’s letter to Goethe of 18 March 1796, which speaks of a ‘musical mood’ as a prerequisite for poetic composition). In the dithyrambs in praise of Dionysus tragedy had its origin; the choruses with which the classical drama was interspersed—whose function had been taken over by Wagner’s continuous orchestral commentary—were reminders of the musical source from which the stage-world of dialogue and images sprang. He contends that the primordial musical element, directly confronted, would be insupportable, much as Schopenhauer had

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis  145 epitomized in his hypothetical ‘Will’ the ceaseless strife, flux, extravagance and onrush of life. The potentially destructive intensity of the musical ‘afflatus’ had been shown in the orgiastic religious festivals of ancient Greece in which (as in the Babylonian Sacaea) the initiate of Dionysus had sought to transcend his personal identity, entering into communion with the deity in a state of spiritual intoxication and frenzy. In medieval Germany, he says, similar out breaks of communal ecstasy drove ever increasing crowds from place to place (§ 1): Singend und tanzend äussert sich der Mensch als Mitglied einer höheren Gemeinsamkeit: er hat das Gehen und das Sprechen verlernt und ist auf dem Wege, tanzend in die Lüfte emporzufliegen. (Singing and dancing man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak, and as he dances he is on the verge of flying up in the air.)

Again one thinks of the passages in Zarathustra (discussed in Chapters 6 and 7 above) in which descriptions of dancing and singing are associated with images of flight in defiance of the despotic spirit of gravity. As Nietzsche wrote to Marie Baumgartner on 28 May 1883 after finishing Part I: ‘Erst unter diesem Drucke gewinne ich das gute Gewissen dafür, etwas zu besitzen, das wenige Menschen haben und gehabt haben: Flügel—um im Gleichnisse zu reden’ (Only under this strain do I gain a clear conscience in laying claim to something that few men have or have had: Wings—to speak metaphorically).10 For the moment, however, the spectator is protected from such extremes of Dionysian possession by the intervention of the dream-like images of the conceptual arts under the patronage of Apollo, which wrest him from his self-destruction by deceiving him as to the universality of the Dionysian event. The coupling of the names of Dionysus and Apollo was not new to students of Hellenism. Yet, as we learn in the first sentences of Nietzsche’s book, the names are used figuratively in Die Geburt der Tragödie to characterize contrasted aspects of the Greek psyche. In this respect, the argument marked a radical departure from scholarly precedent. Here, in the new emphasis on the importance of the ‘musical’ Dionysian element among the Greeks,11 is the first fundamental innovation acknowledged in the retrospective Ecce homo, ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie’, § 1. These two opposed impulses—the dark Dionysian force and the Apollonian bias to rationality, restraint, and formal perfection—engaged in rivalry and warfare, and the arts over which they held sway developed along different paths, until at the height of Greek culture a reconciliation was briefly effected in the drama. Although the fashionable notion of the ‘serenity’ of classical art advocated by Goethe, Schiller, Winckelmann, and other early Hellenists had been challenged by such writers as Hölderlin and Heine, the force of this interpretation was altogether unprecedented, and its impact was to be permanent and pervasive.12 Greek serenity was construed as a victory, willed and fought for, over the forces of multifariousness, intemperance, wildness, and immoderation (§ 25): ‘Wie viel musste dies Volk leiden, um so schon werden zu können!’ (How much did this race have to suffer to be able to become so beautiful!). The search for anticipations of Nietzsche’s dualism has been diligently pursued.13 More general analogies have also been noted: Aristotle’s distinction between form and matter, Schiller’s dichotomy of the ‘naive’ and the ‘sentimental’, and Hegel’s dialectical interpretation of history among them. In the present context, however, it is not easy to disregard a parallel in Wagner’s manifesto Die Kunst und die Revolution, written at the time of the Dresden uprising in 1849 and reissued as the first item in the third volume of

146  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism the collected writings in 1872: the very year of Die Geburt der Tragödie (here Wagner first coins the term ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’). Die Kunst und die Revolution

Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 1

Der griechische Geist…fand…seinen entsprechendsten Ausdruck in Apollon, dem eigentlichen Haupt—und Nationalgott der hellenischen Stämme…. Und so sah ihn, den herrlichen Gott, der von Dionysos begeisterte tragische Dichter, wenn er allen Elementen der üppig aus dem schönsten menschlichen Leben, ohne Geheiß, von selbst, und aus innerer Naturnothwendigkeit aufgesproßten Künste, das kühne, bindende Wort, die erhabene dichterische Absicht zuwies, die sie alle wie in einen Brennpunkt vereinigte, um das höchste erdenkliche Kunstwerk, das Drama, hervorzubringen. (The Greek spirit found its most representative expression in Apollo, the true presiding, national deity of the Hellenic race…. And so the tragic poet, inspired by Dlonysos saw the glorious god [Apollo], when to the other artistic media— abundant, spontaneous, springing directly from the fairest type of human life—he added language, audacious and binding, the sublime poetic intention, and brought all into one focus so as to produce the drama: the highest conceivable art-form. W-A1 III 13 f

Wir werden viel für die aesthetische Wissenschaft gewonnen haben, wenn wir nicht nur zur logischen Einsicht, sondern zur unmittelbaren Sicherheit der Anschauung gekommen sind, dass die Fortentwickelung der Kunst an die Duplicität des Apollinischen und Dionysischen gebunden ist.

We will have gained much for aesthetics if we recognize not just by logical reasoning, but with the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuing development of art is bound up with the Apollonian and Dlonysian duality.)

Certainly Wagner’s account of the birth of tragedy respects contemporary opinion in assigning first place to Apollo—rather than Dionysos—as the representative deity of Greece: there is nothing here to suggest Nietzsche’s reversal of the order of precedence. Yet the coupling of Apollo and Dionysos as the progenitors of tragedy is prophetic of Nietzsche’s dualism. Did not Nietzsche then encounter this passage during his early years at Basel when he devoted close study to Wagner’s theoretical writings? The names of Apollo and Dionysus are first used with their familiar connotations in the lecture ‘Das griechische Musikdrama’ of January 1870, which Nietzsche read during his stay at Tribschen with Rohde in June of that year. ‘The lecture is a good one’, Cosima noted in her diary ‘and shows that he has a true feeling for Greek art.’ Hence no doubt Wagner’s brief reference to the dualism in ‘Über die Bestimmung der Oper’: his inaugural lecture to the Academy of Arts in Berlin delivered on 28 April 1871. ‘Oft meinte ich Dich, liebster Freund, souffliren zu hören, da wo vom griechischen Drama die Rede ist’ (I often fancied that I could hear you prompting, dearest friend, where Greek drama is under discussion) Rohde wrote to Nietzsche on 28 May 1871 after reading Wagner’s address. Elisabeth fell neatly into the trap which Rohde had unwittingly prepared, asserting that Wagner had borrowed the concepts Apollo and Dionysus from her brother—concepts of which he (Wagner) had no previous knowledge.14 Both Rohde and Elisabeth, then, were ignorant of

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis  147 the reference to Apollo and Dionysos in Die Kunst und die Revolution. This is not to say, however, that Nietzsche’s attention could not have been drawn to Wagner’s essay, perhaps by Wagner himself, after his arrival at Tribschen in May 1869 and during the eight months before ‘Das griechische Musikdrama’ was committed to paper. It has been noted that among Nietzsche’s early impressions of Tribschen was a water colour, ‘Dionysus Among the Muses’ by Bonaventura Genelli, which Wagner had long coveted and recently acquired from the Leipzig branch of his family.15 In the admonitory letter of 16 July 1872 in which Nietzsche supplied Rohde with ammunition for his impending reply to Wilamowitz-Möllendorff’s Zukunftsphilologie—a scathing attack on Die Geburt der Tragödie—Nietzsche gave the Genelli as one of his sources. As the picture was prominently displayed in the drawing-room at Tribschen,16 Rohde could hardly have missed it during his visit in June 1870: at all events, he acted on Nietzsche’s instructions and made mention of it in Afterphilologie, p. 27. Nietzsche, however, must have known the Genelli almost from the time of his admission into the family circle; this gives additional support to the theory that the genesis of classical drama and the nature of the Dionysian phenomenon among the Greeks was discussed at an early stage, when it could have been related to the account of the birth of tragedy in Wagner’s early theoretical tracts. In Mein Leben, Wagner actually states that Genelli’s picture inspired Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft with its long treatment of the Greek theatre and classical synthesis of the arts—a work contemporary with Die Kunst und die Revolution; and on 26 November 1871, soon after Nietzsche had read the draft of Die Geburt der Tragödie at Tribschen, he related it in turn to Nietzsche’s current research. The probability that the argument in Die Geburt der Tragödie took shape in the light of Wagner’s observations therefore is a strong one. Genelli’s restrained and conventional neo-classical style is far removed from the terror and frenzy of Die Geburt der Tragödie; and it would be an exaggeration to say that his painting offers in any sense a key to Nietzsche’s view of antiquity. Yet it is possibly significant that Dionysus appears in a musical setting. The picture shows a lively scene of dancing and revelry presided over by the god who brandishes the cymbals. A panther sports and a lioness reclines at his feet. Does this not anticipate the last discourse in Zarathustra? Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 20

Z IV-Das Zeichen

Nehmet den Thyrsusstab zur Hand und wundert Und in Wahrheit…da lag ihm ein gelbes euch nicht, wenn Tiger und Panther sich mächtiges Gethier zu Füssen und schmiegte das schmeichelnd zu euren Knien niederlegen. Haupt an seine Knie und wollte nicht von ihm lassen vor Liebe… (Take the thyrsus in your hand, and do not be And in truth…there at his feet lay a mighty surprised if the tiger and panther lie down, yellow animal which nuzzled its head against fawning, at your feet. his knee and would not leave him for love.)

The second innovation in Die Geburt der Tragödie acknowledged in Nietzsche’s autobiography is its portrait of the unmusical Socrates: the despotic logician and theoretician, as Nietzsche calls him, whose ascendancy brought closer the decline and demise of Attic drama.

148  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism While warning that our feelings are compounded of inherited errors and offer no infallible guide, Nietzsche constantly defends the primary of instinct over reason. His simultaneous— and curiously conflicting—claim that the inquiring scientific spirit promoted by Socrates may yet engender new constellations of genius, too, anticipates the positivism affected in the works of the later ‘seventies.17 It would be churlish to contend that his portrait of Socrates as robber and despoiler was not reached independently from his own convictions, enhanced by the study of Schopenhauer, the philosopher of the Will and pioneer of modern psychology. It would be no less churlish to deny that experiences at Tribschen, talks with Wagner, and study of Wagner’s writings, too, gave powerful support to it: Die Kunst und die Revolution

Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 12

Aller Kunsttrieb stockte endlich vor dem ernsten Sinnen der Philos ophie, welche über die Ursache der Vergänglichkeit des menschlichen Schönen und Starken nachdachte. … Der Philosophie, und nicht der Kunst, gehören die zwei Jahrtausende an, die seit dem Untergange der griechischen Tragödie bis auf unsere Tage verflossen. (Every artistic impulse finally came to a halt before the grave speculations of philosophy, which dwelt on the cause of the transitoriness of human beauty and strength…. To philosophy, and not to art, belong the two millennia since the downfall of Greek tragedy up to our own day. W-A1 III 17

Dies ist der neue Gegensatz: das Dionysische und das Sokratische, und das Kunstwerk der griechischen Tragödie ging an ihm zu Grunde.

This is the new antithesis: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the art of Greek tragedy foundered on it.)18

A plethora of parallels in contemporary works by Nietzsche and Wagner is clearly significant, even if it is insufficient to sustain the charge of plagiarism levelled at Nietzsche with the waning of the friendship.19 The matter was fairly—and movingly—assessed by Wagner in the letter of 10 January 1872 which conveyed his initial impressions of Die Geburt der Tragödie. Every influence, he said, der etwa auf Sie ausgeübt worden wäre, ist durch den ganzen Charakter dieser Arbeit fast auf Nichts zurückgeführt: was Ihr Buch vor allen andren auszeichnet ist die vollendete Sicherheit, mit welcher sich eine tiefsinnigste Eigentümlichkeit darin kundgibt. (that has been brought to bear on you is reduced almost to insignificance by the entire character of this work: what marks out your book from the rest is its consummate assurance, which betokens a most profound originality.)

Similarly he wrote to Clemens Brockhaus on 18 January 1872: Hat ihn [Nietzsche] mein Einfluß hierbei geleitet, so kann Niemand besser als ich beurtheilen, wie tief innerlich mein Gedanke das Eigenthum dieses wissenschaftlich, mit allem dem, was ich in mir ungepflegt lassen mußte, so ernsthaft und tüchtig ausgerüsteten Mannes geworden ist. (If my influence has guided [Nietzsche] in this, then certainly none can judge better than I how deeply and inwardly my thought has become the property of this man who is academically so formidably well equipped with everything that I have had to leave uncultivated in myself. C-Br II, n. 125)

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis  149 This should not lead us to underestimate the book’s controversial aspect. For it cannot be denied that, in reading it, the thoughtful account of Attic drama is overshadowed by the last sections where, in the course of a eulogy of Tristan und Isolde, the imminent re-birth of tragedy is predicted. The hue and cry in academic circles, led by Nietzsche’s former schoolfellow, Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, was due neither to the derivative features of the argument nor to the contentious essayist’s manner (entirely unlike that of Nietzsche’s current articles in Ritschl’s Rheinisches Museum für Philologie and other scholarly journals). It was due rather to Nietzsche’s decision to exploit his position at Basel for the purposes of Wagnerian propaganda. In later years, Nietzsche made strenuous efforts to free the book from its propagandist connotations by acknowledging a serious error of judgement in regard to Wagner’s art and aims, and by drawing attention to those elements in his argument that—undetected by even the most discerning of his first readers—were already in conflict with the pretensions of the ‘art of the future’. Yet the essential idea—the idea of a regeneration of contemporary culture through a return to the ‘Dionysian’ spirit of Greece—was never relinquished; indeed, it provides the key to much that was decisive in Nietzsche’s subsequent career, finding creative embodiment in the anti-Wagnerian manifesto Also sprach Zarathustra. From this point of view, it may be said that one of Nietzsche’s most arresting, distinctive, and creatively revealing points is made in the concluding discussion of Tristan und Isolde: in precisely those passages, that is to say, which Elisabeth adduced as showing that her brother had given in to external pressure.

II Tristan und Isolde has indissoluble ties with Wagner’s residence at the ‘Asyl’ in Zürich in 1857; but the music-drama was conceived much earlier in Dresden around the time of the final revisions to the text of Der Ring. Of particular interest is a remark in Wagner’s Epilogischer Bericht, where Tristan und Isolde is designated a ‘supplementary Act’ to the trilogy. In Tristan und Isolde ist nur breiter und deutlicher gefaßt, was auch dort [in Der Ring] unverkennbar sich ausspricht: der Tod durch Liebesnoth, welche in der einseitig des Verhältnisses sich bewußten Brünnhilde zum Ausdrucke gelangt. (we find more fully and clearly formulated a subject also unmistakably enunciated in The Ring: death through the agony of love, here expressed by Brünnhilde, who alone is conscious of the nature of her relationship [with Siegfried]. W-A1 VI 378 f)

It is sometimes forgotten that the subject of fated love gets special treatment in Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin: the three main works of the Dresden period.20 In Tristan und Isolde this subject is intensified. While the plot retains the outlines of Gottfried’s poem, there is no mistaking the effect of the study of Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and especially Schopenhauer: it is no accident that the project is mentioned in the letter to Liszt of 16 December 1854, which records Wagner’s initial reactions to Schopenhauer’s writings. This comes across in the diary kept at the Palazzo Giustiniani at Venice where Act II was scored and Act III was composed; in Mein Leben we read ‘es war wohl zum Theil die ernste Stimmung, in welche mich Schopenhauer versetzt hatte, und die nun nach einem extatischen Ausdrucke ihrer Grundzüge drängte, was mir die Konzeption

150  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism eines “Tristan und Isolde” eingab’ (certainly it was to some extent the serious mood induced by Schopenhauer and which now sought ecstatic expression of its essential features that inspired the conception of Tristan und Isolde. W-A7 605).21 More unequivocally than any of the works that preceded it, the music-drama promulgates the principle of renunciation, and affirms as the ultimate goal the bliss of oblivion. Nietzsche’s admiration for Tristan und Isolde was to survive even his disillusionment about Wagner’s central message. Admittedly his immediate reaction to Bülow’s vocal score at the age of seventeen was less favourable than he made out in his autobiography (‘Warum ich so klug bin’, § 8).22 More spontaneous was his appreciation of Die Meistersinger: a work noticeably absent in the pages of the later writings (the exception being the admiring Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 240, prompted by a performance of the prelude at Monte Carlo on 7 January 1886).23 As Nietzsche discovered Schopenhauer in 1865, he could not originally have known about that philosopher’s influence on Wagner’s conception. At some stage after his arrival at Tribschen, Wagner gave him a copy of the score; and we may assume that by this time the work’s philosophical affiliations had been impressed upon him and that the recognition of Schopenhauer’s contribution had added to its dangerous fascination. Cosima’s diary shows that during the memorable Christmas of 1870, Wagner read the poem aloud to Nietzsche and herself: Die Geburt der Tragödie, §§ 16–26, may have been meant as a reminder of this. When Die Geburt der Tragödie was written, Nietzsche had missed the first performance of Tristan und Isolde in Munich under Bülow in 1865. He had to wait until the end of June 1872 to see the work for the first time in two performances in Munich conducted by Bülow for Ludwig II.24 While this gives an added interest and authority to Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, § 6, Ecce homo, ‘Warum ich so klug bin’, § 6—an unusually outspoken tribute, singled out for special mention in a letter to Köselitz of 31 December 1888—and other writings, it would be unwise to underestimate the fruitfulness of his private studies. On 27 October 1868, just before meeting Wagner, he told Rohde that his every fibre and nerve had responded to an orchestral concert in Leipzig at which the preludes to Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger were given. On 20 December 1871, he heard the prelude and ‘Liebestod’ under Wagner’s direction at Mannheim. This performance was too late to have had any effect on Die Geburt der Tragödie, the completed manuscript of which reached the Leipzig publisher on the same day; but it confirmed the connection he envisaged between Wagner’s music and Dionysus as the progenitor of the tragic art. On the 21st, in a letter to Rohde, he wrote Denn genau das ist Musik und nichts sonst! Und genau das meine ich mit dem Wort ‘Musik’, wenn ich das Dionysische schildere, und nichts sonst! (For that is precisely what music is and nothing else! And that is just what I mean by the term ‘music’ when I describe the Dionysian, and nothing else!)

Wagner’s music made a tremendous impact on early audiences. Even before Wagner’s death, Nietzsche had been unable to restrain himself from giving a long and eloquent, if severely derogatory description in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 87 (Wagner is named in Nietzsche contra Wagner, § 1). In the long, quasi-autobiographical § 370, when recalling his introduction to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Nietzsche remarked that he interpreted this score as Ausdruck einer dionysischen Mächtigkeit der deutschen Seele: in ihr glaubte ich das Erdbeben zu hören, mit dem eine von Alters her aufgestaute Urkraft sich endlich Luft macht— gleichgültig dagegen, ob Alles, was sonst Cultur heisst, dabei in’s Zittern geräth.

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis  151 (the expression of a Dionysian power in the German soul. I believed that I heard in it the earthquake through which a long-pent-up, elemental force finally came to the surface, indifferent as to whether everything formerly called culture should shake in the process.)

Now, by the time that Die Geburt der Tragödie was reissued as the first work in the official canon of his writings, Nietzsche had reacted against what he called Wagner’s ‘immoderation and glorified unrestraint’, notwithstanding his affection for Tristan und Isolde, ‘the authentic opus metaphysicum of all art’ (U IV § 8). He had also revised his opinion of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics of music, warning Cosima in a previously unpublished birthday letter from Sorrento of his own lack of a sense of binding commitment.25 This statement did not pass without remark at Wahnfried, as Cosima’s diary discloses (24 December 1876). Yet he did not revoke his theory of the Dionysian origin of tragedy or of Dionysus as the patron of music: ‘Ich habe hoch über Wagner die Tragödie mit Musik gesehen—und hoch über Schopenhauer die Musik in der Tragödie des Daseins gehört’ (I have seen musical tragedy far above Wagner—and I have heard the music in the tragedy of life far above Schopenhauer. N-A3 V 2 11[257]). On the contrary, here were ideas salvaged from his first book, which he went on to make peculiarly and permanently his own. ‘Ja, was ist dionysisch?’ he asks in the ‘Versuch einer Selbstkritik’, § 4: ‘In diesem Buche steht eine Antwort darauf,—ein “Wissender” redet da, der Eingeweihte und Jünger seines Gottes’ (What really is Dionysian? An answer is given in this book—an ‘initiate’ speaks here, an adept and disciple of his god). In § 6, he poses the question as to what sort of music would be truly Dionysian in spirit—as opposed to modern German music with its roots in Romanticism. The same point is made slightly later in Ecce homo, ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie’, § 4, where Nietzsche returns to the tremendous ‘hope’ expressed in his first book: the hope for music’s Dionysian future. This calls for closer consideration. In reading the account of Tristan und Isolde in Die Geburt der Tragödie, §§ 21 ff, one might well suppose that Nietzsche thought of this as exactly the right illustration, and is tacitly assenting to Schopenhauer’s view of the superiority of modern over ancient tragedy (see above, p. 58). No work by any Greek author gets nearly so much attention. In this work pre-eminently, he says, the Dionysian power of music is given free rein: but for the intervention of myth, its effect would be of a destructive intensity. Apollo, however, parades the images of life before the spectator, protecting him from his Dionysian selfannihilation: Der Mythus schützt uns vor der Musik, wie er ihr andrerseits erst die höchste Freiheit giebt. Dafür verleiht die Musik, als Gegengeschenk, dem tragischen Mythus eine so eindringliche und überzeugende metaphysische Bedeutsamkeit, wie sie Wort und Bild ohne jene einzige Hülfe, nie zu erreichen vermögen. (Myth protects us from music, while alone giving it the highest freedom. In return, music endows tragic myth with an intense and convincing metaphysical significance, which word and image without this peculiar assistance would never attain. § 21)

The passage has a familiar ring to the student of Beethoven; and the dependence seems to be maintained when we pass on to consider the nature of tragedy. Up to now, theorists have been chiefly concerned to spell out the motivation of the dramatists’ characters; but having failed to locate the source of tragedy they have been unsuccessful in their efforts to elucidate the genre, properly understood as a manifestation

152  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism and projection into images of musical experiences, ‘as a conceptualization of Dionysian wisdom by means of Apollonian artifice’. The alternative is a supra-moral, ‘aesthetic’ view of the drama. Aristotle’s catharsis and the diligent tracing of poetic justice after the manner of Gervinus26 are inadequate attempts, at once pompous and trivializing, to thrash out the problem. Aestheticians, bogged down in ethical abstractions, never tire of discussing the hero’s struggle with fate, the triumph of the moral order, the purging of the emotions by pity and terror. Are they then affected by aesthetic considerations at all? Should they not rather be classed as moralistes manqués who have inadvertently strayed into the artist’s demesne? Along with tragedy, he says, the aesthetically responsive spectator must be reinstated, his rightful place having for too long been usurped by theorists of partly moral, partly learned pretensions. Here we sense a discrepancy: a discrepancy resulting from a singular omission. Schopenhauer, it is true, had condemned poetic justice as a concession to moralists’ sensibilities; but he did not deny the educative value of tragedy. For him, tragedy brings home to the spectator the elemental power of the ‘Will’ which holds the human race in subservience to its perpetual suffering and torment. Release lies in the only wholly voluntary act of which mankind is capable: the act of renunciation. Towards this knowledge the contemplation of appalling misfortune, injustice, folly, and crime, magnified by the elective intuition of the greatest (modern) tragedians, inescapably leads. Once this is grasped we see that Nietzsche’s conception of tragedy is incompatible with Schopenhauer’s. Aesthetic experience, for the philosopher a bridge leading to a higher moral awareness, for Nietzsche is a self-sufficient—and explicitly non-moral—end (§ 9): ‘the justification (‘Rechtfertigung’) of human evil—that is, both of guilt and of the suffering it brings.’ Admittedly, Die Geburt der Tragödie speaks of the ‘rending of the veil of māyā’, the shattering of the ‘principium individuationis’, the ‘longing for blindness’, and the ‘metaphysical solace’ of tragedy: the book, Nietzsche acknowledged, is full of terms foreign to the vocabulary of Zarathustra and Dionysus. Despite this, Nietzsche’s aesthetically discerning spectator, whose horizons extend beyond those of the moralist and critic, does not seek to escape from the power of Dionysus (‘Dionysus’ here being all but indistinguishable from Schopenhauer’s ‘Will’), so as to find solace in the state of timeless oblivion. Quite the reverse, the euphoric, supra-moral condition induced by tragedy represents a conquest by the elemental life-force, having issue not in an act of unconditional abnegation but of unconditional assent. The gist of the argument is transmitted in a brilliant and celebrated epigram (‘Vorrede’, and §§ 5 and 24): Nur als aesthetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt. (Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.)

The fact that Nietzsche laboured under no illusions, but realized his implicit rejection of the pessimism of Tristan und Isolde is made clear (if clarification were needed) in the ensuing § 7, which speaks of the satyr chorus as an affirmative element in the drama, in direct contradiction of the Buddhistic principle of renunciation and denial of life. With this chorus tröstet sich der tiefsinnige und zum zartesten und schwersten Leiden einzig befähigte Hellene, der mit schneidigem Blicke mitten in das furchtbare Vernichtungstreiben der sogenannten Weltgeschichte, eben so wie in die Grausamkeit der Natur geschaut hat und in

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis  153 Gefahr ist, sich nach einer buddhaistischen Verneinung des Willens zu sehnen. Ihn rettet die Kunst, und durch die Kunst rettet ihn sich—das Leben. (the profound Greek, uniquely susceptible to the tenderest and severest suffering, consoles himself, having looked boldly right into the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as into the cruelty of nature, and being in danger of longing for a Buddhist denial of the Will. Art rescues him, and through art-life.)

The last sentence was transcribed in a note around the time of Zarathustra, Part I, with the emphatic comment: ‘Grundgedanke. Mein weiteres Leben ist die Consequenz’ (Basic premiss. The rest of my life is the result. N-A3 VII 1 16[11]).27 In the context of a work to which Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung contributed so much, the disagreement is not at all obvious. Perhaps this is why, in letters that preceded and followed publication, Nietzsche went back to Tristan und Isolde and mentioned the difficulty he had had in taking up an independent position: ‘Gerade an diesem Punkte fühle ich mich stolz und glücklich und bin überzeugt, daß mein Buch nicht untergehn wird’ (Precisely on this point I feel proud and fortunate, and am sure my book will not miss its mark. To Rohde, 4 February 1872).28 The problem was not that he had sacrificed his integrity so as to reach a temporary semblance of agreement with his mentor. It was more nearly the opposite. In those passages in Die Geburt der Tragödie cited by Elisabeth as evidence of her brother’s adjustments and concessions to Wagner, Nietzsche puts forward a highly original and utterly characteristic, affirmative theory of tragedy, but adduces a wholly inappropriate example—Tristan und Isolde—which instead of corroborating his argument actually conflicts with it: Auch Resignation ist nicht eine Lehre der Tragödie!—sondern ein Mißverständniß derselben! Sehnsucht in’s Nichts ist Verneinung der tragischen Weisheit, ihr Gegensatz! (Resignation, too, is not a lesson of tragedy!—but a misunderstanding of it! Yearning for nothingness is a negation of tragic wisdom, its opposite! N-A3 VII 2 25[95])

The right example and ne plus ultra came only long afterwards, and moreover was supplied by Nietzsche himself: the prose-poem Also sprach Zarathustra.

III When discussing Also sprach Zarathustra in his autobiography, Nietzsche remarks on the revival of an interest in music during a halcyon year in which he was possessed by the affirmative pathos, designated by him the tragic pathos par excellence. The claim that Zarathustra is imbued with such an affirmative, musical spirit is made explicit in the superscription on the title-page of Part III (a quotation from ‘Vom Lesen und Schreiben’ in Part I29): Ihr seht nach Oben, wenn Ihr nach Erhebung verlangt. Und ich sehe hinab, weil ich erhoben bin. Wer von euch kann zugleich lachen und erhoben sein? Wer auf den höchsten Bergen steigt, der lacht über alle Trauer-Spiele und Trauer-Ernste. (You look up when you want to be lifted up. And I look down because I am up. Which of you can laugh and be lifted up at the same time? Those who climb upon the highest mountains laugh at all tragedies, on stage or off.)

154  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Dionysus is not mentioned at all in Also sprach Zarathustra; and the name might be thought to make an uncomfortable match with that of the Iranian prophet. The names are too frequently coupled elsewhere, however, for there to be any real doubt of their close association, indeed virtual identity; and a moment’s reflection will show that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra who dances and sings in a state of spiritual transport has more than a little in common with the classical Deity.30 One thinks of the early sketches for a poetic drama on the life and death of Empedocles, the teacher of spiritual and corporeal rebirth, with the concluding scene ‘Er wird als Gott Dionysus verehrt’ (He is worshipped as the god Dionysus). Again in Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 11, Nietzsche confidently asserts that early Greek drama had as its sole theme the sufferings of Dionysus, and that all the celebrated figures of tragedy—Prometheus, Oedipus, and others—are masks of Dionysus, the original hero. ‘My concept of the “Dionysian” has here become the highest reality’, we read in the Zarathustra analysis in Ecce homo, § 6. Zarathustra’s Dionysian dexterity—his accessibility to opposites—is made conspicuous in the following sentences. The psychological problem of the Zarathustra type is wie der, welcher die härteste, die furchtbarste Einsicht in die Realität hat, welcher den ‘abgründlichsten Gedanken’ gedacht hat, trotzdem darin keinen Einwand gegen das Dasein, selbst nicht gegen dessen ewige Wiederkunft findet,—vielmehr einen Grund noch hinzu, das ewige Ja zu allen Dingen selbst zu sein, ‘das ungeheure unbegrenzte Ja—und Amensagen’… ‘In all Abgründe trage ich noch mein segnendes Jasagen’ … Aber das ist der Begriff des Dionysos noch einmal. (how he who has the harshest and most terrible insight into reality, who has thought the ‘most abysmal thought’, nontheless f inds here no objection to existence, nor even to its eternal recurrence—rather, one more reason for being in person the everlasting ‘Yes’ to all things, ‘the terrible, unqualified Yes and Amen’… ‘Into all abysses I still bear my “Yes” which blesses’… But that is the idea of Dionysos once more.)

Although it is clear from Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 295, that Nietzsche regarded the ‘Dionysos-Zarathustra’ of the late books as a direct descendant of the ‘Dionysus’ who partners Apollo in Die Geburt der Tragödie, the original dualism is for the most part abandoned, and the term ‘Dionysos’ takes on a more comprehensive meaning.31 Now, too, the concept of the ‘Dionysian’, specifically associated with the music of Tristan und Isolde in his letter to Rohde of 21 December 1871, becomes the formula that best defines Nietzsche’s anti-Wagnerian position. These changes call for some explanation. In the résumé of the argument in Die Geburt der Tragödie, which begins in § 16, Nietzsche represents the worlds of Dionysus and Apollo as differing in their essences and aims. Apollo, the patron of the visual arts and poetry, redeems through illusion; Dionysus, the god of the vine and patron of music,32 breaks the spell of individuation and gives access to the kernel of things. Apollo conquers by a glorification of the phenomenal world; here the beauty bestowed on the world of appearances triumphs over pain. Dionysus, too, seeks to convince us of the joy in existence; but we find this joy not in appearances but beyond them in Dionysian ecstasy. These reflections prompt a remarkable anticipation of the theory of eternal recurrence in § 23:

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis  155 Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 23 Gerade nur so viel ist ein Volk—wie übrigens auch ein Mensch—werth, als es auf seine Erlebnisse den Stempel des Ewigen zu drücken vermag. The value of a people—as also of a person— depends on the degree to which it is able to stamp the mark of eternity on its experiences.

Note for Also sprach Zarathustra, AugustSeptember 1881 Drücken wir das Abbild der Ewigkeit auf unser Leben! Dieser Gedanke enthält mehr als alle Religionen. Let us stamp the image of eternity on our life! There is more in this idea than in all religions. N-A3 V 2 11 [159])

In tragedy, in which the two opposed forces are momentarily reconciled, Apollonian myth seems to be dominant, compelling music to serve it. In fact, music and myth stand in opposite relation: music being best defined as an ‘Idea’ of the world; myth as a manifestation and projection into images of Dionysian states, ‘als sichtbare Symbolisirung der Musik’ (as the visible symbolization of music. GdT § 14). One recalls Wagner’s reference to ‘ersichtlich gewordene Thaten der Musik’ (visible deeds of music) in ‘Über die Benennung “Musikdrama”’, which appeared soon after the publication of Die Geburt der Tragödie (W-A1 IX 364). On these terms the rigid dualism starts to give way. In § 21, we learn that in the total effect of tragedy Dionysus predominates. The illusions of Apollo are the veiling of the terrifying Dionysian reality: a reality so strong that it ends up by compelling the drama to speak with Dionysian wisdom, and even to deny itself and its Apollonian visibility: Dionysus redet die Sprache des Apollo, Apollo aber schliesslich die Sprache des Dionysus: womit das höchste Ziel der Tragödie und der Kunst überhaupt erreicht ist. (Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; but Apollo finally the language of Dionysus: with this the highest goal of tragedy and art in general is attained.)

In Die Geburt der Tragödie, then, Nietzsche’s duality is more apparent than real: Apollo is no more than a manifestation, mask, or mouthpiece of the all-powerful Dionysus, and the way is paved for the interpretation of tragedy as an exclusively Dionysian phenomenon. For illustrative purposes we may consider an anthology culled from the late writings where Nietzsche tried to develop the affirmative theory of tragedy central to his first book. The essay in self-criticism comes straight to the point. The problem at issue in Die Geburt der Tragödie—a problem identified by the amended title—was that of pessimism. Is pessimism always a sign of decline, decay, degeneration, and of weak and weary instincts? Giebt es einen Pessimismus der Stärke? Eine intellektuelle Vorneigung für das Harte, Schauerliche, Böse, Problematische des Daseins aus Wohlsein, aus überströmender Gesundheit, aus Fülle des Daseins? (Is there a pessimism of strength? an intellectual predilection for the harsh, gruesome, evil, problematical side of existence, prompted by well-being, by overflowing health, by fullness of existence?)

This leads to a re-statement of the argument addressed to (but already at odds with) Wagner, which proposed art rather than morals as the metaphysical concern of mankind and suggested that life might be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. In this respect, Die

156  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Geburt der Tragödie was a prophetic document, expressing for the first time a pessimism ‘beyond’ good and evil: a ‘tragic’ pessimism which, he says, banished even morals to the realm of illusion.33 The concept of a ‘pessimism of strength’ brings out the stark contrast. For example, the concept of ‘tragedy of renunciation’ defined in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Supplement 37—quoted in extenso in the ‘Versuch einer Selbstkritik’, § 6—is a limiting and disabling notion ‘Oh wie ferne war mir damals gerade dieser ganze Resignationismus!’ (O how far removed from me then was all this resignationism!). This is reaffirmed in the preface to Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, II, § 7, where Nietzsche returns to the fray, comparing the pessimism of the vanquished and exhausted with his own ‘tragic’ pessimism: a sign as much of severity as of strength of intellect ‘Dies war meine pessimistische Perspektive von Anbeginn’ (This was my pessimistic perspective from the very start). A second retrospective attempt at self-criticism comes in Ecce homo, ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie’.34 The new sub-title, ‘Griechenthum und Pessimismus’, which shifted the emphasis away from Schopenhauer’s aesthetics of music to the wider subject of the nature of tragedy, represented more than an attempt to rid the book of its propagandist tone: ‘Ich fand die Schrift mehrmals citirt als “die Wiedergeburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik”’ (I have often found the book cited as ‘The Re-Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music’).35 It focused attention on that side of the argument which was not only alien to Wagner but at cross purposes with him as well. Did not this amendment open the door to an interpretation of art in terms of ‘play’, as in Lobeck’s Aglaophamus?36 The idea, it is true, had a certain appeal for Nietzsche, who associated the innocent play of the child with the final stage of metamorphosis in Zarathustra. One recalls the letter to Köselitz of 3 September 1883 which, just before Part III, adapted Goethe’s letter to Schiller of 9 December 1797 (discussed in Die Geburt der Tragödie, § 22): Um aber diesen Theil machen zu können, brauche ich selber erst tiefe, himmlische Heiterkeit: denn das Pathetische der höchsten Gattung wird mir nur als Spiel gelingen. Zum Schluß wird Alles hell. (In order to write this section, I myself first need a deep, heavenly cheerfulness: for I shall succeed in depicting the highest kind of pathos only if I treat it as play. At the end, everything becomes bright.)

In fact, the play concept is introduced into the argument in a special sense, being associated with an unqualified assent to reality, including all that is inherently harsh, fearful, problematical, and strange. Nietzsche’s originality cannot easily be missed. The terrible aspects of life must be seen to belong to a higher order in the hierarchy of values than those that can be labelled according to the tenets of morality ‘good’ or ‘bad’: ‘Dies zu begreifen, dazu gehört Muth und, als dessen Bedingung, ein Überschuss von Kraft’ (To appreciate this, it takes courage, and as its prerequisite, a surplus of strength. § 2). On this showing, how should Wagner’s music-dramas be classified? Nietzsche’s answer begins to emerge in Der Wanderer und sein Schatten, § 217, where he paraphrases Goethe’s famous distinction between the terms ‘Classicism’ and ‘Romanticism’.37 A longer paragraph enlarging on this distinction in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 370, ‘Was ist Romantik?’ (the source of Nietzsche contra Wagner, ‘Wir Antipoden’), analyses the ways in which Nietzsche misunderstood and overestimated Wagner and Schopenhauer

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis  157 in his youth: not, he says, to their disadvantage. The bond between his mentors was not triumphant plenitude, wealth, and strength of spirit, as he had then mistakenly supposed, but a craving for deliverance born of indigence and the spirit of resentment. Creation, the desire to eternalize (‘zu verewigen’), may stem from love and gratitude; but it may also stem from the self-indulgence of one who seeks to turn the very idiosyncrasy of his suffering into an obligatory constraint. Here, he says, we get ‘Romantic’ pessimism in its most extreme form: the last great event in the destiny of our civilization, whether exemplified by Schopenhauer’s philosophy or Wagner’s art. That there could be a completely different, ‘Classical’ pessimism, the counterpart of Zarathustra’s teaching —diese Ahnung und Vision gehört zu mir, als unablöslich von mir, als mein proprium und ipsissimum: nur dass meinen Ohren das Wort ‘klassisch’ widersteht, es ist bei weitem zu abgebraucht, zu rund und unkenntlich geworden. Ich nenne jenen Pessimismus der Zukunft-dennerkommt! ich sehe ihn kommen!—den dionysischen Pessimismus. (—this premonition and vision belongs to me, as something peculiarly and quintessentially my own: except that to my ears the term ‘Classical’ jars—it has become too well worn, too trite and unrecognizable. I name this pessimism of the future—for it is coming! I see it coming!—Dionysian pessimism.)

The discussion is carried over into the penultimate section of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Book V (quoted in full in Ecce homo, ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, § 2, as if to drive home the point): ‘Another ideal goes on ahead of us…’ Nietzsche’s ‘tragedy of affirmation’ underlying Also sprach Zarathustra—the exact antithesis of Schopenhauer’s ‘tragedy of renunciation’ which at a crucial moment in Wagner’s career had helped to clarify the plot of Der Ring des Nibelungen, and had been decisive in the composition of his later music-dramas as well—is of considerable moment. Nowhere, perhaps, is he more completely himself; nowhere does he avail himself of a topic more inclusive in scope. It is fitting therefore that this topic is developed in his last published book, GötzenDämmerung, as well as in his unpublished autobiography, both of which enunciate a number of themes bearing directly on his early paragons. As a preliminary it will be noted that the antithesis, optimism versus pessimism, is cancelled out by Nietzsche’s Dionysian (‘strong’ or ‘tragic’) pessimism versus Wagner’s and Schopenhauer’s Romantic pessimism. ‘Ich sah zuerst den eigentlichen Gegensatz’ he exclaims in Ecce homo, ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie’, § 2, den entartenden Instinkt, der sich gegen das Leben mit unterirdischer Rachsucht wendet… und eine aus der Fülle, der Überfülle geborene Formel der höchsten Bejahung. (I was the first to see the real antithesis: the degenerate instinct that turns against life with a subterranean lust for vengeance…and a formula of supreme affirmation born of abundance, of super-abundance.)

In the last chapter, Zarathustra is described as the first to see that the optimist is as decadent as the pessimist, only perhaps more deadly. We get instead a series of vigorous coinages: health versus sickness, strength versus weakness, plenitude versus indigence, are some of the derivatives. Underlying them all is the contrast between the faulty psychology and pseudo-aesthetics of the Romantics, and the supra moral, Dionysian interpretation creatively embodied in Zarathustra, which promises a rebirth of the genuine spirit of tragedy.

