To
overcome
his age in
himself, to become “timeless.
himself, to become “timeless.
Nietzsche - v08 - The Case of Wagner
To both of these views there is but one reply:—
they are absolutely false. -
In the “Ecce Homo,” Nietzsche's autobiography,
—a book which from cover to cover and line for
line is sincerity itself—we learn what Wagner
actually meant to Nietzsche. On pages 41, 44,
84, I22, 129, &c. , we cannot doubt that Nietzsche
is speaking from his heart, and what does he say?
—In impassioned tones he admits his profound
indebtedness to the great musician, his love for
him, his gratitude to him, how Wagner was the
only German who had ever been anything to him
—how his friendship with Wagner constituted the
happiest and most valuable experience of his life-
how his breach with Wagner almost killed him.
And, when we remember, too, that Wagner on his
part also declared that he was “alone” after he
had lost “that man” (Nietzsche), we begin to
perceive that personal bitterness and animosity
are out of the question here. We feel we are on
a higher plane, and that we must not judge these
two men as if they were a couple of little business
people who had had a suburban squabble.
## p. xi (#15) ##############################################
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xi
Nietzsche declares (“Ecce Homo,” p. 24) that
he never attacked persons as persons. If he used
a name at all, it was merely as a means to an end,
just as one might use a magnifying glass in order
to make a general, but elusive and intricate fact
more clear and more apparent; and if he used the
name of David Strauss, without bitterness or spite
(for he did not even know the man), when he
wished to personify Culture-Philistinism, so, in
the same spirit, did he use the name of Wagner,
when he wished to personify the general decadence
of modern ideas, values, aspirations and Art.
Nietzsche's ambition, throughout his life, was
to regenerate European culture. In the first period
of his relationship with Wagner, he thought that
he had found the man who was prepared to lead
in this direction. For a long while he regarded
his master as the Saviour of Germany, as the
innovator and renovator who was going to arrest
the decadent current of his time and lead men to
a greatness which had died with antiquity. And
so thoroughly did he understand his duties as a
disciple, so wholly was he devoted to this cause,
that, in spite of all his unquestioned gifts and the
excellence of his original achievements, he was for
a long while regarded as a mere “literary lackey”
in Wagner's service, in all those circles where the
rising musician was most disliked.
Gradually, however, as the young Nietzsche de-
veloped and began to gain an independent view
of life and humanity, it seemed to him extremely
doubtful whether Wagner actually was pulling the
same way with him. Whereas, theretofore, he had
## p. xii (#16) #############################################
xii TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
identified Wagner's ideals with his own, it now
dawned upon him slowly that the regeneration of
German culture, of European culture, and the trans-
valuation of values which would be necessary for this
regeneration, really lay off the track of Wagnerism.
He saw that he had endowed Wagner with a good
deal that was more his own than Wagner's. In his
love he had transfigured the friend, and the com-
poser of “Parsifal” and the man of his imagination
were not one. The fact was realised step by step;
disappointment upon disappointment, revelation
after revelation, ultimately brought it home to him,
and though his best instincts at first opposed it, the
revulsion of feeling at last became too strong to
be scouted, and Nietzsche was plunged into the
blackest despair. Had he followed his own human
inclinations, he would probably have remained
Wagner's friend until the end. As it was, however,
he remained loyal to his cause, and this meant
denouncing his former idol.
“Joyful Wisdom,” “Thus Spake Zarathustra,”
“Beyond Good and Evil,” “The Genealogy of
Morals,” “The Twilight of the Idols,” “The Anti-
christ”:—all these books were but so many exhor-
tations to mankind to step aside from the general
track now trodden by Europeans. And what
happened? Wagner began to write some hard
things about Nietzsche; the world assumed that
Nietzsche and Wagner had engaged in a paltry
personal quarrel in the press, and the whole im-
portance of the real issue was buried beneath the
human, all-too-human interpretations which were
heaped upon it.
