He does not see that his spirit
has another desire and bent—a totally different
outlook—that it prefers to squat peacefully in the
corners of broken-down houses: concealed in this
way, and hidden even from himself, he paints his
really great masterpieces, all of which are very
short, often only one bar in length—there, only,
does he become quite good, great and perfect,
perhaps there alone.
has another desire and bent—a totally different
outlook—that it prefers to squat peacefully in the
corners of broken-down houses: concealed in this
way, and hidden even from himself, he paints his
really great masterpieces, all of which are very
short, often only one bar in length—there, only,
does he become quite good, great and perfect,
perhaps there alone.
Nietzsche - v08 - The Case of Wagner
Ah, this old robber!
He robs our
young men: he even robs our women as well, and
drags them to his cell. . . . Ah, this old Minotaur !
What has he not already cost us? Every year
processions of the finest young men and maidens
are led into his labyrinth that he may swallow
them up, every year the whole of Europe cries out
“Away to Cretel Away to Cretel" . . .
## p. 43 (#79) ##############################################
SECOND POSTSCRIPT
It seems to me that my letter is open to some
misunderstanding. On certain faces I see the
expression of gratitude; I even hear modest but
merry laughter. I prefer to be understood here
as in other things. But since a certain animal,
the worm of Empire, the famous Rhinoxera, has
become lodged in the vineyards of the German
spirit, nobody any longer understands a word I
say. The Kreuz-Zeitung has brought this home
to me, not to speak of the Litterarisches Central-
blatt. I have given the Germans the deepest
books that they have ever possessed—a sufficient
reason for their not having understood a word of
them. . . . If in this essay I declare war against
Wagner—and incidentally against a certain form
of German taste, if I seem to use strong language
about the cretinism of Bayreuth, it must not be
supposed that I am in the least anxious to glorify
any other musician. Other musicians are not to
be considered by the side of Wagner. Things are
generally bad. Decay is universal. Disease lies
at the very root of things. If Wagner's name
represents the ruin of music, just as Bernini's
stands for the ruin of sculpture, he is not on that
account its cause. All he did was to accelerate
the fall,—though we are quite prepared to admit
that he did it in a way which makes one recoil
with horror from this almost instantaneous decline
43
## p. 44 (#80) ##############################################
44 THE CASE OF WAGNER
and fall to the depths. He possessed the ingenu-
ousness of decadence: this constituted his superi-
ority. He believed in it. He did not halt before
any of its logical consequences. The others hesi-
tated—that is their distinction. They have no
other. What is common to both Wagner and
“the others” consists in this : the decline of all
organising power; the abuse of traditional means,
without the capacity or the aim that would justify
this. The counterfeit imitation of grand forms,
for which nobody nowadays is strong, proud, self-
reliant and healthy enough ; excessive vitality in
small details; passion at all costs; refinement as
an expression of impoverished life, ever more nerves
in the place of muscle. I know only one musician
who to-day would be able to compose an overture
as an organic whole: and nobody else knows him. *
. . He who is famous now, does not write better
music than Wagner, but only less characteristic, less
definite music:-less definite, because half measures,
even in decadence, cannot stand by the side of com-
pleteness. But Wagner was complete; Wagner re-
presented thorough corruption; Wagner has had the
courage, the will, and the conviction for corruption.
What does Johannes Brahms matter? . . . It was
his good fortune to be misunderstood by Germany
he was taken to be an antagonist of Wagner—
people required an antagonist! —But he did not
write necessary music, above all he wrote too
much music l—When one is not rich one should
* This undoubtedly refers to Nietsche's only disciple and
friend, Peter Gast. —Tr.
## p. 45 (#81) ##############################################
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM 45
r
at least have enough pride to be poor . . . The
sympathy which here and there was meted out to
Brahms, apart from party interests and party mis-
understandings, was for a long time a riddle to
me: until one day through an accident, almost, I
discovered that he affected a particular type of
man. He has the melancholy of impotence. His
creations are not the result of plenitude, he thirsts
after abundance. Apart from what he plagiarises,
from what he borrows from ancient or exotically
modern styles—he is a master in the art of copy-
ing, there remains as his most individual quality
a longing. . . . And this is what the dissatisfied
of all kinds, and all those who yearn, divine in
him. He is much too little of a personality, too
little of a central figure. . . . The “impersonal,”
those who are not self-centred, love him for this.
He is especially the musician of a species of dis-
satisfied women. Fifty steps further on, and we
find the female Wagnerite—just as we find Wagner
himself fifty paces ahead of Brahms-The female
Wagnerite is a more definite, a more interesting,
and above all, a more attractive type. Brahms is
touching so long as he dreams or mourns over
himself in private—in this respect he is modern ;-
he becomes cold, we no longer feel at one with
him when he poses as the child of the classics.
. . . People like to call Brahms Beethoven's heir :
I know of no more cautious euphemism. —All
that which to-day makes a claim to being the
grand style in music is on precisely that account
either false to us or false to itself. This alterna-
tive is suspicious enough : in itself it contains a
## p. 46 (#82) ##############################################
46 THE CASE OF WAGNER
!
casuistic question concerning the value of the two
cases. The instinct of the majority protests
against the alternative; “false to us”—they do
not wish to be cheated;—and I myself would
certainly always prefer this type to the other
(“False to itself”). This is my taste. —Expressed
more clearly for the sake of the “poor in spirit”
it amounts to this: Brahms or Wagner. . . .