158  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism For example, Götzen-Dämmerung, ‘Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen’, §§ 21 ff, contains a tribute to Schopenhauer. The philosopher speaks of beauty with a melancholy ardour— why? Because beauty offers release from the torment of the ‘Will’, a temporary sense of respite from the relentless drive towards life. Is this tenable? If the function of art were to induce resignation (as in the ‘Versuch einer Selbstkritik’, the target is Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Supplement 37), would not the artist cancel himself out? A psychologist asks what art actually does: Lobt sie nicht? verherrlicht sie nicht? wählt sie nicht aus? zieht sie nicht hervor? Mit dem Allen stärkt oder schwächt sie gewisse Werthschätzungen … Ist dies nur ein Nebenbei? ein Zufall? (Doesn’t it praise? glorify? select? prefer? In all these ways it strengthens or weakens certain evaluations… Is this all by the way? by chance? § 24)38

Is not art directed towards the enhancement of life, as Plato held? Does not tragedy furnish the supreme example of a pledge to life in this sense? Does not music, itself the source of tragedy, celebrate the triumph of the Will that Schopenhauer was above all concerned to annihilate? The greatest dramatists manifest a victorious condition; man glorifies existence in tragedy. Nietzsche’s wit was irrepressible: ‘Man muss einen Schritt weiter gehn in seiner Logik, nicht bloss mit “Wille und Vorstellung”, wie Schopenhauer es that, das Leben verneinen—man muss Schopenhauern zuerst verneinen…’ (One must take one’s logic a step further and not deny life merely as ‘Will and Representation’, as did Schopenhauer— one must first deny Schopenhauer…).39 Schopenhauer’s errors should not be put down to mere intellectual confusion but to something devious: a trait of casuistry; a palpable attempt to tailor the facts. Was even Schopenhauer—this great writer and commanding spirit, a European event on a par with Goethe, Hegel, and Heine, whose love of art is not in question—convinced by his own opinions? If he gets things back-to-front, if he thinks misanthropy a tragic state and refuses to allow that the Greeks understood either tragedy or life, that is parti pris due to the logic of a faulty system.40 To Nietzsche, single-handed, has fallen the task of reinstating a notion of tragedy that even in antiquity, thanks to such theorists as Aristotle, was buried beneath a mountain of misleading speculation. Dramatic art is not primarily intended to effect an emotional catharsis in Aristotle’s sense;41 nor is it conducive to ‘disinterest’ as Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer would have it;42 nor, on the other hand, is it concerned to bolster the tenets of traditional morality as Gervinus believed: ‘Wer die Tragödie moralisch genießt, der hat noch einige Stufen zu steigen’ (Whoever takes tragedy morally has a few more steps to climb. N-A3 V 2 12[102]). Tragedy is to be understood in terms of a higher necessity—‘amor fati’—from which pain and suffering are not excluded. This insight obstructs Zarathustra in his struggle to reconcile himself to his fate and causes the sickness from which he is recovering in ‘Der Genesende’; yet it also explains the elation of the hymn of praise to life that signals his return to health, emanating from a depth of joy ‘in which the most painful and forbidding does not act as a deterrent, but as conditioned, as demanded, as a necessary colouring in such an abundance of light’ (Eh-Z § 3).43 In the same strain Nietzsche exclaims in Ecce homo, ‘Warum ich so klug bin’, § 9: ‘Ich will nicht im Geringsten, dass Etwas anders wird als es ist’ (I don’t in the least want anything to become other than it is); and again in the last sentences of the chapter he says

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis  159 Meine Formel für die Grösse am Menschen ist amor fati: dass man Nichts anders haben will, vorwärts nicht, rückwärts nicht, in alle Ewigkeit nicht. Das Nothwendige nicht bloss ertragen, noch weniger verhehlen—aller Idealismus ist Verlogenheit vordem Nothwendigen-, sondern es lieben… (My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one doesn’t want anything different in the future, in the past, in all eternity. Not just endure what is necessary, still less disguise it-all idealism is equivocation in the face of the necessary-but love it…)

Like the theory of recurrence and the concept of will to power—and unlike the revaluation of good and evil and the name of Dionysos—the cardinal term ‘amor fati’ is seldom met with in Nietzsche’s published books. From these writings, however, it is not difficult to see why the title-page of Also sprach Zarathustra, Part III, broaches the subject of the nature of tragedy in terms distinctly reminiscent of Die Geburt der Tragödie, or why Nietzsche represented the two books to Köselitz on 20 September 1884 as ‘the decisive climaxes of my “thinking and poetizing”’. Similarly in a letter to Overbeck of July 1885 he says that despite his inveterate scepticism he always comes back to the same judgements: judgements already hinted at in his first book, ‘und Alles, was ich inzwischen hinzugelernt habe, ist hineingewachsen und ein Theil davon geworden’ (and everything that I have learned meanwhile has become an integral part of them). On the merit of this perfected and creatively realized theory of tragedy, Nietzsche describes himself in Ecce homo, ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie’, § 3, as the antithesis and antipode of a pessimist, quoting at length from one of his finest pronouncements in Götzen-Dämmerung, ‘Was ich den Alten verdanke’, § 5. The will to life expressed in the sacrifice of the highest types of men —das nannte ich dionysisch, das verstand ich als Brücke zur Psychologie des tragischen Dichters. Nicht um von Schrecken und Mitleiden loszukommen, nicht um sich von einem gefährlichen Affekt durch eine vehemente Entladung zu reinigen—so missverstand es Aristoteles: sondern um, über Schrecken und Mitleiden hinaus, die ewige Lust des Werdens selbst zu sein, jene Lust, die auch noch die Lust am Vernichten in sich schliesst… (—that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I understood as a bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not to get rid of terror and pity, not to purge oneself of a dangerous feeling by a violent discharge—this was Aristotle’s mistake: but, beyond terror and pity, to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming, that joy which includes the joy of destroying…)

Nietzsche’s last published lines bring Die Geburt der Tragödie and Also sprach Zarathustra together in a single, compelling sentence, taking him back to the point from which he originally set out: —die ‘Geburt der Tragödie’ war meine erste Umwerthung aller Werthe: damit stelle ich mich wieder auf den Boden zurück, aus dem mein Wollen, mein Können wächst—ich, der letzte Jünger des Philosophen Dionysos,—ich der Lehrer der ewigen Wiederkunft… (—The Birth of Tragedy was my first re-evaluation of all values: there I stand again on the ground from which my intention and my ability grows—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysos—I, the teacher of eternal return…)

IV Nietzsche ceased to write at the beginning of 1889. There are signs that at the time of his collapse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin on 3 January 1889, he was counting on a period of unprecedented advance and achievement.

160  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism The loss of a cogent definition of the concept ‘Dionysos’ is one of the more serious results of Nietzsche’s inability to complete his projected Umwerthung aller Werthe. The surviving schematic tables, reflecting the strategic, experimental, and inherently unsystematic (or improvisatory) character of his thought, differ too much for it to be possible—or perhaps desirable—to guess at its contents. Yet there is a measure of agreement at least as concerns the title of the final (fourth) instalment, which reads ‘Dionysos. Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkunft’ (Dionysos. Philosophy of eternal return’). It is doubtful whether even at this time a rigorous consistency would have been aimed at, let alone achieved. In GötzenDämmerung, ‘Streifzüge’, §§ 10 and 11, for example, there is a brief reference to the original dualism in which ‘Apollo’ and ‘Dionysus’ are figurative, aesthetic terms. In the months that follow there is a growing intimacy of address, until in the autobiography and communiqués of the first days of 1889, Dionysos becomes a pseudonym under which Nietzsche begins his re-evaluation of values: ‘Hat man mich verstanden? Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten…’ (Have I been understood? Dionysos versus the Crucified…). These fateful words, followed in the manuscript of the last chapter of Ecce homo by a recently published declaration of war,44 may have been intended to prepare for the dithyramb, ‘Ruhm und Ewigkeit’, with its powerful evocation of the principle of amor fati. Here Nietzsche identifies fate with chance, freedom with necessity beyond ‘Yes, and ‘No’, in a gesture of unconditional assent: Höchstes Gestirn des Seins! Ewiger Bildwerke Tafel! Du kommst zu mir?— Was Keiner erschaut hat, deine stumme Schönheit,— wie? sie flieht vor meinen Blicken nicht? Schild der Nothwendigkeit! Ewiger Bildwerke Tafel! —aber du weisst es ja: was Alle hassen, was allein ich liebe, dass du ewig bist! dass du nothwendig bist! Meine Liebe entzündet sich ewig nur an der Nothwendigkeit. Schild der Nothwendigkeit! Höchstes Gestirn des Seins! —das kein Wunsch erreicht, das kein Nein befleckt, ewiges Ja des Seins, ewig bin ich dein Ja: denn ich liebe dich, oh Ewigkeit!— (Highest star of being! Table of eternal imagery! You come to me?—Your silent beauty which none has beheld—what? it does not shun my gaze? Shield of necessity! Table of eternal imagery!—but indeed you know what all others hate, what I alone love: that you are eternal! that you are necessary! My love is inflamed for ever only by necessity. Shield of necessity! Highest star of being!—which no desire can reach, which no negation can defile. Eternal affirmation of being, eternally shall I affirm you: for I love you, O eternity!—)

Conclusion: The Final Metamorphosis  161 In the absence of the Umwerthung aller Werthe, the postscript to Nietzsche’s life and work is the Dionysos-Dithyramben: a collection of ode-like verses which testifies to the strange euphoria of the final period.45 This was the least complete of the four books awaiting publication at the time of his breakdown. For although Köselitz released six poems bound together with the fourth part of Zarathustra in 1891, the divergence among subsequent scholarly reconstructions suggests that the form of the book was never settled. Zarathustra, however, appears in two new poems, ‘Zwischen Raubvögeln’ and ‘Das Feuerzeichen’;46 and the collection was probably to have included the three long songs from the unpublished Zarathustra, Part IV—capriciously, perhaps, seeing that in their original setting these songs are sung by Zarathustra’s rivals, the wicked sorcerer and the shadow (see above pp. 153 ff). In the case of the sorcerer’s song, ‘Wer wärmt mich, wer liebt mich noch?’, Nietzsche takes up the story of Theseus, Dionysos, and Ariadne from the unpublished fragments Empedokles and Naxos written at the time of his friendship with Wagner.47 The title is changed to ‘Klage der Ariadne’, and a postscript is added in which Dionysos appears in glory: Ein Blitz. Dionysos wird in smaragdener Schönheit sichtbar. (A flash of lightning. Dionysos becomes visible in emerald beauty.)

As we have it in the eclectic idiom of Also sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s affirmation is to be seen as part of a polemical campaign versus Wagner’s ardours and pessimism. The polemical element remains to the end; but it appears that in his last months Nietzsche had progressed towards an independent standpoint. Familiar as is the act of piety informing the Dionysos-Dithyramben, the anthology may yet have been inspired by a vision surpassing that of the exegetical masterpiece with which Nietzsche’s name is usually associated. In conclusion, it must be acknowledged that Nietzsche’s prospect of a Dionysian, lifeenhancing creation and destruction—for from the first his theory of tragedy held eschatological rather than epistemological implications—lands us in difficulties. On this subject, as on others, Nietzsche speaks with the voice of prophecy rather than of philosophy. It may be that he considered his standpoint to be too impregnable to require justification by reasoned argument; or thought that sufficient justification, if needed, could be as readily supplied by others. If so, on both counts he was mistaken. Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy calls for the application of a particular brand of aesthetics in the field of ethics. There are no moral ‘laws’, no immutable standards, no metaphysical imperatives which command unquestioning obedience. Laws, standards, and imperatives, he seems to be saying, are provisional and strategic evaluations, determined like styles in architecture, painting, or music, by the prevailing climate of particular historical periods, reflecting above all the strength of will and sense of purpose of particular peoples and individuals. The examples of monstrous wickedness and mendacity, so defined by the ethos of an age, and depicted with stark realism by the tragic dramatist, invalidate the notion of a universal morality to which all human beings by nature, or by Divine decree, are bound. While many will wish to question his further deductions, this ethical relativism was clearly valuable and courageous as a corrective to contemporary opinion, drifting inexorably, Nietzsche believed, towards acquiescence in the consolations of the German humanistic philosophical tradition. Yet assuming that the world is not justified as a moral

162  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism phenomenon, it is not clear that Nietzsche’s ‘strong pessimism’—his claim that what is conventionally called evil is licensed as part of a higher, non-moral, ‘aesthetic’ totality, and should therefore be actively intensified and unconditionally affirmed—will do as an alternative, or that he really thought that it would. One more serious aspect of the difficulty is brought out by his campaign against the presiding artistic genius of the age. Did not the author of Die Geburt der Tragödie insist on the ability of a work of art to transcend the considerations that engender it, and on its right to be judged by aesthetic standards? Is there not a contradiction between the terms of his opposition to Wagner discussed in this book and his claim that ethical considerations have no place in the discussion of works of art (or perhaps of ethics)? If Wagner’s teachings really were an ancillary part of his technical equipment, valid only by virtue of their immediate aesthetic effectiveness, and so a matter of comparative—or complete—philosophical irrelevance, why did Nietzsche bother to contradict them? and, moreover, to contradict them in a book—Also sprach Zarathustra—that has every right to be considered a work of art itself? One feels that in his anxiety to probe into the nature of good and evil with the eye of the tragic dramatist, he misunderstood the fanatical moral bias of his proselytising activities as Dionysos’ last disciple and Wagner’s antipode. Was he not saying, in effect, that the value of a work of art actually depends on the value of its underlying assumptions? and that a major flaw here—in Wagner’s case, he believed, consisting essentially in Wagner’s adherence to the tenets of Schopenhauerian pessimism—substantially reduces its worth? Or, as the only viable alternative, could it be that Nietzsche’s comments on Wagner the protagonist of pessimism are incidental to his criticism of Wagner the artist, especially the musician: criticism that, if comparable in its intransigent hostility, was nevertheless conducted on an altogether different level in altogether different technical terms? An affirmative answer to this final question looks unlikely, taking into account the findings of this inquiry. In order to settle the matter, it would be necessary to start again at the beginning and to ask what was the nature of Nietzsche’s aesthetic response to Wagner, regarding this as a separate and separable issue: what precisely were his objections? and what precisely did he champion in preference?

Calendar November 1868—February 1883

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in Röcken near Lützen on 15 October 1844: the birthday of Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. His father, Pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, sometime tutor to the Queen of Hanover and her three sisters, was born in 1813, the same year as Wagner. Like his father, his mother, Franziska née Oehler, came from a clerical family (see Max Oehler, Zur Ahnentafel Nietzsches, Weimar 1938). Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth was two years his junior; a younger brother, Ludwig Joseph, died in infancy. In 1858, after his father’s early death in 1849 and the family’s transfer to Naumburg, Nietzsche won a scholarship to the Königliche Landes-Schule Pforta, where Klopstock, Fichte, Schlegel, and Ranke were educated. Paul Deussen, Carl von Gersdorff, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff were near contemporaries. Nietzsche’s interest in music was apparent at an early age; and his first literary efforts were accompanied by studies, scarcely less resolute and prolific, in musical composition. As a composer, he was self-taught, and consequently his imagination ran ahead of his technique. The musical ‘Nachlaß’, however, contains striking and at times powerful ideas; and it prompts speculation on the showing he might have made if he had been properly trained. He became a proficient pianist and throughout his life was capable of exploiting a gift for extemporization to considerable effect. At Pforta, Nietzsche’s interest in Wagner was awakened by the ‘Germania’ society formed with two Naumburg friends, Wilhelm Pinder and Gustav Krug. For three years—until Nietzsche left for Bonn—the ‘Germania’ held monthly meetings outside the school precincts, reading papers on musical, literary, and philosophical subjects. In the spring vacation of 1861, Krug borrowed a copy of Bülow’s vocal score of Tristan und Isolde (1860); and a year later, on Krug’s initiative, the vocal score was purchased out of ‘Germania’ funds. Although Nietzsche at this time appears to have had a limited knowledge of Wagner’s theoretical writings, the records of the society show that Wagner’s music was a frequent subject of discussion; and we may infer that he was well informed of the progressive trend of Wagner’s reforms. In 1864, Nietzsche and Deussen, equipped with letters of recommendation to Friedrich Ritschl, enrolled at the University of Bonn. Here Nietzsche briefly applied himself to the study of theology. A collection of songs is among the products of this period: settings of Petöfi and Chamisso, the French expatriate whose typically German verses supplied the text for Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben. Nietzsche read Fortlage, Reissmann, Adolf Marx, and Hanslick critically: ‘dumm!’, ‘ein flacher Syllogismus’, &c. (see G-Br II 101, n. 52). He took part in the Lower Rheinland Music Festival in Cologne in June 1865, when Handel’s Israel in Egypt was performed under Ferdinand Hiller. A year later, Nietzsche accompanied Ritschl to Leipzig: a transfer precipitated by a serious clash between Ritschl and Otto Jahn (see below s.v. end of May 1872). Here he teamed up with Heinrich Romundt, who was to join him for a time in Basel, Ernst Windisch, later professor of Sanskrit at Leipzig, and Erwin Rohde, one year his junior, who after 1886 occupied Ritschl’s Chair. The latter was the closest of his youthful friendships; but it began

164  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism to deteriorate in Basel, and reached deadlock not long after a last meeting in Leipzig in 1886 (E.F.Podach, ‘Erwin Rohde’, Gestalten um Nietzsche, Weimar 1932, pp. 34–67). At Leipzig, Nietzsche attended the orchestral concerts of the Euterpe Society, joined the choral society conducted by Carl Riedl, and visited the Tonkünstlerversammlung in Altenburg. In 1867, an impromptu visit to the festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein at Meiningen during a walking-holiday in the Böhmerwald with Rohde helped to foster his interest in the experiments of the musical avant-garde. Wilhelm Wisser, a contemporary at Leipzig, mentions a performance of Tannhäuser on 8 July 1866: possibly Nietzsche’s introduction to Wagner in the theatre (N-Br2 II 386). Also at Leipzig, Nietzsche engaged in friendly but heated disputation with Franz Hüffer, the ‘pseudo-Englishman’ as he called him (to Wagner, 18 November 1871), afterwards an influential critic on the London ‘Times’ and a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his circle, whose efforts helped to promote Wagner’s cause in England. Above all, the Leipzig residence at Blumengasse 4 was memorable for the accidental discovery in the autumn of 1865 of Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in the antiquarian book-shop owned by Nietzsche’s landlord, Rohn. In the summer of 1868, Nietzsche’s interest in Wagner was rekindled by Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, first performed under Bülow in Munich in June. A letter to Rohde of 28 October shows that he was carried away by a Euterpe concert at which he heard the preludes to Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger for the first time. Ritschl’s wife Sophie had taken a benevolent interest in her husband’s most promising pupil. As a friend of Wagner’s elder sister Ottilie (the wife of Hermann Brockhaus, the Zoroastrian scholar and professor of Sanskrit at Leipzig), she was invited to meet the artist during his incognito visit to Leipzig between 2–9 November 1868. She lost no time in commending Nietzsche to Wagner, who, astonished and delighted, expressed the wish to make his acquaintance:

1868 8 Nov.

(evening). N (aged 24) is introduced to W (aged 55) at the home of Professor Hermann Brockhaus, W’s brother-in-law, at Querstraße 15 in Leipzig. W’s visit is a closely guarded secret. The invitation is delivered by a fellow student, Ernst Windisch, who accompanies N to the meeting (see esp. N’s letter to Rohde of 9 Nov. 1868). W plays extracts from Die Meistersinger, and reads passages from Mein Leben dealing with his student exploits in Leipzig (his birthplace). Schopenhauer is discussed, and in parting W asks N to visit him. W

[1868–69]

mentions the meeting in his ‘Annalen’ (W-A8 201); and he conveys his greetings to N in a letter to Ottilie on 6 Dec. 1868 after his return to Tribschen (see N to Gersdorff, 18 Jan. 1869). W returns to Tribschen [the estate near Lucerne in Switzerland where he had found a haven in April 1866, after a stormy residence in Munich under the patronage of Ludwig II of Bavaria. Here the music for Die Meistersinger, Acts II and III, had been written]. The death of Rossini. W’s tribute, ‘Eine Erinnerung an Rossini’, appears in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung on 17 Dec. (W-A1 VIII 278–83).

11 Nov.

12 Nov.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  165 16 Nov.

19 Nov. N to Rohde, 25 Nov. Late Dec. 25 Dec.

Cosima von Bülow takes up residence at Tribschen with W’s daughters Isolde and Eva. [Cosima (b. 25 Dec. 1837), the daughter of Liszt and the Countess Marie d’Agoult (Daniel Stern), is a passionate anti-Semite like her future husband. She is however of partly Jewish descent, her mother being the natural daughter of the Vicomte de Flavigny and Marie Bethmann of an old Frankfurt family of Jewish moneylenders.] W recommences his autobiography, Mein Leben, which he dictates to Cosima. [The autobiography was begun by dictation in Munich on 17 July 1865, soon after Ludwig II suggested it on 28 May 1865.] N recommends W’s Oper und Drama, which has recently appeared in a second edition with a new preface and a dedication to the nationalist political pamphleteer Konstantin Frantz (see below s.v. Feb. 1878). The score of Siegfried, Act I, is completed.1 N spends Christmas with his family in Naumburg.

1869 1 Jan.

Cosima begins her diary, terminated only with W’s death. On the same day, W dictates the passage on Schopenhauer in Mein Leben. He prepares to reissue the pseudonymous Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850) as a monograph under his own name, adding an open letter addressed to Marie Muchanoff, the Countess Nesselrode, and an extended Appendix (W-A1 V 83–108 and VIII 299–323).

21 Jan.

N attends Die Meistersinger under Bülow in Dresden, writing to Rohde on 22– 28 Feb. 1869: ‘The whole time I had the strongest feeling of being unexpectedly comfortable and at home, and my past life faded into an oblivion from which I was redeemed.’ On Ritschl’s recommendation, N is appointed ‘außerordentlicher Professor’ of classics at Basel on the retirement of Adolf Kiessling (Stroux 29 ff). The indispensable doctorate is conferred without examination on 23 Mar. on the strength of his work for the classical society which he has founded, his reviews for Zarncke’s Literarisches Centralblatt, and a series of brilliant contributions to Ritschl’s Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, including ‘De Laertii Diogenis fontibus’ published in Mar. ‘Lucerne is no longer out of reach’ he notes when announcing the impending transfer to Rohde on 16 Jan. 1869: ‘Now, God willing, from Easter on, I shall live in Wagner’s immediate proximity’ he exclaims to Gersdorff two days later. The score of Siegfried, Act II, is completed. N is invited to dine with Franz Liszt at the Hôtel de Pologne in Leipzig (to Rohde 22–28 Feb. 1869). The composition-sketch of Siegfried, Act III, is begun after an interval of eleven years. [The orchestral sketch of Act II was finished on ca. 9 Aug. 1857; thereafter W worked intermittently on the scores of the first two Acts.]

12 Feb.

23 Feb. ca. 24 Feb. 1 Mar.

1.

Otto Strobel identified three stages in the composition of W’s later music (i) the compositionsketch (ii) the orchestral sketch (iii) the score. This hitherto standard terminology is likely to be replaced by that of the new collected edition, ed. Martin Geck with others, in preparation in Munich: see John Deathridge, ‘The Nomenclature of Wagner’s Sketches’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, CI(1975), 75–83; and Robert Bailey, ‘The Method of Composition’, The Wagner Companion, ed. Peter Burbidge and Richard Sutton, London 1979, pp. 269–338.

166  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 8 Mar. 26 and 28 Mar. 13 Apr.

17 Apr. [1869]

19 Apr. 15 May: Whit Saturday. *2

*17 May: Whit Monday.

22 May.

28 May.

The death of Berlioz. An unfinished obituary is published in W-A5 77 f. W publishes the polemic ‘Eduard Devrient. “Meine Erinnerungen an Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy”’ under the pseudonym Wilhelm Drach in the Nordd. Allgem. Zt. (W-A1 VIII 284–98). After almost a month in Naumburg, N leaves for Basel, breaking the journey at Karlsruhe to hear his ‘favourite opera’, Die Meistersinger, conducted by Hermann Levi (letter home, 20 Apr. 1869). [Levi (b. 1839), a protégé of Brahms, is gradually won over to W, becoming director of the Munich Hoftheater in 1871, and consequently the first conductor of Parsifal, staged by the Munich company at Bayreuth in 1882. Köselitz held that N was responsible for bringing him to W’s notice: note to N’s letter of 4 Aug. 1882: N-Br1 IV 459 f.] Because of his appointment in Switzerland, N renounces his German citizenship and is declared stateless (see E.His, ‘Friedrich Nietzsches Heimatlosigkeit’, Basler Zeitschr. für Geschichte und Altertumskunde, XL (1941), 159–86). N arrives in Basel and finds temporary lodgings at Spalentorweg. 2 Within a month of his arrival in Basel, N and a group of friends visit the Vierwaldstättersee. N pays an impromptu call at Tribschen where W is working on Siegfried, Act III, and cannot be disturbed; Cosima, who may have been absent from the house at the time, does not mention this visit in her diary. The circumstances are outlined in N’s recently discovered letter to W of 15 Oct. 1872 (N-Br16 179 f). Elisabeth says that N is unable to dine with the family, but accepts an invitation for Whit Monday extended by one of the servants, presumably on W’s instructions (W-Br9 9 f). N dines at Tribschen: ‘A calm and pleasant visit’, Cosima records. He is received by W and Cosima, and meets Cosima’s children: Daniela and Blandine von Bülow (who have arrived on 8 Apr.); Isolde and Eva Wagner. The villa is lavishly decorated in Parisian style (DjN 255; W-Br3 55; W-Br8 V 153; Fehr II 231; Peter Cornelius to Hestermann, mid-Sept. 1868: Ausgewählte Briefe, ed. Carl Maria Cornelius, 2 vols., Leipzig 1904 f, II 573 ff). A splendid collection of butterflies and a gilt Buddha, a present from the Countess d’Agoult, are prominently displayed (Judith Gautier, Le Troisième Rang du collier, Paris 1909, pp. 21 ff). A water-colour, ‘Dionysos Among the Muses’, by Bonaventura Genelli hangs in the drawing-room (Fehr II 258; W to N, 26 Nov. 1871). W’s 56th birthday. N declines Cosima’s invitation to Tribschen because of preparations for his inaugural lecture, but sends the first of a long series of birthday letters. W is awakened at 6 a.m. by the strains of Siegfried’s horn call played by Hans Richter (b. 1843), who pays a brief visit from Munich. The four children dressed as the Heralds of Peace from Rienzi recite Greek poems in praise of spring. During the day there is a Beethoven concert by the Morin-Chevillard stringquartet. ‘The day passes like a dream’ Cosima notes in her diary. N delivers his inaugural lecture ‘Über die Persönlichkeit Homers’ (privately printed under the title Homer und die klassische Philologie). He strikes up his enduring friendship with Jacob Burckhardt (Köbi: b. 1818), remarking on the wonderful congruity of his and Burckhardt’s aesthetic paradoxes (to Rohde, 29 May 1869). For a first-hand impression of N in the years of his professorship, see Ludwig v. Scheffler, ‘Nietzsche’, Neue freie Presse, 1907, 15429 f.

*2. In a letter to Gersdorff of 1 May 1872, N says that he paid 23 visits to Tribschen during W’s residence. The 23 visits so far establishedare indicated by asterisks.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  167 *5–6 (or 7) June. N’s first stay at Tribschen. W’s third child, Siegfried, is born on the 6th. Strobel (W-Br8 V 209) contradicts Glasenapp (IV 286) in contending that N did not leave until the 7th. The date is not established by Cosima’s diary. N writes home later in the month ‘We live together there in the most affectionate family circle and at a far remove from the usual triviality of social life.’ 14 June. The composition-sketch of Siegfried, Act III, is completed. 25 June. The orchestral sketch of Siegfried, Act III, is begun. 16–25 July. *31 July–1 Aug.

4 Aug. (not 5 Aug.) 18 Aug. *21–3 Aug.

25 Aug. [1869] *28–29 or 30 Aug. 28 Aug. 1–2 Sept.

N to Rohde, 3 Sept.

Catulle and Judith Mendès (née Gautier, the daughter of Théophile) pay frequent visits to Tribschen. N’s second stay at Tribschen after a few days at Interlaken. He is installed in a room on the second floor of the villa—the ‘Denkstube’ set aside for the private education of Cosima’s children—overlooking the lake and the Rigi (to Krug, 4 Aug. 1869). He inspects short-stories, philosophical essays, and sketches for stage works, along with the unpublished Über Staat und Religion. W, jubilant at the near completion of Siegfried, plays the scene with the woodbird and the dragon-fight from Act II (to Krug, 4 Aug. 1869). After dining with the family on the 1st, N leaves to climb Mt. Pilatus, returning to Basel on 5 Aug. ‘A cultivated and pleasant man’ Cosima notes in her diary. Alexander Serov (b. 1820), the composer and contributor to the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik whom W had entertained in Lucerne in 1859 and visited in Petersburg in 1863, comes to Lucerne in July and is a frequent visitor at Tribschen. In her ‘Memoirs of Richard Wagner’, The Artist, XII (Moskow 1891), 70 f, Mme Serov says that W played the ‘Erda’ scene from Siegfried before the rehearsal of Das Rheingold on 18 Aug. This is not mentioned in Cosima’s diary, although she records a visit from the Serovs on 31 July during N’s stay. The orchestral sketch of Siegfried, Act III, is completed. At Tribschen, W and Richter rehearse the principal singers from the Munich Hoftheater for the première of Das Rheingold. N stays at Tribschen, ‘always very pleasant’. He meets the Serovs, and Eduard Avenarius and his wife Cäcilie (née Geyer), W’s half-sister. This is W’s first meeting with Cäcilie in 21 years. W plays Siegfried, Act III, after a family banquet, on the afternoon of the 22nd. The orchestral score of Siegfried, Act III, is begun on Ludwig II’s 24th birthday. The projected birthday performance of Das Rheingold in Munich is however postponed (see below s.v. 22 Sept.). N, ‘always pleasant’ stays at Tribschen. He is summoned by telegram on the 27th to meet Hermann Brockhaus and his wife. Following his resignation on 21 Aug., W’s protégé, Hans Richter, is suspended as music director of the Munich Hoftheater. The news reaches Tribschen on the 29th. Lassen, Herbeck, Levi, and Saint-Saëns then decline invitations to replace him. W visits Munich. The King, indignant at the machinations at the Hoftheater, moves to Hochkopf, and W is cold-shouldered by both Court and theatre officials. Elisabeth alleges that he confers with N in Basel on the outward and return journeys: uncorroborated (W-Br3 20). N says that he has recently visited Tribschen four times. Janz (N-Br18 165) suggests an unrecorded visit in July. But this is ruled out by N’s letter to Rohde of 17 Aug. 1869: ‘When I was there the time before last, actually during the night of my stay, a little boy called Siegfried came into the world.’

168  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism *18–19 or 20 Sept. 22 Sept.

N visits Tribschen. There is an argument about the merits of vegetarianism which N abandons forthwith (to Gersdorff, 28 Sept. 1869). [In his last years, W becomes a fanatic vegetarian: see C-Tb, 14 Jan. 1882.] The première of Das Rheingold at the Munich Hoftheater under Franz Wüllner. Throughout this period, W faces a crisis of confidence in his dealings with Ludwig II of Bavaria (b. 25 Aug. 1845). In an excess of zeal and enthusiasm, the King had embarked on productions of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre: the two completed instalments of the trilogy of which he was the legal owner. The undertaking now runs into deep water and starts to jeopardize the friendship with W, whose sense of frustration and injury finds vent in the Bayreuth Festival scheme promoted initially without Ludwig II’s active support (see below, s.v. 5 Mar. 1870). At Cosima’s request, N has kept the family informed of the generally hostile press publicity since early July. His initially unfavourable opinion of Ludwig II—whom he never met—was coloured by these experiences. He came out in Ludwig’s favour, however, at the time of the King’s death at Lake Starnberg on 13 June 1886, holding W to be partly responsible for the tragedy (to Overbeck, 20 June 1886).

The composition-sketch of the prologue to Götterdämmerung is begun. N visits his family in Naumburg where he celebrates his 25th birthday on the 15th. N sends Ritschl the MS. of his ‘Analecta Laertiana’ N to Ritschl, Oct.-Nov. (Rheinisches Museum, XXV(1870), 217–31). 3 Nov. W finishes ‘Über das Dirigiren’ (N.Z.F.Musik: W-A1 VIII 325–410): the most important by-product of the Munich première of Das Rheingold, containing an attack on Franz Wüllner. 5 Nov. W and Cosima foresee that Siegfried may have to be educated away from home—possibly with N. Their plans are outlined in Cosima’s diary. Cosima asks N to obtain a copy of Dürer’s ‘Die Melancholie’ which she intends Cosima to N, as a Christmas present for W. N selects the children’s presents, which include Nov. a puppet theatre. *13–14 or N stays at Tribschen. On the evening of the 13th W plays the start of the Norns’ 15 Nov. scene; on the evening of the 14th he discusses with N the origins of language. 20–21 Nov. Following study of Plato’s Apology, W speaks to Cosima of the negative attitude of Socrates, which greatly impresses him. W to N, 3 Dec. W sends the first instalment of the MS. of Mein Leben to N, who is to act as his liaison with the printer G.A.Bonfantini in Basel. Early Dec. N attends an indifferent performance of the Overture to Die Meistersinger in Basel (Cosima to N, 9 Dec. 1869). *24 Dec. 1869–2 N stays at Tribschen for Christmas, spending most of his time with Cosima. On Jan. 1870 [1869] his arrival, he helps to set up the puppet theatre. W gives him the score of Die Meistersinger and possibly the score of Tristan und Isolde (see below, s.v. 1 Jan. 1878). Cosima specifies a reading of the prose synopsis of Parsifal after lunch on the 25th, the text of which is available in W-A8 52–70. [The synopsis was prepared for Ludwig II and submitted to the King on 31 Aug. 1865.] After this, W expounds the philosophy of music: a prelude to his essay Beethoven. In the evening, he reads from Mein Leben. N gives Cosima an inscribed copy of his recently published inaugural lecture. He gives W an enlarged photograph of Schopenhauer in a frame surmounted 2 Oct. 6–18 Oct.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  169 by W’s crest (a vulture); Cäcilie sends copies of her father’s—Ludwig Geyer’s— letters to her mother; Cosima produces the text of Geyer’s comedy Der Bethlehemitische Kindermord. A self-portrait of Geyer hangs in the drawingroom (Fehr II 258). These circumstances, no less than the symbolism of the crest on the title-page of Mein Leben, which N helped to design, bear on the unsubstantiated claim in FW-‘Nachschrift’, that W was Geyer’s natural son. (See the author’s ‘The Title-page of Wagner’s “Mein Leben”’, Music & Letters, LI(1970), 415–22.)

1870 9 Jan. W to N, 16 Jan. 18 Jan. and 1 Feb. W to N, 4 Feb.

*12–13 Feb. 27 Feb. 5 Mar.

N to Gersdorff, 11 Mar. Cosima to N, 16 Mar.

N to Ritschl, 28 Mar. 9 Apr. 14 Apr. (Easter).

The orchestral sketch of Götterdämmerung is begun. W sends ‘Über das Dirigiren’ to N. N gives two lectures for the Freie Akademische Gesellschaft at Basel: ‘Das griechische Musikdrama’ and ‘Sokrates und die Tragödie’. W was originally to have attended these lectures (to Gersdorff, 28 Sept. 1869). W acknowledges the MS. of ‘Sokrates und die Tragödie’, expressing concern at N’s dogmatic manner and warning of the danger of public misunderstanding and academic censure. On the 5th, Cosima tells N to write a book on Greek drama; on the 6th she says that since reading N’s lecture W has composed the orchestral interlude in Götterdämmerung, Act I—‘Siegfried’s Rhine-journey’. N stays at Tribschen. On the 12th, there is an animated discussion between W and N of Mozart’s operas: Die Entführung and Figaro. Heinrich Porges, W’s liaison with the Munich Hoftheater, arrives unexpectedly at Tribschen. On 2 Mar., W goes over the scene of Erda’s awakening from Siegfried. W hits on the idea of staging Der Ring in Bayreuth after reading a description of the town with its Rococo opera house in Brockhaus’s Konversations-Lexikon: the birthday of Bayreuth. [The Bayreuth plan brought to fulfilment the earlier scheme for a Festival Theatre in the fields near Zürich, mentioned in correspondence with Kietz and Uhlig in 1850, and more fully discussed in the article ‘Ein Theater in Zürich’ of April 1851 (W-A1 V 25–64). A similar plan had been enthusiastically supported by Ludwig II during W’s residence in Munich in 1864–5, when elaborate designs were prepared by Gottfried Semper: the first of the King’s grandiose building projects.] N congratulates Gersdorff on his timely study of Oper und Drama. Cosima asks N to return an ‘Index’ to W’s collected writings, an edition of which is now in preparation (see W-A8 156 ff). W has arranged for Gersdorff to attend Die Meistersinger in Berlin on the 22nd (see Gersdorffs letter of thanks to W of 1 Apr. 1870). N discusses his article ‘Certamen quod dicitur Homeri et Hesiodi’ (Acta societatis philologae Lipsiensis, ed. F.Ritschl, I(1871), 1–24). N is promoted ‘ordentlicher Professor’ at Basel (Stroux 65 f). N leaves Basel with his mother and sister, who have just arrived, for a week at Clarens-au-Basset on the lake of Geneva. On 10 May 1870, W writes ‘Those same places which you have now visited and observed have during different periods of my life significantly impressed me too.’ N’s mother stays on in Basel until 1 July; Elisabeth until the end of August (four months).

170  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 23 Apr.

Franz Overbeck (b. 1837), a friend of Treitschke, transfers from Jena to Basel to take up the chair of theology. For five years, until July 1875, he shares lodgings with N at the ‘Baumannshöhle’, Schützengraben 45 (today 47). N to Rohde, N has recently heard two rehearsals and a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew 30 Apr. Passion in the Münster at Basel: ‘This is the music of the renunciation of the Will’. A prospective summer performance of Beethoven’s Mass in D is replaced by the Ninth Symphony on 11 December. Early May. N publishes his pamphlet Beiträge zur Quellenkunde und Kritik des Laertius Diogenes, Basel 1870. 22 May W’s 57th birthday. He is awakened at 8.30 a.m. by the strains of the (Sunday). Huldigungsmarsch played by a military band of 45 players assembled in the garden. N stays in Basel with his mother and sister, but sends 12 flowering standard roses to his ‘Pater Seraphicus’. Ludwig II sends a horse (Grane). 29 May–13 June. Rohde, who has just returned from 14 months in Italy, spends a fortnight in Basel, visiting the Bernese Oberland at Whitsun (5–6 June) with N, his mother and his sister. W to N, 4 June. W assumes responsibility for the printing of Mein Leben. N is to be the custodian of the memoirs in the event of his death. The first instalment covering the years 1813–42 is printed in a limited edition of ca. 15 copies for private distribution. It is unclear whether N read either the second or third instalments (see Kelterborn’s comment N-Br2 IV 348). He certainly did not read the fourth and last, printed in Bayreuth in 1881. 5 June. The composition-sketch of Götterdämmerung, Act I, is completed. N stays at Tribschen with Rohde who makes a good impression (Otto Crusius, *11–12 (not 13) June. [1870] Erwin Rohde, Tübingen u. Leipzig 1902, p. 38). He provides Cosima with Dürer’s ‘Die Melancholie’, somewhat belatedly (see above, s.v. Cosima to N, Nov. 1869). He reads his lecture ‘Das griechische Musikdrama’, and W severely criticizes the title. N to Cosima, 19 June. 22 June. 26 June.

2 July. 3–19 July. N to Ritschl, 12 July. 18 July. 19 July. 19–30 July.

N contemplates resigning from Basel and taking up residence in Bayreuth. He sends a bound fair copy of his two recent lectures dedicated to Cosima. N sprains a foot and is bed-ridden for a fortnight: his first sick-leave from Basel. The première of Die Walküre at the Munich Hoftheater under Wüllner (see above, s.v. 22 Sept. 1869). N decides not to attend, to Cosima’s evident relief (Cosima to N, 16 July 1870). Richter arrives at Tribschen, following his dismissal, and stays for ten months as W’s amanuensis. The orchestral sketch of Götterdämmerung, Act I, is completed. W drafts a short first sketch for his essay Beethoven (W-A8 210 f: previously unpublished). N reports on the completion of the first two instalments of ‘Der Florentinische Tractat über Homer und Hesiod’, published on 28 Sept. (Rheinisches Museum, N.F. XXV (1870), 528–40). See below, s.v. N to Ritschl, 12 Aug. 1872. Cosima is legally separated from her husband, Hans von Bülow (b. 1830). France declares war on Prussia. The announcement is made by Cosima’s brother-inlaw, Émile Ollivier, who had become Prime Minister of France in January 1870. Catulle and Judith Mendès, Saint-Saëns, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Duparc, and René Joly stay in Lucerne on their return from the Munich première, following the declaration of war. W performs extracts from Der Ring with Saint-Saëns as his accompanist.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  171 *28–30 July.

N stays at Tribschen after a week with Elisabeth in Axenstein. He meets the French visitors, including Judith Mendès, whose Jewish husband had defended W in books and articles at the time of the disastrous Paris performance of Tannhäuser. Judith mentions the meeting in her memoirs. In the evening, W plays the Norns’ scene and music from Tristan und Isolde. On the morning of the 29th, W reads to N from Beethoven. Elisabeth arrives during the afternoon, and is rowed out to the house by Richter (W-Br3 55). ‘A nice, well-bred girl’, Cosima comments. Richard Pohl comes later in the day, as do the French visitors. During this stay, N makes Richter’s acquaintance. No friendship develops, and no correspondence survives, although N is ‘Friedrich’ in the pages of Richter’s diary (W-Br8 V 161–6).