## p. xiii (#17) ############################################
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xiii
Nietzsche was a musician of no mean attain-
ments. For a long while, in his youth, his superiors
had been doubtful whether he should not be
educated for a musical career, so great were his
gifts in this art; and if his mother had not been
offered a six-years' scholarship for her son at the
famous school of Pforta, Nietzsche, the scholar and
philologist, would probably have been an able
composer. When he speaks about music, there-
fore, he knows what he is talking about, and when
he refers to Wagner's music in particular, the simple
fact of his long intimacy with Wagner during the
years at Tribschen, is a sufficient guarantee of
his deep knowledge of the subject. Now Nietzsche
was one of the first to recognise that the principles
of art are inextricably bound up with the laws of
life, that an aesthetic dogma may therefore promote
or depress all vital force, and that a picture, a
symphony, a poem or a statue, is just as capable
of being pessimistic, anarchic, Christian or revolu-
tionary, as a philosophy or a science is. To speak
of a certain class of music as being compatible with
the decline of culture, therefore, was to Nietzsche a
perfectly warrantable association of ideas, and that
is why, throughout his philosophy, so much stress
is laid upon aesthetic considerations.
But if in England and America Nietzsche's
attack on Wagner's art may still seem a little
, incomprehensible, let it be remembered that the
Continent has long known that Nietzsche was
actually in the right. Every year thousands are now
added to the large party abroad who have ceased
from believing in the great musical revolutionary of
## p. xiv (#18) #############################################
- xiv TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
the seventies; that he was one with the French
Romanticists and rebels has long since been ac-
knowledged a fact in select circles, both in France
and Germany, and if we still have Wagner with
us in England, if we still consider Nietzsche as a
heretic, when he declares that “Wagner was a
musician for unmusical people,” it is only because
we are more removed than we imagine, from all
the great movements, intellectual and otherwise,
which take place on the Continent.
In Wagner's music, in his doctrine, in his whole
concept of art, Nietzsche saw the confirmation, the
promotion—aye, even the encouragement, of that
decadence and degeneration which is now rampant
in Europe; and it is for this reason, although to the
end of his life he still loved Wagner, the man and
the friend, that we find him, on the very eve of his
spiritual death, exhorting us to abjure Wagner the
musician and the artist.
ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI.
## p. xv (#19) ##############################################
PREFACE TO THE THIRD
EDITION*
IN spite of the adverse criticism with which the
above preface has met at the hands of many reviewers
since the summer of last year, I cannot say that I
should feel justified, even after mature consideration,
in altering a single word or sentence it contains. If
I felt inclined to make any changes at all, these
would take the form of extensive additions, tending
to confirm rather than to modify the general argu-
ment it advances; but, any omissions of which I
may have been guilty in the first place, have been so
fully rectified since, thanks to the publication of the
English translations of Daniel Halévy's and Henri
Lichtenberger's works, “The Life of Friedrich
Nietzsche,” + and “The Gospel of Superman,” re-
spectively, that, were it not for the fact that the
truth about this matter cannot be repeated too often,
I should have refrained altogether from including
any fresh remarks of my own in this Third Edition.
In the works just referred to (pp. 129 et seq. in
Halévy's book, and pp. 78 et seq. in Lichtenberger's
* It should be noted that the first and second editions of
these essays on Wagner appeared in pamphlet form, for which
the above first preface was written.
t Fisher Unwin, 1911.
† T. N. Foulis, 1910.
## p. xvi (#20) #############################################
xvi PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
book), the statement I made in my preface to
“Thoughts out of Season,” vol. i. , and which I did
not think it necessary to repeat in my first preface
to these pamphlets, will be found to receive the
fullest confirmation.
The statement in question was to the effect that
many long years before these pamphlets were even
projected, Nietzsche's apparent volte-face in regard
to his hero Wagner had been not only foreshadowed,
but actually stated in plain words, in two works
written during his friendship with Wagner, the
works referred to being “The Birth of Tragedy”
(1872), and “Wagner in Bayreuth” (1875) of which
Houston Stuart Chamberlain declares not only that
it possesses “undying classical worth " but that “a
perusal of it is indispensable to all who wish to
follow the question [of Wagner] to its roots. ””
The idea that runs through the present work like
a leitmotif—the idea that Wagner was at bottom
more of a mime than a musician—was so far an
ever present thought with Nietzsche that it is even
impossible to ascertain the period when it was first
formulated.
" In Nietzsche's wonderful autobiography (Ecce
Homo, p. 88), in the section dealing with the early
works just mentioned, we find the following passage:
—“In the second of the two essays [Wagner in
Bayreuth] with a profound certainty of instinct, I
already characterised the elementary factor in
Wagner's nature as a theatrical talent which, in all
his means and aspirations, draws its final conclu-
* See Richard Wagner, by Houston Stuart Chamberlain
(translated by G. A. Hight), pp. 15, 16.