Brahms is not an actor. —A very great part of
other musicians may be summed up in the concept
Brahms-I do not wish to say anything about the
clever apes of Wagner, as for instance Goldmark:
when one has “The Queen of Sheba" to one's
name, one belongs to a menagerie, one ought
to put oneself on show. —Nowadays all things that
can be done well and even with a master hand
are small. In this department alone is honesty
still possible. Nothing, however, can cure music
as a whole of its chief fault, of its fate, which is to
be the expression of general physiological contra-
diction,--which is, in fact, to be modern.
The best instruction, the most conscientious
schooling, the most thorough familiarity, yea, and
even isolation, with the Old Masters, all this only
acts as a palliative, or, more strictly speaking, has
but an illusory effect, because the first condition
of the right thing is no longer in our bodies ;
whether this first condition be the strong race of
a Händel or the overflowing animal spirits of a
Rossini. Not everyone has the right to every
teacher: and this holds good of whole epochs. -In
itself it is not impossible that there are still remains
of stronger natures, typical unadapted men, some-
4
## p. 47 (#83) ##############################################
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM 47
where in Europe: from this quarter the advent of
a somewhat belated form of beauty and perfection,
even in music, might still be hoped for. But the
most that we can expect to see are exceptional
cases. From the rule, that corruption is paramount,
that corruption is a fatality, not even a God can
save music.
## p. 48 (#84) ##############################################
º
wº
w
2-
E PILOG UE
AND now let us take breath and withdraw a
moment from this narrow world which necessarily
must be narrow, because we have to make enquiries
relative to the value of persons. A philosopher
feels that he wants to wash his hands after he has
concerned himself so long with the “Case of
Wagner. ” I shall now give my notion of what is
modern. According to the measure of energy of
every age, there is also a standard that determines
which virtues shall be allowed and which forbidden.
The age either has the virtues of ascending life, in
which case it resists the virtues of degeneration
with all its deepest instincts. Or it is in itself an
age of degeneration, in which case it requires the
virtues of declining life, in which case it hates
everything that justifies itself, solely as being the
outcome of a plenitude, or a superabundance of
strength. AEsthetic is inextricably bound up with
these biological principles: there is decadent
aesthetic, and classical aesthetic, - “beauty in
itself” is just as much a chimera as any other
kind of idealism. —Within the narrow sphere of
the so-called moral values, no greater antithesis
could be found than that of master-morality and
the morality of Christian valuations: the latter
having grown out of a thoroughly morbid soil.
(—The gospels present us with the same physio-
logical types, as do the novels of Dostoiewsky),
48
## p. 49 (#85) ##############################################
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM 49
the master-morality (“Roman,” “pagan,”“classical,”
“Renaissance”), on the other hand, being the sym-
bolic speech of well-constitutedness, of ascending
life, and of the Will to Power as a vital principle.
Master-morality affirms just as instinctively as
Christian morality demies (“God,” “Beyond,” “self-
denial,”—all of them negations). The first reflects
its plenitude upon things, it transfigures, it em-
bellishes, it rationalises the world,—the latter im-
poverishes, bleaches, mars the value of things; it
suppresses the world. “World” is a Christian term
of abuse. These antithetical forms in the optics
of values, are both necessary: they are different
points of view which cannot be circumvented either
with arguments or counter-arguments. One can-
not refute Christianity: it is impossible to refute
a diseased eyesight. That people should have
combated pessimism as if it had been a philo-
sophy, was the very acme of learned stupidity.
The concepts “true” and “untrue” do not seem to
me to have any sense in optics. -That, alone, which
has to be guarded against is the falsity, the instinc-
tive duplicity which would fain regard this anti-
thesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,
—and his mastery in this kind of falseness was of
no mean order. To cast side-long glances at
master-morality, at noble morality (–Icelandic
saga is perhaps the greatest documentary evidence
of these values), and at the same time to have the
opposite teaching, the “gospel of the lowly,” the
doctrine of the need of salvation, on one's lips' . . .
Incidentally, I admire the modesty of Christians
who go to Bayreuth. As for myself, I could not
4
## p. 50 (#86) ##############################################
50 THE CASE OF WAGNER
endure to hear the sound of certain words on
Wagner's lips. There are some concepts which
are too good for Bayreuth. . . . What? Christianity
adjusted for female Wagnerites, perhaps by female
Wagnerites—for, in his latter days Wagner was
thoroughly feminini generis—? Again I say, the
Christians of to-day are too modest for me. . . .
If Wagner were a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps
a Father of the Church —The need of salvation,
the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing
in common with such clowns: it is the most
straightforward expression of decadence, it is the
most convincing and most painful affirmation of
decadence, in sublime symbols and practices. The
Christian wishes to be rid of himself. Le mot est
toujours haissable. Noble morality, master-morality,
on the other hand, is rooted in a triumphant saying
of yea to one's self-it is the self-affirmation and
self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime
symbols and practices; but only “because its heart
is too full. ” The whole of beautiful art and of
great art belongs here: their common essence is
gratitude. But we must allow it a certain instinctive
repugnance to decadents, and a scorn and horror
of the latter's symbolism: such things almost prove
it. The noble Romans considered Christianity as
a fada superstitio: let me call to your minds the
feelings which the last German of noble taste—
Goethe–had in regard to the cross. It is idle
to look for more valuable, more necessary con-
trasts. ” . . .
* My “Genealogy of Morals” contains the best exposi-
tion of the antithesis “noble morality” and “Christian
## p. 51 (#87) ##############################################
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM 51
But the kind of falsity which is characteristic
of the Bayreuthians is not exceptional to-day.
We all know the hybrid concept of the Christian
gentleman. This innocence in contradiction, this
“clean conscience” in falsehood, is rather modern
par excellence, with it modernity is almost defined.