8 Aug.

From Maderanerthal, perhaps swayed by Mosengel, N applies for leave from Basel to enlist in the German army (Stroux 60 ff). He notifies Cosima of his decision (this letter, received by Cosima on the 9th, does not survive). Gersdorff follows suit. 9 or 10 Aug.? Elisabeth says that N visits Tribschen on his way back to Basel from Maderanerthal, and reads ‘Die dionysische Weltanschauung’. This appears to be a fabrication of Elisabeth’s (W-Br3 58), since in his letter to W of 10 Nov. 1870 N mentions his essay as unknown to W. It was afterwards adapted to form the first sections of GdT. 11 Aug. Because of his appointment in Switzerland, and renunciation of his German citizenship (see above, s.v. 17 Apr. 1869), N is debarred from the regular German army, despite his former rank as Lieutenant in the reserve of the Mounted Field Artillery. On the 1 1th, he is accepted by the medical corps, and leaves Basel next day with Elisabeth for Lindau where he teams up again with Mosengel. N and Mosengel reach Erlangen on the 13th for ten days of training. For N’s war-time diary, see N-Br2 III 420 ff. 25 Aug. Ludwig II’s 25th birthday. W sends the King a copy of the orchestral sketch of the prologue and Act I of Götterdämmerung. At 8 a.m., W and Cosima are married at the Protestant church in Lucerne. N, on active service, is unable to attend as a witness (to Gersdorff, 7 Nov. 1870). The witnesses are Richter and Malwida von Meysenbug (N does not meet Malwida until his visit to Bayreuth in May 1872, q.v.). 4 Sept. At 4 p.m., Helferich Siegfried Richard Wagner is baptized. 4 Sept. N, serving in the Ruhr, contracts dysentery and diphtheria. He is invalided out of the war and returns to Naumburg on the 14th, remaining there until 21 Oct. From now on, his health gradually declines. 7 Sept. W completes Beethoven, adding a preface on the 11th (W-A1 IX 75–151). He entrusts it to the Leipzig publisher, E.W.Fritzsch, editor of the Musikalisches Wochenblatt. The essay contains his first public acknowledgement of his debt to Schopenhauer, and marks a radical change in his theoretical position. Late Sept. [1870] The first instalment of N’s article ‘Der Florentinische Tractat über Homer und Hesiod’ appears in the Rheinisches Museum (see below, s.v. late Feb. 1873). Late Sept. and Oct. 15 Oct.

In Naumburg, N sketches an Empedokles drama after Hölderlin. N’s 26th birthday.

172  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 21 Oct.

N leaves Naumburg for Basel after seeing Ritschl in Leipzig on 27 Sept. and 12 Oct., and re-visiting Pforta on the 18th. The contents of a lost letter to Tribschen, written soon after his return, are disclosed by Cosima’s diary on 24 Oct.: ‘He expresses fears that before long everything will bear the stamp of militarism and, above all, pietism.’ N to Gersdorff,7 N hears Burckhardt lecture on the study of history. [Burckhardt’s lecture notes, edited by Rudolf Marx, were posthumously published under the title Nov. Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Leipzig 1935.] N to W, 10 Nov. N acknowledges the MS. of Beethoven with reservations: ‘Yet I fear that contemporary aestheticians will regard you as a somnambulist whom it would not only be inadvisable, but positively dangerous and even impossible to follow.’ This gives serious offence. Cosima notes on the 14th: ‘Professor Nietzsche returns Beethoven, remarking that only a few will be able to follow R.’ See, however, Kelterborn’s reminiscences (N-Br2 III 394); and also N to Rohde, 15 Dec. 1870: A new book by Wagner on Beethoven will suggest much of what I want of the future. Read it, it is a laying bare of the spirit in which we—we!—shall live in the future. Mid-Nov. W makes a draft for his political satire in the style of Aristophanes, Eine Kapitulation (W-A8 216–20, previously unpublished; and (W-A1 IX 5–51). The work mocks the surrender of German art to Parisian taste: i.e., the operettas of Offenbach. N announces his theory that Greek verse lacked regular metrical stress: one N to Rohde, of his most significant scholarly insights (Paul Maas, Greek Metre, trs. Hugh 23 Nov. Lloyd-Jones, Oxford 1962, p. 4). *26–8 Nov. N stays at Tribschen for the first time since his discharge from the army. Cosima writes with unusual restraint on 17 Nov. 1870: ‘Wagner is pleased that you are coming, as he was by your Beethoven letter.’ The contents of N’s lost letter in reply may be inferred from Cosima’s diary on 24 Nov.: ‘Terribly pessimistic about Germany.’ Cosima also records that on the evening of the 26th, W reads Eine Kapitulation. This contradicts Du Moulin Eckart (I 533), who says that the work was deliberately withheld from N because he did not ‘fit in’ at Tribschen (‘Er paßte jetzt eigentlich nicht nach Tribschen’). On the evening of the 27th, W plays Siegfried, Act I. 11 Dec. N to Rohde, 15 Dec. 16 Dec. *24 Dec.–1 Jan. 1871. [1870–71]

N hears Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the Martinskirche at Basel. N contemplates forming a select intellectual and artistic community. The centenary of the birth of Beethoven. Cosima mentions a letter from N: a Professor at Basel has asked him whether W’s Beethoven is meant as an attack on Beethoven. N’s most memorable stay at Tribschen: his second and last Christmas with the family. He is summoned by telegram to a secret rehearsal of the Siegfried-Idyll at the Hôtel du Lac in Lucerne, 3–5 p.m., on the 24th (he must have had prior knowledge of the work because his letter home of 12 Dec. 1870 mentions a ‘Tribschener Symphonie’). Richter has rehearsed the fourteen other musicians in Zürich, and has learned the trumpet for the occasion (Fehr II 315 f, n. 268). W conducts the first performance on the interior staircase of the villa at 7.30 a.m. on the 25th: Cosima’s 33rd birthday. Afterwards he gives Cosima the score.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  173  

In the afternoon, the Idyll—at this time known as the Tribschener-Idyll or Treppenmusik—is twice repeated; a Septet by Beethoven and the march from Lohengrin are also played. As a memento, Cosima copies out for N the lines from Die Meistersinger, Act III: Es war ein schöner Morgentraum Daran zu deuten wage ich kaum. (C-Br I, n.370) N gives W Dürer’s Ritter, Tod und Teufel; and Cosima a slightly revised copy of ‘Die dionysische Weltanschauung’ under the title ‘Die Geburt des tragischen Gedankens’ (first published in N-A3 III 2 71–91). He receives a copy of Beethoven, a pre-publication off-print of the vocal score of Siegfried, Act I, and, from Cosima, a splendid octavo edition of Montaigne (letter home, 30 Dec. 1870). On the evening of the 25th, W reads the text of Die Meistersinger for Jacob Sulzer who arrives during the day and stays overnight; on the 26th, he reads aloud from ‘Die Geburt des tragischen Gedankens’. which makes an excellent impression. On the 27th and 28th, he reads E.T.A.Hoffmann’s Der goldene Topf. In the afternoon on the 28th, Cosima, Richter, and N play music from Tristan und Isolde; during W’s absence on the afternoon of the 29th, Richter plays Act I. In the evening on the 29th, W goes over the poem, reading quietly so as not to disturb the infant Siegfried. On the 31st, some of the Zürich musicians return with Friedrich Hegar (b. 1841) and play Beethoven string quartets. Several week-ends of quartets follow during N’s absence in Lugano. In a letter to Köselitz of 2 Apr. 1883, N recalled ‘an obscure and moody music’, and expressed a preference for Haydn. The start of N’s friendship with Hegar. After the musicians’ departure, W, Cosima, Richter, and N see in the New Year.

1871 Early Jan.

18 Jan.

5 Feb. (*?) N to Elisabeth, ca. 8 Feb.

Soon after his return to Basel on 1 Jan., N applies unsuccessfully for the chair of philosophy at Basel, proposing Rohde in his stead for the chair of classics (Stroux 72 ff). In July and Aug., he supports Rohde’s application for the chair of classics at Zürich (also rejected). The King of Prussia, acting with the consent of the other German monarchs, including Ludwig II of Bavaria, is crowned Kaiser at Versailles. The armistice between Prussia and France follows on the 28th. W marks these events in the poem ‘An das deutsche Heer vor Paris’ (W-A1 IX 1 ff; and W-A8 222–4): acknowledged by Bismarck on 21 Feb. 1871 (Glasenapp IV 343 f). The score of Siegfried, Act III, is completed. N, now unwell, proposes to visit Tribschen before travelling to Lugano with Elisabeth. At about the same time, he notifies Cosima that he intends to leave for Italy without taking leave (see C-Tb, entry for 10 Feb. 1871, which mentions W’s dismay at this announcement). Neither Cosima’s nor Richter’s diaries shed further light on the matter. A short visit between 10–14 Feb. cannot, perhaps, be ruled out. Elisabeth working from N’s detailed, proposed itinerary remarks that the journey went almost completely according to plan (Förster-N II i 55; compare esp. W-Br3 71). Although her dates are inaccurate, she specifically states that she met her

174  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism

9 Feb.

brother in Lucerne—not in Basel—when setting out on the Italian expedition (N-Br1 V i 206, note). It seems unlikely that she would have been mistaken on this point. A combined holiday with N on Lake Como had been discussed at Tribschen a year earlier (N to Rohde, Jan.–Feb. 1870). W receives the news of Serov’s death.

15 Feb.

N is granted convalescent leave from Basel until the end of the winter Term.

Mid-Feb.

N and Elisabeth leave Lucerne for Lugano by stage-coach. At Flüelen, they meet Giuseppe Mazzini, the apostle of nationalism in Italy, travelling incognito. Together they journey by sleigh across the St. Gothard Pass.

16 Feb.–2 Apr.

N and Elisabeth stay for six weeks at the Hôtel du Parc in Lugano where N works on GdT. The original, discarded ‘Vorwort an R.W.’ is dated ‘Lugano 22 Feb. 1871, on Schopenhauer’s birthday’. They make friends with Field Marshal Moltke’s brother, his wife and two daughters. N takes an interest in a pageant marking the birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm I, writing to Gersdorff on 21 June in an antiSemitic, Wagnerian style: Our German mission isn’t over yet! I am more confident than ever: for not everything has perished in the wake of French-Jewish decline.

15 Mar.

The Kaisermarsch celebrating the Prussian victory over the French is completed.

24 Mar.

W completes Über die Bestimmung der Oper, his inaugural address to the Kgl. Akademie der Künste in Berlin (W-A1 IX 153–87).

*3–8 Apr.

N pays an unexpected visit to Tribschen on his return from Lugano: ‘He seems very unwell’, Cosima notes. He goes through the Kaisermarsch on 3 Apr.; Siegfried, Act II, on the 6th; and music from Tristan und Isolde on the 7th (played by W?). On the 5th, 6th, and 7th, N reads GdT, nearing completion, to W’s delight: ‘One sees here a gifted man, in his own way imbued with R’s ideas.’ N returns to Basel on the 8th, and is in Elisabeth’s company almost continuously until the end of Aug.

Apr.

W completes the ‘Schlußbericht’ on the circumstances attending the performance of Der Ring (W-A1 IX 373–81).

15 Apr.

W and Cosima leave for Berlin: their first journey into the Reich.

17–20 Apr.

W and Cosima visit Bayreuth and realize the unsuitability of the Rococo Margraves’ opera-house for the production of Der Ring. Undaunted, W resolves to build a festival theatre.

N sends the MS. of GdT to the Leipzig publisher who does not at once N to Wilhelm acknowledge it. Engelmann, 20 W and Cosima pass through Leipzig. On the 21st there is a rehearsal of Apr. (draft) 20–2 the Kaisermarsch. The score used by W on this occasion, and at the first Apr. [1871] performance in Berlin on 5 May, was presented to N. See N’s letter to his mother, 6 Jan. 1886: It is music that I still love dearly.—the score of the Kaisermarsch in my possession is simply not for sale! (N-Br18 83 f, previously unpublished). Compare NcW-Wo ich Einwände mache: ‘Not even the young German Kaiser could march to Wagner’s Kaisermarsch’ (interpolated in frW § 368). N’s library contains this score along with piano arrangements for 2 and 4 hands by Hugo Ulrich.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  175 25 Apr.–8 May.

8–13 May.

11 May. 15–16 May.

*22 and 24 May.

*28–9 May (Whitsuntide)

W’s triumphant visit to Berlin. He is befriended by the influential Countess Marie von Schleinitz, to whom he attributes much of his success in founding the Bayreuth Festival (see ‘Ein Rückblick auf die Bühnenfestspiele des Jahres 1876’, W-A1 X 139–56). He addresses the Kgl. Akademie der Künste (28 Apr.), is received by Bismarck (3 May), and conducts the first performance of the Kaisermarsch before Wilhelm I and the Empress (5 May). He sees his sister Cäcilie, and his friend the pianist Karl Tausig. Following the bestowal of the Imperial crown on the Prussian monarchy, it has become imperative that W should promote his interests in Berlin. In view of the temporary waning of his friendship with Ludwig II, the transfer of loyalties is effected comparatively painlessly. W and Cosima return to Leipzig where they visit W’s birthplace in Leipzig’s Jewish quarter. W’s nephew Clemens Brockhaus tells them that N has dedicated his inaugural lecture on Homer to his sister in the same terms in which he had previously dedicated it to Cosima. There seems to be no basis for this assertion. From Leipzig, W issues a public announcement of the Festival at Bayreuth, prospectively in 1873. The news is retailed to N by Cosima on the same day (12 May). N hears Handel’s Messiah in Basel. After passing through Darmstadt and Heidelberg where they attend the puppet show mentioned in Über Schauspieler und Sänger, W and Cosima stay overnight in Basel. There is a pleasant reunion with N, and with W’s nephew Fritz Brockhaus: the son of Hermann and Ottilie and brother of Clemens, with N’s support recently appointed professor of law at Basel (see C-Tb for 3 Jan. 1871). N visits Tribschen for W’s 58th birthday. On the 22nd, he travels to Lucerne on University business with Wilhelm Vischer-Bilfinger. This appears to occupy him on the 23rd, as Cosima does not mention his presence at Tribschen. Although Andler (1437) went too far in saying that the plan that came to fruition in the Bayreuther Blätter was N’s—W had discussed a music journal in correspondence as early as 1850—a Reformationszeitschrift or ReformationsJournal is mentioned in N’s letters. It is clear from Cosima’s diary for 22 May that N gives new life to the project: Professor Nietzsche tells us that he means to found a journal under R’s auspices in two years’ time; until then he will be busy making preparations. The title ‛Baireuther Blätter’ occurs in N’s letter to Rohde of 21 Dec. 1871. (See Martin Vogel, ‘Nietzsche und die “Bayreuther Blätter”’ Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musikkritik, ed. Heinz Becker, Regensberg 1965, 55–68.) Elisabeth specifies a stay at Tribschen with her brother: [After W’s and Cosima’s return], we received a pressing invitation to spend the Whitsuntide holidays at Tribschen, and these days remain among my most beautiful memories. (W-Br3 72 and 79) See also Du Moulin I 570: ‘But guests came and went, most notably Nietzsche with his sister Elisabeth.’ This visit, previously overlooked by scholars, is now confirmed by Cosima’s diary. Fritz Brockhaus comes from Basel on the 27th. On the evening of the 28th, there is an excursion to the hermitage at Winkel (two carriages). On the 29th, N discusses Aeschylus and Sophocles.

176  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Mid-June.

At his own expense, N publishes an extract from GdT (§§ 8–15) under the title Sokrates und die grieschische Tragödie, along with the original preface addressed to W drafted in Lugano (N-A3 III 2 93–132). Cosima to N, Cosima persuades N to transcribe Siegfried’s Tod for publication in W’s collected 2 and 5 June. writings. She acknowledges the MS. on the 18th. 24 June: Summer The composition-sketch of Götterdämmerung, Act II, is begun. In the evening Solstice. W receives N’s pamphlet on Greek tragedy with a covering letter (now lost). ‘Certainly he is the most outstanding of our friends’, Cosima notes on the 25th. 5 July. The orchestral sketch of Götterdämmerung, Act II, is begun. W to Ludwig II, W sends the King the newly completed orchestral arrangement of the Huldigungsmarsch in advance for his 26th birthday. 13 July. 15 July–4 Aug. N, Elisabeth, and Gersdorff visit the Bernese Oberland (Grimmelwald). 16–17 July. During the night, the death from typhoid fever of Liszt’s pupil and W’s beloved [1871] friend, the young Jewish pianist Karl Tausig (b. 1841). Tausig is the business manager of the Bayreuth Festival scheme under the patronage of Marie von Schleinitz. The news reaches Tribschen on the 20th. For W’s ‘Epitaph’, see W-A8 230. 30 July–3 Aug. *31 July–3 Aug.

Cosima to N, 17 Aug. Cosima to N, 3 Sept. 5-ca. 8 Sept. Sept. 13–14 Oct. 15 Oct. 25 Oct. *27–9 Oct. 31 Oct. 7 Nov.

Gersdorff stays at Tribschen for the first time. He has spent the whole of the war on active service. N and Fritz Brockhaus join Gersdorff at Tribschen, ‘all equally pleasant’. On the afternoon of the 2nd, W plays extracts from Siegfried. N and Gersdorff leave on the 3rd; Brockhaus stays on until the 5th. Cosima again speaks of N as the most gifted of W’s friends, but notes that a certain natural reserve makes his behaviour displeasing, as if he were trying to resist the effect of W’s personality. The diary also reveals a singularly unfortunate incident: with W’s permission, as a special favour, N is allowed to inspect the score of the Siegfried-Idyll in Cosima’s possession; but he forgets to return it, and after his departure W chances upon the abandoned manuscript with predictable consequences. Cosima sends Klindworth’s vocal score of Siegfried. N is invited to find a travelling companion for Prince Hatzfeldt-Trachenberg, Marie von Schleinitz’s brother-in-law, who has returned from the war. Romundt visits N in Basel after Elisabeth’s departure for Wiesbaden. Elisabeth (W-Br3 78) specifies a visit to Tribschen before N’s departure on 25 Sept. for Frankfurt a.M., Naumburg, and Leipzig: unconfirmed (N-Br18 169). Following Engelmann’s rejection of GdT, N sends the MS. to W’s publisher, E.W.Fritzsch, in Leipzig. N’s 27th birthday, which he celebrates in Naumburg with Rohde, Gersdorff, Krug, and Pinder. He receives a polite call from U.v.Wilamowitz-Möllendorff (to Rohde, 8 June 1872). He returns to Basel on the 22nd. The composition-sketch of Götterdämmerung, Act II, is completed. N pays a surprise visit to Tribschen: the latter date established by Janz (N-Br18 169). He meets the Countesses Muchanoff and Waldbott-Bassenheim. On the evening of the 27th, W reads from his essay on Auber. W completes his ‘Erinnerungen an Auber’ (Musikal. Wochenblatt; and W-A1 IX 51–73). W completes his ‘Brief an einen italienischen Freund’: Arrigo Boïto as the translator of Lohengrin (Nordd. Allgemeine Zeitung; and W-A1 IX 341–5).

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  177 N to Krug, 13 Nov.

N reports on the recent completion of his Nachklang einer Sylvesternacht, an adaptation for piano duet of an early violin piece, which he has tried out with Overbeck: his first musical composition for more than six years.

16 Nov. N to W, 18 Nov.

N composes his Kirchengeschichtliches Responsorium for Overbeck’s birthday. N reports on the acceptance (on the 16th) of GdT by E.W.Fritzsch. Although W questioned the choice of publisher (to N, 16 Oct. 1871), his intervention has probably been decisive in enlisting Fritzsch’s co-operation. The orchestral sketch of Götterdämmerung, Act II, is completed. W invites N to Tribschen on ca. 9 Dec.

19 Nov. W to N, 26 Nov. 7 Dec. 9 Dec. 14–16 Dec. 16–22 Dec. [1871–72]

25 Dec.

W completes the ‘Epilogischer Bericht’ published by Fritzsch in the following year (W-A1 VI 365–84). W travels to Munich on the way to Mannheim. W’s second visit to Bayreuth. On the 15th, the town council authorizes the presentation of a new, projected site for the Festspielhaus (see below, s.v. 31 Jan. 1872). Cosima stays overnight in Basel, and spends the evening with N and Fritz Brockhaus. On the afternoon of the 17th, she travels to Mannheim, where W is to conduct a concert promoted by Emil Heckel on behalf of the premier WagnerVerein. According to C-Tb, she travels alone, arriving on the evening of the 17th; N arrives during the evening of the 18th, having ‘literally run away from Basel.’ This does not agree with Karl Heckel, who says that Cosima arrived at Mannheim by train in N’s company (W-Br3 83: accepted by Janz 1425). It is hard to decide which of these conflicting accounts is the correct one. Rehearsals are held on the 18th and 19th. On the morning of the 20th an orchestra of 36 players assembles for the Siegfried-Idyll. The audience is select because the Idyll is closely guarded, personal property until W, with the utmost reluctance, allows it to be published in 1881. The concert on the 20th consists of the Kaisermarsch, the overture to Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte—a bad performance N tells Fuchs on 9 Sept. 1888 (but compare Kelterborn’s recollections N-Br2 III 393)—and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, together with the prelude to Lohengrin, the overture to Die Meistersinger, and the prelude and ‘Liebestod’ from Tristan und Isolde. A banquet follows. N leaves for Basel with the King’s aide Max von Baligand, with whom he later corresponds (Glasenapp IV 384 ff). ‘What are all other artistic memories and experiences compared with this latest one!’ (to Rohde, 21 Dec. 1871; see also N to Gersdorff, 23 Dec. 1871). For Richard Pohl’s impression of the concert, see Glasenapp IV 381, n. 4. W and Cosima stay overnight in Basel on the 21st, on their return journey to Tribschen. They spend the evening with Brockhaus; but Cosima does not mention a meeting with N. N absents himself from Tribschen, and spends Christmas in Basel with influential friends: Vischer-Bilfinger (24 and 31 Dec.), Bachofen (27 Dec.), Stähelin (29 Dec.). He works on a course of lectures ‘Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten’ for the Freie Akademische Gesellschaft (see below, s.v. 16 Jan. 1872). On the anniversary of the first performance of the Siegfried-Idyll, N sends Cosima his Nachklang einer Sylvesternacht: ‘[I] am very curious as to what I shall hear about my musical work from there, for I have never heard a competent opinion’ (to Rohde, 21 Dec. 1871). The piece is courteously acknowledged by Cosima on the 30th ‘Is the Sylvester-Klänge meant for orchestra?’

178  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism

1872 N to W, 2 Jan.

N sends GdT to Tribschen as a belated Christmas and New Year gift. The book appears in the format of W’s Über die Bestimmung der Oper; a preface addressed to W has been added at the end of the preceding year. Meanwhile I feel with pride that I have now been marked out, and that now I shall always be associated with you.

17

GdT reaches Tribschen. On the same day, the composition-sketch of Götterdämmerung, Act III, is begun (not 4 Jan.). Cosima’s diary leaves no doubt of the warm welcome given to N’s book. W replies briefly ‘I have never read anything better!’; adding ‘I said to Cosima that you come next to her’ (compare W to N, Feb. 1870 and 25 June 1872). He returns to the idea of founding a periodical in Bayreuth with N as its editor. Cosima writes on the 18th ‘I have read your book like a poem.’ In due course, copies are sent to many friends, including Bülow, Liszt, and Ludwig II: ‘Each of us must see how he can best serve the great Bayreuth undertaking’ (N to Gersdorff, 10 Jan. 1872). The King’s secretary, Lorenz Düfflipp, sends a formal acknowledgement from Hohenschwangau on 7 Feb. (C-Br II, n. 116).

W to N, 10 Jan.

On learning that N is again unwell, W writes more fully about GdT, commending N’s assurance and originality: I always need it to get into the right mood between breakfast and work; for since reading your book I am once again composing my last Act. His welcome to Eine Sylvesternacht is more restrained.The letter shows that almost from the beginning, on W’s side, there has been a deeply disturbing element in the friendship. Cosima’s diary suggests that on this day W decided against setting the amended peroration to Götterdämmerung to music

16 Jan.

N delivers the first of his five lectures ‘Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten’ for the Akademische Gesellschaft before a large audience in the Aula des Museums (to E.M.Fritzsch, 22 Mar. 1872).

*20–1 Jan.

(see N-Br18 169). N pays a surprise visit to Tribschen, to the family’s delight. On the 20th, however, a performance of Eine Sylvesternacht by N and Cosima ends in disaster when W abruptly leaves the room. Richter, a witness to the incident, connected N’s apostasy with this experience (Glasenapp V 149, n.l). Cosima simply comments ‘he played us his composition very nicely.’ On the 21st, W plays Götterdämmerung, Act II, for N and Cosima.

24 Jan.

W travelling to Berlin, breaks the journey at Basel and sees Fritz Brockhaus and N. The meeting makes a deep impression on N, since after W’s departure on the same day, he writes and offers to give up his career so as to devote himself entirely to W. W replies on 5 Feb. 1872: ‘I was almost shocked at being so clearly understood by you in Basel!’ In Berlin, at N’s instigation, W is entertained by Gersdorff.

N to his family, 24 Jan.

N reports on the reception of GdT: ‘With regard to my book the whole world has gone head over heels—fortunately, in most of the cases that I hear of it is out of joy; in others out of rage.’

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  179 N to Rohde, 8 Jan.

N reaches the height of his fame at Basel. He declines the offer of a professorship at Greifswald; and also a torchlight procession proposed in his honour by the students. He recalls W’s recent visit: I have formed an alliance with Wagner. You can’t imagine how close we are now and how our plans coincide.

N to Ritschl, 30 Jan.

N acknowledges publication of the Index to the Rheinisches Museum, N.F., I–XXIV, which he has prepared with Elisabeth’s help.

31 Jan.–3 Feb.

W’s 3rd visit to Bayreuth on his return from Berlin. He purchases the land for his house, Wahnfried. He chooses the third and final site for the Festspielhaus.

6 Feb.

N delivers his second lecture ‘Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten’.

9 Feb.

The orchestral sketch of Götterdämmerung, Act III, is begun.

18–19 Feb. [1872]

N visits Tribschen (C-Tb, previously unrecorded). W plays Götterdämmerung, Act III, scene 1, on the morning of the 19th, which ‘upsets N so much that all day he cannot eat’.

27 Feb.

N delivers his third lecture ‘Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten’.

Franz Liszt to N, (N-Br2 III 466 f). A characteristic letter of appreciation on reading GdT. 29 Feb. 5 Mar.

N delivers his fourth lecture ‘Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten’.

23 Mar.

N delivers his fifth lecture ‘Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten’. Copies of the lectures are attentively read at Tribschen.

27 Mar.

Bülow, now permanently estranged from W and Cosima, calls on N in Basel, full of admiration for GdT. He proposes to dedicate a translation of Leopardi to N (to Rohde, 11 Apr. 1872).

*28 Mar.–1 Apr.

N visits Tribschen for Easter. On the evening of the 28th, he reads his fifth lecture to the family. On the afternoon of the 30th, W plays the ‘Waltraute’ scene from Götterdämmerung, Act I.

9 (not 10) Apr.

The composition-sketch of Götterdämmerung, Act III, is completed.

N to Rohde, ca. 11 Apr.

N announces a plan to spend the winter lecturing to the German Wagner Societies on the subject of Der Ring.

15 Apr.

N completes his Manfred-Meditation for piano duet.

21 Apr.

N is expected at Tribschen, but fails to arrive.

22 Apr.

W leaves Tribschen for good, taking up permanent residence in Bayreuth on the 24th. On the evening of the 21st, just before his departure, Josef Rubinstein (b. 1847) arrives unexpectedly from Kharkov with a companion, Dr. Cohen, and is kindly received. The start of W’s friendship with Rubinstein, one of the closest of his later associates.

*25–7 Apr.

Following a short holiday with his colleague Prof. Hermann Immermann and Pinder at Vernex on Lake Geneva, N pays his twenty-third visit to Tribschen. Cosima is preparing to leave. On the evening of the 26th, N improvises at the piano at Cosima’s request.

29 Apr.

Cosima, with her five children and W’s dog Rus, leave for Bayreuth, where they arrive on the 30th.

N to Fritzsch, 29 Apr.

N submits his Manfred Meditation for publication, passing it off as a composition by ‘George Chatham’: a fictitious English friend.

180  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 6–13 May

W and Cosima visit Vienna where W conducts a concert for the Wagner-Verein on the 12th. There is a tumultuous ovation.

18–23 May.

N’s first visit to Bayreuth for the laying of the foundation stone of the Festspielhaus on W’s 59th birthday. The plan of the Festspielhaus prepared by Karl Brandt and Otto Brückwald is based on Semper’s abandoned designs for a Festival Theatre in Munich (see above, s.v. 5 Mar. 1870). The family stays at the Hôtel Fantasie in Donndorf outside the town. N writes to Gersdorff on 5 Apr. 1873: I believe, though, that these were the happiest days I have had. There was something in the air that I have never experienced anywhere else, something quite inexpressible but full of hope. Ludwig II, indignant at W’s refusal to part with the score of Siegfried, contents himself with a congratulatory telegram. The Huldigungsmarsch is played in his honour. Liszt, too, is prevented by the Princess Wittgenstein from attending. Rohde, appointed to the chair of classics at Kiel in April, Gersdorff, and Krug attend the ceremony which is marred by heavy rain. There are no tickets for Elisabeth (to Elisabeth, mid-May 1872). Afterwards, N, Gersdorff, and Emil Heckel drive in W’s carriage to the Margraves’ opera house: a journey described in the opening pages of U IV (see also Karl Heckel, Nietzsche, Leipzig 1922, pp. 3 f). Here, at noon, W delivers an oration (W-A1 IX 388–93) and the ‘Wachet auf!’ chorus from Die Meistersinger, Act III, is sung. At 5 o’clock, W conducts the popular Kaisermarsch with its choral ending, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The concert is followed by a banquet. At the rehearsal on the 20th, N is introduced to Malwida von Meysenbug (b. 1816), confidante of the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini and the guardian of the daughters, Olga and Natalie, of the Russian revolutionary, Alexander Herzen. Malwida’s Mémoires d’une Idéaliste appeared in Basel and Geneva in 1869 (see N to Gersdorff, 5 Oct. 1872); the German edition was issued in Stuttgart in 1875 f. She has recently acknowledged a copy of GdT sent by Cosima. (See Elsa Binder, Malwida von Meysenbug und Friedrich Nietzsche, Berlin 1917, passim.) During this visit, N plays his Manfred Meditation. He leaves for Basel on the 23rd; Gersdorff stays on until the 25th.

26 May. End of May. [1872]

Rohde publishes a review of GdT in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (reissued in Kleine Schriften, 2 vols., Tübingen 1901, II. 340–51). ‘Not suitable for the general public’ is Cosima’s verdict. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff (b. 1848) attacks GdT in Zukunftsphilologie! eine erwidrung auf Friedrich Nietzsches ‛geburt der tragödie’, Berlin 1872. The author followed N from Pforta to Bonn, where he was incensed by what he heard of the clash between Ritschl and Jahn which led to Ritschl’s transfer to Leipzig (see U.v.Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, Erinnerungen 1848–1914, Leipzig 1928, p. 129; and Alfred Körte’s article in Die Antike, XI(1935), 211–35). The attack comes as a complete surprise: Just think, he respectfully visited me in Naumburg last autumn [see above, s.v. 15 Oct. 1871], and I myself advised him to take my forthcoming book seriously. This he has done after his own fashion. (To Rohde, 8 June 1872; see also N to Gersdorff, 10 June 1872)

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  181 1 June–27 Sept. N to Gersdorff, 10 June Mid-June. 23 June.

28–30 June.

4–7 July. N to Gersdorff, 20–1 July. 22 July.

Bülow to N, 24 July.

Elisabeth stays in Basel. N starts work on a study of early Greek philosophy (see below, s.v. 5 Apr. 1873). Romundt becomes a private tutor in philosophy at Basel University. The publication of W’s open letter to N in defence of GdT (Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung; and W-A1 IX 350–8). See esp. N’s letters to Brandes of 10 Apr. 1888 and Karl Knortz of 21 June 1888. Rohde also replies to Wilamowitz-Möllendorffs attack in Afterphilologie. Sendschreiben eines Philologen an Richard Wagner, Leipzig 1872. N, accompanied by Gersdorff, Malwida, and Malwida’s ward Olga Herzen, attends two performances of Tristan und Isolde in Munich at Bülow’s invitation: his first Tristan. W has expressed misgivings about the stage-production ‘Only: spectacles off!—You must hear nothing but the orchestra’ (to N, 25 June 1872). N meets the conductor Hugo von Senger (b. 1835), with whom he discusses the idea of an opera based on Flaubert’s Salammbô. On his return journey to Berlin, Gersdorff visits Bayreuth, where W plays extracts from Götterdämmerung on the 6th. N suggests a return visit to Munich in Aug. to hear Lohengrin, Der fliegende Holländer, and Tristan und Isolde. Gersdorff falls ill, and at the last minute the plan is cancelled (Gersdorff to N, 23 July 1872: G-Br II 34; N to W, 25 July 1872: N-Br16 177; N to Malwida, 2 Aug. 1872). The orchestral sketch of Götterdämmerung, Act III, is completed at the Hotel Fantaisie. In a marginal note, W mentions the omission of part of the peroration in deference to Cosima (C.v.Westernhagen, Die Entstehung des ‘Ring’, Zürich 1973, p. 277).

(N-Br1 III 349 ff). N’s Manfred Meditation elicits scathing condemnation from Bülow to whom N has sent it for criticism. N writes to Krug in a deeply despondent strain in a letter pre-dated 24 July: ‘I am now no more a musician than is domestically necessary for me as a philosopher.’ He does not reply to Bülow until 29 Oct., after receiving encouragement from Liszt and W (see below, s.v. N to W, 15 Oct. 1872). Late July. N’s first meeting with Deussen in seven years (at Basel). N sends the completion of his article ‘Der Florentinische Tractat über Homer N to Ritschl, und Hesiod’ for publication in the Rheinisches Museum (see below, s.v. Feb. 12 Aug 1873). 25 Aug. Ludwig II’s 27th birthday. W sends a copy of the sketch of Götterdämmerung, Act III. 31 Aug. Malwida visits Basel for a few days with Olga Herzen and her fiancé, Professor Gabriel Monod. 2–6 Sept. W and Cosima visit Liszt (b. 1811) in Weimar to conclude a difficult peace: the first meeting in nearly five years. 3–10 Sept. N’s mother stays in Basel, and joins N, Malwida, Olga Herzen, and Gabriel Monod for an excursion to the Rigi. 17 Sept. W completes Über Schauspieler und Sänger, Leipzig 1872 (W-A1 IX 189–274). ‘It opens up an entirely new field of aesthetics. And what a fruitful turn it gives to some of the ideas in The Birth of Tragedy’, N writes to Rohde on 25 Oct. 1872, on receiving a presentation copy. 21 Sept.–28 Apr. The Wagners take up residence at Dammallée 7 in Bayreuth. 1874.

182  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 28 Sept. 15–21 Oct. N to W, 15 Oct.

26 Oct. [1872]

31 Oct. W to Heinrich Porges, 2 Nov.

With Elisabeth’s departure from Basel, N leaves for Wesen, Chur, and Bad Passugg. From Splügen on 5 Oct., he makes his first visit to Italy, but abandons the journey at Bergamo and returns on the 8th (to Elisabeth, mid-Oct. 1872). Liszt’s first visit to Bayreuth just before his 61st birthday. (N-Br16 179 f). N’s 28th birthday in Basel with Deussen, Overbeck, and Romundt, who now resides at Schützengraben 45. He tells W of his renewed study of the vocal score of Siegfried, Act III. W replies at length on the 24th, relating that during his recent visit to Bayreuth, Liszt inspected N’s Silvesterklänge. N reports to Rohde on the 27th: The general bewilderment among the musical Masters about me as a composer is highly original and almost amusing. You already know Bülow’s letter. Now Liszt comes along! and judges Bülow’s verdict to be ‘very despairing’. Cosima mentions W’s latest article ‘Über die Benennung “Musikdrama”’ (Mus. Woch., and W-A1 IX 359–65). Precedence is given to music among the elements of W’s synthetic art form

Reformation Day. Cosima is received into the Protestant Church. W invites Porges (b. 1837), the Jewish journalist, to attend the rehearsals of Der Ring in Bayreuth, and to write down his verbal remarks with a view to establishing a ‘tradition’ of interpretation. Porges’s detailed and devoted study Die Bühnenproben zu den Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876, Leipzig 1896, is an indispensable reference work. 9 Nov. W works on his ‘Brief über das Schauspielerwesen an einen Schauspieler’ (Almanach der deutschen Bühnengenossenschaft, and W-A1 IX 307–13). 10 Nov.–15 Dec. W and Cosima visit leading opera-houses to recruit personnel and to raise funds for the Bayreuth Festival: Würzburg, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Straßburg, Karlsruhe, Wiesbaden, Mainz, Köln, Düsseldorf, Hannover, Bremen, Magdeburg, Dessau, and Leipzig. 22–4 Nov. N stays with W and Cosima at the Hôtel Ville de Paris in Straßburg (letter home, 9 Dec. 1872; Glasenapp V 40 ff). Cosima notes that he looks robust and well, and is cheerful and in good heart in spite of his recent experiences. Yet the controversy over GdT has taken its toll, and during the winter Term, N has delivered only one course of lectures to two non-classicists (to W, mid-Nov. 1872; to Rohde, 4 Jan. 1873). Rohde, too, Cosima notes, is completely outlawed and without prospects. David Strauß is discussed; and N tells Cosima of the scandalous attack on W by Theodor Puschmann (see below, s.v. 17 Jan. 1873). Cosima writes from Cologne while W undergoes the torment of yet another Cosima to N, official banquet in the room below. 4 Dec. 22 Dec.–4 Jan. N returns to Naumburg for Christmas. On the 26th, he hears Lohengrin for the 1873. first time under Liszt in Weimar (to Rohde, 4 Jan. 1873). The reference to the work in GdT § 22 may have been prompted by W’s rendering of the prelude at Mannheim (to Senger, 25 July 1872). Some comments on the work from Rohde’s letter of 22 Apr. 1871 are acknowledged by Cosima on 12 May 1871. On the 27th and 28th he calls on Ritschl in Leipzig and authorizes Fritzsch to prepare a second edition of GdT (issued by Schmeitzner in 1878). While visiting Fritzsch he meets Carl Fuchs (b. 1838), an organist and essayist from Danzig with whom he later corresponds. N declines a pressing invitation to visit Bayreuth on the return journey, but sends Cosima the beautifully written MS., Fünf Vorreden zu fünf ungeschriebenen (und nicht zu schreibenden) Büchern (facsimile edition, Berlin 1943). Cosima

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  183 receives the MS. on 1 Jan., and acknowledges it on 23 Jan. and 12 Feb. 1873: W has taken offence both at N’s absence and at the way in which he has conveyed his intentions. This then mars appreciation of his MS. as Cosima’s diary shows: ‘Now and then there are signs of an awkward abruptness, however profound the underlying feelings. We wish he would confine himself chiefly to classical themes.

1873 12 Jan.–8 Feb.

17 Jan.

17–20 Jan. Cosima to N, 12 Feb. 14 Feb. 21 Feb. [1873] [1873]

N to Rohde, 21 Feb. Late Feb. N to Gersdorff, 2 Mar.

Mar. 4 and 11 Apr.

W and Cosima continue their tour of the main German opera-houses. On the 13th, in Dresden, there is a reunion with the Wesendoncks, and a performance of Rienzi. On the 15th, W proceeds to Berlin where, on the 17th, he reads the text of Götterdämmerung at Marie von Schleinitz’s before a distinguished gathering. On the 18th, he reaches Hamburg where he conducts two concerts on 21 and 23 Jan. There is a brief meeting with Rohde who, on 26 Jan., reports on Cosima’s appreciative comments on the Fünf Vorreden (see N’s reply of 31 Jan. 1873). W’s benefit concert in Berlin on 4 Feb. is attended by Wilhelm I and the Empress. N’s open letter, ‘Ein Neujahrswort an den Herausgeber der Wochenschrift “Im neuen Reich”’ appears in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt in reply to attacks on W by Alfred Dove and Theodor Puschmann (Richard Wagner, eine psychiatrische Studie, Berlin 1872). The same issue contains W’s ‘Ein Einblick in das heutige deutsche Opernwesen’ (W-A1 IX 314–40). Gersdorff again stays in Basel with N whose health is critical. Cosima calls N’s attention to David Strauß’s Der alte und der neue Glaube, Leipzig 1872, discussed with the Wesendoncks in Dresden on the 7th. N is appointed by the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein to judge an essay competition on the subject of Der Ring. Associate judges are Karl Simrock and Moritz Heyne (see below, s.v. Jan. 1874). The second instalment of Wilamowitz-Möllendorff’s Zukunftsphilologie! appears in Berlin. The controversy has subsided. In his Erinnerungen 1848– 1914, Leipzig 1928, p. 130, Wilamowitz-Möllendorff says that his book should not have been published; but although he did not re-publish either pamphlet, and Andler (I 439 ff) concluded that he had thought better of the affair, his account of the contretemps shows that he remained intransigent in his opposition to N. N completes Une Monodie à deux for piano duet to mark the marriage of Olga Herzen to the historian Gabriel Monod on 6 Mar. The second instalment of N’s article ‘Der Florentinische Tractat über Homer und Hesiod’ appears in the Rheinisches Museum, XXVIII(1873), 211–49: his last scholarly publication. N flees from the Shrove Tuesday carnival to the Vierwaldstättersee (Gersau). He notes the publication of W’s ‘Über Staat und Religion’ of 1864 in W-A1 VIII 5–37, calling it one of the deepest of W’s literary productions and ‘edifying’ in the noblest sense (see above, s.v. 31 July–1 Aug. 1869). He adds God knows how often I give the Master offence: each time I start to wonder about it again, and can’t really get to the bottom of what is actually the matter. N borrows a large number of scientific works from the Basel University Library (N-Chronik 44 f). W’s ‘Zum Vortrag der neunten Symphonie Beethoven’s’ appears in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt (W-A1 IX 275–304).

184  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 5 Apr. 6–12 Apr.

W to Elisabeth, 8 Apr. (W-Br3 150). N to W, 18 Apr. 20–9 Apr.