## p. xvii (#21) ############################################
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION xvii
sions. ” And as early as 1874, Nietzsche wrote in
his diary:-" Wagner is a born actor. Just as
Goethe was an abortive painter, and Schiller an
abortive orator, so Wagner was an abortive theatrical
genius. His attitude to music is that of the actor;
for he knows how to sing and speak, as it were out
of different souls and from absolutely differentworlds
(Tristan and the Meistersinger). ”
There is, however, no need to multiply examples,
seeing, as I have said, that in the translations of
Halévy's and Lichtenberger's books the reader will
find all the independent evidence he could possibly
desire, disproving the popular, and even the learned
belief that, in the two pamphlets before us we have
a complete, apparently unaccountable, and therefore
“demented” volte-face on Nietzsche's part. Never-
theless, for fear lest some doubt should still linger
in certain minds concerning this point, and with the
view of adding interest to these essays, the Editor
considered it advisable, in the Second Edition, to
add a number of extracts from Nietzsche's diary of
the year 1878 (ten years before “The Case of Wag-
ner,” and “Nietzsche contra Wagner” were written)
in order to show to what extent those learned critics
who complain of Nietzsche's “morbid and uncon-
trollable recantations and revulsions of feeling,”
have overlooked even the plain facts of the case when
forming their all-too-hasty conclusions. These ex-
tracts will be found at the end of “Nietzsche contra
Wagner. ” While reading them, however, it should
not be forgotten that they were never intended for
publication by Nietzsche himself—a fact which ac-
counts for their unpolished and sketchy form—and
/
## p. xviii (#22) ###########################################
xviii PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
that they were first published in vol. xi. of the first
German Library Edition (pp. 99-129) only when
he was a helpless invalid, in 1897. Since then, in
1901 and 1906 respectively, they have been re-
printed, once in the large German Library Edition
(vol. xi. pp. 181-202), and once in the German
Pocket Edition, as an appendix to “Human-All-
too-Human,” Part II.
An altogether special interest now attaches to
these pamphlets; for, in the first place we are at last
in possession of Wagner's own account of his de-
velopment, his art, his aspirations and his struggles,
in the amazing self-revelation entitled My Life *;
and secondly, we now have Ecce Homo, Nietzsche's
autobiography, in which we learn for the first time
from Nietzsche's own pen to what extent his history
was that of a double devotion—to Wagner on the
one hand, and to his own life task, the Transvalua-
tion of all Values, on the other.
Readers interested in the Nietzsche-Wagner con-
troversy will naturally look to these books for a final
solution of all the difficulties which the problem
presents. But let them not be too sanguine. From
first to last this problem is not to be settled by
“facts. ” A good deal of instinctive choice, instinc-
tive aversion, and instinctive suspicion are necessary
here. A little more suspicion, for instance, ought to
be applied to Wagner's My Life, especially in Eng-
land, where critics are not half suspicious enough
about a continental artist's self-revelations, and are
too prone, if they have suspicions at all, to apply
them in the wrong place.
* Constable & Co. , 1911.
## p. xix (#23) #############################################
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EIDITION xix
An example of this want of finesse in judging
foreign writers is to be found in Lord Morley's work
on Rousseau, a book which ingenuously takes for
granted everything that a writer like Rousseau cares
to say about himself, without considering for an
instant the possibility that Rousseau might have
practised some hypocrisy. In regard to Wagner's
life we might easily fall into the same error—that is
to say, we might take seriously all he says concern-
ing himself and his family affairs.