Biologically, modern man represents a contradiction
of values, he sits between two stools, he says yea
and nay in one breath. No wonder that it is
precisely in our age that falseness itself became
flesh and blood, and even genius ! No wonder
Wagner dwelt amongst us! It was not without
reason that I called Wagner the Cagliostro of
modernity. . . . But all of us, though we do not
know it, involuntarily have values, words, formulae,
and morals in our bodies, which are quite anta-
gonistic in their origin—regarded from a physio-
logical standpoint, we are false. . . . How would
a diagnosis of the modern soul begin? With a deter-
mined incision into this agglomeration of contra-
dictory instincts, with the total suppression of its
antagonistic values, with vivisection applied to its
most instructive case. To philosophers the “Case
of Wagner” is a windfall — this essay, as you
observe, was inspired by gratitude.
morality”; a more decisive turning point in the history of
religious and moral science does not perhaps exist. This
book, which is a touchstone by which I can discover who are
my peers, rejoices in being accessible only to the most
elevated and most severe minds : the others have not the
ears to hear me. One must have one's passion in things,
wherein no one has passion nowadays.
## p. 52 (#88) ##############################################
## p. 53 (#89) ##############################################
NIETZSC HE
CONTRA
WAGNER
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST
BY
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
## p. 54 (#90) ##############################################
## p. 55 (#91) ##############################################
PR E FA C E
THE following chapters have been selected from
past works of mine, and not without care. Some
of them date back as far as 1877. Here and there,
of course, they will be found to have been made a
little more intelligible, but above all, more brief.
Read consecutively, they can leave no one in any
doubt, either concerning myself, or concerning
Wagner: we are antipodes. The reader will come
to other conclusions, too, in his perusal of these
pages: for instance, that this is an essay for
psychologists and not for Germans. . . . I have
my readers everywhere, in Vienna, St Petersburg,
Copenhagen, Stockholm, Paris, and New York—
but I have none in Europe's Flat-land–Germany.
. . . And I might even have something to say to
Italians whom I love just as much as I .
Quousque tandem, Crispi . . . Triple alliance: a
people can only conclude a mésalliance with the
“Empire. ” . . .
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
TURIN, Christmas 1888.
## p. 56 (#92) ##############################################
## p. 57 (#93) ##############################################
NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
-—
WHEREIN I ADMIRE WAGNER.
I BELIEVE that artists very often do not know
what they are best able to do. They are much
too vain. Their minds are directed to something
prouder than merely to appear like little plants,
which, with freshness, rareness, and beauty, know
how to sprout from their soil with real perfection.
The ultimate goodness of their own garden and
vineyard is superciliously under-estimated by
them, and their love and their insight are not
of the same quality. Here is a musician who is
a greater master than anyone else in the dis-
covering of tones, peculiar to suffering, oppressed,
and tormented souls, who can endow even dumb
misery with speech. Nobody can approach him
in the colours of late autumn, in the indescribably
touching joy of a last, a very last, and all too short
gladness; he knows of a chord which expresses
those secret and weird midnight hours of the soul,
when cause and effect seem to have fallen asunder,
and at every moment something may spring out
of nonentity. He is happiest of all when creating
from out the nethermost depths of human happi-
57
## p. 58 (#94) ##############################################
58 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
ness, and, so to speak, from out man's empty
bumper, in which the bitterest and most repulsive
drops have mingled with the sweetest for good or
evil at last. He knows that weary shuffling along
of the soul which is no longer able either to spring
or to fly, nay, which is no longer able to walk; he
has the modest glance of concealed suffering, of
understanding without comfort, of leave-taking
without word or sign; verily as the Orpheus of
all secret misery he is greater than anyone, and
many a thing was introduced into art for the first
time by him, which hitherto had not been given
expression, had not even been thought worthy of
art—the cynical revolts, for instance, of which only
the greatest sufferer is capable, also many a small
and quite microscopical feature of the soul, as it
were the scales of its amphibious nature—yes
indeed, he is the master of everything very small.
But this he refuses to be His tastes are much
more in love with vast walls and with daring
frescoes' . . .
He does not see that his spirit
has another desire and bent—a totally different
outlook—that it prefers to squat peacefully in the
corners of broken-down houses: concealed in this
way, and hidden even from himself, he paints his
really great masterpieces, all of which are very
short, often only one bar in length—there, only,
does he become quite good, great and perfect,
perhaps there alone. —Wagner is one who has
suffered much—and this elevates him above other
musicians. —I admire Wagner wherever he sets
himself to music. —
## p. 59 (#95) ##############################################
WHEREIN I RAISE OBJECTIONS.
With all this I do not wish to imply that I
regard this music as healthy, and least of all in
those places where it speaks of Wagner himself.
My objections to Wagner's music are physiological
objections. Why should I therefore begin by
clothing them in aesthetic formulae P AEsthetic is
indeed nothing more than applied physiology. —
The fact I bring forward, my “petit fait vrai,” is
that I can no longer breathe with ease when this
music begins to have its effect upon me; that my
foot immediately begins to feel indignant at it and
rebels: for what it needs is time, dance, march :
even the young German Kaiser could not march to
Wagner's Imperial March,--what my foot demands
in the first place from music is that ecstasy which
lies in good walking, stepping and dancing. But
do not my stomach, my heart, my circulation also
protest? Are not my intestines also troubled P And
do I not become hoarse unawares? . . . in order to
listen to Wagner I require Géraudel's Pastilles. . . .