24 Apr. W to N, 30 Apr.

2 (not 3) May. N to Rohde, 5 May. 17 May. 22 May. [1873]

N completes a fair copy of Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen: the first instalment of an unfinished study of the pre-Platonic philosophers. See above, s.v. N to Gersdorff, 10 June 1872. He leaves for Bayreuth on the same day. N’s second visit to Bayreuth (Dammallée 7) with Rohde from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. On the 5th, N tells Gersdorff that he hopes that his visit will make up for his absence at Christmas (see above, s.v. 22 Dec. 1872–4 Jan. 1873). On the 6th, there is a visit to Wahnfried, now nearing completion; and in the evening W reads his latest essay (on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony?). On the evenings of the 7th, 8th, and 11th, N reads the sketches for his book on the pre-Platonic Greek philosophers: Elisabeth’s claim that W is disappointed with this work is not corroborated by Cosima’s diary. On the 9th, W plays the end of Götterdämmerung. At some stage—possibly on the 11th—N and W play Une Monodie à deux. W caustically remarks that N has ushered the unfortunate Monods into the presence of the Pope (see Köselitz’s note to N’s letter to Rohde of 5 May 1873: N-Br1 II 606). Cosima does not mention theincident; but N’s abject letter to W of 18 Apr. 1873 suggests that something went seriously wrong on this occasion. Rohde is impressed by W, as can be seen from his letter to Professor Ribbeck of 29 Apr. 1873 (Otto Crusius, Erwin Rohde, Tübingen 1902, p. 64). On Elisabeth’s initiative, N has become a Patron of the Bayreuth Festival. W now responds by gallantly presenting Elisabeth with a Patron’s Certificate. N prepares to write his attack on David Strauß: ‘A choice selection of his stylistic enormities should show once and for all what this ostensible “classic” really is.’ W and Cosima leave for Cologne where W conducts a concert on the 24th. On the way back they visit Eisleben where W spent his 8th year at the home of his step-uncle, Carl Geyer. There is a reunion with Liszt in Leipzig on the 28th. They return to Bayreuth on the 29th. Undeterred by W’s response to the Monodie, N drafts a tentative sketch for his Hymnus an/auf die Freundschaft: his last and most ambitious musical composition. After calling on Fritzsch, his publisher in Leipzig, W reports that Fritzsch has agreed to accept Overbeck’s Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie (see N to W, ca. 26 Apr. 1873: N-Br16 182). He says that he cannot wait to read N’s impending essay on Strauß ‘So: let’s have it!—’ The score of Götterdämmerung, Act I, is begun. In Basel, N is introduced to Dr. Paul Rée (b. 1849) by Romundt. During the summer Term, Rée and Gersdorff attend N’s lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers. Hans von Wolzogen (b. 1848), son of the director of the Court Theatre at Schwerin, introduces himself to W by way of one of his recent writings. W’s 60th birthday is marked by a concert at the Margraves’ opera house in Bayreuth, which includes W’s Concert Overture of 1831, Geyer’s comedy Der Bethlehemitische Kindermord, W’s arrangement for violin and orchestra of ‘Träume’ from the Wesendonck-Lieder, and his early cantata Beim Antritt des neuen Jahres. N is absent, but sends his customary birthday letter (Westernhagen 501 f: recently discovered). Cosima gives W Alexandre Langlois’s translation of the Rig-Veda; W treats himself to translations of a number of other oriental classics.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  185 N celebrates the occasion in Basel with Overbeck, Rohde, Gersdorff, and Romundt by a performance of piano-duet arrangements of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and W’s Kaisermarsch: a recollection of the foundation-stone ceremony at Bayreuth when both these works were performed (see above, s.v. 18–23 May 1872). 29 May. W and Cosima attend the first performance of Liszt’s Christus in Weimar, which arouses mixed feelings. June. W publishes Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth, dedicated to Marie von Schleinitz (W-A1 IX 384–408). He sends a copy to Bismarck on the 24th. Schott publishes the score of Das Rheingold. 5 June–21 Oct. Elisabeth stays in Basel with N, who has to memorize his lectures for fear of eye-strain. Gersdorff is also with N until Sept., and helps to prepare the MS. of U I on Strauß, which is published by Fritzsch on 8 Aug. N dictates to Gersdorff his essay ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne’. Mid-July–mid N visits Flims, Graubünden, with Gersdorff, who acts as his amanuensis. Aug. Together they study the text of Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Gersdorff to Elisabeth, 18 July 1873: G-Br IV 111 ff). N receives an advance copy of U I (to Rohde, 9 Aug. 1873). Romundt arrives at Flims on 21 July and stays until 10 Aug. Elisabeth arrives on 14 Aug., and returns with N to Basel on the 26th. 2 Aug. The topmost beam in the Festspielhaus is set in place. Liszt attends the ceremony. 8 Aug. W receives U I, but does not acknowledge it until 21 Sept., q.v. On 20 Aug., Cosima notes that it makes a disturbing impression. 25 Aug. Ludwig II’s 28th birthday. W gives the King a set of the recently completed nine volumes of W-A1 with an inscription in verse (W-A1 233 f; and W-Br8 III 22 f). 13–14 Sept. Anton Bruckner (b. 1824) visits Bayreuth, and persuades W to accept the dedication of his third symphony (see C-Tb, s.v. 8 Feb. 1875). He returns for the Bayreuth Festivals in 1876 and 1882. N to W, 18 Sept. N reports on the extraordinary effect of his essay on Strauß: ‘a wildly hostile (N-Br16 185; and press literature has come out against me, but everyone has read it.’ N-Br3 II 3 156 ff). W acknowledges U I: ‘I swear before God that I regard you as the only person who knows what I am aiming at!’ (quoted in N’s letter to Gersdorff of 27 Sept. W to N, 1873). This is surprising in view of N’s harsh comments on the recent war. 21 Sept. Strauß’s reaction is conveyed to Rapp on 19 Dec. 1873 (Ausgewählte Briefe von David Strauß, ed. Eduard Zeller, Bonn 1895, p. 570). W arranges for N to write a manifesto in an effort to raise funds for the Festival. W to Emil Heckel, 23 Sept. Ludwig II, building Neuschwanstein, has meanwhile declined a request for financial assistance. The idea of the manifesto may have originated with N, who on 18 Oct. 1873 told Rohde that he had already proposed something similar. 28 Sept. Early Oct. 15 Oct. 25 Oct. N to Gersdorff, 27 Oct.

In her diary, Cosima expresses indignation with W’s sister Ottilie Brockhaus for condoning the official censure of GdT. Her remarks suggest a deep concern at the plight of W’s ‘most loyal supporter’. Rohde visits N in Basel. N’s 29th birthday in Basel. Elisabeth leaves on the 21st. N begins U II. U I is denounced in an article in Die Grenzboten, ‘Herr Friedrich Nietzsche und die deutsche Kultur’.

186  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 30 Oct.–2 Nov.

4–12 Dec. 12 Dec. 20 Dec.–4 Jan. 1874 24 Dec.

N’s third visit to Bayreuth for the Patrons’ meeting which he describes to Gersdorff on 7 Nov. 1873. He ruins a new hat inspecting the site of the Festspielhaus with the delegates in the pouring rain; and his boldly worded appeal, ‘Mahnruf an die Deutschen’, already set up in print by Bonfantini, is rejected. On 1 Nov. Professor Adolf Stern of Dresden takes over the assignment. 4000 copies of Stern’s temperate Bericht und Aufruf are distributed, almost without effect. Both pamphlets are sent to Ludwig II on 6 Nov. On 2 Nov., as if to make up for this setback, W gives N the nine Sibylline Books with an amusing inscription in doggerel verse. The last volume contains a reprint of his open letter to N of 23 June 1872. Malwida von Meysenbug, residing in Bayreuth since Aug., recalls N’s frequent piano extemporizations, which prompt W to remark ‘No, Nietzsche, you play too well for a professor!’ (Meysenbug 207 f). Gersdorff visits Basel on his return from Italy. He helps N with the first part of the MS. of U II. The Order of Maximilian is conferred on W. The news that Brahms has simultaneously been elected to the Order causes some annoyance (C-Tb, s.v. 31 Dec. 1873). N in poor health returns to Naumburg for Christmas. On the 30th, he again visits Ritschl (who lets loose a barrage of criticism) and Fritzsch in Leipzig. There is a second meeting with Carl Fuchs (see above, s.v. 22 Dec. 1872). He completes U II on 1 Jan. (to Gersdorff, 18 Jan. 1874); and returns to Basel on 4 Jan. 1874. The score of Götterdämmerung, Act I, is completed on the eve of Cosima’s birthday.

1874 4 Jan.

Overbeck’s first visit to Bayreuth with gloomy news of N’s health.

Ludwig II to W, 24 Jan. [1874]

After many unsuccessful entreaties, W persuades the King to rescue the endangered Bayreuth Festival with a loan of 100.000 thalers: ‘No! No, and again No! It shall not end like this!’ The essay competition is won by Ernst Koch’s Richard Wagner’s Bühnenfestspiel ‛Der Ring des Nibelungen’ in seinem Verhältnis zur alten Sage wie zur modernen Nibelungendichtung betrachtet (Leipzig 1874). See above, s.v. 14 Feb. 1873. A second edition of GdT is printed. Publication is delayed until 1878. The death of David Strauß(N to Gersdorff, 11 Feb. 1874). W acknowledges U II which he has received on the 22nd: ‘You surely don’t expect praise from me! It would be a fine thing indeed for me to presume to praise your wit and your fire!’ He invites N to stay at Wahnfried, nearing completion, in May. Bruno Mayer publishes his ‘Beiträge zur Wagner-Frage’, Deutsche Warte, V(1874), 641–73—a reply to Johannes Dräseke, ‘Beiträge zur Wagner-Frage’, Musikalisches Wochenblatt, IV(1873), 438 ff, 453 ff, 470 ff. He denounces N as ‘enemy of our culture’ (N to Rohde, 19 Mar. 1874). Dräseke replies in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt, V(1874), 403 ff, 418 ff, 438 ff. The same journal publishes Richard Falckenberg’s ‘Nietzsche und Schletterer’ and Carl Fuchs’s ‘Gedanken aus und zu Grillparzer’s ästhetischen Studien’, both of which refer more favourably to N. U II earns an eloquent and touching welcome. Some of W’s critical comments are recorded in C-Tb on 9 Apr., where the essay is said to be derivative, repetitious, and formless, but the work of a very significant person.

Jan. Feb. 8 Feb. W to N, 27 Feb.

Mar.

Cosima to N, 20 Mar.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  187 28 Mar.

5 Apr.

N’s first visit to Mme Marie Baumgartner-Koechlin (b. 1831) in Lörrach: the mother of Adolf Baumgartner (b. 1855), his pupil, later professor of history at Basel, who during this period has been acting as his amanuensis. This leads to one of the most rewarding of his Basel friendships: see below, s.v. 26 Sept. 1874; 22 Dec. 1874; 14 Mar. 1875; Dec. 1876; 26 July 1878; and 26 Oct. 1878. N completes a revised version of his Hymnus an/auf die Freundschaft for piano duet. Hegar writes about the Manfred Meditation.

Hegar to N, 9 Apr. (note to N’s letter to Hegar of early Apr. 1874: N-Br2 IV 383). 25 Apr.–6 July. Elisabeth stays in Basel. During a visit to Schaffhausen at Whitsuntide, N begins U III. 28 Apr. 22 May.

The Wagner family takes up residence at Wahnfried. W’s 61st birthday at Wahnfried. N’s birthday letter is published in N-Br16 187 ff. Gersdorff stays with the family until the 25th; and on the 29th he tells N of W’s intense concern over N’s marriage prospects (G-Br II 87 f). N replies on 1 June: ‘It is sheer heaven to think of you and the Bayreuthers sitting together on a marriage-guidance council!’ The names of possible candidates are put forward in the course of the year. 9 June. Brahms conducts his Triumphlied, Op. 55, in the Münster at Basel at the last of three concerts marking the 50th anniversary of the local choral society. Kelterborn, while noting that N at this time held no strong views for or against Brahms’s music, mentions his interest in the opening section of this work. The text—Rev. 19:1 f—may have suggested the almost identical quotation from Rev. 7:12 in Z IV-‘Die Erweckung’. See below, s.v. 12 July 1874 and 4–15 Aug. 1874. 26 June. The score of Götterdämmerung, Act II, is completed. 10 July. The score of Götterdämmerung, Act III, is begun. 12 July. N attends a music festival in Zürich and hears Brahms’s Triumphlied and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under Hegar. 18 July–2 Aug. N’s summer holiday with Romundt at Graubünden. 4–15 Aug. [1874] N’s calamitous, penultimate (fourth) visit to Bayreuth. He stays at the ‘Sonne’, but is unwell, and is taken by W to Wahnfried on the 5th. Karl Klindworth (b. 1830) is staying with the family, and at some stage goes over his new vocal score of Götterdämmerung, Acts I and II (N to Krug, 31 Oct. 1874). On the evening of the 6th, W goes over the Rhinemaidens’ scene from Act III. N produces Brahms’s Triumphlied to W’s apparent amusement. On the 8th, however, the work occasions a furious outburst. Elisabeth notes that W found the examination of new music extremely distasteful (W-Br3 221 f); but in view of W’s consistently adverse response to N’s musical activities since 20 Jan. 1872, N’s advocacy of this work is hard to distinguish from deliberate provocation. The rest of N’s stay at Wahnfried is not recorded in Cosima’s diary. A letter from Cosima to Felix Mottl of ca. Oct.-Nov. 1887 states that the ‘breach’ between N and W was occasioned by W’s response to N’s Hymnus an/auf die Freundschaft, composed and frequently revised between Apr. 1873

188  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism and Nov. 1875. It is unlikely that N produced the work during the last visit to Bayreuth for the Festival in 1876, and there is no mention of it in Cosima’s diary or letters. It is not inconceivable that he could have taken it to Wahnfried together with the Triumphlied in Aug. 1874 (see my article ‘The “Triumphlied” Episode’, N-Studien, II(1973), 196–201). N leaves Bayreuth on the 15th, ‘having caused W many difficult hours.’ On the same day, Overbeck arrives from Dresden; he reports that N has been virtually excommunicated by the University. During N’s return journey to Basel, an inscribed copy of Der Ring and a volume of Emerson, are stolen at the railway-station at Würzburg (to Gersdorff, 24 Sept. 1874; to Elisabeth, 26 Jan. 1875). N does not revisit Bayreuth for almost two years. At about this time a good many palpably anti-Wagnerian observations appear in N’s notes. 19 Aug.

N sends the first instalment of U III to Schmeitzner, his new publisher; the rest follows on 9 Sept.

Sept.

The score of Die Walküre is published.

Mid-Sept.

Rohde stays in Basel for two weeks. N falls under the spell of Paul Rée (see above, s.v. N to Rohde, 5 May 1873).

26 Sept.–6 Oct.

N stays with Romundt and his pupil Adolf Baumgartner for three days at Rigi. On the 29th, he takes a cure at Lucerne and revisits Tribschen before returning to Basel (dates established N-Br18 158).

7 Oct.

N starts to write the unfinished Wir Philologen, meant as a further instalment of the UB.

15 Oct.

N’s 30th birthday. U III is published.

16–23 Oct.

Gersdorff visits Basel.

ca. mid-Oct.

U III on Schopenhauer reaches Wahnfried, and is very well received. W acknowledges the book by telegram. Cosima, who reads it on her return from Dresden on the 23rd, sends a long, perceptive letter on the 26th.

N to Rohde, 15 Nov.

N hears Berlioz’s Carnaval Romain overture at a subscription concert in Basel.

21 Nov.

W completes the score of Der Ring. N mentions the event in letters to Rohde (21 Dec. 1874) and Gersdorff (24 Dec. 1874); but the surviving correspondence with Bayreuth does not refer to it. Perhaps it was mentioned in Cosima’s letter to Gersdorff which Gersdorff sent to N on 3 Dec. 1874: ‘Yesterday a letter came from Bayreuth’ (G-Br III 79, n. 13).

22 Dec.–2 Jan. 1875

After a short visit to Mme Marie Baumgartner in Lörrach, N returns to Naumburg for Christmas. He sorts his musical MSS. (to Rohde, 21 Dec. 1874), and produces a new version of his Hymnus an/auf die Freundschaft for piano solo.

W to N, 26 Dec.

With genuine dismay, W reprimands N for declining his invitation to the rehearsals of Der Ring in the following year. The plan was for you to spend your entire summer vacations here with us… We could be of great help to you. Why do you scorn our assistance on every occasion? Gersdorff and the others always enjoy being here.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  189 Elisabeth conjectures that W is replying to a lost Christmas letter to Cosima (W-Br3 213). If so, it must have conflicted with the letter of 21 Dec. 1874 in which N encouraged Fuchs to attend the rehearsals: ‘I mean, one must be there, otherwise there is no longer a “must”.’ On Christmas Day at Wahnfried there is a performance of W’s charming Kinderkatechismus in praise of the name ‘Cosima’.

1875 N to Malwida, 2 Jan. Early Jan.

N outlines the programme of his newly revised Hymnus an die Freundschaft.

15 Apr. [1875]

W and Cosima arrive in Berlin where W conducts two concerts on the 24th and 25th. At both concerts Siegfried’s Funeral March has to be repeated. They leave for Bayreuth on the 26th, arriving on the 27th. N describes with dismay Romundt’s departure from Basel on 10 Apr. following his conversion to Roman Catholicism (see N to Rohde, 28 Feb. 1875: and Bernoulli I 107). N stays in Bern (N-Br18 159). N reports with evident delight on his study of the vocal score of Götterdämmerung, published on 1 May. N remarks on a review of U I and III in the Jan.–Apr. issue of The Westminster Review. The text (non-committal) is available in N-Br2 IV 425 ff. He also mentions appreciative comments by Karl Hillebrand in Zeiten, Völker und Menschen, 2 vols., Berlin 1874 f, II. 291–310. Hillebrand (b. 1829) is a friend of the Marchesa Emma Guerrieri-Gonzaga with whom he has corresponded; and the husband of Jessie Laussot, one of W’s more celebrated female acquaintances. Until his death in 1884, he is one of N’s loyal friends. See Eh-U § 2. Elisabeth comes to Basel.

After his return to Basel on 4 Jan., N goes ahead with Wir Philologen, part of which he dictates to Gersdorff. Deussen is persuaded to devote himself to the study of Indian thought: a personal Deussen to N, 17 Jan (N-Br2 IV triumph for N. 407 f). N to Rohde, N mentions a new composition, Hymnus auf die Einsamkeit (see also N to Rohde, 5 Feb. 28 Aug. 1877). The work does not survive in MS. 14–15 Feb. N spends two days in Lucerne (N-Br18 159). 15 Feb.–25 Mar. With N’s consent, Elisabeth resides for about six weeks at Wahnfried, where she supervises the household while W and Cosima are away in Vienna and Budapest, 20 Feb.–16 Mar. 1 Mar. W’s first concert in Vienna. This includes the Norns’ scene without voice parts. He gets an unprecedented ovation. 6–28 Mar. Gersdorff spends three weeks with N in Basel. 10 Mar. W, Liszt, and Richter appear as conductors at a concert in Budapest which includes the first performance of Liszt’s Die Glocken von Straußburg and extracts from Der Ring. This is the first occasion on which W and Liszt have appeared together on the concert platform since Nov. 1856. 14 Mar. Marie Baumgartner’s French translation of U III is submitted to Schmeitzner for publication. See below, s.v. Late Dec. 1876. W to Bonfantini, W expresses satisfaction at the completion of the third instalment of Mein 4 Apr. Leben.

N to Gersdorff, 17 Apr. 27 Apr.–4 May. N to Elisabeth, 5 May. N to Gersdorff, 8 May.

13 May.

190  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 14–17 May. 15 May.

N and Elisabeth visit Baden-Baden. Cosima’s diary describes W’s pleasure on receiving a letter on Götterdämmerung (now lost) from N. 22 May. W’s 62nd birthday. A copy of N’s birthday letter, dictated to Elisabeth, is sent from Wahnfried to Ludwig II (W-Br8 IV 214). W to Gersdorff, W speaks of the destructive effect of many of his relationships, but makes an exception in N’s case ‘for I really could not imagine that he would have been 31 May happier if he had never met me.’ (W-Br3 226f). 3 June. Georges Bizet dies in Bougival three months after the ill-starred première of Carmen at the Opéra-Comique (see below, s.v. 30 Oct.–17 Nov. 1875; 4 Jan.–26 May 1880; and Oct. 1881–29 Mar. 1882). 27 June–23 July. Richter rehearses the singers for Der Ring in Bayreuth. With the further decline 1 July 1875–22 in his health, N sets up house with Elisabeth at Spalentorweg 48 in Basel. There July 1876. is a good deal of music-making; and Elisabeth recalls We sang together scenes from Götterdämmerung, published in vocal score in the New Year, which my brother had described to me in a letter as heaven on earth (the scene between Siegfried and the Rhinemaidens went especially well). (DjN 382 f) N reports on his introduction to Dr. Bernhard Förster from Berlin: Elisabeth’s N to Overbeck, husband to be (see below, s.v. Elisabeth to Köselitz, 7 Jan. 1883). 14 July. 16 July–12 Aug.

N undergoes a cure at Steinabad in the Black Forest as a patient of Dr. Josef Wiel. He remarks to Malwida on 11 Aug. 1875: People like us never suffer purely physically, but everything is deeply bound up with spiritual crises, so that I really have no idea whether medicine and diet alone can ever make me well again. 1–13 Aug. The preliminary rehearsals for Der Ring in Bayreuth under Richter. Gersdorff, Overbeck, and Rohde attend in N’s absence at Steinabad: ‘I am there in spirit for more than three-quarters of the day, and roam about Bayreuth like a ghost’(to Rohde, 1 Aug. 1875). The correspondence tells us how N deplored his inability to attend, how eagerly he awaited news, and how his sense of deprivation increased with each letter he received. W sees more of Hans von Wolzogen (Glasenapp V 206). See above, s.v. 17 May 1873. 31 Aug.–7Sept. On his return from Bayreuth, Rohde stays with N in Basel, leaving on the 7th to hear Tristan und Isolde in Munich. He conveys his impressions to N on 9 Sept. 1875 (G-Br III, n. 139). N says that U IV on W, now almost finished, will not be published. Köselitz, who N to Rohde, salvaged the MS. and persuaded N to complete it, says that it was thought too 7 Oct. personal (‘Vorwort’, N-Br1 IV xxiii f). The letter to Rohde suggests that N had set his heart against further compromise with W long before the Festival. For Elisabeth’s unreliable account, see Newman IV 495 ff. 12–21 Oct. Gersdorff stays in Basel. 15 Oct. N’s 31st birthday. He is visited by Malwida von Meysenbug. N to Rée, 22 Oct. In his first letter to Rée, N acknowledges the anonymous Psychologische Beobachtungen. Aus dem Nachlass von , Berlin 1875. ‘He is a “moralist” of the most acute perception’ (to Rohde, 8 Dec. 1875). 30 Oct.–17 Dec. W is six weeks in Vienna where he supervises performances of Lohengrin and Tannhäuser under Richter. He creates the third version of the Tannhäuser Overture. He hears Verdi’s Requiem, and works by Goldmark, Gounod, and

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  191 Meyerbeer. On 3 Nov. he attends Bizet’s Carmen, given with Guiraud’s recitatives. This is the first production of Bizet’s opera since its Paris première. Cosima speaks of ‘the blatant modern French style.’ W is approached by a student from the Vienna Conservatoire, Hugo Wolf, aged fifteen. N mentions two young musicians, Heinrich Köselitz from Annaberg (b. 1854) N to Gersdorff 6 Nov.; to Rohde, and his friend Paul Heinrich Widemann from Chemnitz, who have enrolled at 8 Dec. [1875–76] Basel University so as to attend his lectures. The start of the association with Köselitz. (See F.R.Love, ‘Prelude to a Desperate Friendship’, N-Studien, I(1972), 261–85.) ca. 16 Nov. N to Gersdorff, 13 Dec.

N gives Overbeck a copy of his Hymnus auf die Freundschaft for his birthday (Basel University Library). In poor health and deep depression, the author of GdT speaks of the worthlessness of life: ‘The constant joy of having found in Schopenhauer and Wagner educators and in the Greeks the daily objects of my study…this is what I now live for.’

1876 Jan. N to Gersdorff, 18 Jan. 4 Feb. 18 Feb.–30 Mar. 1–24 Mar.

6 Mar.–12 Apr.

The score of Siegfried is published. At the beginning of the month N obtains sick-leave from the Pädagogium for the rest of the Term. He doubts that he will be able to attend the Bayreuth Festival. W and Cosima read Helen Zimmern’s book on Schopenhauer approvingly. N’s mother stays in Basel—with Elisabeth after N’s departure for Veytaux on 6 Mar. W and Cosima travel to Vienna on 1 Mar; next day, for the benefit of the chorus, and for the first and only time, W conducts a performance of Lohengrin (see above, s.v. 30 Oct. 1875). On the 4th, they reach Berlin where W rehearses Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Karl Eckert on the 20th: the first Berlin performance. In the interval, W is received by Wilhelm I and the Empress. The visit is marred by the news of the death of Cosima’s mother, the Countess Marie d’Agoult, on the 5th. Having discontinued his lectures at Basel University in mid-Feb., N travels with Gersdorff to Veytaux on the lake of Geneva. Here he reads Malwida von Meysenbug’s memoirs. Gersdorff leaves for Vienna on the 29th. On 6 Apr., N proceeds to Geneva, where he visits Voltaire’s house at Ferney and hears the overture to Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini conducted by Senger (see above s.v. 28–30 June 1872). Senger introduces him to the sisters Trampedach. On 11 Apr. the day before his return to Basel, he proposes marriage by letter to the elder sister, Mathilde (b. 1853): his only proposal of marriage. Mathilde Trampedach, whose reminiscences are published by Gottfried Bohnenblust, ‘Nietzsches Genferliebe’, Annalen, II(1928), 1–14, eventually becomes Senger’s third wife. When describing this visit to Geneva to Gersdorff on 15 Apr. 1876, N mentions the discovery ‘that I am going to be a great pianist. His physical health and morale are much improved.

In Berlin, W completes the score of the Großer Festmarsch, commissioned to mark the centenary of the American Declaration of Independence. Malwida suggests that she, N, and one of N’s pupils, Albert Brenner (b. Malwida von Meysen-bug to N, 1856), should spend a year in Italy. Brenner’s health is already critical. On N’s recommendation, he has stayed with Malwida in Rome before proceeding to 30 Apr. Sicily at the end of 1875 (to Rohde, 8 Dec. 1875).

17 Mar.

192  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 22 May.

Rée to N, 30 May. June. 2 June. 3 June. 17–18 June. 18 June. June–Aug. 4 July. W to N, 12 July.

22 July–27 Aug. [1876]

W’s 63rd birthday. N writes: It is almost exactly seven years since I first visited you in Tribschen, and I know of nothing more to say to you on your birthday than this: since that time, I have celebrated my spiritual birthday, too, annually in May. W replies at some length on the 23rd, and mentions his impending visit to Italy. Rée has made the acquaintance of Heinrich von Stein (b. 1857). The score of Götterdämmerung is published. N obtains a year’s leave from Basel. The rehearsals commence for the Bayreuth Festival. During a stay at Badenweiler, N completes U IV on W. The opening sections were remitted to the printer on 30 May. August Röckel (b. 1814), the friend of W’s Dresden period, dies in Budapest. N works intermittently on a projected U V, Die Pflugschar—eventually MA— with Köselitz. The Centenary of the American Declaration of Independence. W acknowledges U IV, published on the 10th: ‘How did you get to know me so well?’ Only the draft of N’s covering letter to W survives; his covering letter to Cosima has recently come to light (N-Br15 598). Cosima replies by telegram on the 11th, having stayed up half the night to read the book (Glasenapp V 264 f). A copy sent to Ludwig II is acknowledged by telegram from Hohenschwangau on the 21st. In MA II, ‘Vorrede’, § 1, N speaks of his ceremonial oration in honour of W as an act of homage to the past; in the preface to MA II he quotes the sentence ‘Examining requires a secret antagonism, that of an opposite point of view.’ Yet it is hard to believe that this fine encomium is feigned, despite the element of strain which some have detected in it. A week before the end of Term, N leaves for the Bayreuth Festival, staying overnight at Heidelberg on the 22nd. He arrives on the 23rd, and puts up in private lodgings. His pupil Brenner is already in residence. Despite his health, he joins in the inevitable social round, meeting the songwriter Martin Plüddemann (to Overbeck, 6 Dec. 1876), Ludwig Schemann (Meine Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner, Leipzig u.Hartenstein 1924), Edouard Schuré (who describes his aristocratic demeanour in ‘L’Individualisme et l’anarchie en littérature’, Revue des deux mondes, CXXX(1895), 775–805), Reinhard von Seydlitz (‘Friedrich Nietzsche. Briefe und Gespräche’, Neue deutsche Rundschau, X(1899), 617–28; ‘Nietzsche und die Musik’, Die Gesellschaft, XVII(1901), 94–103), H.v.Wolzogen (Lebensbilder, Regensburg 1923, p. 80), the English writer Helen Zimmern (who described the encounter in an interview with Dr. Oscar Levy: Rosenthal-Levy Collection); Adolf Wallnöfer (Sophie Rützow, Richard Wagner und Bayreuth, Nürnberg 21953, pp. 169 ff), Carl Fuchs (Bernoulli 1122 f; Janz 1674), and others. He turns out for all the rehearsals. Three letters from Bayreuth survive of 25 July, 28 July, and 1 Aug. (not 1, 4, and 5 Aug., as stated in N-Br1 V i). Newman (IV 504 ff) deduced that he saw (a) on 24, 25, and 26 July a rehearsal of Götterdämmerung, one Act at a time, missing the last part of Act I (b) on 29 July, the start of the 3rd rehearsal cycle, Das Rheingold (c) on 31 July, Die Walküre, at which his eyes were such a torture to him that he dared not look at the stage. Newman (IV 517, n. 2) was inclined to doubt whether he stayed for Siegfried on 2 Aug. This was essential if he was to form a complete picture of Der Ring. We

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  193 may surely assume that he attended this particular rehearsal. Glasenapp (V 277, n. 2) notes that his companion Brenner alone was present at Wahnfried on the 3rd, because N had left for Franconian Switzerland. On 2 or 3 Aug. (not 4 Aug. if Glasenapp is correct), just after Liszt’s arrival in Bayreuth, N departs abruptly for Klingenbrunn, excusing himself by means of a ‘fatalistic telegram’. The telegram is lost; but it is unlikely that it contained more than a brief notification of temporary absence. Elisabeth arrives from Basel on the 5th. Ludwig II arrives after midnight on the 5th by special train at a signal station near the Rollwenzelei Inn, and attends the final dress-rehearsals as the sole spectator. This is the first reunion with W since the première of Die Meistersinger in Munich in June 1868. Ludwig leaves after the rehearsal of Götterdämmerung on the 9th. On 12 Aug., N returns to Bayreuth at Elisabeth’s request (to Mathilde Maier, 15 July 1878). Elisabeth’s reports conflict on this point, and N does not mention his return in Eh. With Elisabeth, he attends the first cycle of Der Ring conducted by Richter on 13, 14, 16, and 17 Aug. The first performance attracts a distinguished audience which includes Wilhelm I, who also attends Die Walküre. (According to a deleted page of Eh, the Emperor while applauding the performance exclaimed to his adjutant, Count Lehndorf, ‘dreadful! dreadful!’: N-A5 276.) N is present at a reception at Wahnfried on the 19th, with Elisabeth, Judith Mendès, Gersdorff, Klindworth, Pohl, and Schuré, among some two hundred guests (Glasenapp V 299 f). Louise Ott, the wife of the sculptor Paul Ott, tries to console him (Eh-MA § 2). After disposing of his and Elisabeth’s tickets for the second cycle to the Baumgartners, N returns to Basel with his new acquaintance, Schuré, and Rée on 27 Aug. The third cycle commences on the same day in the presence of Ludwig II, who arrives by train at midnight on the 26th. The Festival makes a negative impression. Kelterborn says that on his return N asked for news: ‘We who were there know so much less than those who stayed away’ (N-Br2 IV 352). It appears, however, that N’s accounts of his reaction against Bayreuth are exaggerated, or refer to inner feelings which he disguised at the time: i.e., NcW—‘Wie ich von Wagner loskam’; Eh—‘Warum ich so klug bin’, § 5; Eh-MA § 2; and the open letter to Ferdinand Avenarius in Der Kunstwart: ‘After 1876, Wagner regarded me as his inveterate opponent’ (N-Br5 89). See also N-A3 VII 3 34[205] and 41[2 § 9]. 25 Aug.

14 Sept.

N to W, 27 Sept. [1876]

Ludwig II’s 31st birthday. As a result of correspondence during 1872–6, W sends a setting of the deleted section of Brünnhilde’s peroration from the closing scene of Götterdämmerung beginning ‘Verging wie Hauch der Götter Geschlecht’, which the King particularly admired. A facsimile of the sketch on three staves is given in W-Br8 III, facing 88. W, Cosima, and four of the five children leave for Italy to recuperate from the Bayreuth Festival: Verona, Venice, Bologna, Naples, and Sorrento (see below, s.v. 5 Oct.–7 Nov. 1876). Elisabeth notifies N on 18 Sept. 1876 (N-A3 IV 4 24 f). Glasenapp (V 403) maintains that W informs N of his movements by telegram. N’s last surviving letter to W dictated to Köselitz, which mentions his impending visit to Italy. This lends little credence to the familiar story of a decisive breach with W at the Festival.

194  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 1–27 Oct.–8 May N leaves Basel with Rée for Italy on the 1st. After visiting Montreux, they stay at 1877. Bex: ‘The honeymoon of our friendship’ (Rée to N, 10 Oct. 1877: N-Br17 37). On the 19th, N and Rée leave Bex for Geneva where they collect Brenner who has just arrived from Basel. N and Brenner take the night train for Genoa via Turin: Rée takes the early morning train on the 20th (Janz I 742). Also on the night train are the Baroness Claudine von Brevern and Isabelle von der Pahlen, who describes N’s animation on their arrival at Genoa in her memoirs (Isabelle von Ungern-Sternberg, Nietzsche im Spiegelbilde seiner Schrift, Leipzig 1902, p. 20). References to Genoa and Columbus, her illustrious son, abound in N’s writings. On 23 Oct., N and Brenner proceed to Livorno by ship; Rée perhaps by train (Janz 1742 n.). At Pisa there is a reunion with Isabelle von der Pahlen. N, Rée, and Brenner then continue by ship to Naples, arriving at 1 a.m. on the 26th (according to Brenner’s letters). Malwida von Meysenbug is awaiting their arrival, and accompanies them later in the day on an expedition to Posilipo. Next day (the 27th), the party transfers to the Villa Rubinacci at Sorrento: From the terrace there was a splendid view over the green foreground of the garden across the Gulf to Vesuvius, at that time very much disturbed, and at night sending up columns of fire. (Meysenbug 236) 5 Oct.–7 Nov. The Wagner family stays at the Hotel Vittoria in Sorrento. W writes to Gabriel Monod about the Festival (W-A2 XVI 120 ff). 27 Oct. The ‘quartet’—N, Malwida, Rée, and Brenner—call on the Ws on the 27th (evening)– 7 (Cosima to Daniela von Bülow, 29 Oct. 1876). Elisabeth quotes Malwida as Nov. saying that N and W met each day in Sorrento as if nothing untoward had occurred (W-Br3 263). Brenner in a letter home specifies about six meetings. Cosima’s diary is curiously uninformative. Long afterwards, Malwida maintained that the meetings were not without an element of strain: It troubled me though to detect in Nietzsche’s conversation and manner a sort of contrived naturalness and cheerfulness which was quite uncharacteristic. (Meysenbug 238) When writing to Fritzsch around the time of N’s breakdown, Cosima cast a lingering look upon the last meeting, ‘when we parted as good friends’ (Du Moulin II 211). See, too, Cosima’s letter to Ernst zu Hohenlohe Langenburg of 4 Feb. 1894 (Briefwechsel zwischen Cosima Wagner und Fürst Ernst zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg, ed. Ernst Fürst zu Hohenlohe, Stuttgart 1937, p. 86). W, alarmed by the colossal deficit of 150.000 marks, tells N of the probable postponement of the next Bayreuth Festival (N to Seydlitz, 16 Dec. 1876). According to Malwida, a new plan for an ambitious subscription scheme was discussed at the Villa Rubinacci (this information is given in an unpublished letter to Heckel of 18 Jan. 1897 in the Rosenthal-Levy Collection). Elisabeth describes a last evening when W enlarged on the joy he felt in the celebration of the Eucharist (DeN 15 f; W-Br3 263 f). The story, elaborated by Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche en Italie, Paris 1929, pp. 25 ff, and elsewhere, is probably a fabrication. Elisabeth may be working from Paneth’s letter of 3 Jan. 1884 recounting a conversation with N: ‘[Wagner] had taken Communion and experienced its “delights”’ (Förster-N II ii 482; DeN 268); or from the many comparable statements in N’s notes. Perhaps W mentioned Cosima’s reception into the Protestant Church on 31 Oct. 1872, when he was moved by the Communion service. Cosima’s diary records an unwelcome visit from Rée on 1 November: ‘On closer inspection we come to the conclusion that he must be an Israelite.’

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  195 7 Nov.–3 Dec.

N to Köselitz, 14 Nov. 3–18 Dec. 18 Dec. [1876–77]

N to Cosima, 19 Dec. (N-Br15 599 f).

20 Dec.–30 Apr. 1877. ca. Late Dec.

W cuts short his stay in Sorrento because of inclement weather (Glasenapp V 318). The family arrives in Rome on the 9th and stays there for almost a month. W makes friends with Arthur Gobineau, whose theory of racial degeneration finds a responsive echo in ‘Kunst und Religion’, ‘Heldenthum und Christenthum’, and other works of his last period. On 23 Nov., from Rome, W offers Wolzogen the editorship of the Bayreuther Blätter. ‘RW has not learned fear, but unfortunately he has not learned patience either’, N remarks drily to Köselitz when noting the appointment on 8 Jan. 1877. In his second letter to Köselitz, N asks after W’s presentation scores of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger. On 3 Dec., W visits Florence. On 4 Dec., he attends a performance of Rienzi in Bologna. He returns to Florence on the 5th, where he sees Jessie Laussot. N forwards the MS. of Rée’s Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen to Schmeitzner for publication. He refers to the book appreciatively in MA I §§ 36 and 37, and in his letters. Rée’s presentation copy is inscribed ‘To the father of this book with thanks from its mother’ (N-Br2 IV 465). The verdict, however, took the form of an attack in ZG-Vorrede, §§ 4 and 7: Perhaps I have never read anything which I was compelled to negate, sentence by sentence, conclusion by conclusion, to the extent that I was in the case of this book: and this quite without rancour and impatience. George Brandes (Friedrich Nietzsche, trs. A.G.Chater, London 1914, p. 29) noted that Rée modified his views, and in Die Entstehung des Gewissens, Berlin 1885, drew closer to N’s position. N might not have agreed. ‘How empty, how boring, how false’ is his comment on this book in his letter to Stein of 15 Oct. 1885. In a recently discovered birthday letter received by Cosima on 24 Dec., N mentions the death of his grandmother, Wilhelmina Oehler, on 3 Nov., of his colleague Franz Gerlach on 31 Oct., and of Ritschl on 9 Nov. He also speaks of a new aversion to Schopenhauer’s dogmas (this is recalled in a letter to Deussen of early Aug. 1877 where he says that he veered sharply away from Schopenhauer after writing U III). Although Cosima comments on the announcement in her diary on 24 Dec., her discursive reply of 1 Jan. 1877 tactfully makes no mention of it. W resides in Bayreuth where he works on the text of Parsifal. Richard Wagner à Bayreuth, translated by Marie Baumgartner, is published in Paris: the only translation to appear in N’s active lifetime. The book is reviewed in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt, VIII(1877), 118, on 16 Feb. Mme Baumgartner’s translation of U III sent to Cosima on 19 Dec. 1876 (N-Br15 600) is not published (see above, s.v. 14 Mar. 1875).

1877 14 Feb. Mar.

N consults Professor Schrön of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Naples, but health eludes him. In early Mar., N visits Pompeii; on the 23rd he makes an excursion to Capri where he plays the piano (Elsa Binder, Malwida von Meysenbug und Friedrich Nietzsche, Berlin 1917, p. 47).

196  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Late Mar.

30 Mar.

Just before the departure of Brenner and Rée on 10 Apr. 1877, Reinhard and Irene von Seydlitz come to stay in Sorrento. N plays extracts from Tristan with amazing conviction and ardour (R.v.Seydlitz, ‘Nietzsche und die Musik’, Die Gesellschaft, XVII(1901), 100). The performance probably takes place at the Hôtel Vittoria, as there is no piano at the Villa Rubinacci (Binder, op. cit., p. 47).

Köselitz publishes a spirited attack on Selmar Bagge, the anti-Wagnerian director of the music-school at Basel, who has released the text of a lecture on Beethoven in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung: Heinrich Köselitz, ‘Musikalische Philister’, Musikalisches Wochenblatt, XIV(1877), 200–2. N takes umbrage in a letter to Köselitz of 25 Apr.: But no more polemics, I beg you: that is not the musician’s concern. Later I will say more on this matter, which I must regard as a ludicrous mishap. On 3 May, Bagge addresses a formal complaint to Vischer, the Rector of the University (Janz 1763–9). (Du Moulin I 794 ff). Intense irritation is caused by N’s adverse criticism of Cosima to Malwida, 17 Apr. Shakespeare. (See also C-Tb, 2 Dec. 1877.) 19 Apr. The poem Parsifal is completed. N arranges to send a cherished bust of W to Rohde as a wedding-present: N to Elisabeth, acknowledged by Rohde on 20 May. The friendship now begins to wane. 25 Apr. 30 Apr.–28 July. W and Cosima visit London, arriving on 1 May and staying at Edward Dannreuther’s house at 12 Orme Square. W and Richter jointly conduct eight fund-raising concerts in the Albert Hall, described by N’s erstwhile antiWagnerian friend Franz Hueffer in Half a Century of Music in England, London 1889, pp. 71–8. On 17 May, W is received at Windsor by the widowed Queen Victoria and her younger son, Prince Leopold. [The Queen with Prince Albert had befriended him during his earlier concert season in London in 1855.] He celebrates his 64th birthday on 22 May. From a financial point of view, the London concert season is an almost total failure: also from a musical point of view according to Hueffer, who notes that W, knowing no English, was unable to achieve a rapport with the orchestra. Cosima, whose English is fluent, makes friends with the novelist George Eliot. The return journey to Bayreuth via Bad Ems, Heidelberg, Tribschen (a sentimental visit), begins on 4 June. 8 May–1 Sept. N begins his circuitous return journey to Basel from Sorrento: Genoa (by sea), [1877] Lugano, Ragaz (ca. four weeks with a visit from Overbeck), Rosenlauibad (ca. four weeks), Lucerne (a meeting with Elisabeth), and the Lake of Zug (ca. two weeks with Elisabeth). He returns to Rosenlauibad at the end of July (ca. four weeks), breaking the journey at Meiringen to see Dr. Otto Eiser, a physician from Frankfurt a.M., founder of the Frankfurt Wagner-Verein, and an admirer of his writings. Eiser and his wife then spend four days with N in Rosenlauibad. Here N also meets G.Croom Robertson, the founding editor of the English philosophical journal Mind. In August from Rosenlauibad he acknowledges Deussen’s Die Elemente der Metaphysik, but launches into an attack on Schopenhauer: ‘Your book serves me in a singular way as a felicitous compilation of everything I no longer believe to be true.’ He expresses admiration for Siegfried Lipiner’s Der entfesselte Prometheus, sent by his mother (letter home, 25 Aug. 1877). On 24 Aug., he writes appreciatively to Lipiner: ‘Tell me frankly whether you have any Jewish blood.’ A possible influence on Z.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  197 2 Aug. 1 Sept. 1877–25 June 1878.