We should beware of this, and should not even
believe Wagner when he speaks badly about him-
self. No one speaks badly about himself without a
reason, and the question in this case is to find out
the reason. Did Wagner—in the belief that genius
was always immoral—wish to pose as an immoral
Egotist, in order to make us believe in his genius,
of which he himself was none too sure in his inner-
most heart? Did Wagner wish to appear “sincere”
in his biography, in order to awaken in us a belief
in the sincerity of his music, which he likewise
doubted, but wished to impress upon the world as
“true”? Or did he wish to be thought badly of in
connection with things that were not true, and that
consequently did not affect him, in order to lead us
off the scent of true things, things he was ashamed
of and which he wished the world to ignore—just
like Rousseau (the similarity between the two is
more than a superficial one) who barbarously pre-
tended to have sent his children to the foundling
hospital, in order not to be thought incapable of
having had any children at all? In short, where is
the bluff in Wagner's biography? Let us therefore
## p. xx (#24) ##############################################
xx PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
be careful about it, and all the more so because
Wagner himself guarantees the truth of it in the
prefatory note. If we were to be credulous here, we
should moreover be acting in direct opposition to
Nietzsche's own counsel as given in the following
aphorisms (Nos. I9 and 20, p. 89):-
“It is very difficult to trace the course of Wagner's
development, no trust must be placed in his own
description of his soul's experiences. He writes
party-pamphlets for his followers. -
“It is extremely doubtful whether Wagner is
able to bear witness about himself. ”
While on p. 37 (the note), we read:—“He
[Wagner] was not proud enough to be able to suffer
the truth about himself. Nobody had less pride
than he. Like Victor Hugo he remained true to
himself even in his biography, he remained an
actor. ”
However, as a famous English judge has said:—
“Truth will come out, even in the witness box,”
and, as we may add in this case, even in an auto-
biography. There is one statement in Wagner's
My Life which sounds true to my ears at least—
a statement which, in my opinion, has some impor-
tance, and to which Wagner himself seems to grant
a mysterious significance. I refer to the passage on
p. 93 of vol. i. , in which Wagner says:–“Owing
to the exceptional vivacity and innate susceptibility
of my nature . . . I gradually became conscious of
a certain power of transporting or bewildering my
more indolent companions. ”
This seems innocent enough. When, however,
it is read in conjunction with Nietzsche's trenchant
## p. xxi (#25) #############################################
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION xxi
criticism, particularly on pp. 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18
of this work, and also with a knowledge of Wagner's
music, it becomes one of the most striking passages
in Wagner's autobiography; for it records how soon
he became conscious of his dominant instinct and
faculty.
I know perfectly well that the Wagnerites will
not be influenced by these remarks. Their grati-
tude to Wagner is too great for this. He has
supplied the precious varnish wherewith to hide
the dull ugliness of our civilisation. He has given
to souls despairing over the materialism of this
world, to souls despairing of themselves, and long-
ing to be rid of themselves, the indispensable hash-
ish and morphia wherewith to deaden their inner
discords. These discords are everywhere apparent
nowadays. Wagner is therefore a common need, a
common benefactor. As such he is bound to be
worshipped and adored in spite of all egotistical
and theatrical autobiographies.
Albeit, signs are not wanting—at least among his
Anglo-Saxon worshippers who stand even more in
need of romanticism than their continental brethren,
—which show that,in order to uphold Wagner, people
are now beginning to draw distinctions between the
man and the artist. They dismiss the man as
“human-all-too-human,” but they still maintain that
there are divine qualities in his music. However
distasteful the task of disillusioning these psycholo-
gical tyros may be, they should be informed that no
such division of a man into two parts is permissible,
save in Christianity (–the body and the soul—);
but that outside purely religious spheres it is utterly
## p. xxii (#26) ############################################
xxii PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
unwarrantable. There can be no such strange
divorce between a bloom and the plant on which
it blows, and has a black woman ever been known
to give birth to a white child?
Wagner, as Nietzsche tells us on p. 19, “was
something complete, he was a typical decadent, in
whom every sign of “free will 'was lacking, in whom
every feature was necessary. ” Wagner, allow me
to add, was a typical representative of the nineteenth
century, which was the century of contradictory
values,of opposed instincts, and of every kind of inner
disharmony. The genuine, the classical artists of
that period, such men as Heine, Goethe, Stendhal,
and Gobineau, overcame their inner strife, and each
succeeded in making a harmonious whole out of
himself—not indeed without a severe struggle; for
everyone of them suffered from being the child of
his age, i. e. , a decadent. The only difference between
them and the romanticists lies in the fact that they
(the former) were conscious of what was wrong with
them, and possessed the will and the strength to
overcome their illness; whereas the romanticists
chose the easier alternative—namely, that of shut-
ting their eyes on themselves.
“I am just as much a child of my age as Wagner
—i. e. , I am a decadent,” says Nietzsche. “The
only difference is that I recognised the fact, that I
struggled against it. ”
What Wagner did was characteristic of all ro-
manticists and contemporary artists: he drowned
and overshouted his inner discord by means of
* See Author's Preface to “The Case of Wagner” in this
volume.