And then I ask myself, what is it that my whole
body must have from music in general? for there
is no such thing as a soul. . . . I believe it must
have relief: as if all animal functions were accele-
rated by means of light, bold, unfettered, self-reliant
rhythms; as if brazen and leaden life could lose its
weight by means of delicate and smooth melodies.
My melancholy would fain rest its head in the
haunts and abysses of perfection: for this reason
I need music. But Wagner makes one ill—What
do I care about the theatre P What do I care
59
## p. 60 (#96) ##############################################
6O NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
about the spasms of its moral ecstasies in which
the mob—and who is not the mob to-day P-
rejoices? What do I care about the whole panto-
mimic hocus-pocus of the actor? You are beginning
to see that I am essentially anti-theatrical at heart.
For the stage, this mob art par excellence, my soul
has that deepest scorn felt by every artist to-day.
With a stage success a man sinks to such an extent
in my esteem as to drop out of sight; failure in
this quarter makes me prick my ears, makes me
begin to pay attention. But this was not so with
Wagner; next to the Wagner who created the
most unique music that has ever existed there was
the Wagner who was essentially a man of the stage,
an actor, the most enthusiastic mimomaniac that
has perhaps existed on earth, even as a musician.
And let it be said en passant that if Wagner's
theory was “drama is the object, music is only a
means”—his practice was from beginning to end,
“the attitude is the end, drama and even music can
never be anything else than means. ” Music as
the manner of accentuating, of strengthening, and
deepening dramatic poses and all things which
please the senses of the actor; and Wagnerian
drama only an opportunity for a host of interesting
attitudes l—Alongside of all other instincts he had
the dictatorial instinct of a great actor in everything:
and, as I have already said, as a musician also. -On
one occasion, and not without trouble, I made this
clear to a Wagnerite pur sang, clearness and a
Wagnerite I won't say another word. There
were reasons for adding; “For heaven's sake, be a
little more true unto yourself! We are not in
## p. 61 (#97) ##############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 61
Bayreuth now. In Bayreuth people are only
upright in the mass; the individual lies, he even
lies to himself. One leaves oneself at home when
one goes to Bayreuth, one gives up all right to
one's own tongue and choice, to one's own taste and
even to one's own courage, one knows these things
no longer as one is wont to have them and practise
them before God and the world and between one's
own four walls. In the theatre no one brings the
finest senses of his art with him, and least of all
the artist who works for the theatre, for here
loneliness is lacking; everything perfect does not
suffer a witness. . . . In the theatre one becomes
mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, electing cattle, patron,
idiot—Wagnerite: there, the most personal con-
science is bound to submit to the levelling charm
of the great multitude, there the neighbour rules,
there one becomes a neighbour. ”
WAGNER AS A DANGER.
I.
The aim after which more modern music is
striving, which is now given the strong but obscure
name of “unending melody,” can be clearly under-
stood by comparing it to one's feelings on entering
the sea. Gradually one loses one's footing and one
ultimately abandons oneself to the mercy or fury
of the elements: one has to swim. In the solemn,
or fiery, swinging movement, first slow and then
quick, of old music—one had to do something quite
different; one had to dance. The measure which
was required for this and the control of certain
## p. 62 (#98) ##############################################
62 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
balanced degrees of time and energy, forced the
soul of the listener to continual sobriety of thought.
—Upon the counterplay of the cooler currents of
air which came from this sobriety, and from the
warmer breath of enthusiasm, the charm of all
good music rested — Richard Wagner wanted
another kind of movement, he overthrew the
physiological first principle of all music before his
time. It was no longer a matter of walking or
dancing, we must swim, we must hover. . . . This
perhaps decides the whole matter. “Unending
melody” really wants to break all the symmetry
of time and strength; it actually scorns these
things—Its wealth of invention resides precisely in
what to an older ear sounds like rhythmic paradox
and abuse. From the imitation or the prevalence
of such a taste there would arise a danger for
music—so great that we can imagine none greater
—the complete degeneration of the feeling for
rhythm, chaos in the place of rhythm. . . . The
danger reaches its climax when such music cleaves
ever more closely to naturalistic play-acting and
pantomime, which governed by no laws of form,
aim at effect and nothing more. . . . Expressive-
ness at all costs and music a servant, a slave to
attitudes—this is the end. . . .
2.
What? would it really be the first virtue of a
performance (as performing musical artists now
seem to believe), under all circumstances to attain
to a haut-relief which cannot be surpassed ? If
this were applied to Mozart, for instance, would
Z
## p. 63 (#99) ##############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 63
it not be a real sin against Mozart's spirit,
Mozart's cheerful, enthusiastic, delightful and loving
spirit? He who fortunately was no German, and
whose seriousness is a charming and golden serious-
ness and not by any means that of a German
clodhopper. . . . Not to speak of the earnestness
of the “marble statue. ” . . . But you seem to think
that all music is the music of the “marble statue”?
—that all music should, so to speak, spring out of
the wall and shake the listener to his very bowels?
. . . Only thus could music have any effect! But
on whom would the effect be made? Upon some-
thing on which a noble artist ought never to deign
to act, upon the mob, upon the immature! upon
the blasés 1 upon the diseased upon idiots! upon
Wagnerites 1 . . .
A MUSIC WITHOUT A FUTURE.
Of all the arts which succeed in growing on the
soil of a particular culture, music is the last plant
to appear; maybe because it is the one most
dependent upon our innermost feelings, and there-
fore the last to come to the surface—at a time
when the culture to which it belongs is in its
autumn season and beginning to fade. It was only
in the art of the Dutch masters that the spirit of
mediaeval Christianity found its expression—, its
architecture of sound is the youngest, but genuine
and legitimate, sister of the Gothic. It was only
in Händel's music that the best in Luther and
in those like him found its voice, the Judeo-heroic
trait which gave the Reformation a touch of great- |
!