Sept. 25 Sept. 3–7 Oct. 7 Oct. N to Cosima, 10 Oct. (N-Br15 601 f). 13 Oct.

15 Oct. 17 Oct. Dec.

Within a week of his return to Bayreuth on 28 July, W starts the music for Parsifal (C-Tb). N returns to Basel (Gellertstraße 22). Elisabeth stays with him once more until mid-June 1878. He works on MA. After N’s return, Köselitz submits three atheistic articles for inclusion in the Bayreuther Blätter. These are rejected in a seven-page letter from Wolzogen. The veto may have come from Cosima: ‘For she discussed with Wolzogen every essay and every article sent in, and gave her opinion as to whether it should be published or not’ (Du Moulin I 820 f). Despite his early interest in the journal (see above, s.v. 22–4 May 1871), N now reacts to it with conspicuous disdain. Köselitz alleged that he was more decisively affected by this humiliating rebuff than by W’s later reaction to MA (Josef Hofmiller, ‘Nietzsche’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte, XXIX(1931), 87). For N’s later opinion of the Bayreuther Blätter, see the note N-A3 VII 2 26[394]: previously unpublished. Brief mention of U II–IV is made by W.Wundt in ‘Philosophy in Germany’, Mind, II (1877), 493–518. See above, s.v. 8 May–1 Sept. 1877. The orchestral sketch of Parsifal, Act I, is begun. N, whose health is little improved, consults Otto Eiser in Frankfurt. Wolzogen arrives in Bayreuth to take up permanent residence. Cosima breaks the news to N on the 22nd. From Basel, N writes ‘The glories promised by Parsifal can comfort us in all matters in which we need comfort.’ W receives Eiser’s ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen. Ein exegetischer Versuch’, sent by N for inclusion in the Bayreuther Blätter, I(1878), 309–17; 352–66. Cosima replies to N with considerable charm in her last surviving letter on the 22nd. Correspondence then ensues between W and Eiser with anxious speculation about the course (and cause) of N’s illness. The letters are published by Westernhagen (531 f) and discussed by Janz, who contends that Eiser’s breach of medical confidence was decisive for the future of the association (C.P.Janz, ‘Die “tödtliche Beleidigung”’, N-Studien, IV(1975), 263–78). N’s 33rd birthday. N applies for an extension of his leave from the Basel Pädagogium. This is granted on the 22nd. The beginning of N’s three years’ breach with Gersdorff as a result of Gersdorff’s marriage plans (see below, s.v. N to Köselitz, 22 Feb. 1881; and G-Br III, n. 288).

1878 Winter 1877–8.

N to Köselitz, 1 Jan. 3 Jan.

N reads Die Ideale des Materialismus. Lyrische Philosophie by Heinrich von Stein (pseud. Armand Pensier). (See Roderick Stackelberg, ‘The Role of Heinrich von Stein in Nietzsche’s Emergence as a Critic of Wagnerian Idealism and Cultural Nationalism’, N-Studien, V(1976), 178–93.) See below, s.v. 20 Oct. 1879. N gives W’s presentation score of Tristan und Isolde to Köselitz (N-Br2 IV 462; facsimile of N’s inscription Schaeffner, Pl. II); the score of Die Meistersinger to Widemann (N-A3 IV 4 534, n. 48). See above, s.v. 24 Dec. 1869. N receives an inscribed copy of the text of Parsifal after a delay caused by W’s bookbinder Senfft. He responds by getting Elisabeth to send an admiring ‘Parsifal’ letter from Eiser (N-A3 IV 441). This contradicts Eh-MA § 5: ‘We both kept silent.’ On 4 Jan. 1878, he conveys his mainly adverse impressions in a letter to Seydlitz (a reply to Seydlitz’s previously unpublished letter of 30 Dec. 1877: N-A3 IV 440).

198  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism

29 Jan. 31 Jan. Feb. [1878]

12 Mar. 13 Mar. 2 Mar.–4 Apr. 5–24 Apr.

10 Apr. N to Köselitz, 13 Apr.

24 Apr. 25 Apr.

17 May.

22 May. W to Overbeck, 24 May (Bernoulli I 263).

On 10 Jan.—Köselitz’s 24th birthday—N completes MA, which he sends to Schmeitzner on the 20th. This contradicts Elisabeth who maintained that he sent the MS. on 3 Jan: DeN 43; and Schriften für und gegen Wagner, Leipzig 1924, p. 574. On the 25th, Schmeitzner advises against the use of a pseudonym. The composition-sketch of Parsifal, Act I, is completed. The orchestral sketch of Parsifal, Act I, is completed. In the next weeks, W begins the composition-sketch of Act II. Schmeitzner publishes the first issue of the Bayreuther Blätter, containing W’s ‘Was ist deutsch?’, based on notes written for Ludwig II in 1865 (W-A1 X 51–73). The article elicits a reply from Constantin Frantz, who directs severe criticism at Bismarck (B.Bl., June 1878). W’s tacit endorsement of Frantz’s opinions comes as a shock to the Berlin Wagner Society, many of whose members resign in protest. W completes the anti-Semitic article ‘Modern’ (B.Bl. and W-A1 X 75–84). The orchestral sketch of Parsifal, Act II, is begun. While the University authorities deliberate over some reduction in N’s teaching duties, N takes a cure at Baden-Baden, where he is joined towards the end of the month by Elisabeth and Köselitz. N stays for three weeks in Naumburg, spending two days in Leipzig with Rée. He arranges for Schmeitzner to take over the second edition of GdT from Fritzsch (see above, s.v. 27–8 Dec. 1872). He retains Schmeitzner’s services until after the appearance of Z III. Köselitz leaves Basel for Venice where he takes up permanent residence. N acknowledges a fair copy of his Manfred-Meditation prepared by Köselitz. His postcard strikes a more familiar note: On reading your farewell letter… I started to wonder whether you too are not one of the chosen few who seek the ‘philosophy of the forenoon’ by means of art and life? N, released from his duties at the Basel Pädagogium on 7 Mar., returns to Basel for the summer Term. Elisabeth stays with him until 25 July. He delivers his last lectures in the University. W and Cosima receive two copies of MA, dedicated to Voltaire. W is not mentioned by name, and N has considered using the pseudonym ‘Bernhard Cron’; but his hostile tone is unmistakable. ‘All hope of a further, healthy advance for this rare spirit was cut away as if with a sharp knife’ (Glasenapp V 404). N adopts an aphoristic style which he relinquishes only after J in 1886. W and Cosima sense the guiding hand of Rée, finding here, in the Semitic influence, the true cause of N’s apostasy (Du Moulin 1833; Glasenapp VI 124). N’s pupil, Albert Brenner, dies at the age of 21 after protracted illness. Extracts from his letters are published by Bernoulli (I 198 ff); a poem is quoted in Malwida’s letter to N of 25 May 1876; an inscribed copy of the Novelle, ‘Das flammende Herz’, Deutsche Rundschau, VII(July 1877), 1–11, is listed in the inventory of N’s library. W’s 65th birthday. W acknowledges the receipt of MA: Those however who had already observed Nietzsche’s psychic spasms years ago might almost consider that a long-dreaded, and not entirely unpredictable catastrophe has overtaken him. Out of friendship, I have decided…not to read his book. Despite this, Cosima’s diary shows that W devoted most of May and June to the study of MA.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  199 30 May. N to Seydlitz, 11 June. Rohde to N, 16 June

25 June. N to Mathilde Maier, 15 July. 26 July–ca. 20 Sept. Aug. Aug. [1878–79]

N to Rée, 10 Aug. (N-Br17 51): Mid-Sept. ca. 20–1 Sept.– 17 Oct. 29 Sept. 30 Sept. 11 Oct. 15 Oct. 17 Oct.–10 May 1879. 26 Oct. 30 Oct. 14 Nov. 17, 19, 21 and 23 Nov.

On the centenary of the death of Voltaire, N receives a bust of Voltaire from an anonymous admirer in Paris: Louise Ott is suggested by Schlechta (N-Chronik 65). N announces that Elisabeth is to return to live with his mother in Naumburg. Rohde, growing away from N, too, finds his ‘Réealistic’ performance in MA hard to swallow, but still praises isolated passages on the Greeks. N replies later in the month: [Rée] has not had the slightest influence on my ‘philosophy in nuce’: this was ready and to a large extent committed to paper when I made his closer acquaintance in the autumn of 1876. Elisabeth leaves Basel, and after a visit from N in Jura, 6–8 July, returns to Naumburg. N disposes of his furniture and takes lodgings on the outskirts of the town at Bachlettenstraße 11, where he remains for his last Term. N’s first uncompromising attack on Bayreuth. He appears to be replying to a letter from Mathilde, the draft of which is given in W-Br6 273 ff. N stays in the Bernese Oberland until mid-Aug., and at Interlaken until 17 Sept. He returns to Basel, breaking the journey to visit Mme Baumgartner in Lörrach. Bismarck writes to Schmeitzner to acknowledge a copy of MA. He recommends the use of Gothic rather than Roman print (N-A3 IV 4 53 f). During N’s summer vacation, W attacks N in the last of three signed articles, ‘Publikum und Popularität’, in the Apr., June, and Aug. issues of the Bayreuther Blätter (W-A1 X 85–122). N is warned by his publisher, Schmeitzner, who has also assumed responsibility for publishing the Bayreuther Blätter, and replieson the 25th: It is very welcome that Wagner has come out against me in public, as I hate opposition to be obscure and furtive; and moreover I have no wish to get mixed up with the trend of the Bayreuther Blätter. (N-A3 IV 4 54) ‘All my friends are now unanimous in the opinion that my book was conceived and written by you.’ The second edition of GdT is published by Schmeitzner. N consults Dr. Wiel in Zürich about his health, returning to Naumburg on the 24th. Schmeitzner visits Naumburg: ‘[Nietzsche] had quite gone to pieces and looked dreadful. He was quite emaciated’ (to Köselitz, 7 Oct. 1878: N-A3 IV 4 55). The composition-sketch of Parsifal, Act II, is completed. The orchestral sketch of Parsifal, Act II, is completed, together with ‘Das Publikum in Zeit und Raum’ (B.Bl. and W-A1 X 123–37). N’s 34th birthday in Naumburg. His health is critical. N leaves Naumburg for the start of the winter Term, arriving in Basel on the 18th. N calls on Mme Baumgartner in Lörrach to discuss the preparation of the MS. of VMS. The composition-sketch of Parsifal, Act III, is begun. Nov. W completes the article ‘Ein Rückblick auf die Bühnenfestspiele des Jahres 1876’ (B.Bl., and W-A1 X 139–56). The orchestral sketch of Parsifal, Act III, is begun. The complete cycle of Der Ring is given in Munich, Ludwig II’s capital: the first performance outside Bayreuth.

200  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 25 Dec. 31 Dec.

At 7 a.m. on Cosima’s birthday, W conducts the private first performance of the prelude to Parsifal in the drawing-room at Wahnfried, with the orchestra of the Duke of Meiningen. N sends the MS. of VMS prepared by Mme Baumgartner to Schmeitzner for publication (the proof is corrected with aid from Köselitz). Very ill, he stays in Basel for Christmas and the New Year.

1879 Jan., Feb., and Apr. Jan.

W to Ludwig II, 9 Feb. 12 March.

Angelo Neumann stages three complete cycles of Der Ring in Leipzig: the first production by the Jewish impresario, whose touring company is to carry the music drama as far afield as England and Russia, providing a model for subsequent local productions. Elisabeth misguidedly tries to sort out what she takes to be the misunderstanding at Wahnfried caused by MA. Cosima’s indignant letters in reply, the first dated 1 Mar. 1879, are published in N-A3 IV 4 61 ff. See also C-Tb for 8 and 28 Jan.

‘Only recently have I gained in Hans von Wolzogen the one person who recognizes the ideal significance of my work.’ VMS appears in print. N’s public campaign against W begins in § 134, ‘Wie nach der neueren Musik sich die Seele bewegen soll’. 19 Mar. A week before the end of the winter Term, N discontinues his lectures at Basel, interrupted in Jan. and Feb. by recurring attacks of migraine. He is invited to recuperate at Marie Baumgartner’s, but instead takes a month’s cure in Geneva, returning to Basel on 21 Apr., a week after the start of the summer Term. Apr. Ludwig II attends a private performance of the complete cycle of Der Ring in Munich under Levi. 16 Apr. The composition-sketch of Parsifal is completed, except for the ending (see below, s.v. 9 Sept.). 26 Apr. The orchestral sketch of Parsifal is completed. 2 May. N submits his resignation to the University of Basel on the grounds of ill-health: accepted on 14 June (Stroux 86 ff). He is granted a pension, and from now on travels in Italy and Switzerland with occasional visits to Germany. 10 May–21 June. Elisabeth, summoned by Overbeck, visits Basel. She stays briefly with N at Schloß-Bremgarten near Bern, returning to Basel to arrange for the disposal of N’s household effects. Meanwhile N goes on to Zürich and then stays for a month at Wiesen (Graubünden). With Elisabeth’s departure on 18 June, the ten years of N’s residence at Basel are effectively at an end. 13 May. W completes ‘Wollen wir hoffen?’ (B.Bl., and W-A1 X 157–80). 22 May. W’s 66th birthday. N notes that of the first edition of 1000 copies of MA, only 120 copies have N to Overbeck, been bought. [Until the appearance of FW in 1888, N’s books are little read and 13 June. seldom reviewed. One recalls W’s cynical observation ‘Oh, you know, people read Nietzsche only in so far as he upholds our cause’ (Förster-N II i 308; DeN 61).] 21 June–17 Sept. On 21 June N travels from Wiesen to St. Moritz, where for the next three months he works on WS: his first visit to the Ober-Engadin. 28 June. Following a holiday in Switzerland, W completes ‘Über das Dichten und Komponiren’ (B.Bl., and W-A1 X 181–200). 29 July. W completes ‘Über das Opern-Dichten und Komponiren im Besonderen’ (B.Bl., and W-A1 X 201–28).

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  201 ca. Aug. [1879–80] 23 Aug. Aug. and Sept.

W completes ‘Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama’ (B.Bl., and W-A1 X 229–50). The score of Parsifal is begun at Bayreuth where Liszt is a visitor. W’s extended article (in English), ‘The Work and Mission of My Life’, appears in the North American Review, Aug. 1879, 107–24; Sept. 1879, 238–58. 9 Sept. At noon Wagner decides on the ending of Parsifal and plays it to Cosima. In the evening, Rubinstein distresses W by talking about N, whose ‘perfidy’ W cannot forgive or forget. 17 Sept.–10 Feb. On 17 Sept., N leaves St. Moritz arriving at Chur where he spends three days 1880. with Elisabeth. He returns to Naumburg alone on the 20th for a stay of almost five months. 29 Sept. W completes his ‘Offenes Schreiben an Herrn Ernst von Weber’ (B.Bl., and W-A1 X 251–71). 15 Oct. N’s 35th birthday. 20 Oct. H.v.Stein takes up an appointment at Wahnfried as tutor to Siegfried Wagner. See above, s.v. Rée to N, 30 May 1876; Winter 1877–8; and below, s.v. 7 Sept.– 15 Nov. 1882. 5 Nov.–4 Dec. Gersdorff stays at Bayreuth. Dec. N publishes WS (dated 1880), completed with aid from Köselitz and Marie Baumgartner. His health reaches its lowest ebb. 31 Dec. 1879–17 For almost a year, W travels in Italy. Nov. 1880.

1880 4 Jan.–26 May.

W and his family stay at the Villa d’Angri at Posilipo. They are greeted at the railway-station by Gersdorff. W is incensed by a performance of Carmen in Naples (Gersdorff to N, 23 Sept. 1888). Gersdorff leaves on 16 Jan. 14 or 15 Jan.–ca. Rée visits N in Naumburg. 20 Jan. 17 Jan. W and Cosima are delighted by a performance of a favourite opera, Halévy’s La Juive, at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. 18 Jan. The painter, Paul von Joukowsky (b. 1845), a friend of Henry James, calls at the Villa d’Angri, to become a member of W’s current entourage and finally stage designer for Parsifal. 10 Feb.–29 June. N’s longest sojourn with Köselitz (four months). He leaves Naumburg on 10 Feb. for Riva del Garda, arriving on the 12th. Here on the 22nd Köselitz joins him at the Villa Tempe. He works on his next book Mr. There is some musicmaking: works by Chopin, extracts from Der Ring, &c. (Bernoulli I 304–8; 444–8). A performance of Götterdämmerung, Act III, described in a previously unpublished letter from Köselitz to Overbeck of 26 Mar. 1880, produces a particularly extreme and agonized reaction (see F.R.Love, ‘Nietzsche’s Quest for a New Aesthetic of Music’, N-Studien, VI(1977), 192, n. 79). On 13 Mar., he proceeds to Venice where Köselitz resides at the house of the Countesses Marina and Anna Diedo: N’s first visit to Venice. Here he receives August Siebenlist’s Schopenhauers Philosophie der Tragödie, Preßburg 1880, sent by the author. N strains Köselitz’s endurance to the limits (see the extracts from Köselitz’s letters to Cäcilie Gusselbauer in E.F.Podach’s Gestalten um Nietzsche, Weimar 1932, pp. 68–78; and Köselitz’s letter to Franziska Nietzsche of 30 June 1880 quoted in K-Br II 189). For an impression of N’s demeanour in Venice, see W.v.Bartels, ‘Nietzsche in Italien’, Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 Jan., 1901.

202  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 9 Mar. 20 Mar. 22 May.

26 May. 16 June. 5 July–1 or 2 Sept. 19 July. N to Köselitz, 20 Aug. 24 Aug. [1880–81]

4–30 Oct. 15 Oct.

31 Oct.–17 Nov.

ca. 23 Nov.

W is visited by Engelbert Humperdinck (b. 1854). W begins to dictate the last instalment of Mein Leben, privately printed in Bayreuth in August. W’s 67th birthday. Humperdinck, Rubinstein, and Plüddemann join forces with Cosima’s four daughters in a performance of the Grail scene from Parsifal. The audience consists of W, Cosima, Siegfried, Malwida von Meysenbug, and Joukowsky. W and Joukowsky visit the Palazzo Rufolo at Ravello: Klingsor’s magic garden, as W describes it. Ludwig II makes a grant to enable W to prolong his stay in the south. N stays in Marienbad. He discusses W’s arrangement of Palestrina’s Stabat Mater of 1848, published by Kahnt in Leipzig in 1878 (see FW § 6, and N to Köselitz, 18 July 1880). In Posilipo, W completes ‘Religion und Kunst’ (B.Bl., Oct., 1880: the whole issue; and W-A1 X 273–324). N indulges in sentimental recollections of W: How often I dream of him, and always in the manner of our intimate, past association [i.e., at Tribschen]. Not a word was ever spoken in anger between us. W takes up residence for a month at the Villa Torre di Fiorentina near Siena, whose cathedral inspires the design for the Grail scene in Parsifal. On the 25th, Ludwig II’s 35th birthday, he sends the King a copy of Mein Leben. On 28 Sept. 1880, he tells the King that he wishes to restrict the performance of Parsifal to Bayreuth, and proposes a concert tour of six months in the U.S.A. W stays at the Palazzo Contarini dalle figure in Venice. He renews his friendship with Gobineau. On the 25th, he completes ‘“Was nützt diese Erkenntniß?”’ (B.Bl., and W-A1 X 325–37). Ludwig II annuls all previous agreements concerning the performance of Parsifal, thereby enabling the work to be restricted to Bayreuth. N’s 36th birthday. He has spent July and Aug in Marienbad; Sept. with his family in Naumburg. In early Oct., he visits Overbeck in Basel, and then makes his way via Locarno and Stressa to Genoa. He arrives on 8 Nov. and has difficulty in finding suitable lodgings. Until the end of Apr. 1881, he works on Mr at Salita delle Battistine 8: his first, difficult winter at Genoa. On his return journey from Italy, W stays in Munich. He hears Der fliegende Holländer and Tristan und Isolde at the Munich Hoftheater under Levi. On 10 Nov. there is a special performance of Lohengrin for Ludwig II; and on the 12th, W conducts the prelude to Parsifal before the King alone. This is W’s last meeting with his patron. Soon after his return to Bayreuth on 17 Nov., W takes up the score of Parsifal.

1881 Jan. 8 Jan. N to Köselitz, 9 Feb. N to Köselitz, 22 Feb.

W completes his bitterly anti-Semitic article ‘“Erkenne dich selbst”’ (B.Bl., and W-A1 X 338–50). Humperdinck takes up residence in Bayreuth as a member of the ‘NibelungenKanzlei’ (W’s team of copyists). N changes the title of his next book—‘Die Pflugschar’—to Morgenröthe at Köselitz’s suggestion. N reports on the resumption of correspondence with Gersdorff: ‘Things are as of old between us’ (see above, s.v. Dec. 1877). The two friends never meet again.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  203 W to Neumann, 23 Feb.

mid-Apr. N to Köselitz, 16 Apr. 25 Apr. 29 Apr.–11 May. 1 May–2 July.

11 May. 22 May.

6 June. Early July. 2 July–1 Oct. [1881–82]

W disassociates himself from the powerful anti-Semitic lobby in Berlin. During the summer of 1880, he has refused to sign an anti-Semitic petition to the Reichstag organized by Bernhard Förster, doubting its efficacy. He has his own hardly less powerful organ of expression in the Bayreuther Blätter. [The full right of German citizenship was conferred on the Jewish community by the Reichstag in 1871.] The outbreak of war between France and Tunisia puts an end to N’s plans to visit North Africa with Gersdorff. N acknowledges the receipt of Robert Mayer’s Mechanik der Wärme, Stuttgart 1874, sent by Köselitz. This book with its theory of the conservation of energy reawakens his interest in physics (see below, s.v. 2 July–1 Oct. 1881). The score of Parsifal, Act I, is completed. W and Cosima visit Berlin for the first cycle of Der Ring under Neumann. N meets Köselitz in Vicenza on 1 May. Köselitz proceeds to the mountain spa of Recoaro next day, and N follows. This visit consolidates the friendship. The pseudonym, ‘Peter Gast’, devised in Recoaro, is used by Köselitz after this time (see N’s card to Köselitz of 17 June 1881 and Köselitz’s reply). Köselitz plays part of his first large-scale work, an operetta based with impeccable taste at N’s suggestion on Goethe’s Scherz, List und Rache. Extracts have already been sent to Basel. N suggests Goethe as the librettist for Köselitz’s next work, the opera Nausikaa (Bernoulli I 447). N’s letters abound with attentive comments on Köselitz’s latest compositions. Köselitz leaves Recoaro on 31 May; but N stays on for an extra month until the beginning of July. W and Cosima return to Bayreuth where they are greeted by Gobineau. W’s 68th birthday. On the 25th, W, Cosima, Gobineau, and Joukowsky leave for the fourth cycle of Der Ring in Berlin. The last performance on the 29th is attended by Wilhelm I. Fearing a heart-attack, W abruptly leaves the stage at the conclusion. Soon after W’s return to Bayreuth on 31 May, the score of Parsifal, Act II, is begun. Schmeitzner publishes Mr. On 2 July, N leaves Recoaro for the Ober-Engadin. He stays at Sils-Maria, discovered as the result of a chance meeting with a total stranger on 4 July (to his sister, 7 July 1881). On 30 July, N tells Overbeck of his discovery of Spinoza, and lists his famous five points of resemblance. This is a result of study of Kuno Fischer’s book on Spinoza sent by Overbeck ca. 8 July. N now asks for works on scientific subjects, and he adds to this reading list in correspondence with Elisabeth in Sept. Mention is made of the theory of recurrence in E.Dühring’s Cursus der Philosophie, Leipzig 1875, p. 84, which N asked Elisabeth and Overbeck to send in July. (Information about N’s scientific studies will be found in Karl Schlechta and Anni Anders, Friedrich Nietzsche. Von den verborgenen Anfängen seines Philosophierens, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1962, pp. 60–158, et passim.) At the beginning of Aug., he is invaded by the idea of eternal return during a walk round the lake of Silvaplana. The first outline for a book in four parts centring on the teaching, dated 26 Aug. 1881, is preceded in N’s notebook by a reference to Zarathustra ‘born near Lake Urmi’ (N-A3 V 2 11 [195]). He subsequently attempts to win a few friends over to the idea—Lou von Salomé, Overbeck, and Köselitz—all of whom speak of the terror it held for him. It is not certain that Elisabeth was initiated into the secret.

204  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Köselitz completes Scherz, List und Rache. W completes ‘Heldenthum und Christenthum’ (B.Bl., and W-A1 X 351–62). N’s second winter at Genoa. He frequents the Teatro Politeama, hearing Rossini’s Semiramide, Bellini’s I Capuletti ed i Montecchi (four times), and La sonnambula (twice). On 27 Nov., he hears Bizet’s Carmen (to Köselitz, 28 Nov. 1881; the ‘Carmen’ letter to Elisabeth of 29 Nov. 1881 is listed by Schlechta as a forgery). Carmen had begun to win acclaim following the successful Vienna production in 1875. The prima donna is Celestine Galli-Marié who created the title-role at the première at the Opéra-Comique in 1875 (see Winton Dean, Georges Bizet, London 1965, p. 129). N to Köselitz, N encourages his friend to proceed with Die heimliche Ehe, an opera based on 4 Oct. the libretto of Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto. [In 1884, during his stay with Köselitz in Venice, 21 Apr.–12 June, N suggests the final title Der Löwe von Venedig.] 15 Oct. N’s 37th birthday in Genoa. 5 Nov. 1881—13 W and his family accompanied by Rubinstein winter in Sicily: Palermo, Acireale, Apr. 1882. Messina. On 8 Nov., the score of Parsifal, Act III, is begun at the Hôtel des Palmes in Palermo; but progress is impeded by W’s worsening health. Rubinstein simultaneously works on the vocal score. N to Köselitz, N hears Carmen for the second time. As a birthday gift, W presents Cosima with 5 Dec. 25 Dec. his Polonia Overture of 1836, and the score of Parsifal. A few pages of Parsifal have yet to be inked in (see below, s.v. 13 Jan. 1882).

Late Aug. 4 Sept. Oct. 1881–29 Mar. 1882.

1882 N to Ida Overbeck,

N resolves to be conspicuous by his absence from the

Jan. (N-Br18 106, previously unpublished). N to Köselitz, 5 Jan. 13 Jan.

second Bayreuth Festival. In fact he would have been more conspicuous by his presence.

Late Jan. N to Köselitz, 29 Jan. N to Elisabeth, 30 Jan. N to Elisabeth, 3 Feb. 4 Feb.–13 Mar.

N sends the vocal score of Bizet’s Carmen to Köselitz with copious annotations (see N-A4). The score of Parsifal is completed at Palermo. On the 15th, Renoir sketches W’s portrait. Early in Feb., the family moves to a house on the Piazza dei Porazzi lent by Prince Gangi. Köselitz’s Scherz, List und Rache is again rejected, this time by Wilhelm Jahn in Vienna. N encourages Köselitz to attend the second Bayreuth Festival: I think that all my friends will be there, my sister too to go by yesterday’s letter (and that is quite all right by me). N encourages his sister to attend the Festival. N writes again about the Festival: ‘Hasn’t this nerveshattering music ruined my health?’ Rée visits N in Genoa. On the 5th they see Sarah Bernhardt perform (reminding N of Cosima). Early in Mar., they spend two days in Monaco. On the 13th, Rée goes to Monte Carlo where he is visited by N; he then leaves for Rome where he stays with Malwida von Meysenbug and meets Lou von Salomé.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  205 N to Köselitz, late N, preparing to leave Genoa for southern Italy, asks if Köselitz knows whether the Wagners have returned from Palermo. Feb. He comments adversely on Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, remarking ‘I love a quite different Seville’ (i.e. Bizet’s). Cenerentola and Stendhal’s Vie de Rossini caused him to revise this opinion (see FW-Nachschrift, and NcW-Intermezzo). 13 Mar. W completes his ‘Brief an H.v.Wolzogén’ bringing the Patrons’ Association to an end (B.Bl., and W-A1 X 363–70). 29 Mar.–20 Apr. On the 29th, N sails from Genoa to Messina, passing the Aeolian Islands. He is the only passenger. The expedition inspires the Idyllen aus Messina, N’s first and only independently published collection of verse, which appears in Schmeitzner’s Internationale Monatsschrift, I 5, in May. 10–13 Apr. W stays in Messina for three days before returning to Naples and Venice (missing [1882] Rome). He is visited by Levi. He is unaware of N’s presence in the town, and there is no reunion. Janz (II 98) suggests that N may have wanted to provoke an ‘accidental’ meeting: why otherwise in his precarious state of health should he risk travelling further south in the spring? W to August Förster, 19 Apr. (Angelo Neumann, Erinnerungen, 31907, pp. 228 f).

From Venice, on the grounds of health, W declines to attend the first performance of The Ring in London by Neumann’s touring company. He also quashes plans that might have led to an Honorary Doctorate at Oxford University. The London season commences on 5 May with Das Rheingold, and is patronized by the Prince of Wales who attends every performance.

23 or 24 Apr.– 16 May.

N arrives in Rome from Messina at the invitation of Malwida and Rée. He is introduced to Lou von Salomé (b. 1861) in St. Peter’s. Much has been made of the ensuing unhappy episode of just over five months’ duration, barely six weeks of which are spent in Lou’s company, in the course of which N consistently uses the formal ‘Sie’ (Rée addresses Lou with ‘Du’). The fullest account to date—Rudolf Binion’s Frau Lou, Princeton 1968—has the merit of showing that Lou’s testimony is scarcely more reliable than Elisabeth’s. At the end of Apr., Lou and Mme von Salomé proceed to Lake Orta where they are joined by N and Rée. On ca. 7 May, N leaves for Basel where he sees the Overbecks on the 8th and reports on his ‘discovery’ of Lou. He seems in good health. On 13–16 May, N rejoins Rée and Lou in Lucerne. A celebrated photograph is taken, and he visits Tribschen for the last time in Lou’s company. Binion (55, n. f) questions Lou’s sentimental account of this excursion; and he questions the claim that N asked Rée to propose to Lou on his behalf in Lucerne (168 f). After Rée’s death, Lou herself said that N made Rée his go-between in Rome, and then repeated the proposal in person in Lucerne (N-Br17 108 and 110).

Late Apr.

Rubinstein’s vocal score of Parsifal is published by Schott.

1 May.

W returns to Bayreuth from Venice. Gobineau arrives on the 11th for a long stay.

22 May.

W’s 69th and last birthday. A boys’ choir rehearsed by Humperdinck sings the last chorus from Parsifal, Act I, at Wahnfried.

17 June.

W completes his open letter ‘Offenes Schreiben an Herrn Friedrich Schön in Worms’ (B.Bl. and W-A1 X 371–80).

25 June–27 Aug.

N reaches Tautenburg by way of Berlin (in the hope of seeing Lou). He stays for a month and meets Arthur Egidi (‘Gespräche mit Nietzsche im Parsifalsjahr 1882’, Die Musik, I iv (1902), 1892–99). At the end of June, he receives a short visit from Elisabeth.

206  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism 2 July.

The start of the rehearsals for Parsifal under Levi and Franz Fischer.

W to an unnamed correspondent, 10 July (W-Br9 816 f).

W says that he has given up his plans for Die Sieger: a music-drama based on the life of the Buddha (see also Du Moulin 1986 f). Ludwig II was particularly concerned with this project, which had received a good deal of publicity (it is mentioned in Köselitz’s letter to N of 22 June 1882).

15 July–5 Aug.

Liszt stays in Bayreuth.

23 July (Sunday).

N visits Naumburg from Tautenburg. He takes Elisabeth through Rubinstein’s vocal score of Parsifal, comparing the style of the music with that of some of his own early compositions (to Köselitz, 25 July 1882: the letter to Elisabeth of22 Feb. 1887 that refers to this incident is listed by Schlechta as a forgery).

24 July.

The dress rehearsal of Parsifal.

26 July–29 Aug. [1882]

The second Bayreuth Festival consisting of 16 performances of Parsifal under Levi and Fischer. Ludwig II is absent, as are Bülow, N, and Gersdorff (who has offended W by not bringing his wife to Wahnfried). The performances on the 26th and 28th are restricted to Patrons of the Festival. At the first performance, W quells the applause after the first Act; at the last performance, on an impulse, he conducts the last part of Act III from the transformation music, taking a very slow tempo. At N’s request, Elisabeth meets Lou on the way to Bayreuth where they attend the second performance on the 28th. As a result of meetings with Malwida, Stein, and her fellow-countryman Joukowsky, all of whom are regular visitors at Wahnfried, Lou is made painfully aware of N’s fall from favour. Elisabeth describes a specially requested interview during which W said Tell your brother that since he left me, I am alone.’ She adheres to this story with some tenacity, recounting it once in Förster-N II ii 867; thrice in the popular biography; and once in W-Br3 279 and N-Br1 III ii 595 respectively. Newman (IV 689, n. 8) questioned her veracity; E.F.Podach (Friedrich Nietzsche und Lou Salomé. Ihre Begegnung 1882, Zürich und Leipzig 1937, p. 67) quotes a letter of 15 Apr. 1883 to Overbeck where Elisabeth explicitly states that she did not speak with Wagner ‘im vorigen Sommer’. The postscript to N’s letter from Tautenburg to Köselitz of 1 Aug, 1882, which mentions a meeting privatissime between Elisabeth, Lou, and Cosima in Bayreuth, is informative: ‘The other day, W said something terribly sad: “His best friends Nietzsche and Rohde [Gersdorff?] had left him; he is alone”.’ One might surmise that the message was conveyed to Elisabeth by Cosima on W’s behalf. Yet it is not unlikely that the entire story is a fabrication; for it would not be out of character if W, determined to sever all connection with the apostate N, refused to communicate with Elisabeth, despite the good relations he continued to maintain with many of N’s friends.

1 Aug.

Elisabeth leaves Bayreuth for Naumburg, and then proceeds to Tautenburg.

N to Köselitz, 4 Aug.

At Tautenburg, N’s interest in composition revives: Yesterday, old friend, the demon of music took possession of me. Just imagine my horror!

Malwida to N, 5 Aug.

(N-Br19 385 f: previously unpublished): W is unfair to you and you to him: that is understandable although it is painful.

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  207 7 Aug.

Lou von Salomé, who has stayed on in Bayreuth, leaves for Tautenburg. There is an unpleasant scene between Lou and Elisabeth in Jena just before their reunion with N (Binion, op. cit., 72 ff; and C.P.Janz, ‘Die tödliche Beleidigung’, N-Studien, IV(1975), 275 f).

24–30 Aug.

Liszt attends the Bayreuth Festival.

26 Aug.

Lou leaves Tautenburg, presenting N with a poem, ‘Gebet an das Leben’, written in the autumn of 1881 (Lou Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Zürich 1951, pp. 46 f). After his return to Naumburg on the 27th, N fits this to the music of his Hymnus an die Freundschaft of 1873 as a solo song with piano accompaniment: his last musical composition. Favourable mention of the text is made in the letter to Köselitz of 27 Oct. 1887, and Eh-Z § 1.

Late Aug.

The first four books of frW are published.

7 Sept.–15 Nov.

N escapes from Naumburg to Leipzig hoping to see Romundt (who is away). From here, he sends frW to H.v.Stein (see above, s.v.Rée to N, 30 May 1876; Winter 1877–8; and 20 Oct. 1879). In exchange, he receives the proof of Stein’s series of dialogues, Helden und Welt. Dramatische Bilder. [N was visited by Stein at Sils-Maria, 26–8 Aug. 1884; and he saw him for the last time in Oct. 1885 on the road between Kösen and Naumburg. Stein’s career of exceptional promise was cut short by his premature death on 20 June in 1887. N’s library contains the monumental Wagner-Lexikon of which Stein was co-editor with C.F.Glasenapp, and he would probably have known Stein’s contributions to Wolzogen’s Bayreuther Blätter, to which he continued to subscribe.] W, in failing health, leaves Bayreuth for Venice. He arrives on the 16th, and moves with his family and entourage into the Palazzo VendraminCalergi on the Grand Canal on the 18th. Here he spends the last five months of his life.

14 Sept.

15 Sept. 17 Sept. Köselitz to N, 23 Sept.

N to Köselitz, 4 Oct. and 6 Oct. Early Oct.–5 Nov.

N hears Carmen in Leipzig. Overbeck visits N for a few hours from Dresden. Köselitz resides in Venice throughout W’s last sojourn in the city, and is invited to meet Rubinstein. He reports: Liszt and Wagner stroll around the Piazza San Marco deep in conversation, as if it were a question of the production of a new, doubtless Buddhist culture. Scholars, following Glasenapp VI 726, set the date of Liszt’s arrival in Venice as 19 Nov. 1882: the date of this letter therefore appears to be inaccurate. N calls on Nikisch in Leipzig in the hope of arranging a performance of Scherz, List und Rache. Köselitz arrives on the 7th, and sees N daily until his departure for Basel on 15 Nov.; he also meets Rée and Lou (Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick, p. 316). The negotiations with Nikisch fall through. N’s last meetings with Rée and Lou in Leipzig. The relationship has become strained, largely as a result of Elisabeth’s jealous machinations. In July and Aug. of the following year, the crisis threatens to engulf not only N’s but also Rée’s family and to reduce N to the condition of a ‘Timon of Athens’ (to Ida Overbeck, July 1883; Bernoulli I 339 f). The letter to Köselitz of 26 Aug. 1883 contains a previously unpublished remark: ‘The strange peril of this summer for me was called—not to shy away from the evil word—madness’ (quoted N-Chronik 87 after N-Br18).

208  Nietzsche, Wagner, and The Philosophy of Pessimism Following hints from Ida Overbeck, Lou is sometimes given a share of the credit for Z. ‘The fact that it was Lou who lifted Nietzsche up to such Himalayan heights makes her an object of reverence’ (Köselitz to Hofmiller, 10 Nov. 1896: J.Hofmiller, ‘Nietzsche’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte, XXIX(1931), 107; see also Bernoulli I 338 and 352). Only, it should be remembered that plans for Z were begun and the whole of Mr and most of frW were written before the meeting with Lou (these two books were later instated as commentaries on Z). Zarathustra’s strident words on the subjects of women and marriage may reflect N’s later disenchantment; but it is to be remembered in this connection that Elisabeth, too, emerged from the fray in an unfavourable light. 13 Oct. The death of Gobineau. 1 Nov. W completes ‘Das Bühnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth 1882’ (B.Bl. and W-A1 X 381–95). N to Louise Ott, Hoping for a reunion with Rée and Lou, N asks Mme Ott to find lodgings for him 7 Nov. [1882–83] in Paris. Then on 15 Nov., realizing that his friends have abandoned their plans to visit France, he cancels his request (his last letter to Mme Ott) 15 Nov.–23 Feb. After the departure of Rée and Lou on ca. 5 Nov., N returns from Leipzig to Basel. 1883. He sees Overbeck, doubtless to report on his ‘loss’ of Lou (see above, s.v. 23 or 24 Apr. 1882). On 18 Nov., he sets out for Genoa. On 3 Dec., he reaches Nice where he stays for nearly three months: his third winter on the Italian Riviera. 24 Dec. In honour of Cosima’s birthday, W conducts his early Symphony in C major at La Fenice before a family gathering. The circumstances of the recovery of the score in Dresden, partly as a result of N’s friendship with the son of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, are described in W’s open letter to E.W.Fritzsch, editor of the Musikalisches Wochenblatt, ‘Bericht über die Wiederaufführung eines Jugendwerkes’ (Mus. Woch., and W-A1 X 397–406). Overbeck receives the ‘good news’ of the end of N’s short-lived affair with Lou. Overbeck to N, 27 or 28 Dec. (N-Br17 475 f).

1883 Lou von Salomé to Rée, 1 Jan.

In an affectionate letter, Lou looks back on the events of the past year. She makes no mention of N who seems far from her mind.

3 Jan.

Humperdinck, summoned from Paris to rehearse W’s Symphony, leaves Venice. Köselitz has tried unsuccessfully to interest Ernst Schuh in a performance of Scherz, List und Rache in Dresden. Elisabeth speaks warmly of the Wagnerian schoolmaster and political agitator, Bernhard Förster: At times we luxuriated in pity, heroic self-renunciation, Christianity, heroism, vegetariansim, racialism, colonialism, &c. &c. All this is so congenial to me and I feel so much at home with these ideas. [Elisabeth marries Förster on 22 May—W’s birthday—in 1885, and leaves for Paraguay in early Feb. 1886. She sees her brother for the last time before his breakdown in Oct. 1885.]

Köselitz to N, 6 Jan. Elisabeth to Köselitz 7 Jan. (N-Br17 284).

Calendar November 1868—February 1883  209 Köselitz to N, 13 Jan.

Köselitz has personally submitted some of his compositions to Levi in Munich: The manner in which on my second visit he expressed his admiration for you as author of The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations has given me a real respect for him.

13 Jan.

Liszt leaves Venice.

31 Jan.

W completes his last finished work: a reply to an open letter from Stein of December 1882 (W-A1 X 407–16). The two letters form the introduction to Stein’s Helden und Welt, Chemnitz 1883.