## p. xxiii (#27) ###########################################
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION xxiii
exuberant pathos and wild exaltation. Far be it
from me to value Wagner's music in extenso here
—this is scarcely a fitting opportunity to do so;-
but I think it might well be possible to show, on
purely psychological grounds, how impossible it was
for a man like Wagner to produce real art. For how
can harmony, order, symmetry, mastery, proceed
from uncontrolled discord, disorder, disintegration,
and chaos? The fact that an art which springs
from such a marshy soil may, like certain paludal
plants, be “wonderful,”“gorgeous,” and “overwhelm-
ing,” cannot be denied ; but true art it is not. It is
so just as little as Gothic architecture is, that style
which, in its efforts to escape beyond the tragic con-
tradiction in its mediaeval heart, yelled its hysterical
cry heavenwards and even melted the stones of its
structures into a quivering and fluid jet, in order to
give adequateexpression to the painful and wretched
conflict then raging between the body and the soul.
That Wagner, too, was a great sufferer, there can
be no doubt; not, however, a sufferer from strength,
like a true artist, but from weakness—the weakness
of his age, which he never overcame. It is for this
reason that he should be rather pitied than judged
as he is now being judged by his German and
English critics, who, with thoroughly neurotic sud-
denness, have acknowledged their revulsion of feeling
a little too harshly.
“I have carefully endeavoured not to deride, or
deplore, or detest . . . ” says Spinoza, “but to under-
stand”; and these words ought to be our guide, not
only in the case of Wagner, but in all things.
Inner discord is a terrible affliction, and nothing
## p. xxiv (#28) ############################################
xxiv PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
is so certain to produce that nervous irritability
which is so trying to the patient as well as to the
outer world, as this so-called spiritual disease.
Nietzsche was probably quite right when he said
the only real and true music that Wagner ever com-
posed did not consist of his elaborate arias and over-
tures, but of ten or fifteen bars which, dispersed here
and there, gave expression to the composer's pro-
found and genuine melancholy. But this melancholy
had to be overcome, and Wagner with the blood of
a cabotin in his veins, resorted to the remedy that
was nearest to hand—that is to say, the art of
bewildering others and himself. Thus he remained
ignorant about himself all his life; for there was, as
Nietzsche rightly points out (p. 37, note), not suffi-
cient pride in the man for him to desire to know or
to suffer gladly the truth concerning his real nature.
As an actor his ruling passion was vanity; but in
his case it was correlated with a semi-conscious
knowledge of the fact that all was not right with
him and his art. It was this that caused him to
suffer. CHis egomaniacal behaviour and his almost
Rousseauesque fear and suspicion of others were
only the external manifestations of his inner dis-
crepancies? But, to repeat what I have already said,
these abnormal symptoms are not in the least
incompatible with Wagner's music, they are rather
its very cause, the root from which it springs.
In reality, therefore, Wagner the man and Wagner
the artist were undoubtedly one, and constituted
a splendid romanticist. His music as well as his
autobiography are proofs of his wonderful gifts in
this direction. His success in his time, as in ours,
## p. xxv (#29) #############################################
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION xxV
is due to the craving of the modern world for actors,
sorcerers, bewilderers and idealists who are able to
conceal the ill-health and the weakness that prevail,
and who please by intoxicating and exalting. But
this being so, the world must not be disappointed
to find the hero of a preceding age explode in the
next. It must not be astonished to find a disparity
between the hero's private life and his “elevating” art
or romantic and idealistic gospel. As long as people
will admire heroic attitudes more than heroism, such
disillusionment is bound to be the price of their error.
In a truly great man, life-theory and life-practice,
if seen from a sufficiently lofty point of view, must
and do always agree; in an actor, in a romanticist,
. # Christian, there is always a
yawning chasm between the two, which, whatever
well-meaning critics may do, cannot be bridged
posthumously by acrobatic feats in psychologicis.
Let anyone apply this point of view to Nietzsche's
life and theory. Let anyone turn his life inside
out, not only as he gives it to us in his Ecce Homo,
but as we find it related by all his biographers,
friends and foes alike ; and what will be the result P
Even if we ignore his works—the blooms which
blowed from time to time from his life—we abso-
lutely cannot deny the greatness of the man's private
practice, and if we fully understand and appreciate
the latter, we must be singularly deficient in instinct
and in flair if we do not suspect that some of this
greatness is reflected in his life-task.
ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI.
LONDON, July 1911.
## p. xxvi (#30) ############################################
## p. xxvii (#31) ###########################################
T H E
CASE OF WAGNER
A MUSICIAN’S PROBLEM
A LETTER FROM TURIN, MAY 1888
“RIDENDo DiCERE severuM . . .
## p. xxviii (#32) ##########################################
## p. xxix (#33) ############################################
PRE FACE
I AM writing this to relieve my mind. It is not
malice alone which makes me praise Bizet at the
expense of Wagner in this essay. Amid a good
deal of jesting I wish to make one point clear
which does not admit of levity. To turn my back
on Wagner was for me a piece of fate; to get to
like anything else whatever afterwards, was for me
a triumph. Nobody, perhaps, had ever been more
dangerously involved in Wagnerism, nobody had
defended himself more obstinately against it,
nobody had ever been so overjoyed at ridding
himself of it. A long history! —Shall I give it a
name P-If I were a moralist, who knows what I
might not call it! Perhaps a piece of self-mastery. —
But the philosopher does not like the moralist,
neither does he like high-falutin' words. . . .
What is the first and last thing that a philosopher T.
demands of himself?
To overcome his age in
himself, to become “timeless. ” With what then
does the philosopher have the greatest fight?
With all that in him which makes him the child of
his time. Very well then I am just as much a
child of my age as Wagner—i. e. , I am a decadent.
The only difference is that I recognised the fact,
xxix
## p. xxx (#34) #############################################
xxx PREFACE
that I struggled against it. The philosopher in
me struggled against it.
My greatest preoccupation hitherto has been
the problem of decadence, and I had reasons for
this. “Good and evil” form only a playful sub-
division of this problem. If one has trained one's
eye to detect the symptoms of decline, one also
understands morality, one understands what lies
concealed beneath its holiest names and tables of
values: e. g. , impoverished life, the will to nonentity,
great exhaustion. Morality denies life. . . . In
order to undertake such a mission I was obliged to
exercise self-discipline:–I had to side against all
that was morbid in myself including Wagner,
including Schopenhauer, including the whole of
modern humanity. — A profound estrangement,
coldness and soberness towards all that belongs
to my age, all that was contemporary: and as the
highest wish, Zarathustra's eye, an eye which
surveys the whole phenomenon—mankind—from
an enormous distance,—which looks down upon
it. —For such a goal—what sacrifice would not have
been worth while? What “self-mastery”! What
“self-denial "l
The greatest event of my life took the form of
a recovery. Wagner belongs only to my diseases.
Not that I wish to appear ungrateful to this
disease. If in this essay I support the proposition
that Wagner is harmful, I none the less wish to
## p. xxxi (#35) ############################################
PREFACE xxxi
point out unto whom, in spite of all, he is indispen-
sable—to the philosopher. Anyone else may
perhaps be able to get on without Wagner: but
the philosopher is not free to pass him by. The
philosopher must be the evil conscience of his age,
but to this end he must be possessed of its best
knowledge. And what better guide, or more
thoroughly efficient revealer of the soul, could be
found for the labyrinth of the modern spirit than
Wagner? Through Wagner modernity speaks her
most intimate language: it conceals neither its
good nor its evil; it has thrown off all shame.
And, conversely, one has almost calculated the
whole of the value of modernity once one is clear
concerning what is good and evil in Wagner.
I can perfectly well understand a musician of
to-day who says: “I hate Wagner but I can
endure no other music. ” But I should also
understand a philosopher who said: “Wagner is
modernity in concentrated form. ” There is no
help for it, we must first be Wagnerites. . . .
## p. xxxii (#36) ###########################################
## p. 1 (#37) ###############################################
THE CASE OF WAGNER
I.
YESTERDAY-would you believe it? —I heard Bizet's
masterpiece for the twentieth time. Once more I
attended with the same gentle reverence; once
again I did not run away. This triumph over my
impatience surprises me. How such a work com-
pletes one | Through it one almost becomes a
“masterpiece” oneself—And, as a matter of fact,
each time I heard Carmen it seemed to me that I
was more of a philosopher, a better philosopher
than at other times: I became so forbearing, so
happy, so Indian, so settled. . . . To sit for five
hours: the first step to holiness! —May I be allowed
to say that Bizet's orchestration is the only one
that I can endure now P That other orchestration
which is all the rage at present—the Wagnerian–
is brutal, artificial and “unsophisticated" withal,
hence its appeal to all the three senses of the
modern soul at once. How terribly Wagnerian
orchestration affects me ! I call it the Sirocco. A
disagreeable sweat breaks out all over me. All my
fine weather vanishes.