## p. 64 (#100) #############################################
64 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
ness—the Old Testament, not the New, become
music. It was left to Mozart, to pour out the epoch
of Louis XIV. , and of the art of Racine and Claude
Lorrain, in ringing gold; only in Beethoven's and
Rossini's music did the Eighteenth Century sing
itself out—the century of enthusiasm, broken ideals,
and fleeting joy. All real and original music is a
swan song—Even our last form of music, despite
its prevalence and its will to prevail, has perhaps
only a short time to live: for it sprouted from a
soil which was in the throes of a rapid subsidence,
—of a culture which will soon be submerged. A
certain catholicism of feeling, and a predilection
for some ancient indigenous (so-called national)
ideals and eccentricities, was its first condition.
Wagner's appropriation of old sagas and songs,
in which scholarly prejudice taught us to see
something German par excellence—now we laugh
at it all, the resurrection of these Scandinavian
monsters with a thirst for ecstatic sensuality and
spiritualisation — the whole of this taking and
giving on Wagner's part, in the matter of subjects,
characters, passions, and nerves, would also give
unmistakable expression to the spirit of his music
provided that this music, like any other, did not
know how to speak about itself save ambiguously:
for musica is a woman. . . . We must not let our-
selves be misled concerning this state of things,
by the fact that at this very moment we are living
in a reaction, in the heart itself of a reaction. The
age of international wars, of ultramontane martyr-
dom, in fact, the whole interlude-character which
typifies the present condition of Europe, may
## p. 65 (#101) #############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 65
indeed help an art like Wagner's to sudden glory,
without, however, in the least ensuring its future
prosperity. The Germans themselves have no
future. . . .
WE ANTIPODES.
Perhaps a few people, or at least my friends, will
remember that I made my first plunge into life
armed with some errors and some exaggerations,
but that, in any case, I began with hope in my
heart. In the philosophical pessimism of the nine-
teenth century, I recognised—who knows by what
by-paths of personal experience—the symptom of
a higher power of thought, a more triumphant
plenitude of life, than had manifested itself hitherto
in the philosophies of Hume, Kant and Hegell—
I regarded tragic knowledge as the most beautiful
luxury of our culture, as its most precious, most
noble, most dangerous kind of prodigality; but,
nevertheless, in view of its overflowing wealth, as
a justifiable luxury. In the same way, I began by
interpreting Wagner's music as the expression of a
Dionysian powerfulness of soul. In it I thought I
heard the earthquake by means of which a primeval
life-force, which had been constrained for ages, was
seeking at last to burst its bonds, quite indifferent
to how much of that which nowadays calls itself
culture, would thereby be shaken to ruins. You
see how I misinterpreted, you see also, what I
bestowed upon Wagner and Schopenhauer—my-
self. . . . Every art and every philosophy may be
regarded either as a cure or as a stimulant to
->
5
## p. 66 (#102) #############################################
66 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
|
ascending or declining life: they always presuppose
suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds
of sufferers:–those that suffer from overflowing
vitality, who need Dionysian art and require a
tragic insight into, and a tragic outlook upon, the
phenomenon life, and there are those who suffer
from reduced vitality, and who crave for repose,
quietness, calm seas, or else the intoxication, the
spasm, the bewilderment which art and philosophy
provide. Revenge upon life itself—this is the most
voluptuous form of intoxication for such indigent
souls | . . . Now Wagner responds quite as well
as Schopenhauer to the twofold cravings of these
people, they both deny life, they both slander it
but precisely on this account they are my anti-
podes. —The richest creature, brimming over with
vitality, the Dionysian God and man, may not
only allow himself to gaze upon the horrible and
the questionable; but he can also lend his hand to
the terrible deed, and can indulge in all the luxury
of destruction, disaggregation, and negation,-in
him evil, purposelessness and ugliness, seem just as
allowable as they are in nature—because of his
bursting plenitude of creative and rejuvenating
powers, which are able to convert every desert into
a luxurious land of plenty. Conversely, it is the
greatest sufferer and pauper in vitality, who is most
in need of mildness, peace and goodness—that
which to-day is called humaneness—in thought as
well as in action, and possibly of a God whose
speciality is to be a God of the sick, a Saviour, and
also of logic or the abstract intelligibility of exist-
ence even for idiots (—the typical “free-spirits,”
## p. 67 (#103) #############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 67
like the idealists, and “beautiful souls,” are
decadents—); in short, of a warm, danger-tight, and
narrow confinement, between optimistic horizons
which would allow of stultification. . . . And thus
very gradually, I began to understand Epicurus,
the opposite of a Dionysian Greek; and also the
Christian who in fact is only a kind of Epicurean,
and who, with his belief that “faith saves,” carries |
the principle of Hedonism as far as possible—far
beyond all intellectual honesty. . . . If I am
ahead of all other psychologists in anything, it is -
in this fact that my eyes are more keen for tracing 9.
those most difficult and most captious of all deduc-
tions, in which the largest number of mistakes have
been made,-the deduction which makes one infer .
something concerning the author from his work,
something concerning the doer from his deed,
something concerning the idealist from the need
which produced this ideal, and something concern-
ing the imperious craving which stands at the
back of all thinking and valuing. —In regard to all
artists of what kind soever, I shall now avail
myself of this radical distinction : does the creative .
power in this case arise from a loathing of life, or
from an excessive plenitude of life? In Goethe,
for instance, an overflow of vitality was creative, in
Flaubert—hate: Flaubert, a new edition of Pascal,
but as an artist with this instinctive belief at heart:
“Flaubert est toujours haissable, l'homme n'est riem,
l'aeuvre est tout. ” . . . He tortured himself when
he wrote, just as Pascal tortured himself when he
thought — the feelings of both were inclined to
be “non-egoistic. ” . . . “Disinterestedness”—
## p. 68 (#104) #############################################
68 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
\
principle of decadence, the will to nonentity in art
as well as in morality.