3 Feb.

W and Cosima discuss Ernst Wagner’s ‘Friedrich Nietzsches neuestes Buch “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft”’, Internationale Monatsschrift, I 11(1882), 685. Cosima notes: I mentioned this, and R looked at it only to express his total aversion. Everything of value came from Schopenhauer. And everything about the man disgusted him.

4 Feb.

Levi comes to Venice to discuss the next Bayreuth Festival, and brings the news that Köselitz has presented himself in Munich with a testimonial from N (Glasenapp VI 764). W has already heard of Köselitz, whom N wanted to bring to the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 (N to W, 27 Sept. 1876; to Cosima 19 Dec. 1876: N-Br15 599 f). Cosima writes: Finally R said to me: Nietzsche had no ideas of his own, no blood of his own. What flowed into him was other people’s blood. Still more touching is her remark on the 5th: ‘Nietzsche’s perfidy again crossed his mind.’

11 Feb.

W begins a fair copy of the unfinished ‘Über das Weibliche im Menschlichen’ (W-A2 XII 341–3).

12 Feb.

At noon, very moved, Levi takes leave of W. In the evening W reads from La Motte-Fouqué’s Undine while his portrait is sketched by Joukowsky; he plays the song of the Rhine-maidens from Das Rheingold and comments on the words. The last entry in Cosima’s diary.

13 Feb.

N completes the fair copy of Z I, which he remits to his publisher next day.

13 Feb., ca. 3.30 p.m.

W’s death.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

To Naumann, 6 Nov. 1888 (N-Br6 1379). Extracts from Paneth’s letters to his fiancée, Sophie Schwab, are given in Förster-N II ii 481–93; and DeN 265 ff and 272 f. Paneth proposed to review the book (N to Overbeck, 22 Dec. 1884). To Overbeck, 24 Mar. 1887. An amendment of the original title, Der Wille zur Macht. Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe: see N-A5 60–80, and facsimiles IV and V. The question as to whether the book constituted the whole of the Umwerthung aller Werthe or only the first instalment is discussed by Mazzino Montinari, ‘Ein neuer Abschnitt in Nietzches “Ecce homo”’, N-Studien, I(1972), 398 f, n. 33. To Overbeck, 7Apr. 1884. To Fritzsch, 29 Aug. 1886: a facsimile is given without transcription by Kaufmann 470 ff. To Deussen, 26Nov. 1888 (N-Br19 400: previously unpublished). From a critical note on the nature of art dated 25 Mar. 1888: the amended text of WzM § 1039. See L.Lampert’s perceptive article ‘Zarathustra and His Disciples’, N-Studien, VIII(1979), 309–33. H.G.Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics, London 1966, p. 244. The note in which N recorded the experience is transcribed in N-A3 V 2 11[141]. See Calendar, s.v. 2 July–1 Oct. 1881. See, however, J.P.Hershbell and S.A.Nimis, ‘Nietzsche and Heraclitus’, N-Studien, VIII(1979), 37: ‘Alas, in the end one can only say that the idea of eternal recurrence simply never suggested itself to Heraclitus.’ See C-Tb, entry for 24 Dec. 1873: ‘R and I recognize with some concern the great influence this writer has had on Prof. Nietzsche’; and N-A3 IV 1 1[2]: ‘Hölderlin Schluß Empedokles’. See M.W.Bertallot, Hölderlin-Nietzsche, Berlin 1918; and Carl Roos, Nietzsches Empedoklesfragmenter, Copenhagen 1937. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner, 6 vols. in 12, Stuttgart 1943–61, IV i 133. Zoroaster is represented by many Hellenists as the father of philosophy (J.Duchesne-Guillemin, The Western Response to Zoroaster, Oxford 1958, pp. 70 ff). N’s knowledge of Zoroaster was derived in part from Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, 3rd edn., 4 vols., Leipzig and Darmstadt 1836–43, pp. 230–33, listed in the inventory of his library (N-Bibliothek 10); and Fr. Spiegel, whose Eranische Alterthumskunde, 3 vols., Leipzig 1871–8, he borrowed from the Basel University Library in 1878–9 (N-Bibliothek 55). It is also possible that he knew Hermann Brockhaus’s Vendidad Sade, Leipzig 1850, one of the landmarks of early Zoroastrian scholarship. See also Andler II 408 ff, and H.Mehregan, ‘Zarathustra im Awesta und bei Nietzsche’, N-Studien, VIII(1979), 291–308. The earliest reference to Zoroaster occurs in some notes of 1867–8, ‘Zum Prooem des Laertius’ (N-A2 IV 22 f). Ludwig Klages, Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Nietzsches, Leipzig 1926, pp. 214 ff. Klages stands strongly opposed to a purely mechanical interpretation of the theory. See the annotations to N’s letters of 14 Aug. 1881 and 3 Sept. 1883 (N-Br1 IV 451 and 470). By Malcolm Pasley, ‘Nietzsche and Klinger’, The Discontinuous Tradition. Studies…in Honour of Ernest Ludwig Stahl, ed. P.F.Ganz, Oxford 1971, pp. 146–57.

Notes  211 22 Compare N-A3 VII 1 4[81]; 10[47]; 15[10]; 16[86]; 20[10]; 21[6]: ‘Wir schufen den schwersten Gedanken—nun laßt uns das Wesen schaffen, dem er leicht und selig ist!’ 23 Rütimeyer’s influence is discussed by Andler 1467–75, and Janz I 317–21. A copy of Die Grenzen der Thierwelt, Basel 1868, was found in Elisabeth’s library, probably appropriated from her brother’s (G-Br IV 32, n. 153). Darwin was the subject of N’s correspondence with Raimund Granier as early as September 1865. 24 For the draft of this passage see N-A3 V 2 11[143]. 25 N, however, used the ‘clock’ image in the essay ‘Fatum und Geschichte’ in 1862, before he read Schopenhauer. 26 On this point see Martin Heidegger, ‘Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra?’, Vorträge und Aufsätze, Pfullingen 1954, 101–26. 27 See Paul Valadier, Nietzsche et la critique du christianisme, Paris 1974, p. 582: ‘Mais Nietzche reconnaît que Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra, sur ce point, ne peut être dépassé et que, si cette pensée doit encore justifier ses presupposes et montrer ses implications critiques, elle a trouvé la son expression achevée.’ 28 On 25 Jan. 1882, at the time of Mr, N wrote to Köselitz ‘Ich bin noch nicht raif genug für die elementaren Gedanken, die ich in diesen Schluß-Büchern darstellen will’. The words are echoed in Z II-Die stillste Stunde: ‘O Zarathustra…du bist nicht reif für deine Früchte!’, and in Z IVDas Zeichen: ‘Zarathustra ward reif, meine Stunde kam.’ 29 See N to Brandes, 2 Dec. 1887. 30 Eh-Warum ich so klug bin, § 4. N erroneously thought that he was of Polish extraction and, like Heine, an expatriate in Germany. 31 For once N’s sister had to admit defeat (Förster-N II ii 421; DeN 206). Köselitz, too, was evasive in his ‘Einführung in den Gedankenkreis von “Also sprach Zarathustra”’ (N-A1 VI 516). 32 See N-A3 V 2 11[195]. When writing to Köselitz on 20 May 1883, N gave ‘Zarathustra’ as an etymological improvement on ‘Zoroaster’. 33 Newman IV 328, n. 10. 34 See N to Elisabeth, 24 June 1879. Sils-Maria is ‘die Ursprungsstätte des Zarathustrismus’ in the letter to Köselitz of 25 July 1884. The importance of Malwida von Meysenbug’s Memoiren for the evocations of landscape in Z is stressed by Janz I 686 ff. 35 Alternative sources are suggested by Förster-N I 49 f; DjN 59; Andler III 251 f; Schaeffner 215 f; and Karl Hartmann, ‘Aus dem geistigen Leben Bayreuths’, Archiv für die Geschichte von Oberfranken, XXXIV ii (1940), 1–35. 36 Gustav Naumann, Zarathustra-Commentar, 4 vols., Leipzig 1899 ff, I 34. Edgar Salin, Vom deutschen Verhängnis, Hamburg 1959, p. 131, suggested Basel. Andler (III 251) was more circumspect: ‘Il faut voir dans sa denomination métaphorique une de ces associations d’idées imprévues où se complaît l’imagination de Nietzsche.’ 37 Köselitz in a note to N’s letter of 10 Oct. 1886 said Portofino (N-Br1 IV 487). 38 C.G.Jung, Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phänomene, Diss. Zürich, Leipzig 1902, pp. 112 ff. 39 A reproduction of Gill’s cartoon will be conveniently found in Charles Osborne, Wagner and his World, London 1977, p. 84. 40 See The Hon. Mrs. Burrell, Richard Wagner. His Life and Works from 1813–1834, London 1898, p. XV: ‘I have often thought in looking at Richard Wagner that he had a narrow escape of deformity; he was not in the least deformed, yet the immense head was poised on the shoulders at the angle peculiar to hunchbacks; it caused him to fall an easy prey to caricaturists.’ 41 To Seydlitz, 18 Nov. 1878. 42 See Janz II 224: ‘Dieses Archaisieren lag im Geschmacke der Zeit…. In der Literatur wurde Nietzsche davon berührt durch Richard Wagners Rückgrifif auf den Stabreim.’ 43 One thinks, for example, of N’s early interest in Voltaire’s drama Mahomet. 44 Here W was influenced by Herder’s research into the origin of language.

212  Notes 45 To Gersdorff, 28 June 1883. 46 Compare Mr § 447, ‘Meister und Schüler’, and frW § 106. Kaufmann (402) cites Aristotle’s excuse for disagreement with Plato in the Nichomachean Ethics, 1096a, as a likely source. The passage also answers Matt. 5:44; 10:24; and Luke 6:27, 35, and 40. 47 To Köselitz, 14 Feb. 1883 and Köselitz’s note (N-Br1 IV 463). 48 See Calendar, s.v. 3 Feb. 1883. 49 Köselitz to N, 16 Feb. 1883. 50 Any idea that N entertained an unreserved admiration for Cosima may be dismissed in view of the previously unpublished draft for a letter of Aug.-Sept. 1888: N-Br19 396. 51 Compare N to Overbeck, 7 Apr. 1884: ‘Es beginnt schon, was ich lange prophezeit habe, daß ich in manchen Stücken der Erbe R.W.’s sein werde.—’

PART I CHAPTER 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

W to Eduard Avenarius, 12 Oct. 1869. W-A7 26–33. In 1871, W published a slightly revised version, Der Nibelungen-Mythus als Entwurf zu einem Drama, in W-A1 II 201–14. Paneth to Sophie Schwab, 3 Jan. 1884 (Förster-N ii 484; Den 269). A similar impression was given at a later date by Paul Joukowsky in his unpublished recollections quoted by Glasenapp (VI 735 f): ‘Born to command, endowed with a strength that could construct or destroy….’ See N-A3 VII 2 26[20]; ibidem 26[31]: ‘Versuch einer Dictatur’ (previously unpublished); N-A3 VII 3 35[81]; 37[15]; 41[2]. See H.S.Reynold. ‘Richard Wagners jüdische Duzfreundschaften’, Wagner 1976, ed. Stewart Spencer, London 1976, pp. 166–75; and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ‘Wagner and the Greeks’, in The Times Literary Supplement, 9 Jan. 1976. See Rudolf Lück, Richard Wagner und Ludwig Feuerbach, Breslau 1905. Karl Ritter to Franziska Wagner, 24 Nov. 1850 (Glasenapp II i 383). Notes for an important tract Das Künstlerthum der Zukunft are included in W-A5 113–34. Specifically by Professor Bischoff of Cologne according to W’s open letter to Berlioz (W-A1 VII 117). W to Uhlig, 3 Dec. 1851: ‘Heute habe ich an Feuerbach geschrieben.’ W-A2 VII 218–27. N eventually came to know of this speech, which he mentions in his letter to Fuchs of 24 July 1888. Notably Herwegh: see Glasenapp IV 367 ff; and the poem ‘An Georg Herwegh’ of 24 Feb. 1873 (W-A8 231). ‘Wotan’ is ‘Wodan’ in the sketches for the poem and in the first edition of Der Ring of 1853, and in the first sketches for the music. G.A.Kietz, Richard Wagner in den Jahren 1842–1849 und 1873–1875, Dresden 1905, p. 86. Röckel describes the Dresden uprising, his capture, and thirteen years’ imprisonment in his book Sachsens Aufhebung und das Zuchthaus zu Waldheim, Frankfurt a.M. 1865. Like W, he was granted a full amnesty only in 1862. G.A.Kietz, Richard Wagner in den Jahren 1842–1849 und 1873–1875, Dresden 1905, pp. 69 f. See esp. the author’s ‘Carl Dahlhaus and “Der Ring”’, Wagner 1876, ed. Stewart Spencer, London 1976, pp. 68–82. See Robert Bailey, ‘Wagner’s musical sketches for “Siegfrieds Tod”’, Studies in Music History, ed. Harold Powers, Princeton 1968, pp. 459–94. W does not use capitals for nouns in the sketches, in the first fair copy of Der junge Siegfried, or in the fourth fair copy of Siegfried’s Tod. The last two MSS. appear to represent his final thoughts on the bipartite scheme for Der Ring. W-Bibliothek 88 f, 102, 106 f, and 112.

Notes  213 20 Listed by W as a source for Der Ring (W-A7 20). 21 Ettmüller became W’s mentor in Zürich, and was responsible for his introduction to Eliza and François Wille. W was already familiar with Ettmüller’s Vaulu-Spá, Leipzig 1830 (W-Bibliothek, Item 149); and he remarked on his renewed study of the Edda at his first meeting with the Willes in May 1851 (W-Br1 XIII 24 and 29). 22 The impending expansion of the scheme is announced in a letter to Uhlig of Nov. 1851. 23 See Feuerbach’s ‘Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft’, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Wilhelm Bolin jointly with Friedrich Jodl, 13 vols. in 12, Stuttgart 1959–64, II 299; and (on Hafiz) W to Röckel, 12 Sept. 1852 and 8 June 1853; to Uhlig, 14 Oct. 1852. 24 On the ‘tragic’ stature of Wotan and Brünnhilde as opposed to Siegfried, the original inspiration of the trilogy, see esp. C-Tb, s.v. 4 July 1873. 25 The sketch for the Norns’ scene is included in W-A7 56 ff. The reworking is discussed in Strobel’s ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der “Götterdämmerung”’, Die Musik, XXV(1933), 336–8. 26 This fulfils the god’s pact with Brünnhilde in the last lines of Die Walküre. In Der junge Siegfried, he gives way without putting up a fight (W-A7 180).

CHAPTER 2 1

For the history of the word, used by such writers as Novalis, Heine, and Goethe, see R.M.Meyer, ‘Der Übermensch. Eine wortgeschichtliche Skizze’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Wortforschung, I(1900), 3–25. Manfred is an ‘Übermensch’, and Byron’s poem ‘ein übermenschliches Werk’ in an essay of 1861, ‘Über die dramatischen Dichtungen Byrons’ (N-A2 9–15); apparently N’s first use of the term. 2 More conciliatory in tone is Mr § 27, ‘Der Werth im Glauben an übermenschliche Leidenschaften’. There is passing reference to ‘Heroen und Übermenschen’ in frW § 143, ‘Grösster Nutzen des Polytheismus’. 3 See N to Rohde, 9 Dec. 1868, where W is ‘die leibhaftigste Illustration dessen, was Schopenhauer ein Genie nennt.’ N refers to Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, § 31, ‘Vom Genie’. 4 Martin Plüddeman, Die Bühnenfestspiele in Bayreuth, ihre Gegner und ihre Zukunft, Colberg 1877, pp. 53 f. 5 N-Bibliothek 32. 6 See esp. A§ 47. 7 The dictum ‘Gott is todt!’ is evolved from Plutarch’s De defectu oraculorum, XVII: ‘Great Pan is dead!’, cited in GdT § 11 and in N’s Empedokles fragments (N-A1 IX 130 ff). Hegel, too, speaks of the death of God; and Heine mentions it in Zur Geschichte der Religion u. Philosophie in Deutschland, Book II (last lines): ‘Hört Ihr das Glöckchen klingeln? Kniet nieder—Man bringt die Sakramente einem sterbenden Gotte’ (Sämtliche Werke, ed. Fritz Strick, 11 vols., Munich 1925 ff, V. 216). See inter alia Martin Heidegger, ‘Nietzsches Wort “Gott ist tot”’, Holzwege, Frankfurt a.M. 1950, pp. 193–247. 8 Siegfried is identified with the sun-god in Die Wibelungen (W-A1 II 157 and 170 ff). 9 This echoes passages in W’s Die Revolution (W-A2 XXII 247); and Kunst und Klima, last sentences (W-A1 III 268). 10 Paneth to Sophie Schwab, 25 Jan. 1884 (Förster-N II ii 487). 11 Slightly re-phrased in N-A3 VII 1 5[1:63]; and in ZII—Auf den glückseligen Inseln: ‘Was wäre denn zu schaffen, wenn Götter—da wären!’

214  Notes

CHAPTER 3 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

As a guest of Ludwig II, 1–18 Nov. 1865. Förster-N II ii 854. Newman III 271–5. Compare N to Rohde, 17 Aug. 1869: ‘Als ich das letzte Mal dort war, wurde Wagner gerade fertig mit der Composition seines “Siegfried” und war im üppigsten Gefühl seiner Kraft.’ The performances took place on 29 Nov. 1869 (Cosima and Richard Pohl), 22 Aug. 1869 (Cosima and N): 1 Dec. 1869 (Pohl); 6 Jan. 1870 (Cosima); 2 Mar. 1870 (Porges); 18 July 1871 (Cosima). On 3 Aug. 1871, W played extracts from Siegfried for N and Gersdorff, but precise details are not forthcoming in C-Tb or in N’s correspondence. See also C-Tb, s.v. 18 July 1872 (Rubinstein); 28 July 1873 (Liszt and Klindworth) in Bayreuth. This performance is not mentioned by Cosima. See Calendar, s.v. 31 July—1 Aug. 1869. See Köselitz to N, 6 Apr. and 18 Apr. 1883. Köselitz especially admired the last part of Siegfried, Act III. The Westminster Review. 3 N.S. (1853), 388–407. See W’s ‘Publikum und Popularität’, § 1: ‘Wo blieb der große Schopenhauer…wenn ihn nicht ein englischer Reviewer uns entdeckt hätte?’ (W-A1 X 96). Oxenford was drama critic for the London Times. Westernhagen 531 f. In all probability, W first read Schopenhauer in 1852, without registering his full significance. See Edouard Sans, Richard Wagner et la pensée Schopenhauerienne, Paris 1969, pp. 17–22. The date of the passage on Schopenhauer in Mein Leben is established by the first entry in Cosima’s diary. Predictably, Schopenhauer, who like W albeit for different reasons entertained a particular aversion to Grand Opera, did not respond to W’s overture; and he ignored an invitation to visit W and Herwegh in Zürich (to A.v.Doß, 10 Jan. 1855). When writing to Julius Frauenstädt on 30 Dec. 1854, he mentioned having received Der Ring der [sic.] Nibelungen, remarking on the fine quality of the paper. In conversation with François Wille—soon an ardent admirer, who visited Frankfurt a.M. regularly between 1855–9 to pay homage—he is reputed to have said: ‘[Wagner] hat mehr Genie zum Dichter! Ich, Schopenhauer, bleibe Rossini und Mozart treu’ (W-Br1 XIII 79). Der Ring was attentively read, and Schopenhauer’s marginal notes, if they shed no light on the pessimistic motivation as W conceived it, are of some interest: see W.A.Ellis, The Life of Richard Wagner, 6 vols., London 1900–8, IV 440–6; and S-A2 V 436 f. First published in Otto Strobel’s ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Götterdämmerung’, Die Musik, XXV(1933), 336–41. I am grateful to the Archiv des Hauses Wahnfried for having made the text available. Strobel gives the date as 26 June, which is written on the letter in different ink and handwriting. Rebirth is the fate of the evil Hagen, according to the sketch. Cf. esp. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, § 63; and Supplements 41 and 47 (concluding passages).

CHAPTER 4 1 2 3 4 5 6

This is made explicit in a draft N-A3 VII 3 34(204]: previously unpublished. The event is vividly described in the autobiographical sketch Rückblick auf meine zwei Leipzig Jahre (N-A2 III 291 ff). See Calendar, s.v. 8 Nov. 1868. Du Moulin 1465 f. Du Moulin I 473. Wilhelm Tappert, Richard Wagner, sein Leben und seine Werke, Elberfeld 1883, p. 77.

Notes  215 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

On 10 May, Gersdorff reported that he had inspected Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, the two published instalments of the cycle. See also N’s letters to Elisabeth of 5 May 1875 on inspecting Klindworth’s vocal score: ‘Das ist der Himmel auf Erden’; and Gersdorff of 8 May 1875. A facsimile of the page, ‘Auskomponiert 10. Apr. ’72’, is given in Otto Strobel’s ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der “Götterdämmerung”’, Die Musik, XXV(1933), facing 337. A complete transcription including several discarded lines is given in Carl Dahlhaus’s article ‘Über den Schluß der “Götterdämmerung”’, Richard Wagner: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Carl Dahlhaus, Regensburg 1971, p. 107. From a brief first visit to Italy. In letters to Gersdorff of May 1874 and 21 July 1876 N pointedly quotes the words ‘wunsch— und wahnlos’. In N-Br2 IV 384, this is wrongly traced to the duet in Tristan und Isolde, Act II, scene ii: ‘Nie Wiedererwachens wahnlos holdbewußter Wunsch.’ This recalls a remark in one of the lectures included in Burckhardt’s Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, perhaps indebted to N’s insights: ‘Und nun zeigt es sich…, daß die Macht an sich böse ist’ (N-A3 IV 4 158 f). See Calendar, s.v. 7 Nov. 1870. From St. Augustine: see J § 200. Compare N-A3 VIII 1 2[101]; ‘Verhängnißvoll die Verse Brünnhildes’. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, IV § 59 (last sentences). Unless one accepts Carl Dahlhaus’s recent contention that the two notions are the same (‛Über den Schluß der “Götterdämmerung”’, Richard Wagner: Werk und Wirkung. ed. Carl Dahlhaus, Regensburg 1971, pp. 97–116). Compare S-A1 III 583: ‘Das Daseyn…giebt [der Resignierte] willig auf: was ihm statt dessen wird, ist in unsern Augen nichts; weil unser Daseyn, auf jenes bezogen, nichts ist. Der Buddhaistische Glaube nennt jenes Nirwana, d.h. Erloschen.’ N is probably thinking of Franz Brendel, editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, who is mentioned in Eh-MA § 2 as the Wagnerian who confuses W with Hegel. On Cosima’s advice: the orchestral sketch bears a marginal note: ‘Schluß! Alles Cosel’n zu gefallen. 22. Juli 1872’ (C.v.Westernhagen, Die Entstehung des ‘Ring’, Zürich 1973, p. 277). Following correspondence with Ludwig II in 1872–6, W allowed himself to be persuaded to set the first peroration to music. The MS. presented to the King on his 31st birthday is lost. A facsimile of the sketch (on three staves) is given in W-Br8 III, facing 88. Otto Eiser, ‘Richard Wagners “Der Ring des Nibelungen”. Ein exegetischer Versuch’, Bayreuther Blätter, I(1878), 311. See also W to Röckel, 25–6 Jan. 1854 and 23 Aug. 1856.

CHAPTER 5 1

Partly based on an untitled short story of 1864 (N-A2 II 415 f). Compare Mr § 423, ‘Im grossen Schweigen’. 2 See Calendar, s.v. 1 July 1875–22 July 1876. 3 N-A3 IV 1 11[41]. Compare ibidem 11 [38]. 4 N-A3 IV 3 27[69] and 30[147]. See Förster-N II ii 254; DjN 389. The music was played to N by Köselitz at Riva: see Calendar, s.v. 10 Feb.—29 June 1880. 5 This is developed in G-Was ich den Alten verdanke, § 4. 6 Deussen 2. 7 A reply to N’s letter to Gersdorff of 18 Jan. 1876. 8 See N to Overbeck, Sept. 1882 and 11 Feb. 1883 (two crucial sentences are restored in N-A6 184). 9 Socrates’ death is mentioned in GdT § 13, and frW § 36, ‘Letzte Worte’ and § 340, ‘Der sterbende Sokrates’. Compare G-Das Problem des Sokrates, § 1. 10 To Brandes, 10 Apr. 1888.

216  Notes 11 See Cosima to N, 21 Jan. 1871; Westernhagen 467; and Bergfeld’s note to N’s letter to W of 18 Sept. 1873 (N-Br16 186). For Elisabeth, the ‘island of tombs’ was the wilderness adjoining the parsonage at Röcken (DjN 22); but for Köselitz it was the island of San Michele at Venice (note to N’s letter of 15 Jan. 1888: N-Br1 IV 501 f): accepted by Andler II 382 and 479. 12 Andler (III 262, n.i.) tried to derive these words from Dante’s Inferno, Canto VII i: ‘Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe!’ An autobiographical source offered by R.v.Seydlitz, Wann, warum, was und wie ich schrieb, Gotha 1900, p. 36, is cited in N-A3 IV 4 453. 13 To H.S.Chamberlain, 1 Mar. 1901 (Cosima Wagner und Houston Stewart Chamberlain im Briefwechsel 1888–1909, ed. Paul Pretzsch, Leipzig 1934, p. 609). 14 Allegedly, a dog was responsible for Nietzsche’s father’s accident at Röcken: DjN 18. See also ibidem 21 f, where Elisabeth recalls the howling of a dog as the family left Röcken for Naumburg. 15 Probably based on Herodotus who records that Xerxes shot arrows at the sun. 16 Compare Z-Vorrede, § 5: ‘Muss man ihnen erst die Ohren zerschlagen, dass sie lernen, mit den Augen hören?’; and frW § 223—a playful paraphrase of Isaiah 6:9 f. 17 See the author’s ‘Carl Dahlhaus and “Der Ring”’, Wagner 1976, ed. Stewart Spencer, London 1976, pp. 79 f. 18 See Gustav Naumann, Zarathustra-Commentar, 4 vols., Leipzig 1899 ff, III 161: ‘Indem Nietzsche seine Art betont, hebt er sein Antipodenthum Wagner gegenüber mit besonderem Nachdruck hervor.’ On the centrality of the ‘Erda’ scene in Siegfried, see the penultimate chapter of Kurt Overhoff’s Der germanisch-christliche Mythos Richard Wagners, Dinkelsbühl 1955. 19 N is probably thinking of the lyric poetry of Heine, which was one of the models for the poetic supplement to frW, ‘Lieder des Prinzen Vogelfrei’. See S.L.Gilman, ‘Incipit parodia: the Function of Parody in the Lyrical Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche’, N-Studien, IV(1975), 52–74. 20 An allusion to the cave of Trophonius which supplicants entered with honey cakes to pacify the snakes (mentioned in Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, § 1; and in Cosima’s letter to N of 22 Aug. 1872). Honey is Zarathustra’s repast in the poem ‘Aus hohen Bergen’ which concludes J. 21 The motto from the second of Pindar’s Pythian Odes, which prefaces the essay on Diogenes of 1867, was a particular favourite (see Köselitz’s note to N’s letter of 20 Aug. 1882:N-Br1 IV 460). 22 Matt. 14:26: ‘Und da ihn die Jünger sahen auf dem Meer gehen, erschraken sie, und sprachen: Es ist ein Gespenst; und schrieen vor Furcht.’ 23 Justin Kerner, Blätter aus Prevorst, IV (Karlsruhe 1833), 57 ff. N is thought to have read this journal at his grandparents’ house in Pobles: C.G.Jung, Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phänomene, Diss Zürich, Leipzig 1902, pp. 112 ff. 24 From Heine’s Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, Book III (Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Fritz Strich, 11 vols., Munich 1925 ff, V 274).

CHAPTER 6 1 2 3

Here, as in ‘Vom Gesicht und Räthsel’, one is reminded of the terrifying dream of the toad related to Clara Thurneysen at Basel (Bernoulli I 72), and mentioned in the notes of 1877–8 (N-A3 IV 2 21[21]; and IV 3 28[42]: previously unpublished). These words are echoed by the wicked sorcerer in Z IV-Das Lied der Schwermuth, § 3, in the passage beginning ‘Herumsteigend auf lügnerischen Wort-Brücken,/Auf bunten Regenbogen…’ ‘Das Nachtlied’ was written during a stay in the Piazza Barberini in Rome: hence the image of the outpouring fountain (Eh-Z §§ 4 and 7). A previously unpublished draft shows that the discourse was originally set out in free verse (N-A3 VII 1 9[53]). In Eh-Z § 7, the discourse is quoted in its entirety as representing the prophet’s poetic manner at its finest.

Notes  217 4 5 6

7 8 9

Set on Ischia according to N’s letter to Köselitz of 16 Aug. 1883. Elisabeth says that the dance by Cupid and the maidens was inspired by a statue in the Villa Borghese (Förster-N II ii 457; DeN 226). Antique castanets? The model may have been the dance song in Bizet’s Carmen, Act II. In the vocal score, N wrote ‘Ideal aller castagnetten Musik’ (N-A4 41). See also FW § 2. Zarathustra produces the whip on the advice of the old woman in Z I—Von alten und jungen Weiblein. A comparable proverb from Sacchetti’s Novella 86 is quoted in J § 147; but this was noted in 1884, a year after Z I was written (N-A3 VII 2 26[337]). Elisabeth gives the source as Turgeniev’s Erste Liebe (Förster-N II ii 559; DeN 411 ff). N particularly emphasized the confidential nature of the disclosure when reading the passage aloud with Resa von Schirnhofer (cf. Janz II 278 ff). For a detailed account of the sketches, see my article with Manfred Ruter, ‘Nietzsche’s Sketches for the Poem “Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!”’, N-Studien, IV (1975), 279–83. The sketches are not transcribed in the relevant volume of N-A3. Compare N-A3 VII 3 28[2]; and N to Resa von Schirnhofer, Nov. 1884 (N-Br12 206): Geht die Welt nicht schief und schiefer? Alle Christen treiben Schacher, Die Franzosen werden tiefer,— Und die Deutschen—täglich flacher.



Of interest is the amusing dedicatory poem W wrote when presenting W-A1 to Ludwig II on 25 Aug. 1873, in which he compared his nine volumes to the nine Sibylline Books: perhaps N read the poem during one of his visits to Bayreuth. The refrain varies the formula: Neun Bücher bot dem König Rom’s Sibylle; Neun biet’ ich Dir: erfülle sie Dein Wille! (W-A8 233 f; and W-Br8 III 22 f)

10 An echo of Rev. 19:2? In a letter, N writes ‘Vor diesem Berlin habe ich ein förmliches Grauen, wie das Entsetzen der ersten Christen vor der großen Hure Rom.’ 11 A note of 1884 reads ‘Ohne die römischen Cäsaren und die römische Gesellschaft wäre der Wahnsinn des Christenthums nicht zur Herrschaft gekommen’ (N-A3 VII 2 25[344]); a previously unpublished note of Sept.-Oct. 1888 reads ‘Das Christenthum ist die Verfallsform der alten Welt in tiefster Ohnmacht…’ (N-A3 VIII 3 22[4]).

CHAPTER 7 1 2

3 4

5 6

Herodotus I 136; Plato, Alcibiades, 212 f. Compare the note of 1885–6 in which N reflected ‘In wiefern diese Selbstvernichtung der Moral noch ein Stück ihrer eigenen Kraft ist’ (N-A3 VIII 1 2[207]: the amended text of WzM § 405); also frW § 357: ‘Man sieht, was eigentlich über den christlichen Gott gesiegt hat: die christliche Moralität selbst…’ See N-A3 VII 2 26[390]; VII 3 38[19] (previously unpublished); and the account of N’s first philosophical essay in ZG-Vorrede, § 3. Andler III 253, n. 1. Schaeffner (213, n. 372) suggests a borrowing from Arthur Gobineau’s Histoire des Perses, 2 vols., Paris 1869, I. 95 f. Parallels have also been noted in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam and Siegfried Lipiner’s Der entfesselte Prometheus. On this symbolism, see D.S.Thatcher, ‘Eagle and Serpent in “Zarathustra”’, N-Studien, VI(1977), 240–60. Echoed by the magician in Z IV-Das Lied der Schwermuth, § 3, in the passage beginning ‘Oder, dem Adler gleich, der lange,/Lange starr in Abgründe blickt…’ See also frW § 286, ‘Zwischenrede’. Orpheus and Amphion are mentioned in Cosima’s letter to

218  Notes 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

N of 24 Apr. 1872 apropos of the construction of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. See N to Köselitz, 8 Jan. 1877: ‘R.W. hat das Fürchten, aber leider auch das Warten nicht gelernt.’ Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Fritz Strich, 11 vols., Munich 1925 ff, VII 398. N-A3 VII 1 5[1:68]. Compare ‘Alles Gute ist aus einem Bösen geworden’ (N-A3 VII 1 1[62]). Compare N-A3 VIII 3 23[7]: ‘Mein Satz: die guten Menschen sind die schädlichste Art Menschen’; and esp. Eh-Warum ich ein Schicksal bin, §§ 4 and 5. Compare frW § 371, ‘Wir Unverständlichen’. See J §§ 2, 4, 23 f, 32 f, 44, 149, 153, 190, 201 f, 212, 225, 227, 229, 260, et passim. The distinction between ‘good’, ‘evil’, and ‘bad’—the subject of the first of these essays— originates in MA § 45, and is developed in J § 260. Zarathustra enlarges on this in ‘Das Nachtwandler-Lied’, § 9. The original title replaces the familiar ‘Das trunkne Lied’ in N-A3. Some of N’s material comes from the poem ‘Einsiedlers Sehnsucht’ which he sent to Heinrich von Stein at the end of Nov. 1884, subsequently adapted and included under the title ‘Aus hohen Bergen’ at the end of J. This passage is expounded in the note N-A3 VIII 1 7[38]. Karl Schlechte (Nietzsches grosser Mittag, Frankfurt a.M. 1954, pp. 16 f) notes that an early poem ‘Gethsemane und Golgotha’ (N-A2 II 400–5) fuses the midnight scene at Gethsemane and the midday scene at Golgotha into a single, decisive event. See also the last stanza of J-Aus hohen Bergen: Nun feiern wir, vereinten Siegs gewiss, Das Fest der Feste: Freund Zarathustra kam, der Gast der Gäste! Nun lacht die Welt, der grause Vorhang riss, Die Hochzeit kam für Licht und Finsternis…

CHAPTER 8 1 2 3

4

See also ZG III § 24, where the saying is attributed to the Society of Assassins. See frW § 377: ‘Wir sind keine Humanitarier…’; and ZG I § 17-Anmerkung. In the celebrated ‘Die Hadesfahrt’ in VMS § 408, N traces his descent from Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. In his notes he cites Moses, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Brutus, Muhammad, Mirabeau, Napoleon, and others. It is unclear that any of these correspond exactly—or even approximately—to the ideal of ‘Übermensch’. The passage harks back to N’s response to the receipt of Deussen’s Das System des Vedânta soon after completing Z I. Early in 1883 he told Deussen ‘Der Zufall will, daß man gerade jetzt ein Manifest von mir druckt, welches ungefähr mit derselben Beredsamkeit Ja! sagt, wo Dein Buch Nein! sagt.’

PART II CHAPTER 9 1 2

See N to Köselitz, 21 Jan. 1887; and N-A3 VIII 1 5[41]: these notes were used by Elisabeth as the basis of a forged letter dated Feb. 1887. Schaeffner (311 f) points out that N’s letters of early Jan. 1887 make no mention of the prelude. N recalls Goethe’s comment on the Catholicism of Friedrich Schlegel in his letter to Zelter of 20 Oct. 1831. See Du Moulin I 829 f, which gives Cosima’s reaction to W’s change of outlook.

Notes  219 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27 28 29

The draft in W’s Brown Book has recently been published (W-A8 53–70). The scenario has most of the familiar features of the poem, discounting the modifications outlined by Glasenapp V 344 f. Compare VMS § 384. For N’s connection with the Bayreuther Blätter and attitude to H.v. Wolzogen, see Calendar s.v. 22 and 24 May 1871; 7 Nov.—3 Dec. 1876; 1 Sept. 1877; Aug. 1878. See esp. the letter to Köselitz of 29 Jan. 1882. The term ‘Verrat’ is used in a letter by Cosima (DeN 70), perhaps following MA I § 637. Ludwig Schemann, Meine Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner, Stuttgart 1902, pp. 40 f. Du Moulin I 842. Du Moulin I 833. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, 3rd edn., Dresden 1924, p. 129. DeN 180 f and 192. E.F.Podach, Friedrich Nietzsche und Lou Salomé. Ihre Begegnung 1882, Zürich and Leipzig 1937, p. 67. This letter contradicts Elisabeth’s published account: see Calendar, s.v. 26 July 1882. Köselitz’s note to N’s letter of 10 Jan. 1883 (N-Br1 IV 462). See Rudolf Binion, Frau Lou, Princeton 1968, pp. 73 and 126 f. Andler II 495. See esp. Eh-Warum ich so weise bin, § 4. In a letter to Wolzogen of 27 Nov. 1884, Stein remarked on N’s fate: ‘Voll Sehnsucht nach freundschaftlich-lebendiger Gemeinsamkeit findet er sie nicht mehr, seit er jener höchsten Gemeinsamkeit einmal untreu ward’ (H.v.Steins Briefwechsel mit Hans von Wolzogen, ed. H.v.Wolzogen Leipzig 1910, pp. 93 ff). Daniel Halévy, La Vie de Nietzsche, rev. edn., Paris 1944, pp. 352 ff. Published in 1887 by Siegfried Wagner as a memorial to Heinrich von Stein. On this point, see Jessie L.Weston, The Legends of the Wagner Drama, London 1900, pp. 110, 156 f, and 195 f. E.F.Podach, Gestalten um Nietzsche, Weimar 1932, pp. 134 f. Förster-N II ii 492. 1st edn., Paris 1944, pp. 205 ff. W’s scenario, dated 16 May 1856, is published in W-A5 97 f (listed in N-Bibliothek 33), and in W-A2 XI 325. In a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of 30 Apr. 1855, the source is given as Adolf Holtzmann’s Indische Sagen. See André Fauconnet, ‘Essai sur une oeuvre inachevée de Richard Wagner: “Les Vainqueurs” et la genèse de Parsifal’, Schopenhauer-Jahrb., XXXIII(1949), 66–81. Bayreuther Festspiele 1962. Tannhäuser Programm, p. 2. W goes on to say that at about this time he drafted a scenario for Herwegh in which the first Act was to show the hero in the Asiatic country of his birth; the second his reincarnation in Greece and Rome; and the third his reincarnation in the Middle Ages and modern times (W-A6 628 f). Kundry most closely resembles Ahasuerus who is said to have laughed at Christ as he was bearing the Cross (mentioned in the last lines of Das Judenthum in der Musik: W-A1 V 108). When writing to Mathilde Wesendonck in Aug. 1860, W offered a solution to two problems in Lohengrin, contending that as Sawitry (Prakrĭti), reborn, proves worthy of Ânanda, so Elsa in her rebirth would completely reach Lohengrin. Lohengrin, too, is no longer Parsifal’s son but his reincarnation. For an extended discussion of this concept in relation to W, see Edouard Sans, Richard Wagner et la pensée Schopenhauerienne, Paris 1969, pp. 85–124, et passim. Having tried out various spellings, W opted for Görres’s ‘Parsifal’ only in 1877. The etymology stems from J. Görres’s introduction to Lohengrin…nach der Abschrift des Vaticanischen Manuscriptes von Ferdinand Gloekle, Heidelberg 1813, p. vi: ‘Parsi oder Parseh Fal, d.i. der reine oder arme Dumme’ (W-Bibiothek 97).

220  Notes 30 See H.v. Wolzogen, Richard Wagner und die Thierwelt, 3rd edn., Berlin 1910, pp. 15 f; and the Venice Diary for 1 Oct. 1858. 31 Bôdhisattva’s cousin and arch-enemy Devadatta shoots a goose, but in this case only wounds it. 32 Robert Petsch, ‘Zur Quellenkunde des “Parsifal”’, Richard Wagner-Jahrb., IV (1912), 138–61; C.R.Hohberger, Die Entstehungsgeschichte von Wagners ‘Parsifal’, Diss., Greifswald, Leipzig 1914, esp. pp. 129 ff, 143 ff, 152 ff. In the 1840s, W had taken Lamprecht’s Alexander as the model for a drama on the subject of Friedrich Barbarossa (W-A6 446). 33 Burnouf, op. cit., p. 76, n. 2. W’s sources are further discussed by C.R.Hohberger, op. cit., pp. 130 f and 166 f; and Glasenapp III 118 f, nn. 3 and 4.