Bizet's music seems to me perfect. It comes
forward lightly, gracefully, stylishly. It is lovable,
I
## p. 2 (#38) ###############################################
2 THE CASE OF WAGNER
it does not sweat. “All that is good is easy, every-
thing divine runs with light feet”: this is the first
principle of my aesthetics. This music is wicked,
refined, fatalistic: and withal remains popular, it
possesses the refinement of a race, not of an
individual. It is rich. It is definite. It builds,
organises, completes: and in this sense it stands
as a contrast to the polypus in music, to “endless
melody. ” Have more painful, more tragic accents
ever been heard on the stage before? And how
are they obtained? Without grimaces ! Without
counterfeiting of any kind! Free from the lie of
the grand style! —In short: this music assumes
that the listener is intelligent even as a musician,—
thereby it is the opposite of Wagner, who, apart
from everything else, was in any case the most ill-
mannered genius on earth (Wagner takes us as if
. . . , he repeats a thing so often that we become
desperate-that we ultimately believe it).
And once more: I become a better man when
Bizet speaks to me. Also a better musician, a
better listener. Is it in any way possible to listen
better? —I even burrow behind this music with my
ears. I hear its very cause. I seem to assist at its
birth. I tremble before the dangers which this
daring music runs, I am enraptured over those
happy accidents for which even Bizet himself may
not be responsible. —And, strange to say, at bottom
I do not give it a thought, or am not aware how
much thought I really do give it. For quite other
ideas are running through my head the while. . .
Has any one ever observed that music emancipates
the spirit? gives wings to thought? and that the
## p. 3 (#39) ###############################################
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM 3
more one becomes a musician the more one is also
a philosopher? The grey sky of abstraction seems
thrilled by flashes of lightning; the light is strong
enough to reveal all the details of things; to
enable one to grapple with problems; and the
world is surveyed as if from a mountain top. –
With this I have defined philosophical pathos. -
And unexpectedly answers drop into my lap, a small
hailstorm of ice and wisdom, of problems solved.
Where am I? Bizet makes me productive. Every-
thing that is good makes me productive. I have
gratitude for nothing else, nor have I any other
touchstone for testing what is good.
2.
Bizet's work also saves; Wagner is not the only
“Saviour. ” With it one bids farewell to the damp
north and to all the fog of the Wagnerian ideal.
Even the action in itself delivers us from these
things. From Merimée it has this logic even in
passion, from him it has the direct line, inexorable
necessity; but what it has above all else is that
which belongs to sub-tropical zones—that dryness
of atmosphere, that limpidegga of the air. Here in
every respect the climate is altered. Here another
kind of sensuality, another kind of sensitiveness
and another kind of cheerfulness make their appeal.
This music is gay, but not in a French or German
way. Its gaiety is African; fate hangs over it, its
happiness is short, sudden, without reprieve. I
envy Bizet for having had the courage of this
sensitiveness, which hitherto in the cultured music
9.
## p. 4 (#40) ###############################################
4 THE CASE OF WAGNER
of Europe has found no means of expression,-of
this southern, tawny, Sunburnt sensitiveness. . . .
What a joy the golden afternoon of its happiness is
to us! When we look out, with this music in our
minds, we wonder whether we have ever seen the
sea so calm. And how soothing is this Moorish
dancing ! How, for once, even our insatiability
gets sated by its lascivious melancholy l—And
finally love, love translated back into Nature /
Not the love of a “cultured girl! ”—no Senta-
sentimentality. ” But love as fate, as a fatality,
cynical, innocent, cruel,-and precisely in this way
Mature / The love whose means is war, whose
very essence is the mortal hatred between the
sexes! —I know no case in which the tragic irony,
which constitutes the kernel of love, is expressed
with such severity, or in so terrible a formula, as
in the last cry of Don José with which the work
ends :
“Yes, it is I who have killed her,
I—my adored Carmen "
—Such a conception of love (the only one worthy
of a philosopher) is rare: it distinguishes one
work of art from among a thousand others. For,
as a rule, artists are no better than the rest of the
world, they are even worse—they misunderstand
love. Even Wagner misunderstood it. They imagine
that they are selfless in it because they appear
to be seeking the advantage of another creature
often to their own disadvantage. But in return
they want to possess the other creature. . . . Even
* Senta is the heroine in the “Flying Dutchman. ”—Tr.