WHERE WAGNER IS AT HOME.
Even at the present day, France is still the refuge
of the most intellectual and refined culture in
Europe, it remains the high school of taste: but
one must know where to find this France of taste.
The North-German Gazette, for instance, or who-
ever expresses his sentiments in that paper, thinks
that the French are “barbarians,”—as for me, if I
had to find the blackest spot on earth, where slaves
still required to be liberated, I should turn in the
direction of Northern Germany. . . . But those
who form part of that select France take very
good care to conceal themselves: they are a small
body of men, and there may be some among them
who do not stand on very firm legs—a few may be
fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids; others may be
enervated, and artificial,—such are those who would
fain be artistic, but all the loftiness and delicacy
which still remains to this world, is in their posses-
sion. In this France of intellect, which is also the
France of pessimism, Schopenhauer is already much
more at home than he ever was in Germany; his
principal work has already been translated twice,
and the second time so excellently that now I
prefer to read Schopenhauer in French (–he was
an accident among Germans, just as I am—the
Germans have no fingers wherewith to grasp us;
they haven't any fingers at all,—but only claws).
And I do not mention Heine—l'adorable Heine, as
## p. 69 (#105) #############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 69
they say in Paris—who long since has passed into
the flesh and blood of the more profound and more
soulful of French lyricists. How could the horned
cattle of Germany know how to deal with the
délicatesses of such a nature! —And as to Richard
Wagner, it is obvious, it is even glaringly obvious,
that Paris is the very soil for him : the more French
music adapts itself to the needs of l'éme moderne,
the more Wagnerian it will become, it is far
enough advanced in this direction already. —In
this respect one should not allow one's self to be
misled by Wagner himself—it was simply dis-
graceful on Wagner's part to scoff at Paris, as he
did, in its agony in 1871. . . . In spite of it all, in
Germany Wagner is only a misapprehension: who
could be more incapable of understanding anything
about Wagner than the Kaiser, for instance? —To
everybody familiar with the movement of European
culture, this fact, however, is certain, that French
romanticism and Richard Wagner are most inti-
mately related. All dominated by literature, up to
their very eyes and ears—the first European artists
with a universal literary culture, most of them
writers, poets, mediators and minglers of the senses
and the arts, all fanatics in expression, great
discoverers in the realm of the sublime as also of
the ugly and the gruesome, and still greater dis-
coverers in passion, in working for effect, in the art
of dressing their windows, all possessing talent
far above their genius, virtuosos to their backbone,
knowing of secret passages to all that seduces, lures,
constrains or overthrows; born enemies of logic
and of straight lines, thirsting after the exotic, the
## p. 70 (#106) #############################################
7o NIETZSCHE COM 7TRA WAGNER
strange and the monstrous, and all opiates for the
senses and the understanding. On the whole, a
daring dare-devil, magnificently violent, soaring
and high-springing crew of artists, who first had to
teach their own century—it is the century of the
mob-what the concept “artist” meant. But they
were ill. . . .
WAGNER AS THE APOSTLE OF
CHASTITY.
I.
Is this the German way?
Comes this low bleating forth from German hearts?
Should Teutons, sin repenting, lash themselves,
Or spread their palms with priestly unctuousness,
Exalt their feelings with the censer's fumes,
And cower and quake and bend the trembling knee,
And with a sickly sweetness plead a prayer?
Then ogle nuns, and ring the Ave-bell,
And thus with morbid fervour out-do heaven?
Is this the German way?
Beware, yet are you free, yet your own Lords.
What yonder lures is Rome, Rome's faith sung
without words.
2.
There is no necessary contrast between sensuality
and chastity; every good marriage, every genuine
love affair is above this contrast; but in those cases
where the contrast exists, it is very far from being
necessarily a tragic one. This, at least, ought to
hold good of all well-constituted and good-spirited
## p. 71 (#107) #############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 71
mortals, who are not in the least inclined to reckon
their unstable equilibrium between angel and petite
béte, without further ado, among the objections to
existence, the more refined and more intelligent
like Hafis and Goethe, even regarded it as an
additional attraction. It is precisely contradictions
of this kind which lure us to life. . . . On the other
hand, it must be obvious, that when Circe's unfor-
tunate animals are induced to worship chastity, all
they see and worship therein, is their opposite—
oh and with what tragic groaning and fervour,
may well be imagined—that same painful and
thoroughly superfluous opposition which, towards
the end of his life, Richard Wagner undoubtedly
wished to set to music and to put on the stage,
And to what purpose 2 we may reasonably ask.
young men: he even robs our women as well, and
drags them to his cell. . . . Ah, this old Minotaur !
What has he not already cost us? Every year
processions of the finest young men and maidens
are led into his labyrinth that he may swallow
them up, every year the whole of Europe cries out
“Away to Cretel Away to Cretel" . . .