CHAPTER 10 1 2

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Köselitz’s note to N’s letters of 21 Mar. 1885 and 8 June 1887 (N-Br1 IV 475 and 494). The known recipients were Brandes, Dr. Helene Druscowitz (an acquaintance of 1884 who returned her copy: N to Köselitz, 21 Aug. 1885), Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster, Carl Fuchs (the non-Jewish organist of a synagogue in Danzig), Gersdorff, Köselitz, Paul Lanzky (who visited N just before Part IV was written), Overbeck, and Widemann. N retained a copy for his own use. The first public edition was followed soon after by a new edited version as part of Elisabeth’s ‘Gesamtausgabe’. Förster-N II ii 425; DeN 212 f. See also N to Overbeck, 28 Aug. 1883, which expresses satisfaction, ‘daß gleich dieser erste Leser ein Gefühl davon hat, worum es sich hier handelt; um den längst verheißenen “Antichrist”’ (cited by Jörg Salaquarda, ‘Der Antichrist’, N-Studien, II(1973), 91–136, who suggests that N took the term from Schopenhauer). Deussen 4. See ibidem p. 26; and Paul Deussen, Mein Leben, ed. Dr. Erika Rosenthal-Deussen, Leipzig 1922, p. 70. Förster-N I 191 ff; DjN 133 ff. N announced his transfer in his letter home on 3 May 1865. Deussen 20. Three sonnets of March 1868 attacking Strauß are published in W-A8 149 ff; scathing remarks are found in W’s diary (Bayreuther Blätter, LIV(1932), 143). To Olga Herzen, Apr. 1875 (M.v. Meysenbug, Im Anfang war die Liebe. Briefe an ihre Pflegetochter, 3rd edn., Munich 1927, p. 73). See Calendar, s.v. W to N, 21 Sept. 1873. To Gersdorff, 11 Feb. 1874; and Eh-Die Unzeitgemässen, § 2, where N gives this as the view of Prof. Ewald of Göttingen. To W ca. 26 Apr. 1873 (N-Br16 182: previously unpublished); and W’s reply of 30 Apr. 1873. Bernoulli I 129. The contrast between ‘Mitfreude’ and ‘Mitleid’, developed inter alia in frW § 338, cannot be adequately rendered in the English language. On this point, see Thomas J.J.Altizer, ‘Eternal Recurrence and the Kingdom of God’, The New Nietzsche, ed. David Allison, New York 1977, pp. 238 ff. See Calendar, s.v. ca. 24 Apr. 1882, et seq. See also N to Malwida, Aug. 1883: the long passage beginning ‘Aber das Schopenhauersche “Mitleiden” hat immer in meinem Leben bisher den Haupt-Unfug angestiftet…’ (N-Br 17 342 f). See MA §§ 26 and 47; Mr § 18 (cited in ZG III § 9) and the interconnected §§ 131–48; frW §§ 13, 14, 118, 251, 271 (based on a letter to Overbeck of 14 Sept. 1884), 289, 338, 339, 345, 377. Hence, too, FW-Nachschrift: ‘[W] schmeichelt jedem nihilistischen (—buddhistischen) Instinkte und verkleidet ihn in Musik, er schmeichelt jeder Christlichkeit, jeder religiösen Ausdrucksform der décadence.’

Notes  221 See E.R.Dodds, ‘Socrates, Callicles, and Nietzsche’, Plato Gorgias, Oxford 1959, pp. 387–91. See N-A3 VIII 1 7[4]: the text of WzM § 368. Bayreuther Blätter, V(1882), 232–52, and VI(1883), 93–146. See also frW § 338. The name of John Stewart Mill might have been added to this list: see N-A3 V14[68]. Five heavily annotated volumes of the complete German translation of Mill’s works, ed. Theodor Gomperz, are listed in N-Bibliothek 41. For N’s view of Schopenhauer’s reaction to Kant’s attack on pity, see Mr § 132. 24 To Köselitz, 14 Feb. 1885; to Overbeck, 20 Feb. 1885; to Fuchs, 29 July 1888. A number of MSS. have recently come to light entitled ‘Zarathustra’s Versuchung’, with the variant subtitles: ‘Mitleid als Sünde’; ‘wenn Mitleiden eine Sünde wäre’; ‘wie Mitleiden eine Sünde wird’; ‘wenn Mitleiden zur Sünde würde’; ‘an wem Mitleiden zur Sünde würde’ (N-A5 365 ff). See also N-A3 VII 3 29[47]: ‘Und wer einen Namen dafür will, der mag es heißen: “die Versuchung Zarathustra’s”’ (previously unpublished).

20 21 22 23

CHAPTER 11 1 2 3

Isaiah 45:15 (linked with Pascal’s ‘deus absconditus’ in Mr § 91). Heinrich Heine. Sämtliche Werke, ed. Fritz Strich, 11 vols., VIII 399. Matt. 28:2 and I Kgs. 17:6 (the latter is paraphrased also near the end of ‘Vom Gesindel’ in Part II).

CHAPTER 12 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

8 9

The ‘dithyrambic dramatist’ is characterized as ‘sorcerer’ in the last lines of U IV § 7, perhaps following W’s use of the term in Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik and Beethoven (W-A1 VIII 80 f, cited N-A3 IV 4 141; and W-A1 IX 106 f). See also Plüddemann’s Die Bühnenfestspiele in Bayreuth, Colberg 1877, p. 10: ‘Richard Wagner heisst der Zauberer…’ (N-Bibliothek 32). Andler (II 512) tentativeiy suggested a comparison with Parsifal here. Elisabeth says that the shadow’s song originated as a parody of Ferdinand Freiligrath’s desert poetry (Forster-N II ii 538; and N-Bibliothek 35). Schaeffner (I 307 f) cites Sélika, the heroine of Meyerbeer’s and Scribe’s L’Africaine, which N saw at Leipzig in 1866, and also Goethe’s Divan. The last line recalls Luther’s dictum before the Diet of Worms to which N refers in frW § 146, ‘Deutsche Hoffnungen’, and ZG III § 22. Based on material from an incomplete poem written at Pforta, and entitled by N’s editors ‘Dem unbekannten Gott’ (N-A2 II 428). See Hans Weichelt, Zarathustra. Erklärt und gewürdigt, Leipzig 1910, where the poem is derived from the story of Jacob and the Angel: Gen. 32:24 ff. frW was ready for publication on 1 July. Elisabeth’s claim that N inserted § 279 after the première of Parsifal on 26 July will hardly bear scrutiny. As for the ‘interview’, see Calendar s.v. 26 July–29 Aug. 1882. Bernoulli 1264. N-A6 159. This contradicts Lou Andreas-Salomé, who associated frW § 279 with Rée (Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, 3rd edn., Dresden 1924, p. 129). Homer’s dictum ‘Viel ja lügen die Sänger!’ is quoted in frW § 84, ‘Vom Urspunge der Poesie’ (last lines). A draft of 1884 reads ‘Der Dichter, der lügen kann/wissentlich, willentlich/Der kann allein Wahrheit reden’ (N-A3 VII 3 28[20]). An extended gloss is given in ZG III § 4, in the passage beginning ‘Ein vollkommner und ganzer Künstler ist in alle Ewigkeit von dem “Realen”, dem Wirklichen abgetrennt…’ Rev. 7:12. N may have come to this text via study of Brahms’ Triumphlied (see Calendar, s.v. 9 June and 12 July 1874). See Jörg Salaquarda, ‘Zarathustra und der Esel. Eine Untersuchung der Rolle des Esels im Vierten Theil von Nietzsches “Also sprach Zarathustra”’, Theologia viatorum, XI(1973), 181–213.

222  Notes 10 See Z III-Von den Abtrünnigen: ‘“Wir sind wieder fromm geworden”—so bekennen diese Abtrünnigen…denen sage ich es in’s Gesicht und in die Röthe ihrer Wangen: ihr seid Solche, welche wieder beten!’ 11 A fuller treatment of this subject will be found in Z I—Von der Keuschheit. See also ZG III, esp. §§ 1–5; G-Moral als Widernatur; NcW-Wagner als Apostel der Keuschheit; and the fourth of the seven propositions that were meant to conclude A (N-A5 158: previously unpublished). Other examples include N-A3 44[6]: a paragraph meant for G, but withdrawn at the proof stage. 12 Cosima quotes: ‘Der verlorenste Tag ist der wo man nicht gelacht hat’ (C-Br I 75). Chamfort’s aphorism is cited in frW § 95. See also frW §§ 1, 177, 200, 324, 327, 333 (on Spinoza), et passim. 13 The laughing lion is presumably the offspring of the lioness Wisdom in Z II-Das Kind mit dem Spiegel: ‘Ach, dass meine Löwin Weisheit zärtlich brüllen lernte!’ 14 From Horace Satires I i 24: ‘quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?’ (What forbids us laughingly to say what is true?). See Eh-FW § 1. 15 W drew a less obvious comparison between Wotan and Titurel (Glasenapp VI 70 f). Cosima compared the Siegfried-Wotan scene with the Parsifal-Kundry scene (Du Moulin 1828). 16 Paneth to Sophie Schwab, 3 Jan. 1884 (Förster-N II ii 483; DeN 268). 17 ‘Auf neuem Weg zum alten Griechenthum/ich dachte in dir den Deutschen zu erlösen/dein Siegfried-Zerrbild Parsifal!’ (N-A3 VII 3 28[7]: previously unpublished). See also the draft for J § 256: N-A3 VII 3 37[15]. 18 Discussed in VMS § 323 and frW § 357. W’s article may also be partly responsible for G-Was den Deutschen abgeht, and Eh-FW entire. 19 ZG I § 11. See also ZG II § 17; G-Die ‘Verbesserer’ der Menschheit. The term is discussed by Detlef Brennecke, ‘Die blonde Bestie. Vom Mißverständnis eines Schlagworts’, N-Studien, V(1976), 113–45; and T.J.Reed, ‘Nietzsche’s Animals’, Nietzsche. Imagery and Thought, ed. J.M.Pasley, London 1978, 159–219. 20 The term ‘idiot’, applied to Parsifal in N’s notes, is used only after the discovery of Dostoevsky in 1887. 21 Surprisingly, N mentions a little-known, projected comedy Die Hochzeit Luthers. A few notes were made in the Brown Book (W-A8 183 f); and the plan was under review in July 1869 (Glasenapp IV 294). See O.Strobel, ‘Gedanken zu einem “Luther”-Drama’, Bayreuther Festspielführer 1937, pp. 158 ff. 22 Possibly a reference to H.v. Wolzogen’s Die Tragödie in Bayreuth und ihr Satyrspiel, Leipzig 1877, which makes reference to N in the first sentence. 23 N transcribed the phrase ‘gesunde und frische Sinnlichkeit’ from Feuerbach’s Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft in a notebook of 1886–7 (N-A3 VIII 1 7[4]). See also W-A6 104, where W discusses his early opera Das Liebesverbot.

CONCLUSION 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

See also N-A3 VII 3 30[13]: ‘Voll Jugend und Ungeschick, schwül, übervoll, aussi trop allemand…’ Compare Eh-GdT § 1: ‘[GdT] riecht anstössig Hegelisch…’ See C-Tb, entry for 5 Apr. 1871. This important point is made by F.R.Love, Young Nietzsche and the Wagnerian Experience, Chapel Hill 1963, pp. 17 f. N’s lecture lists are given in Schlechta’s N-Chronik under the respective years. On this point see Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ‘Wagner and the Greeks’, The Times Literary Supplement, 9 Jan. 1976; and Martin Vogel, ‘Wagners Einfluß auf Nietzsche’, Apollinisch und Dionysisch, Regensburg 1966, pp. 95–123. The nickname for the concealed orchestra-pit in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. See W-A1 IX 402; and Gersdorff to N, 22 May and 6 Aug. 1875.

Notes  223 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Descriptive music which sets out to reproduce, for example, the sounds of nature, is for Schopenhauer an inferior art form. Schopenhauer quotes Leibniz epistolae, collectio Kortholti: [Musica est] exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi’ (Music is the subconscious practice of arithmetic in a mind unaware that it is doing mathematics). Immediately before Z, ‘flight’ is a metaphor for unrestricted mental activity in Mr §§ 314 and 575; frW §§ 293 and 380; and in the ‘Lieder des Prinzen Vogelfrei’. More conventionally, Apollo is the patron of music as N says in GdT § 2. See inter alia E.M.Butler, The Dionysiac: Friedrich Nietzsche’, The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany, Cambridge 1935, pp. 307–15; and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ‘Nietzsche and the Study of the Ancient World’, Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition, ed. J.C.O’Flaherty with others, Chapel Hill 1976, pp. 1–15. See Andler I 394–428. In an Appendix (I 547), Andler mentions Ritschl’s Opuscula philologica, vol. V, and his unpublished Apollinische Kitharistik und dionysische Aulodik, which N may have read as a student. Westernhagen (151 f) follows Andler in attaching a particular importance to the writings of Müller, Creuzer, and Welcker, and points out that N’s borrowings from the University Library at Basel may have been prompted by his delving into W’s library at Tribschen. It has been noted that in a note of ca. 1867, ‘Wirkung einiger Musikstücke’, N uses the term ‘Bacchisch-Orphisch’ in connection with Beethoven’s seventh symphony. It is not at all clear that the expression carries the force of the dualism in GdT. Förster-N II i 54 and II ii 854; DjN 274; W-Br3 67. See also Andler I 392 f: ‘Wagner parlait la langue de Nietzsche, comme si elle eût été la sienne.’ Westernhagen 145 ff: the picture is reproduced in monochrome, facing 144. See also Martin Vogel, ‘Genellis “Bacchus unter den Musen”’, Apollinisch und Dionysisch, Regensburg 1966, pp. 125–48; and W to Ludwig II, 24 Feb. 1869 (W-Br8 II 261). Fehr II 258. See Ludwig Klages, ‘Nietzsches Sokratismus’, Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Nietzsches, Leipzig 1926, pp. 179–95; and Kaufmann 391–411, ‘Nietzsche’s Admiration for Socrates’. This parallel is given and discussed by R.J.Hollingdale, Nietzsche, London 1965, pp. 71 ff. See Du Moulin I 530; and Cosima’s letters to Houston Stewart Chamberlain of 15 Sept. 1893 and 14 Aug. 1900 (ten days before N’s death). See esp. W-A1 IV 343. On 26 Nov. 1858, W asked Breitkopf & Härtel to send a copy of the poem to Schopenhauer. Dr. Hübscher notes that there is nothing to show that the philosopher received it (S-A2 V 437). Compare N-A3 VII 2 26[406]: ‘Aber Tristan und Isolde kam, als ich 17 Jahre alt war, hinzu, als eine mir verständliche Welt.’ This important point is made by F.R.Love, Young Nietzsche and the Wagnerian Experience, Chapel Hill 1963, pp. 51 ff. For N’s ecstatic reaction, see the letters to Krug of 24 July 1872, to Rohde of 25 July 1872, and—belatedly—to Carl Fuchs of 27 Dec. 1888. To Cosima, 19 Dec. 1876 (N-Br15 599 f). Gervinus’s Shakespeare commentaries, depreciated also in W’s Beethoven, were discussed at Tribschen (Cosima to N, 27 Jan. 1870). See also N-A3 VIII 2 9[42]: the amended text of WzM § 1005. See also esp. N to Rohde, 4 Aug. 1871; to Gersdorff, 4 Feb. 1872. Taken in turn from frW § 107. On this point see Paul Valadier, Nietzsche et la critique du christianisme, Paris 1974, pp. 579 ff. This point was probably made initially by Erich Witte, Das Problem des Tragischen bei Nietzsche, Halle a.S. 1904, p. 106.

224  Notes 32 In GdT § 2, the music of Apollo is said to exclude the awe and terror inspired by the Dionysian dithyramb. 33 Frankly controversial: see Chapter 8 above. 34 Linked with this is a note of late 1887, N-A3 VIII 2 9[42]: the amended text of WzM § 1005. See also N-A3 VIII 3 14[14]: WzM § 1050; 14 [17] (previously unpublished); 14[19]; 14[21]; 14[26]; 14[34]; and 14[35] (all previously unpublished). 35 The expression occurs in GdT § 19. See Bülow to N, 1 Nov. 1874, where N is ‘Verfasser der “Wiedergeburt der Tragödie”’, Heinrich Hart to N, 4 Jan. 1877 (N-Br19 384 f); and Eduard Kulke, Richard Wagner, seine Anhänger und seine Gegner, Leipzig 1884, p. 212. 36 Under attack in G-Was ich den Alten verdanke, § 4. 37 Compare Goethe’s Maximen und Reflexionen, § 1031 (cited N-A3 IV 4 339); and Goethe’s conversation with Eckermann, 2 Apr. 1829 (cited Kaufmann 155). 38 Compare frW § 85: ‘Die Künstler verherrlichen fortwährend—sie thun nichts Anderes…’; and the notes N-A3 VII 3 40[60] and ibidem VIII 3 14[47]. 39 Compare the witty jibe in a note of 1883: ‘Um an den Schopenhauerschen Willen zu glauben— dazu gehört ein sehrguter Wille zum Glauben!’ (N-A3 VII 1 9[2]: previously unpublished). 40 This comment is made in a note contemporary with G (N-A3 VIII 3 15[10]: the text of WzM § 851). 41 N comes out against Aristotle in MA § 212; frW § 80; ZG-Was ich den Alten verdanke, § 5; A § 7; and in the notes including N-A3 VIII 3 15[10]. 42 See esp. ZG III § 6; J § 33; and G-Streifzüge, § 21, ‘L’Art pour l’art’. 43 Compare Eh-Warum ich ein Schicksal bin, § 5. 44 N-A5 183: the page was suppressed by N’s sister. 45 See W.D.Williams, ‘Nietzsche and Lyric Poetry’, Reality and Creative Vision, ed. August Closs, London 1963, pp. 85–99. 46 Zarathustra also appears in the poem ‘Auf hohen Bergen’ which concludes J, in ‘Ruhm und Ewigkeit’ which concludes Eh, and in ‘Von der Armuth des Reichsten’ which concludes NcW. 47 The story is briefly adverted to in J § 295, G-Streifzüge, § 19, and Eh-Z § 8.

Bibliography

A Note on Documentary Method Nietzche’s thought shows a progressive development; and although many of his problems are stated embryonically in his early student writings, the views expressed at widely separated intervals of time cannot always be made to agree with one another. Therefore the passages from the earlier and later books, letters, and notes cited here as illuminating the text of Zarathustra have an approximate rather than an absolute parity. This study also leans towards the view—strongly advocated by some and equally strongly contested by others—that the authentic canon consists of the books Nietzsche prepared for publication, including the four unpublished manuscripts discovered at the time of his collapse, and the letters, rather than the unpublished ‘Nachlaß’. Accordingly, the ‘Nachlaß’ is cited chiefly for the insight it gives into his compositional methods. This is not to deny that much of the unpublished material is indistinguishable in quality from the published material; that at times it is more vivid in expression; that it provides an indispensable supportive commentary on the published books. Indeed, attention is drawn to the fact that some of Nietzsche’s key concepts—notably ‘will to power’ and ‘eternal return’—are imperfectly understood without reference to it.

A Key to the Titles of Zarathustra’s Discourses Zarathustra’s Vorrede (Zarathustra’s Prologue) Die Reden Zarathustra’s (Zarathustra’s Discourses) 1. Von den drei Verwandlungen (Of the Three Metamorphoses) 2. Von den Lehrstühlen der Tugend (Of Chairs of Virtue) 3. Von den Hinterweltlern (Of Afterworldsmen) 4. Von den Verächtern des Leibes (Of Despisers of the Body) 5. Von den Freuden—und Leidenschaften (Of Joys and Passions) 6. Vom bleichen Verbrecher (Of the Pale Criminal) 7. Vom Lesen und Schreiben (Of Reading and Writing)

8. Vom Baum am Berge (Of the Tree on the Mountain) 9. Von den Predigern des Todes (Of Preachers of Death) 10. Vom Krieg und Kriegsvolke (Of War and Warriors) 11. Vom neuen Götzen (Of the New Idol) 12. Von den Fliegen des Marktes (Of Flies of the Market) 13. Von der Keuschheit (Of Chastity) 14. Vom Freunde (Of the Friend)

226  Bibliography 15. Von tausend und Einem Ziele (Of a Thousand and One Goals) 16. Von der Nächstenliebe (Of Neighbour-Love) 17. Vom Wege des Schaffenden (Of the Way of the Creator) 18. Von alten und jungen Weiblein (Of Old and Young Women)

1. Das Kind mit dem Spiegel (The Child with the Mirror) 2. Auf den glückseligen Inseln (On the Islands of the Blessed) 3. Von den Mitleidigen (Of Those Who Pity) 4. Von den Priestern (Of Priests) 5. Von den Tugendhaften (Of the Virtuous) 6. Vom Gesindel (Of the Rabble) 7. Von den Taranteln (Of Tarantulas) 8. Von den berühmten Weisen (Of Famous Gurus) 9. Das Nachtlied (The Night Song) 10. Das Tanzlied (The Dance Song) 11. Das Grablied (The Funeral Song)

19. Vom Biss der Natter (Of the Adder’s Bite) 20. Von Kind und Ehe (Of Children and Marriage) 21. Vom freien Tode (Of Voluntary Death) 22. Von der schenkenden Tugend (Of the Virtue That Gives)

sZweiter Theil (Part II) 12. Von der Selbst-Überwindung (Of Self-Conquest) 13. Von den Erhabenen (Of Eminent Men) 14. Vom Lande der Bildung (Of the Land of Culture) 15. Von der unbefleckten Erkenntniss (Of Immaculate Perception) 16. Von den Gelehrten (Of Scholars) 17. Von den Dichtern (Of Poets) 18. Von grossen Ereignissen (Of Great Events) 19. Der Wahrsager (The Soothsayer) 20. Von der Erlösung (Of Redemption) 21. Von der Menschen-Klugheit (Of Human Prudence) 22. Die stillste Stunde (The Stillest Hour)

Dritter Theil (Part III) 1. Der Wanderer (The Traveller) 2. Vom Gesicht und Räthsel (Of the Vision and the Riddle) 3. Von der Seligkeit wider Willen (Of Involuntary Bliss) 4. Vor Sonnen-Aufgang |(Before Sunrise) 5. Von der verkleinernden Tugend (Of the Virtue That Demeans) 6. Auf dem Ölberge (On the Mount of Olives) 7. Vom Vorübergehen (Of Passing By)

8. Von den Abtrünnigen (Of Apostates) 9. Die Heimkehr (The Home-Coming) 10. Von den drei Bösen (Of the Three Evils) 11. Vom Geist der Schwere (Of the Spirit of Gravity) 12. Von alten und neuen Tafeln (Of Old and New Law-Tables) 13. Der Genesende (The Convalescent) 14. Von der grossen Sehnsucht (Of the Great Yearning)

Bibliography  227 15. Das andere Tanzlied (The Other Dance Song)

16. Die sieben Siegel (Oder: das Ja—und Amen-Lied) (The Seven Seals. Or: The Song of Yes and Amen)

Vierter Theil (Part IV) 1. Das Honig-Opfer (The Honey Offering) 2. Der Nothschrei (The Cry of Distress) 3. Gespräch mit den Königen (Conversation with the Kings) 4. Der Blutegel (The Leach) 5. Der Zauberer (The Sorcerer) 6. Ausser Dienst (Retired) 7. Der hässlichste Mensch (The Ugliest Man) 8. Der freiwillige Bettler (The Voluntary Beggar) 9. Der Schatten (The Shadow) 10. Mittags (Noon)

11. Die Begrüssung (The Greeting) 12. Das Abendmahl (The Last Supper) 13. Vom höheren Menschen (Of the Higher an) 14. Das Lied der Schwermuth (The Song of Melancholy) 15. Von der Wissenschaft (Of Science) 16. Unter Töchtern der Wüste (Among the Daughters of the Desert) 17. Die Erweckung (The Awakening) 18. Das Eselsfest (The Feast of the Ass) 19. Das Nachtwandler-Lied (The Sleep-Walker Song) 20. Das Zeichen (The Sign)

Sources and Abbreviations

Quotations are printed in Roman type. Words emphasized in the original editions are generally given in italics. Otherwise no attempt has been made to remove inconsistencies. Abridgements are shown by three closely spaced points… N.B.Nietzsche frequently uses three widely spaced points in punctuation. NIETZSCHE 1. Works

Published books of 1872–89 GdT Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music), 1872, 21874[78], 31886: re-entitled Die Geburt der Tragödie, Oder: Griechenthum und Pessimismus (The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism), with the preface ‘Versuch einer Selbstkritik’ (‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’). U Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations) UI Erstes Stück: David Strauss der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller (David Strauss, Confessor and Writer), 1874. UII Zweites Stück: Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben (On the Benefits and Dangers of History for Life), 1874. UIII Drittes Stück: Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Schopenhauer as Educator), 1874. UIV Viertes Stück: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (Richard Wagner in Bayreuth), 1876. MA Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister, (Human, AllToo-Human. A Book for Free Spirits), 1878, 21886: designated ‘Erster Band’ (‘Volume One’), with Preface. VMS Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche (Assorted Opinions and Maxims), 1879.* WS Der Wanderer und sein Schatten (The Traveller and His Shadow), [1878] 1880.* * VMS and WS were reissued under the collective title Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Zweiter Band (Human, All-Too-Human. Volume Two) in 1886, with Preface. Mr Morgenröthe. Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile (Daybreak. Thoughts On Moral Prejudices), 1881, 21887 with Preface. frW Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (“la gaya scienza”) (The Joyful Science), 1882, 2 1887 with Preface, Part V, and a poetic Appendix ‘Lieder des Prinzen Vogelfrei’ (‘Songs of Prince Vogelfrei’).

Sources and Abbreviations  229 Z

Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (So Said Zarathustra. A Book for All and None)

Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future), 1886. ZG Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift (On the Genealogy of Morals. A Polemic), 1887. FW Der Fall Wagner. Ein Musikanten-Problem (The Wagner Case. A Musicians’ Problem), 1888. G Götzen-Dämmerung. Oder: Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt (Twilight of the Idols. Or: How to Philosophize with a Hammer), 1889. Unpublished books of 1888–9 (in order of eventual publication) NcW Nietzsche contra Wagner. Aktenstücke eines Psychologen (Nietzsche contra Wagner. A Psychologist’s Brief), printed 1889, ed. edn. 1895. DD Dionysos-Dithyramben (Dithyrambs of Dionysos), ed. edn. 1891[92]. A Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christenthum (The AntiChrist. A Curse on Christianity), ed. edn. 1895. Eh Ecce homo. Wie man wird, was man ist (Ecce homo. How One Becomes What One Is), ed. edn. 1908. The following anthology of MS. material prepared by the editors of N-A1 is referred to in the notes WzM Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power), rev. edn. 1905. Nietzsche-Ausgaben Collected editions N-A1 Grossoktavausgabe, ed. E.Förster-Nietzsche with others, rev. edn., 19 vols., Leipzig 1900–18. Index, Leipzig 1926. N-A2 Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, ed. H.J.Mette with others, 5 vols., Munich 1933–40 (discontinued). N-A3 Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli jointly with Mazzino Montinari, ca.30 vols., Berlin 1967 ff (in the process of publication). Select editions   N-A4 Hugo Daffner, Friedrich Nietzsches Randglossen zu Bizets Carmen, Regensburg 1912, 21938. N-A5 Werke des Zusammenbruchs, ed. E.F.Podach, Heidelberg 1961. N-A6 E.F.Podach, Ein Blick in Notizbücher Nietzsches, Heidelberg 1963. J

Der musikalische Nachlaß, ed. Curt Paul Janz, preface by Karl Schlechta, Basel 1976. Note: Quotations from Nietzsche’s works, including the textually problematical Z, have been brought into line with N-A3. Where the notes are cited from the Colli-Montinari edition, they are identified in the text by the numbers (not the pages) given by the editors; and new material is described as ‘previously unpublished’. Quotations from other editions are identified in the text by the pages.

N-A7

230  Sources and Abbreviations 2. Letters Nietzsche-Briefe Collected editions N-Br1 I

II III

IV

V N-Br2

N-Br3 Select editions N-Br4

N-Br5

Gesammelte Briefe, ed. E.Förster-Nietzsche with others, 5 vols. in 6, Berlin and Leipzig 1900–9. (31902) Includes letters to Marie Baumgartner, Deussen (see N-Br19 399 f; and Paul Deussen, Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche, Leipzig 1901), Eiser (see Westernhagen 524–34), Fuchs (see Kaufmann 474 ff), Gersdorff (see G-Br passim), Knortz, Krug (see N-Br11), Pinder, Romundt, Seydlitz (see R.v. Seydlitz, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche. Briefe und Gespräche’, Neue deutsche Rundschau, X(1899), 617–28), and Wilhelm Vischer-Bilfinger (see Stroux passim for the correspondence with the University authorities at Basel). (21902) Correspondence with Rohde (see N-Br20). (21904) Correspondence with Ritschl, Burckhardt (a facsimile of the famous last letter of 6 Jan. 1889 is given by E.F.Podach, Nietzsches Zusammenbruch, Heidelberg 1930, facing p. 167), Taine, Keller, Stein, Brandes (see N-Br19 401 ff), Bülow (see Andler II. 600, n. 3), Senger, and Malwida von Meysenbug (see N-Br18). (1908) Letters to Peter Gast [Heinrich Köselitz] (see N-Br19 403 f; and K-Br passim). The texts contain occasional suppressions; and even the valuable and copious notes are not entirely trustworthy. (1 vol. in 2,1909) Letters to Franziska and Elisabeth Nietzsche (see N-Br18 and N-Br19). The misdatings and forgeries are discussed in N-Br18. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefe, ed. Wilhelm Hoppe jointly with Karl Schlechta, 4 vols., Munich 1938–42 (discontinued). The notes include Nietzsche’s diary and Kelterborn’s reminiscences, among many unpublished documents. The introduction to the first volume lists all the letters known to the Nietzsche-Archiv in 1938. This textually improved, chronological edn. covers the years 1850–77, and contains 17 of the ca. 34 surviving letters to Richard and Cosima Wagner: see N-Br15 (three letters), N-Br16 (seven letters), N-Br19 (a draft), W-Br8 (one letter), Westernhagen 471 (three notes in facsimile) and 501 f (one letter), and E.F.Podach, Nietzsches Zusammenbruch, Heidelberg 1930, p. 88 (one note). Since Nietzsche kept 94 letters from Cosima, this represents a small part of the total correspondence, most of which was burnt in the auto da fée at Bayreuth in 1909 (see N-Br15 597 f). A number of misdatings are listed in N-Br18 153–61. Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli jointly with Mazzino Montinari, ca. 20 vols., Berlin 1975 ff (in the process of publication).   An open letter to the editor of the weekly review ‘Im neuen Reich’, Musikalisches Wochenblatt, Leipzig, 17 Jan. 1873, p. 38 (reprinted with altered spellings in Karl Schlechta, Werke in drei Bänden, 2nd edn., Munich 1960, III. 301 f). Two open letters to Ferdinand Avenarius, Der Kunstwart, VI(1888), 89.

Sources and Abbreviations  231 N-Br6 N-Br7 N-Br8

N-Br9 N-Br10 N-Br11 N-Br12 N-Br13 N-Br14 N-Br15 N-Br16

‘Briefe aus dem Jahre 1880’, ed. E.Förster-Nietzsche, Die neue Rundschau, XVIII(1907), 1367–90. Includes letters to C.G.Naumann. ‘Friedrich Nietzsche und Karl Hillebrand. Unveröffentlichte Briefe’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte, VI 2(1909), 129–42. Briefwechsel mit Franz Overbeck, ed. C.A.Bernoulli jointly with Richard Oehler, Leipzig 1916. A number of suppressed passages are published in N-A6 184–90, ‘Zum Briefwechsel Nietzsche-Overbeck’. See also Franz Overbeck, ‘Briefe an Peter Gast’, Die neue Rundschau, XVII(1906), 26–51. Karl Strecker, Nietzsche und Strindberg. Mit ihrem Briefwechsel, Munich 1921. Andreas Heusler, ‘Zwei ungedruckte Schriftstücke Friedrich Nietzsches mitgeteilt von Andreas Heusler’, Schweizerische Monatshefte für Politik und Kultur, II(1922), 39–42. ‘Zwölf Briefe an einen Jugendfreund’ [Gustav Krug], Süddeutsche Monatshefte, XXVII(1930), 127–40. E.Förster-Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche und die Frauen seiner Zeit, Munich 1935. Includes letters to Mathilde Maier, Luise Ott (see N-Br13), Resa von Schirnhofer, and Meta von Salis-Marschlins (see N-Br14). ‘Luise Ott. Ihr Briefwechsel mit Nietzsche’, ed. Karl Schlechta, Der Aquädukt [Almanach of the publisher C.H.Beck], Munich 1938, 111–22. ‘Briefe an Meta von Salis’, ed. Maria Bindschedler, Neue Schweizer Rundschau, XII(1955), 707–21. ‘Drei Briefe an Cosima Wagner’, ed. Joachim Bergfeld, Maske und Kothurn, X(1964), 597–602. ‘Sieben unbekannte Briefe an Richard Wagner’, ed. Joachim Bergfeld, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, XXVII(1970), 173–91.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Rée, Lou von Salomé. Die Dokumente ihrer Begegnung, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Frankfurt a.M. 1970. For commentaries on some of this material see Lou Andreas-Salomé, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, Vienna 1894, 3rd edn., 1924; E.F.Podach, Friedrich Nietzsche und Lou Salomé. Ihre Begegnung 1882, Zürich 1937; and Rudolph Binion, Frau Lou, Princeton 1968. N-Br18 C.P.Janz, Die Briefe Friedrich Nietzsches, Zürich 1972. Includes unpublished letters to Levi, Malwida von Meysenbug, Mottl, Elisabeth and Franziska Nietzsche, Ida Overbeck, Spitteler, and Volkland. The valuable Appendix, pp. 162–72, ‘Die Daten der Tribschen-Besuche’, is now partly superseded by the information at hand in Cosima’s diaries (see C-Tb passim). N-Br19 Mazzino Montinari, ‘Nietzsche Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe’, Nietzsche-Studien, IV(1975), 374–431. Includes letters to Jean Bourdeau, Brandes, Deussen, Fleischmann, Köselitz, Elisabeth Nietzsche, Schuré, and Cosima Wagner. N-Br20 Hedwig Däuble, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche und Erwin Rohde. Mit bisher ungedruckten Briefen’, Nietzsche-Studien, V(1976), 321–54. Note:Unless otherwise stated, the correspondence of 1850–77 is cited from N-Br2 pending the completion of N-Br3. N-Br17

232  Sources and Abbreviations WAGNER 1. Works

Wagner-Ausgaben Collected editions W-A1

W-A2 Select editions W-A3

W-A4

W-A5 W-A6

W-A7

W-A8

  Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 10 vols., Leipzig 1872–83. The three editions of the poem Der Ring des Nibelungen of 1853, 1863, and 1872 are not identical; the text was further revised in the musical settings, and the vocal scores by Karl Klindworth are at odds with the orchestral scores published by B.Schott’s Söhne, Mainz. See Max Zenker, ‛Die Verschiedenheiten in den Lesarten der RingDichtung’, Bayreuther Blätter, XX(1897), 156–71. Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. Richard Sternfeld with others, 6th edn., 16 vols., Leipzig n.d. Parsifal, Mainz 1877. The 1st edn. of the poem Parsifal differs from the version published in W-A1 X 417–91; the text was revised in the musical setting, and the vocal score by Josef Rubinstein is at odds with the orchestral score published by B.Schott’s Söhne, Mainz. See H.v.Wolzogen, ‛Parsifal Varianten. Eine Übersicht’, Richard Wagner-Jahrb., IV(1912), 168–83; C.R.Hohberger, Die Entstehungsgeschichte von Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’, auf philologisch-historischer Grundlage, Diss. Greifswald, Leipzig 1914, pp. 56–81. ‘The Work and Mission of My Life’, North American Review, August 1879, 107–24; September 1879, 238–58. The German version, Richard Wagners Lebens-Bericht, Leipzig 1884, probably the work of H.v.Wolzogen, is not included in W-A1 or W-A2. Entwürfe, Gedanken, Fragmente. Aus nachgelassenen Papieren zusammengestellt, Leipzig 1885. Mein Leben, 2 vols., München 1911. This slightly abridged edition, which preserves Wagner’s spellings and punctuation, has been chosen as a basis for the text in preference to the modernized ‛Jubiläumsausgabe’, Mein Leben. Erste authentische Veröffentlichung, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin, Munich 1963. Skizzen und Entwürfe zur Ring-Dichtung, ed. Otto Strobel, Munich 1930. An indispensable supplement to this book is Strobel’s article ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der “Götterdämmerung”’, Die Musik, XXV(1933), 336–41. See also Curt von Westernhagen, Die Entstehung des ‘Ring’, Zürich 1973, based on an analysis of Wagner’s musical sketches. Das braune Buch. Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1865 bis 1882, ed. Joachim Bergfeld, Zürich 1975.

Note: Unless otherwise stated, quotations from Wagner’s works follow W-A1 and, in the case of Parsifal, W-A3. A complete edition of Wagner’s music-dramas is in the process of publication under the auspices of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts: Gesamtausgabe der Werke Richard Wagners, Mainz 1970 ff.

Sources and Abbreviations  233 2. Letters Wagner-Briefe Collected editions W-Br1

W-Br2 Select editions W-Br3

W-Br4 W-Br5 W-Br6 W-Br7 W-Br8

W-Br9 W-Br10

Briefe in Originalausgaben, ed. C.F.Glasenapp with others, 17 vols., Leipzig 1912. III Family letters. IV Letters to Theodor Uhlig, Wilhelm Fischer, and Ferdinand Heine. The cuts in the Uhlig correspondence are restored in W-Br9 763–98. J.N.Burk’s introduction, ‘Cosimas Rotstift’, sheds light on editorial procedure in Bayreuth. V Letters to Mathilde Wesendonck, including the Venice Diary. A few additional letters are published in W-Br9 480–500, ‘Mathilde Wesendonck’.

VI VII IX XI XIII XVI

Letters to Otto Wesendonck. Correspondence with Breitkopf & Härtel. Correspondence with Liszt. Correspondence with Röckel. Fifteen letters with recollections and commentaries by Eliza Wille. Letters to Emil Heckel. Sämtliche Briefe, ed. Gertrud Strobel jointly with Werner Wolf, ca. 15 vols., Mainz 1967 ff (in the process of publication). E.Förster-Nietzsche, Wagner und Nietzsche zur Zeit ihrer Freundschaft, Munich 1915. The first study of the partnership, based chiefly on correspondence, took the story up to 1879. There is no other edition of Wagner’s letters to Nietzsche, pending the completion of W-Br2. The texts are reprinted without alteration in Wagner und Nietzsche. Briefwechsel während des Tribschener Idylls, ed. Wilhelm Jerger, Bern 1951. Cosimas letters to Nietzsche are published in C-Br, listed below. Briefe an Hans von Bülow, Jena 1916. See also Hans von Bülow, Briefe, 7 vols., Leipzig 1899–1908; and Neue Briefe, ed. Richard du Moulin Eckart, Munich 1927. Briefe an Hans Richter, ed. Ludwig Karpath, Berlin 1924. Briefe an Mathilde Maier 1862–78, ed. Hans Scholz, Leipzig 1930. Lettres françaises, ed. Julien Tiersot, Paris 1935. König Ludwig II und Richard Wagner. Briefwechsel, ed. Otto Strobel, 4 vols., Karlsruhe 1936. Includes in vol. IV 214 f an unpublished letter from Nietzsche on Wagner’s birthday in 1875. Vol. V, Neue Urkunden zur Lebensgeschichte Richard Wagners 1864–82, ed. Otto Strobel, Karlsruhe 1939. Includes pp. 161–6 extracts from Hans Richter’s Tribschen diary. Briefe. Die Sammlung Burrell, ed. J.N.Burk, Frankfurt a.M. 1953. Lettres a Judith Gautier, ed. Léon Guichard, Paris 1964.

Note: The correspondence with Nietzsche is cited from W-Br3 pending the completion of W-Br2 and N-Br3. A few other letters relevant to this study are published by Bernoulli, Du Moulin Eckart, Fehr, and Westernhagen in the works listed in the Additional Sources. In many cases it is impossible to establish the texts of Wagner’s letters: see J.N.Burk’s editorial note, W-Br9 763 ff. A large part of the correspondence between Wagner and Cosima was destroyed by Eva Wagner after the death of Siegfried Wagner, apparently on his instructions. A few surviving letters are published in the 1979 Bayreuth Festival Programmes for Das Rheingold and Die Walküre.

234  Sources and Abbreviations SCHOPENHAUER 1. Works

 

Schopenhauer-Ausgaben Collected edition S-A1 Sämtliche Werke, ed. Arthur Hübscher, 7 vols., Wiesbaden 1946–50. Select editions Der handschriftliche Nachlaß, ed. Arthur Hübscher, 5 vols., Frankfurt S-A2 a.M. 1966–75. Includes in vol. V, 436–7, an account of Schopenhauer’s annotations to the text of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Schopenhauer’s copy of Der Ring, formerly in the Burrell Collection, and described as lost in S-A2, came to light in the late 1960s in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. This volume was inspected in Bayreuth in 1896 by W.A.Ellis, who discussed it in a detailed Appendix, ‘Schopenhauer’s Private Copy of the Ring-Poem’, The Life of Richard Wagner, 6 vols., London 1900–8, IV. 440–6. S-A3 Gespräche, ed. Arthur Hübscher, Stuttgart Bad-Cannstatt 1971. Includes Schopenhauer’s verbal comments on Wagner.   2.Letters Schopenhauer-Briefe S-Br1 ‘Der Briefwechsel Arthur Schopenhauers’, ed. Carl Gebhardt jointly with Arthur Hübscher, Arthur Schopenhauers sämtliche Werke, ed. Paul Deussen, 16 vols., Munich 1912–42, XIV, XV, and XVI.

Additional Sources Andler Bernoulli

C-Br

C-Tb DeN Deussen DjN Du Moulin

Charles Andler, Nietzsche, sa vie et sa pensée, 6 vols., Paris 1920–31, 5th edn., 3 vols., Paris 1958. Includes (II. 600, n. 3) the text of Nietzsche’s last letter to Bülow, omitted from N-Br1. C.A.Bernoulli, Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche. Eine Freundschaft, 2 vols., Jena 1908. Includes Wagner’s letters to Overbeck, extracts from Albert Brenner’s letters, and Ida Overbeck’s reminiscences, among many other unpublished documents. The passages censored by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche are available in Mazzino Montinari’s ‘Die geschwärzten Stellen in C.A.Bernoulli’, Nietzsche-Studien, VI(1977), 300–328. Die Briefe Cosima Wagners an Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Erhart Thierbach, 2 vols., Weimar 1938–40 (Kraus Reprint, Liechtenstein 1975). See also Briefe Cosima Wagners an ihre Tochter Daniela von Bülow 1866–1885, ed. Max von Waldberg, Stuttgart and Berlin 1933; Cosima Wagner und H.S.Chamberlain im Briefwechsel 1888–1908, ed. Paul Pretzsch, Leipzig 1934; Briefwechsel zwischen Cosima Wagner und Fürst Ernst zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Stuttgart 1937. Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin jointly with Dietrich Mack, 2 vols., Munich 1976 f. E.Förster-Nietzsche, Der einsame Nietzsche, Leipzig 1914. A popular adaptation of the latter part of the biography listed below under Förster-N. Paul Deussen, Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche, Leipzig 1901. E.Förster-Nietzsche, Der junge Nietzsche, Leipzig 1912. A popular adaptation of the first part of the biography listed below under Förster-N. Richard Du Moulin Eckhart, Cosima Wagner, 2 vols., Berlin 1929–31. Includes a number of unpublished letters and material from C-Tb.