## p. 5 (#41) ###############################################
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM 5
God is no exception to this rule, he is very far from
thinking “What does it matter to thee whether I
love thee or not? ”—He becomes terrible if he is
not loved in return. “L’amour—and with this
principle one carries one's point against Gods and
men—est de tous les sentiments le plus égoiste, et
par consequent, lorsqu'il est blessé, le moins géné-
reur” (B. Constant).
3.
Perhaps you are beginning to perceive how very
much this music improves me? —Il faut méditer-
raniser la musique: and I have my reasons for this
principle (“Beyond Good and Evil,” pp. 216 et seq. ).
The return to Nature, health, good spirits, youth,
virtue /–And yet I was one of the most corrupted
Wagnerites. . . . I was able to take Wagner
seriously. Oh, this old magician what tricks
has he not played upon us! The first thing his
art places in our hands is a magnifying glass: we
look through it, and we no longer trust our own
eyes. —Everything grows bigger, even Wagner grows
bigger. . . . What a clever rattlesnake. Through-
out his life he rattled “resignation,” “loyalty,”
and “purity” about our ears, and he retired from
the corrupt world with a song of praise to chastity
—And we believed it all. . . .
—But you will not listen to me? You prefer
even the problem of Wagner to that of Bizet? But
neither do I underrate it; it has its charm. The
problem of salvation is even a venerable problem.
Wagner pondered over nothing so deeply as over
salvation: his opera is the opera of salvation.
J-
## p. 6 (#42) ###############################################
6 THE CASE OF WAGNER
Someone always wants to be saved in his operas,
now it is a youth ; anon it is a maid, this is his
problem. —And how lavishly he varies his leitmotif/
What rare and melancholy modulations ! If it were
not for Wagner, who would teach us that innocence
has a preference for saving interesting sinners?
(the case in “Tannhäuser”). Or that even the eternal
Jew gets saved and settled down when he marries?
(the case in the “Flying Dutchman"). Or that
corrupted old females prefer to be saved by chaste
young men? (the case of Kundry). Or that young
hysterics like to be saved by their doctor? (the
case in “Lohengrin. ”). Or that beautiful girls most
love to be saved by a knight who also happens to
be a Wagnerite P (the case in the “Mastersingers”).
Or that even married women also like to be saved
by a knight? (the case of Isolde). Or that the
venerable Almighty, after having compromised
himself morally in all manner of ways, is at last
delivered by a free spirit and an immoralist? (the
case in the “Ring”). Admire, more especially this
last piece of wisdom Do you understand it?
I—take good care not to understand it. . . . That
it is possible to draw yet other lessons from the
works above mentioned,—I am much more ready
to prove than to dispute. That one may be driven
by a Wagnerian ballet to desperation—and to
virtue ! (once again the case in “Tannhäuser”).
That not going to bed at the right time may be
followed by the worst consequences (once again
the case of “Lohengrin"). -That one can never be
too sure of the spouse one actually marries (for the
third time, the case of “Lohengrin"). “Tristan and
## p. 7 (#43) ###############################################
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM 7
Isolde” glorifies the perfect husband who, in a
certain case, can ask only one question: “But why
have ye not told me this before? Nothing could L
be simpler than that l” Reply: -
“That I cannot tell thee.
And what thou askest,
. *
*
That wilt thou never learn. ” cº
f -
º, tº
“Lohengrin. ” contains a solemn ban upon all in- ". *-
vestigation and questioning. In this way Wagner t
stood for the Christian concept, “Thou must and , º
shalt believe. ” It is a crime against the highest
and the holiest to be scientific. . . . The “Flying
Dutchman” preaches the sublime doctrine that .
woman can moor the most erratic soul, or to put " '
it into Wagnerian terms “save" him. Here we -
venture to ask a question. Supposing that this
were actually true, would it therefore be desirable P-
What becomes of the “eternal Jew” whom a .