## p. 43 (#79) ##############################################
SECOND POSTSCRIPT
It seems to me that my letter is open to some
misunderstanding. On certain faces I see the
expression of gratitude; I even hear modest but
merry laughter. I prefer to be understood here
as in other things. But since a certain animal,
the worm of Empire, the famous Rhinoxera, has
become lodged in the vineyards of the German
spirit, nobody any longer understands a word I
say. The Kreuz-Zeitung has brought this home
to me, not to speak of the Litterarisches Central-
blatt. I have given the Germans the deepest
books that they have ever possessed—a sufficient
reason for their not having understood a word of
them. . . . If in this essay I declare war against
Wagner—and incidentally against a certain form
of German taste, if I seem to use strong language
about the cretinism of Bayreuth, it must not be
supposed that I am in the least anxious to glorify
any other musician. Other musicians are not to
be considered by the side of Wagner. Things are
generally bad. Decay is universal. Disease lies
at the very root of things. If Wagner's name
represents the ruin of music, just as Bernini's
stands for the ruin of sculpture, he is not on that
account its cause. All he did was to accelerate
the fall,—though we are quite prepared to admit
that he did it in a way which makes one recoil
with horror from this almost instantaneous decline
43
## p. 44 (#80) ##############################################
44 THE CASE OF WAGNER
and fall to the depths. He possessed the ingenu-
ousness of decadence: this constituted his superi-
ority. He believed in it. He did not halt before
any of its logical consequences. The others hesi-
tated—that is their distinction. They have no
other. What is common to both Wagner and
“the others” consists in this : the decline of all
organising power; the abuse of traditional means,
without the capacity or the aim that would justify
this. The counterfeit imitation of grand forms,
for which nobody nowadays is strong, proud, self-
reliant and healthy enough ; excessive vitality in
small details; passion at all costs; refinement as
an expression of impoverished life, ever more nerves
in the place of muscle. I know only one musician
who to-day would be able to compose an overture
as an organic whole: and nobody else knows him. *
. . He who is famous now, does not write better
music than Wagner, but only less characteristic, less
definite music:-less definite, because half measures,
even in decadence, cannot stand by the side of com-
pleteness. But Wagner was complete; Wagner re-
presented thorough corruption; Wagner has had the
courage, the will, and the conviction for corruption.
What does Johannes Brahms matter? . . . It was
his good fortune to be misunderstood by Germany
he was taken to be an antagonist of Wagner—
people required an antagonist! —But he did not
write necessary music, above all he wrote too
much music l—When one is not rich one should
* This undoubtedly refers to Nietsche's only disciple and
friend, Peter Gast. —Tr.
## p. 45 (#81) ##############################################
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM 45
r
at least have enough pride to be poor . . . The
sympathy which here and there was meted out to
Brahms, apart from party interests and party mis-
understandings, was for a long time a riddle to
me: until one day through an accident, almost, I
discovered that he affected a particular type of
man. He has the melancholy of impotence. His
creations are not the result of plenitude, he thirsts
after abundance. Apart from what he plagiarises,
from what he borrows from ancient or exotically
modern styles—he is a master in the art of copy-
ing, there remains as his most individual quality
a longing. . . . And this is what the dissatisfied
of all kinds, and all those who yearn, divine in
him. He is much too little of a personality, too
little of a central figure. . . . The “impersonal,”
those who are not self-centred, love him for this.
He is especially the musician of a species of dis-
satisfied women. Fifty steps further on, and we
find the female Wagnerite—just as we find Wagner
himself fifty paces ahead of Brahms-The female
Wagnerite is a more definite, a more interesting,
and above all, a more attractive type. Brahms is
touching so long as he dreams or mourns over
himself in private—in this respect he is modern ;-
he becomes cold, we no longer feel at one with
him when he poses as the child of the classics.
. . . People like to call Brahms Beethoven's heir :
I know of no more cautious euphemism. —All
that which to-day makes a claim to being the
grand style in music is on precisely that account
either false to us or false to itself. This alterna-
tive is suspicious enough : in itself it contains a
## p. 46 (#82) ##############################################
46 THE CASE OF WAGNER
!
casuistic question concerning the value of the two
cases. The instinct of the majority protests
against the alternative; “false to us”—they do
not wish to be cheated;—and I myself would
certainly always prefer this type to the other
(“False to itself”). This is my taste. —Expressed
more clearly for the sake of the “poor in spirit”
it amounts to this: Brahms or Wagner. . . .
Brahms is not an actor. —A very great part of
other musicians may be summed up in the concept
Brahms-I do not wish to say anything about the
clever apes of Wagner, as for instance Goldmark:
when one has “The Queen of Sheba" to one's
name, one belongs to a menagerie, one ought
to put oneself on show. —Nowadays all things that
can be done well and even with a master hand
are small. In this department alone is honesty
still possible. Nothing, however, can cure music
as a whole of its chief fault, of its fate, which is to
be the expression of general physiological contra-
diction,--which is, in fact, to be modern.
The best instruction, the most conscientious
schooling, the most thorough familiarity, yea, and
even isolation, with the Old Masters, all this only
acts as a palliative, or, more strictly speaking, has
but an illusory effect, because the first condition
of the right thing is no longer in our bodies ;
whether this first condition be the strong race of
a Händel or the overflowing animal spirits of a
Rossini. Not everyone has the right to every
teacher: and this holds good of whole epochs. -In
itself it is not impossible that there are still remains
of stronger natures, typical unadapted men, some-
4
## p. 47 (#83) ##############################################
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM 47
where in Europe: from this quarter the advent of
a somewhat belated form of beauty and perfection,
even in music, might still be hoped for. But the
most that we can expect to see are exceptional
cases. From the rule, that corruption is paramount,
that corruption is a fatality, not even a God can
save music.