Sources and Abbreviations  235 Fehr Förster-N

G-Br

Glasenapp Janz

Kaufmann K-Br

Klages Meysenbug

N-Bibliothek

Max Fehr, Richard Wagners Schweizer Zeit, vol. I, Aarau and Leipzig 1934; vol. II, Aarau and Frankfurt a.M. 1953. E.Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche’s, 2 vols. in 3, Leipzig 1895 and 1897–1904. Includes extracts from Cosima Wagner’s letters to Elisabeth and Paneth’s letters to his fiancée among many other unpublished documents. Die Briefe des Freiherrn Carl von Gersdorff an Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Karl Schlechta jointly with Erhart Thierbach, 4 vols., Weimar 1934–7 (Kraus Reprint, Liechtenstein 1975). Vol. IV contains Gersdorff’s letters to Rohde, Richard and Cosima Wagner, Peter Gast, Elisabeth Nietzsche, and Carl Fuchs. C.F.Glasenapp, Das Leben Richard Wagners, final version comprising the 4th and 5th edns., 6 vols. in 7, Leipzig 1905–11. Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographie, 3 vols., Munich and Vienna, 1978 ff. This work, completing the enterprise begun by Richard Blunck’s Friedrich Nietzsche. Kindheit und Jugend, Basel 1953, supersedes the notoriously unreliable biographical studies by Elisabeth FörsterNietzsche (see above s.v. DeN, DjN, and Förster-N). Cf. C.P.Janz, ‛Probleme der Nietzsche-Biographie’, Studia Philosophica, XXIV (1964), 138–61; and ‘A New Nietzsche Biography’, The Malahat Review, XXIV(1972), 93–102. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche. Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-christ, 3rd edn., Princeton 1968. Includes (pp. 453–76) facsimiles of four unpublished letters to Karl Hillebrand, Paul Lanzky, E.W.Fritzsch, and Carl Fuchs. Peter Gast [Heinrich Köselitz]. Die Briefe an Nietzsche, ed. A.Mendt, 2 vols., Munich 1923–4. See also the letters by Köselitz published in Hans Fuchs, ed., ’Friedrich Nietzsches Jünger der letzten Stunde. Briefe Peter Gasts an Carl Fuchs, Ostdeutsche Monatshefte, V(1924), 480–4; Josef Hofmiller, ‘Nietzsche’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte, XXIX(1931), 73–131; and Albert Pfeiffer, ‘Peter Gasts Briefe aus Basel 1876’, Neue Schweizer Rundschau, N.F. IX(1941 f), 362 ff. Ludwig Klages, Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Nietzsches, Leipzig 1926. Malwida von Meysenbug, ‘Der Lebensabend einer Idealistin’, Memoiren einer Idealistin, ed. Berta Schleicher, 2 vols., Berlin and Leipzig 1927, II. 203–537. See also the references to Nietzsche in Malwida von Meysenbug, Im Anfang war die Liebe. Briefe an ihre Pflegetochter, Munich 1926; Elsa Binder, Malwida von Meysenbug und Friedrich Nietzsche, Berlin 1917; and Berta Schleicher, ‛Malwida von Meysenbug über Nietzsche, Richard Wagner und Cosima Wagner’, Deutscher Almanach, Leipzig 1931, 59–63. Max Oehler, Nietzsches Bibliothek. Vierzehnte Jahresgabe der Gesellschaft der Freunde des Nietzsche-Archivs, Weimar 1942 (Kraus Reprint, Liechtenstein 1975). Lists (pp. 45–56) Nietzsche’s borrowings from the University Library at Basel. For further information about Nietzsche’s reading, see N-Chronik under the respective years.

236  Sources and Abbreviations N-Chronik Newman Schaeffner Stroux

W-Bibliothek W-Chronik

Westernhagen

Karl Schlechta, Nietzsche-Chronik. Daten zu Leben und Werk, Munich 1975. Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols., New York, 1933–46, sixth printing New York 1960. André Schaeffner, ‘Introduction et notes’, Nietzsche. Lettres a Peter Gast, vol. I, Monaco 1957. Identifies much of the music Nietzsche heard during his visits to the Riviera. Johannes Stroux, Nietzsches Professur in Basel, Jena 1925. Includes correspondence with the University authorities, and Nietzsche’s lecture lists (amended by C.P.Janz, ‘Friedrich Nietzsches Akademische Lehrtätigkeit in Basel 1869 bis 1879’, Nietzsche-Studien, III(1974), 192–203). Curt von Westernhagen, Richard Wagners Dresdener Bibliothek 1842–1849, Wiesbaden 1966. Martin Gregor-Dellin, Wagner-Chronik. Daten zu Leben und Werk, Munich 1972. See also Otto Strobel, Richard Wagner. Leben und Schaffen. Eine Zeittafel, Bayreuth 1952. Curt von Westernhagen, Richard Wagner. Sein Werk, sein Wesen, seine Welt, Zürich 1956. Includes (pp. 501 f) an unpublished letter on Wagner’s birthday in 1873; and (pp. 524–34) an exchange of letters between Wagner, H.v. Wolzogen, and Otto Eiser. On p. 471, there are facsimiles of three notes to Cosima—‘Ariadne’—of 1889. A fourth note is published by E.F.Podach, Nietzsches Zusammenbruch, Heidelberg 1930, p. 88.

Note: The lists of sources and additional sources are far from exhaustive, being restricted to works especially relevant to this study to which abbreviated reference is made in the main body of the text. The quality of writing about Nietzsche is by no means proportionate to its prodigious quantity; while the work of some of the finest early scholars has been overtaken by later research. Although many scholarly works are cited in the notes, here, too, the approach has been necessarily selective. Insight into the perils that beset Nietzsche’s editors is afforded by Pierre Champromis, ‘Podach, Nietzsches Werke des Zusammenbruchs oder Zusammenbruch der editorischen Werke Podachs?’, Philosophische Rundschau, XII(1964), 246–63; Rolf Zimmermann, ‘Bibliographische Notizen über das Werk Friedrich Nietzsches’, Librarium, XI(1968), 207–27; Mazzino Montinari, ‘The New Critical Edition of Nietzsche’s Complete Works’, The Malahat Review, XXIV(1972), 121–33. Much of the literature on Also sprach Zarathustra, is discussed by Anke BennholdtThomsen, Nietzsches ‛Also sprach Zarathustra’ als literarisches Phänomen, Frankfurt a.M. 1974. Relevant articles have since appeared in Nietzsche-Studien. A select list of 4566 books, pamphlets, and articles on Nietzsche, most of them containing some reference to Wagner, will be found in the International Nietzsche Bibliography, ed. Herbert Reichert jointly with Karl Schlechta, rev. edn., Chapel Hill 1968. Lists compiled by Herbert Reichert and David Thatcher have appeared at intervals in Nietzsche-Studien: so far 861 titles have been added. Lists of recent books about Wagner are available in the Internationale Wagner-Bibliographie 1946–1955, ed. Herbert Barth, Bayreuth 1956, and its sequels.

Select Bibliography

The following list consists of books referred to in the text and in the Calendar. Additional titles, marked by asterisks, have been included as a guide to further reading. * ABRAHAM, GERALD, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche’s Attitude Towards Richard Wagner’, in Slavonic and Romantic Music, London 1968. * ADORNO, T.W., s.v. Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno. ALTIZER, THOMAS, J.J., ‘Eternal Recurrence and the Kingdom of God’, in The New Nietzsche, ed. David Allison, New York 1977. ANDREAS-SALOMÉ, LOU, s.v. Ernst Pfeiffer, ed. *——‘Ein Apokalyptiker. Der Wiederkunftslehre Friedrich Nietzsches’, Magazin für Literatur, LXI(1892), 753–5, 777–8. ——Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, Vienna 1894; 3rd edn., 1924. BAILEY, ROBERT, ‘Wagner’s Musical Sketches for “Siegfrieds Tod”’, in Studies in Music History, ed. Harold Powers, Princeton 1968. ——‘The Method of Composition’, in The Wagner Companion, ed. Peter Burbidge and Richard Sutton, London 1979. * BARZUN, JACQUES, ‘Nictzsche contra Wagner’, in Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage, New York 1941; rev. edn., New York 1958. BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES, s.v. Jacques Crépet, ed. * BECKER, OSKAR, ‘Nictzsches Beweise für seine Lehre von der ewigen Wiederkunft’, in Gesammelte Philosophische Aufsätze, Pfullingen 1963. BEISSNER, FRIEDRICH, ed., Hölderlin. Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols. in 12, Stuttgart 1943–61. * BEKKER, PAUL, Wagner. Das Leben im Werk, Stuttgart 1924. BENNHOLDT-THOMSEN, ANKE, Nietzsches ‛Also sprach Zarathustra’ als literarisches Phänomen, Frankfurt a.M. 1974. * BERGFELD, JOACHIM, Wagners Werk und unsere Zeit, Berlin and Wunsiedel 1963. * BERTRAM, ERNST, Nietzsche. Versuch einer Mythologie, Berlin 1918; 7th edn., Berlin 1929. Stendhal, i.e., HENRI BEYLE, Vie de Rossini, Paris 1824. BINDER, ELSA Malwida von Meysenbug und Friedrich Nietzsche, Diss. Lausanne 1917, Berlin 1917 BINION, RUDOLF, Frau Lou [Andreas-Salomé], Princeton 1968. BOHNENBLUST, GOTTFRIED, ‘Nietzsches Genfer Liebe’, Annalen, II(1928), 1–14. BOLIN, WILHELM, ed. jointly with Friedrich Jodl, Ludwig Feuerbach. Sämtliche Werke, 13 vols. in 12, Stuttgart 1959–64. BRANDES, GEORG, s.v. Georg Morris Cohen. BRENNECKE, DETLEF, ‘Die blonde Bestie. Vom Mißverständnis eines Schlagworts’, NietzscheStudien, V(1976), 113–45. Nilson, Albert, i.e., ALBERT BRENNER, ‘Das flammende Herz’, Deutsche Rundschau, VII(1877), 1–11. * BÜLOW, MARIE VON, ‘Hans von Bülow und Nietzsche’, Allgemeine Zeitung, CIII(1900), 1–3. BURCKHARDT, JAKOB, s.v. Rudolf Marx, ed. BURRELL, MARY, Richard Wagner. His Life and Works 1813–1834, London 1898. BUTLER, E.M., ‘The Dionysiac: Friedrich Nietzsche’, in The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany, Cambridge 1935.

238  Select Bibliography * CAMPBELL, THOMAS MOODY, ‘Nietzsche-Wagner to January 1872’, Publications of the Modern Language Society of America, LVI(1941), 544–77. *——‘Nietzsche’s “Die Geburt der Tragödie” and Richard Wagner’, Germanic Review, XVI (1941), 185–200. * CAMUS, ALBERT, ‘Nictzsche et le nihilisme’, Temps modernes, VII(1951), 193–208. * CHAILLEY, JACQUES, Parsifal. Opéra initiatique, Paris 1980. Brandes, Georg, i.e., GEORG MORRIS COHEN, Friedrich Nietzsche, trs. A.G.Chater, London 1914. CORNELIUS, CARL MARIA, ed., Peter Cornelius. Ausgewählte Briefe, 2 vols., Leipzig 1904 f. CORNELIUS, PETER, s.v. Carl Maria Cornelius, ed. CRÉPET, JACQUES, ed., ‘Charles Baudelaire. Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris, Oeuvres Complètes de Charles Baudelaire, 9 vols., Paris 1925–33, ‘L’Art Romantique’, 199–252. CREUZER, FRIEDRICH, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, 4 vols., Leipzig and Darmstadt 1836–43. CRUSIUS, OTTO, Erwin Rohde, Tübingen and Leipzig 1902. DAHLHAUS, CARL, ‘Über den Schluß der “Götterdämmerung”’, in Richard Wagner: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Carl Dahlhaus, Regensburg 1971. * DAHMS, WALTER, Die Offenbarung der Musik. Eine Apotheose Friedrich Nietzsches, Munich 1922. DEAN, WINTON, Georges Bizet, London 1965. DEATHRIDGE, JOHN, ‘The Nomenclature of Wagner’s Sketches’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, CI(1975), 75–83. DEUSSEN, PAUL, s.v. Erika Rosenthal-Deussen, ed. ——Das System des Vedânta, Leipzig 1883. * DIPPEL, P.G., Nietzsche und Wagner. Eine Untersuchung über die Grundlagen und Motive ihrer Trennung, Bern 1934. DODDS, E.R., ‘Socrates, Callicles, and Nietzsche’, in Plato Gorgias, ed. E.R.Dodds, Oxford 1959. * DREWS, ARTHUR, Der Ideengehalt von Richard Wagners dramatischen Dichtungen, nebst einem Anhang: Nietzsche und Wagner, Leipzig 1931. * DRUSCOWITZ, HELENE, ‘Nietzsche’, in Ein philosophischer Essay, Heidelberg 1886. DUCHESNE-GUILLEMIN, J., The Western Response to Zoroaster, Oxford 1958. EGIDI, ARTHUR, ‘Gespräche mit Nietzsche im Parsifaljahr 1882’, Die Musik, I iv(1902), 1892–99. * EHRENFELS, CHRISTIAN VON, Richard Wagner und seine Apostaten, Vienna and Leipzig 1913. EISER, OTTO, ‘Richard Wagners “Der Ring des Nibelungen”. Ein exegetischer Versuch’, Bayreuther Blätter, I(1878), 309–17, 352–66. ELLIS, WILLIAM ASHTON, ‘Schopenhauer’s private copy of the Ring-poem’, The Life of Richard Wagner, 6 vols., London 1900–8, IV. 440–6. ETTMÜLLER, LUDWIG, Vaulu-Spá, Leipzig 1830. ——Die Lieder der Edda von den Nibelungen, Zürich 1837. * EUCKEN, RUDOLF, ‘Meine persönlichen Erinnerungen an Nietzsche’, in Den Manen Friedrich Nietzsches, ed. Max Oehler, Munich 1921. FAUCONNET, ANDRÉ, ‘Essai sur… “Les Vainqueurs” et la genèse de “Parsifal”’, Schopenhauer Jahrb., XXXIII(1949), 66–81. FEUERBACH, LUDWIG, s.v. Wilhelm Bolin, ed. FÖRSTER-NIETZSCHE, ELISABETH, Schriften für und gegen Wagner, Leipzig 1924. * FRICKE, RICHARD, Bayreuth vor dreissig Jahren, Dresden 1906. * FURTWÄNGLER, WILHELM, ‘Der Fall Wagner, frei nach Nietzsche’, in Ton und Wort. Aufsätze und Vorträge 1918–54, Wiesbaden 1956. GANZ, P.F., ed., The Discontinuous Tradition. Studies in honour of Ernest Ludwig Stahl, Oxford 1971. * GARDINER, PATRICK, Schopenhauer, London 1967. GAUTIER, JUDITH, Le Troisième Rang du collier, Paris 1909.

Select Bibliography  239 * GERBER, HANS ERHARD, Nietzsche und Goethe, Bern 1954. GILMAN, S.L., ‘Incipit parodia: the Function of Parody in the Lyrical Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-Studien, IV(1975), 52–74. GÖRRES, J., ed., Lohengrin…nach der Abschrift des Vaticanischen Manuscriptes von Ferdinand Gloekle, Heidelberg 1813. * GÖTZ, FRIEDRICH, Peter Gast, der Mensch, der Künstler, der Gelehrte, Annaberg 1934. * GRIESSER, LUITPOLD, Nietzsche und Wagner. Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte und Psychologie ihrer Freundschaft, Vienna 1923. * GROTH, J.H., ‘Wilamowitz-Möllendorff on Nietzsche’s “Die Geburt der Tragödie”’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XI(1950), 179–90. * GRÜNDER, KARLFRIED, ed., Der Streit um Nietzsches ‛Geburt der Tragödie’, Hildesheim 1969 [facsimile reprints of polemical writings by Rohde, Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, and Wagner, q.v.]. * HAECKEL, HANS, Ein Beitrag zu den Quellen und zur Erklärung von Nietzsches ‛Also sprach Zarathustra’, Munich 1922. HALÉVY, DANIEL, Nietzsche, Paris 1909; rev edn., 1944. HANSLICK, EDUARD, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Vienna 1854. HARTMANN, KARL, ‘Aus dem geistigen Leben Bayreuths in den Jahrzehnten vor dem Eintreffen und Eingreifen Richard Wagners’, Archiv für die Geschichte von Oberfranken, XXXIV ii (1940), 1–35. * HASSE, HEINRICH, ‘Vorstufen der Lehre Nietzsches von der ewigen Wiederkunft bei Schopenhauer’, Schopenhauer Jahrb., XVI(1929), 45–56. ——‘Das Problem der Erlösung bei Schopenhauer und Nietzsche’, Schopenhauer Jahrb., XXIII(1936), 100–20. HECKEL, KARL, ‘Jesus von Nazareth—Buddha (Die Sieger)—Parsifal’, Bayreuther Blätter, III(1891), 5–19. ——Nietzsche, Leipzig 1922. HEIDEGGER, MARTIN, ‘Nictzsches Wort “Gott ist tot”’, in Holzwege, Frankfurt a.M. 1950. ——‘Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathustra?’, in Vorträge und Aufsätze, Pfullingen 1954. ——Nietzsche, 2 vols., Pfullingen 1961. HEINE, HEINRICH, s.v. Fritz Strich, ed. HERSHBELL, J.P., jointly with S.A.Nimis, ‘Nietzsche and Heraclitus’, Nietzsche-Studien, VIII(1979), 17–38. * HEUSLER, ANDREAS, ‘Die Herrenethik in der isländischen Sage’, Germanentum, Heidelberg 1934, pp. 63–76. * HILDEBRANDT, KURT, Wagner und Nietzsche. Ihr Kampf gegen das neunzehnte Jahrhundert, Breslau 1924. HILLEBRAND, KARL, Zeiten, Völker und Menschen, 2 vols., Berlin 1874 f. HIS, E., ‘Friedrich Nietzsches Heimatlosigkeit’, Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde, XL(1941), 159–86. HOFMILLER, JOSEF, ‘Nictzsche’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte, XXIX(1931), 73–131. HOHBERGER, C.R., Die Entstehungsgeschichte von Wagners ‘Parsifal’, Diss. Greifswald, Leipzig 1914. HÖLDERLIN, FRIEDRICH, s.v. Friedrich Bcissner, ed. HOLLINGDALE, R.J., Nietzsche. The Man and His Philosophy, London 1965. * HOLLINRAKE, ROGER, ‘Nictzsche, Wagner, and Ernest Newman’, Music & Letters, XLI (1960), 245–55. ——‘Nietzsche and Wagner’s “Parsifal”’, Oxford German Studies, IV (1969), 118–41. ——‘The Title-Page of Wagner’s “Mein Leben”’, Music & Letters, LI(1970), 415–22. ——‘The “Triumphlied” Episode’, Nietzsche-Studien, II(1973), 196–201. ——‘A Note on Nietzsche’s “Gondellied”’, Nietzsche-Studien, IV (1975), 139–45.

240  Select Bibliography ——jointly with Manfred Ruter, ‘Nietzsche’s Sketches for the Poem “Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!”’, Nietzsche-Studien, IV(1975), 279–83. ——‘Carl Dahlhaus and “Der Ring”’, in Wagner 1976. A Celebration of the Bayreuth Festival, ed. Stewart Spencer, The Wagner Society, London 1976. HOLTZMANN, ADOLF, s.v. M.Winternitz, ed. HÜBSCHER, ARTHUR, ‘Schopenhauer und Wagner’, Schopenhauer Jahrb., XXXVII(1956), 26–31. HUEFFER, FRANCIS [FRANZ], Half a Century of Music in England, London 1889. HUSZAR, GEORGE DE, ‘Nictzsche’s Theory of Decadence and the Transvaluation of All Values’, Journal of the History of Ideas, VI(1945), 259–72. * JACOB, P.WALTER, ‘Nictzsches musikalischer Amanuensis. Zur Erinnerung an den Komponisten Peter Gast’, Musica, VII(1953), 305–9. * JACOBS, ROBERT L., Wagner, London 1947; rev. edn. London 1965. JANZ, CURT PAUL, ‘Probleme der Nietzsche-Biographie’, Jahrb. der Schweizerischen Philosophischen Gesellschaft, XXIV(1964), 138–61. ——* ‘Die Kompositionen Friedrich Nietzsches’, Nietzsche-Studien, I(1972), 173–84. ——‘Friedrich Nietzsches Akademische Lehrtätigkeit in Basel 1869 bis 1879, Nietzsche-Studien, III(1974), 192–203. ——‘Die tödliche Beleidigung’, Nietzsche-Studien, IV(1975), 263–78. * JASPERS, KARL, Nietzsche. Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophierens, Berlin 1936, 3rd edn., Berlin 1950. ——Nietzsche und das Christentum, Hameln 1946; 2nd edn., Munich 1952. JUNG, C.G., Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phänomene, Diss. Zürich, Leipzig 1902. KESSELRING, MAX, Nietzsche und sein Zarathustra in psychiatrischer Beleuchtung, Affoltern am Albis 1952. KIETZ, G.A., Richard Wagner in den Jahren 1842–49 und 1873–75, Dresden 1905. KLAGES, LUDWIG, Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Nietzsches, Leipzig 1926. ——‘Der Fall Nietzsche-Wagner in graphologischer Beleuchtung’, in Zur Ausdruckslehre und Charakterkunde, Heidelberg 1926. KOCH, ERNST, Richard Wagners Bühnenfestspiel ‛Der Ring des Nibelungen’, in seinem Verhältnis zur alten Sage wie zur modernen Nibelungendichtung betrachtet, Leipzig 1874. KOEPPEN, C.F. Die Religion des Buddha, 2 vols., Berlin 1857–9. KÖRTE, ALFRED, ‘Hermann Usener—Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, Ein Briefwechsel’, Die Antike, XI(1935), 211–35. KÖSELITZ, HEINRICH, ‘Musikalische Philister’, Musikalisches Wochenblatt, XIV(1877), 200–2. KULKE, EDUARD, Richard Wagner, seine Anhänger und seine Gegner, Leipzig 1884. LACHMAN, KARL, ed., rev. Eduard Hartl, Wolfram von Eschenbach. Parzival, Berlin 1952. LAMPERT, L., ‘Zarathustra and His Disciples’, Nietzsche-Studien, VIII(1979), 309–33. LANDMANN, MICHAEL, ‘Nictzsches Schopcnhauer-Erlebnis’, in Geist und Leben. Varia Nietzscheana, Bonn 1951. LANZKY, PAUL, Friedrich Nietzsche als Mensch und als Dichter, Leipzig 1895. LESSING, THEODOR, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche: Einführung in moderne deutsche Philosophie, Munich 1906. LEVY, OSCAR, ‘The Nietzsche Movement in England’, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, 18 vols., London 1909–11, XVIII. ix–xxxvi. LLOYD-JONES, HUGH, ‘Nictzsche and the Study of the Ancient World’, in Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition, ed. J.C.O’Flaherty with others, Chapel Hill 1976. ——‘Wagner and the Greeks’, in The Times Literary Supplement, 9 January 1976. LÖWITH, KARL, ‘Nictzsche im Lichte der Philosophie von Ludwig Klages’, Reichls philosophischer Almanach, IV(1927), 285–348.

Select Bibliography  241 ——Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkunft des Gleichen, Berlin 1935; rev. edn., Stuttgart 1956. *——Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, Zürich 1941; 3rd edn., Stuttgart 1953. *——‘Nietzsches Wiederholung der Lehre von der ewigen Wiederkehr’, in Weltgeschichte und Heilgeschehen, Stuttgart 1953. LOVE, F.R., Young Nietzsche and the Wagnerian Experience, Chapel Hill 1963. ——‘Prelude to a Desperate Friendship’, Nietzsche-Studien, I(1972), 261–85. *——‘Nietzsche’s Quest for a New Aesthetic of Music’, Nietzsche-Studien, VI(1977), 154–94. *——‘Nietzsche, Music and Madness’, Music & Letters, LX(1979), 186–203. * LÜCK, RUDOLF, Richard Wagner und Ludwig Feuerbach, Breslau 1905. * LUKE, DAVID F., ‘Nictzsche and the Imagery of Height’, in Nietzsche. Imagery and Thought, ed. Malcolm Pasley, London 1978. LUZZATTO, G.L., ‘Ursprung und Form von “Zarathustra”’, Rätia, VI(1942 f), 97–107. * MÄHLY, JACOB, ‘Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche’, Die Gegenwart, LVIII(1900), 246–50. * MANN, THOMAS, ‘Vorspruch zu einer musikalischen Nietzsche-Feier’, “Ariadne”. Jahrb. der Nietzsche-Gesellschaft (1925), 122–6. ——‘Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners’, in Adel des Geistes, Stockholm 1945. ——‘Richard Wagner und der “Ring des Nibelungen”’, in Adel des Geistes, Stockholm 1945. ——‘Schopenhauer’ in Adel des Geistes, Stockholm 1945. ——Nietzsches Philosophie im Lichte unserer Erfahrung, Berlin 1948. MARX, RUDOLF, ed., Jacob Burckhardt. Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Leipzig 1935. * MASINI, FERRUCCIO, ‘Rhythmisch-Metaphorischc “Bedeutungsfelder” in “Also sprach Zarathustra”’, Nietzsche-Studien, II(1973), 276–307. MEHREGAN, H., ‘Zarathustra im Awesta und bei Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-Studien, VIII(1979), 291–308. * MENDÈS, CATULLE, Richard Wagner, Paris 1886. * MESSER, AUGUST, Erläuterungen zu Nietzsches ‛Zarathustra’, Stuttgart 1922. MEYER, R.M., ‘Der Übermensch. Eine wortgeschichtliche Skizze’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Wortforschung, I(1900), 3–25. MEYSENBUG, MALWIDA VON, s.v. Bcrta Schleicher, ed. *——‘Nietzsche’ Individualitäten, Berlin 1902, pp. 1–41. ——Im Anfang war die Liebe. Briefe an ihre Pflegetochter, Munich 1926. * MIASKOWSKI, IDA VON, August von Mioskowski. Ein Lebensbild und Familienbuch, Elbing 1901. * MILLENKOWICH-MOROLD, MAX VON, Cosima Wagner, Leipzig 1937. * MILLS, LAURENCE, ‘Zarathustra analogies in Daniel, Revelations, and in some other books of the Old and New Testaments’, Monist, XVII(1907), 23–32. MONOD, GABRIEL, Portraits et souvenirs, Paris 1897. MONTTNARI, MAZZINO, ‘Ein neuer Abschnitt in Nietzsches “Ecce homo”’, Nietzsche-Studien, I(1972), 380–418. ——‘Die geschwärzten Stellen in C.A.Bernoulli’, Nietzsche-Studien, VI(1977), 300–28. * MOREL, GEORGES, Nietzsche, 3 vols., Paris 1973. MÜLLER, KARL OTFRIED, Geschichten hellenischer Stämme und Städte, 3 vols., Breslau 1844. NAUMANN, GUSTAV, Zarathustra-Commentar, 4 vols., Leipzig 1899–1901. NEUMANN, ANGELO, Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner, Leipzig 1907, 3rd edn., Leipzig 1907. * NIELSON, FRANCIS, ‘The Nictzsche-Wagner Rift’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, XII(1953), 211–17. NIGG, WALTER, Franz Overbeck, Munich 1931. NILSON, ALBERT, s.v. Albert Brenner. NIMIS, S.A., s.v. J.P.Hershbell. OEHLER, MAX, Zur Ahnentafel Nietzsches, Weimar 1938.

242  Select Bibliography * OEHLER, RICHARD, ‘Nictzsches Zarathustra und Spittelers Prometheus’, “Ariadne”. Jahrb. der Nietzsche-Gesellschaft (1925), 127–30. OSBORNE, CHARLES, Wagner and His World, London 1977. OVERBECK, FRANZ, s.v. E.Vischer, ed. ——Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie, Leipzig 1973. ——‘Briefe an Peter Gast’, Die neue Rundschau, XVII(1906), 26–51. *——Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche’, Die neue Rundschau, 209–31 and 320–30. OVERHOFF, KURT, Der germanisch-christliche Mythos Richard Wagners, Dinkelsbühl 1955. OXENFORD, JOHN, ‘Iconoclasm in German Philosophy’, Westminster Review, III N.S. (1853), 388–407. PASLEY, MALCOLM, ‘Nictzsche and Klinger’, in The Discontinuous Tradition. Studies in Honour of Ernest Ludwig Stahl, ed. P.F.Ganz, Oxford 1971. ——ed., Nietzsche. Imagery and Thought, London 1978. PENSIER, ARMAND, s.v. Heinrich von Stein. PETSCH, ROBERT, ‘Zur Qucllenkunde des “Parsifal”’, Richard Wagner-Jahrb., IV(1912), 138–68. PFEIFFER, ERNST, ed., Lou Andreas-Salomé. Lebensrückblick, Zürich and Wiesbaden 1951; 2nd edn., Frankfurt a.M. 1974. PLÜDDEMANN, MARTIN, Die Bühnenfestspiele in Bayreuth, ihre Gegner und ihre Zukunft, Colberg 1877. PODACH, ERICH F., Nietzsches Zusammenbruch, Heidelberg 1930. ——Gestalten um Nietzsche, Weimar 1932. *——Der kranke Nietzsche, Vienna 1937. ——Friedrich Nietzsche und Lou Salomé. Ihre Begegnung 1882, Zürich and Leipzig 1937. * POHL, RICHARD, ‘Der Fall Nietzsche. Ein psychologisches Problem’, Musikalisches Wochenblatt, XIX(1888), 517–20. PORGES, HEINRICH, Die Bühnenproben zu den Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876, Leipzig 1896. POURTALÈS, GUY DE, Nietzsche en Italie, Paris 1929. PRETZSCH, PAUL, ed., Cosima Wagner und Houston Stewart Chamberlain im Briefwechsel 1888–1908, Leipzig 1934. * PRÜFER, ARTHUR, ‘Novalis “Hymnen an die Nacht” in ihren Beziehungen zu Wagners “Tristan und Isolde”’, Richard Wagner-Jahrb., I(1906), 290–304. RÉE, PAUL, Psychologische Beobachtungen, Aus dem Nachlass von , Berlin 1875. ——Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen, Leipzig 1877. ——Die Entstehung des Gewissens, Berlin 1885. REED, T.J., ‘Nietzsche’s Animals’, in Nietzsche. Imagery and Thought, ed. Malcolm Pasley, London 1978. REICHERT, HERBERT W., ed. jointly with Karl Schlechta, International Nietzsche Bibliography, Chapel Hill 1960; rev. edn., Chapel Hill 1968. REYNOLD, H.S., ‘Richard Wagners jüdische Duzfreundschaften’, in Wagner 1976. A Celebration of the Bayreuth Festival, ed. Stewart Spencer, The Wagner Society, London 1976. RILKE, RAINER MARIA, s.v. Ernst Zinn, ed. RÖCKEL, AUGUST, Sachscns Aufhebung und das Zuchthaus zu Waldheim, Frankfurt a.M. 1865. RÖCKEL, SEBASTIAN, Ludwig II und Richard Wagner, 2vols., Munich 1913–20. ROHDE, ERWIN, ‘“Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik” von Friedrich Nietzsche’, Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 May 1872, [see also s.v. Karlfried Gründer]. ——Afterphilologie. Sendschreiben eines Philologen an Richard Wagner, Leipzig 1872 [see also s.v. Karlfried Gründer]. ROSENTHAL, ALBI, Catalogue of the Rosenthal-Levy Collection, typescript 1967. ROSENTHAL-DEUSSEN, ERIKA, ed., Paul Deussen. Mein Leben, Leipzig 1922.

Select Bibliography  243 ROOS, CARL N., Nietzsches Empedokles-fragmenter, Copenhagen 1937. RÜTZOW, SOPHIE, Richard Wagner und Bayreuth, Munich 1943; 3rd edn. Nürnberg 1953 [contains Adolf Wallnöfer’s recollections of Nietzsche in 1876, pp. 169 f]. RUPRECHT, ERICH, Das Problem des Mythos bei Wagner und Nietzsche, Berlin 1938. SAKOLOWSKI, PAUL, ‘Wagners erste Parsifal-Entwürfe’, Richard Wagner-Jahrb., I(1906), 317–26. SALAQUARDA, JÖRG, ‘Der Antichrist’, Nietzsche-Studien, II(1973), 91–136. ——‘Zarathustra und der Esel. Eine Untersuchung der Rolle des Esels im Vierten Theil von Nietzsches “Also sprach Zarathustra”’, Theologia viatorum, XI(1973), 181–213. SALIN, EDGAR, Vom deutschen Verhängnis. Gespräch an der Zeitenwende: Burckhardt-Nietzsche, Hamburg 1959. SALOMÉ, LOU VON, s.v. Lou Andreas-Salomé. SANS, ÉDOUARD, Richard Wagner et la pensée Schopenhauerienne, Paris 1969. SCHEMANN, LUDWIG, Meine Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner, Stuttgart 1902. SCHENK, H.G., The Mind of the European Romantics, London 1966. SCHLECHTA, KARL, s.v. Herbert Reichert, ed. ——‘Der junge Nietzsche und Schopenhauer’, Schopenhauer-Jahrb., XXVI(1939), 289–300. ——Nietzsches grosser Mittag, Frankfurt a.M. 1954. ——‘Zeit—und Lebenstafel’ and ‘Philologischer Nachbericht’, Nietzsche. Werke in drei Bänden, 2nd edn., Munich 1960, III. 1359–82, and 1383–452. ——jointly with Anni Anders, Friedrich Nietzsche. Von den verborgenen Anfängen seines Philosophierens, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1962. * SCHLEICHER, BERTA, ed., Briefe von und an Malwida von Meysenbug, Berlin 1920. SCHURÉ, ÉDOUARD, ‘L’Individualisme et l’anarchie en littérature. Friedrich Nietzsche et sa philosophie, Revue des deux mondes, CXXX(1895), 775–805. SEROV, Mme ALEXANDER, ‘Memoirs of Richard Wagner’, The Artist, XII (Moskow 1891), 70–5. SEYDLITZ, REINHARD VON, ‘Friedrich Nictzsche. Briefe und Gespräche’, Neue deutsche Rundschau, X(1899), 617–28. ——Wann, warum, was und wie ich schrieb, Gotha 1900. ——‘Nietzsche und die Musik’, Die Gesellschaft, XVII(1901), 94–103. * SIEGEL, CARL, Nietzsches Zarathustra. Gehalt und Gestalt, Munich 1938. * SIMMEL, GEORG, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, Leipzig 1907; 3rd edn., Leipzig 1923. SPENCER, STEWART, ed., Wagner 1976: A Celebration of the Bayreuth Festival, London 1976. * SPITTELER, CARL, ‘Friedrich Nictzsche aus seinen Werken’, Bund (Bern), 1 January 1888. *——‘Besprechung des “Fall Wagner”’, Bund (Bern), 8 November 1888. *——Meine Beziehungen zu Nietzsche, Munich 1908. STACKELBERG, RODERICK, ‘The Role of Heinrich von Stein in Nietzsche’s Emergence as a Critic of Wagnerian Idealism and Cultural Nationalism’, Nietzsche-Studien, V(1976), 178–93. Pensier, Albert, i.e. HEINRICH VON STEIN, Die Ideale des Materialismus. Lyrische Philosophie, Cologne 1878. STEIN, HEINRICH VON, s.v. Hans von Wolzogen, ed. ——Helden und Welt, Chemnitz 1883. * STEIN, JACK M., Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts, Detroit 1960. * STEIN, LEON, The Racial Thinking of Richard Wagner, New York 1950. STENDHAL, s.v. Henri Beyle. * STERN, J.P., ‘Nietzsche’s Aesthetics?’, Journal of European Studies, V(1975), 213–22. *——A Study of Nietzsche, Cambridge 1979. STRAUSS, DAVID, s.v. Eduard Zeller, ed. ——Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet von D.F.Strauß, 2 vols., Tübingen 1835–36; 3rd edn. Leipzig 1874. ——Der alte und der neue Glaube, Bonn 1873.

244  Select Bibliography * STRICH, FRITZ, Die Mythologie in der deutschen Literatur von Klopstock bis Wagner, 2 vols., Halle 1910. ——ed., ‘Heinrich Heine. Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland’, Heinrich Heine. Sämtliche Werke, 11 vols., Munich 1925 ff, V. 111–276. ——ed., ‘Heinrich Heine. Die Götter im Exil’, Heinrich Heine. Sämtliche Werke, 11 vols., Munich 1925 ff, VIII. 365–99. STROBEL, OTTO, ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der “Götterdämmerung”’, Die Musik, XXV(1933), 336–41. ——Richard Wagner. Leben und Schaffen. Eine Zeittafel, Bayreuth 1952. TAPPERT, WILHELM, Richard Wagner, sein Leben und seine Werke, Elberfeld 1883. THATCHER, DAVID, ed., ‘Friedrich Nietzsche. A Symposium to Mark the Centenary of the Publication of “The Birth of Tragedy”’, The Malahat Review, XXIV(1972). (Complete special issue.) ——‘Eagle and Serpent in “Zarathustra”’, Nietzsche-Studien, VI(1977), 240–60. UNGERN-STERNBERG, ISABELLE VON, Nietzsche im Spiegelbilde seiner Schrift, Leipzig 1902. VALADIER, PAUL, Nietzsche et la critique du christianisme, Paris 1974. * VERWEYEN, JOHANNES M., Wagner und Nietzsche, Stuttgart 1926. * VISCHER, E., ed., Franz Overbeck. Selbstbekenntnisse, Basel 1941. * VITENS, SIEGFRIED, Die Sprachkunst Friedrich Nietzsches in ‘Also sprach Zarathustra, Diss. Riga, Bremen 1951. * VÖLKER, KARL, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner und der Erlösungsgedanke, Vienna 1922. * VOGEL, MARTIN, ‘Nictzsches Wettkampf mit Wagner’, in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musikanschauung im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Walter Salmen, Regensburg 1965. ——‘Nietzsche und die Bayreuther Blätter’, in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musikkritik, ed. Heinz Becker, Regensburg 1965. ——Apollinisch und Dionysisch, Regensburg 1966. WAGNER, COSIMA, s.v. Paul Pretzsch, ed. ——s.v. Max von Waldberg, ed. ——Briefwechsel zwischen Cosima Wagner und Fürst Ernst zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Stuttgart 1937. WAGNER, ERNST, ‘Friedrich Nietzsches neuestes Buch “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft”’, Internationale Monatsschrift, November 1882, 685. WAGNER, RICHARD, ‘An Friedrich Nietzsche’, Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 June 1872 [see also s.v. Karlfried Gründer]. * WAHNES, GUENTER H., Heinrich von Stein und sein Verhältnis zu Richard Wagner und Friedrich Nietzsche, Diss. Jena 1926, Leipzig 1926. WALDBERG, MAX VON, ed., Briefe Cosima Wagners an ihre Tochter Daniela von Bülow 1866–1885, Stuttgart and Berlin 1933.WALLNÖFER, ADOLF, s.v. Sophie Rützow. WEICHELT, HANS, ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’. Erklärt und gewürdigt, Leipzig 1910; 2nd edn., 1922. * WESTERNHAGEN, CURT VON, Vom Holländer zum Parsifal Zürich 1962. *——Wagner, Zürich 1968; 2nd edn., Zürich 1978. ——Die Entstehung des ‘Ring’, Zürich 1973. * WEYERS, RAYMUND, Arthur Schopenhauers Philosophie der Musik, Regensburg 1976. * WIDMANN, JOSEF VICTOR, ‘Nietzsches gefährliches Buch’, Bund (Bern), 16 and 17 September 1886. * Adorno, T.W., i.e. THEODOR WIESENGRUND-ADORNO, Versuch über Wagner, Berlin and Frankfurt a.M., 1952.

Select Bibliography  245 WILAMOWITZ-MÖLLENDORFF, ULRICH VON, Zukunftsphilologie! eine erwidrung auf Friedrich Nietzsches “geburt der tragödie”, Berlin 1872 [see also s.v. Karlfried Gründer]. ——Zukunftsphilologie! Zweites Stück, Berlin 1973 [see also s.v. Karlfried Gründer]. ——Erinnerungen 1848–1914, Leipzig 1928. * WILLIAMS, W.D., Nietzsche and the French, Oxford 1952. ——‘Nietzsche and Lyric Poetry’, in Reality and Creative Vision, ed. August Closs, London 1963. WINTERNITZ, M., ed., Adolf Holtzmann. Indische Sagen, Jena 1913. WITTE, ERICH, Das Problem des Tragischen bei Nietzsche, Halle a.S., 1904. WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH, s.v. Karl Lachmann, ed. WOLZOGEN, HANS VON, Die Tragödie in Bayreuth und ihr Satyrspiel, Leipzig 1877. ——‘Die Religion des Mitleidens’, Bayreuther Blätter, V(1882), 232–52, and VI(1883), 93–146. ——Richard Wagnerund die Thierwelt, Berlin and Leipzig 1910. ——ed., Heinrich von Steins Briefwechsel mit Hans von Wolzogen, Leipzig 1910. ——‘Parsifal-Varianten. Eine Übersicht’, Richard Wagner-Jahrb., IV(1912), 168–83. ——Lebensbilder, Regensburg 1923. ZELLER, EDUARD, ed., Ausgewählte Briefe von David Friedrich Strauß, Bonn 1895. ZENKER, MAX, ‘Die Vcrschiedenheiten in den Lesarten der Ring-Dichtung’, Bayreuther Blätter, XX(1897), 156–71. * ZINN, ERNST, ed., ‘Rainer Maria Rilke. Marginalien zu Friedrich Nietzsche. “Die Geburt der Tragödie”’, Rainer Maria Rilke. Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols., Frankfurt a.M. 1955–66, VI. 1163–77.