## p. 48 (#84) ##############################################
º
wº
w
2-
E PILOG UE
AND now let us take breath and withdraw a
moment from this narrow world which necessarily
must be narrow, because we have to make enquiries
relative to the value of persons. A philosopher
feels that he wants to wash his hands after he has
concerned himself so long with the “Case of
Wagner. ” I shall now give my notion of what is
modern. According to the measure of energy of
every age, there is also a standard that determines
which virtues shall be allowed and which forbidden.
The age either has the virtues of ascending life, in
which case it resists the virtues of degeneration
with all its deepest instincts. Or it is in itself an
age of degeneration, in which case it requires the
virtues of declining life, in which case it hates
everything that justifies itself, solely as being the
outcome of a plenitude, or a superabundance of
strength. AEsthetic is inextricably bound up with
these biological principles: there is decadent
aesthetic, and classical aesthetic, - “beauty in
itself” is just as much a chimera as any other
kind of idealism. —Within the narrow sphere of
the so-called moral values, no greater antithesis
could be found than that of master-morality and
the morality of Christian valuations: the latter
having grown out of a thoroughly morbid soil.
(—The gospels present us with the same physio-
logical types, as do the novels of Dostoiewsky),
48
## p. 49 (#85) ##############################################
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM 49
the master-morality (“Roman,” “pagan,”“classical,”
“Renaissance”), on the other hand, being the sym-
bolic speech of well-constitutedness, of ascending
life, and of the Will to Power as a vital principle.
Master-morality affirms just as instinctively as
Christian morality demies (“God,” “Beyond,” “self-
denial,”—all of them negations). The first reflects
its plenitude upon things, it transfigures, it em-
bellishes, it rationalises the world,—the latter im-
poverishes, bleaches, mars the value of things; it
suppresses the world. “World” is a Christian term
of abuse. These antithetical forms in the optics
of values, are both necessary: they are different
points of view which cannot be circumvented either
with arguments or counter-arguments. One can-
not refute Christianity: it is impossible to refute
a diseased eyesight. That people should have
combated pessimism as if it had been a philo-
sophy, was the very acme of learned stupidity.
The concepts “true” and “untrue” do not seem to
me to have any sense in optics. -That, alone, which
has to be guarded against is the falsity, the instinc-
tive duplicity which would fain regard this anti-
thesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,
—and his mastery in this kind of falseness was of
no mean order. To cast side-long glances at
master-morality, at noble morality (–Icelandic
saga is perhaps the greatest documentary evidence
of these values), and at the same time to have the
opposite teaching, the “gospel of the lowly,” the
doctrine of the need of salvation, on one's lips' . . .
Incidentally, I admire the modesty of Christians
who go to Bayreuth. As for myself, I could not
4
## p. 50 (#86) ##############################################
50 THE CASE OF WAGNER
endure to hear the sound of certain words on
Wagner's lips. There are some concepts which
are too good for Bayreuth. . . . What? Christianity
adjusted for female Wagnerites, perhaps by female
Wagnerites—for, in his latter days Wagner was
thoroughly feminini generis—? Again I say, the
Christians of to-day are too modest for me. . . .
If Wagner were a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps
a Father of the Church —The need of salvation,
the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing
in common with such clowns: it is the most
straightforward expression of decadence, it is the
most convincing and most painful affirmation of
decadence, in sublime symbols and practices. The
Christian wishes to be rid of himself. Le mot est
toujours haissable. Noble morality, master-morality,
on the other hand, is rooted in a triumphant saying
of yea to one's self-it is the self-affirmation and
self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime
symbols and practices; but only “because its heart
is too full. ” The whole of beautiful art and of
great art belongs here: their common essence is
gratitude. But we must allow it a certain instinctive
repugnance to decadents, and a scorn and horror
of the latter's symbolism: such things almost prove
it. The noble Romans considered Christianity as
a fada superstitio: let me call to your minds the
feelings which the last German of noble taste—
Goethe–had in regard to the cross. It is idle
to look for more valuable, more necessary con-
trasts. ” . . .
* My “Genealogy of Morals” contains the best exposi-
tion of the antithesis “noble morality” and “Christian
## p. 51 (#87) ##############################################
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM 51
But the kind of falsity which is characteristic
of the Bayreuthians is not exceptional to-day.
We all know the hybrid concept of the Christian
gentleman. This innocence in contradiction, this
“clean conscience” in falsehood, is rather modern
par excellence, with it modernity is almost defined.
Biologically, modern man represents a contradiction
of values, he sits between two stools, he says yea
and nay in one breath. No wonder that it is
precisely in our age that falseness itself became
flesh and blood, and even genius ! No wonder
Wagner dwelt amongst us! It was not without
reason that I called Wagner the Cagliostro of
modernity. . . . But all of us, though we do not
know it, involuntarily have values, words, formulae,
and morals in our bodies, which are quite anta-
gonistic in their origin—regarded from a physio-
logical standpoint, we are false. . . . How would
a diagnosis of the modern soul begin? With a deter-
mined incision into this agglomeration of contra-
dictory instincts, with the total suppression of its
antagonistic values, with vivisection applied to its
most instructive case. To philosophers the “Case
of Wagner” is a windfall — this essay, as you
observe, was inspired by gratitude.
morality”; a more decisive turning point in the history of
religious and moral science does not perhaps exist. This
book, which is a touchstone by which I can discover who are
my peers, rejoices in being accessible only to the most
elevated and most severe minds : the others have not the
ears to hear me. One must have one's passion in things,
wherein no one has passion nowadays.
## p. 52 (#88) ##############################################
## p. 53 (#89) ##############################################
NIETZSC HE
CONTRA
WAGNER
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST
BY
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
## p. 54 (#90) ##############################################
## p. 55 (#91) ##############################################
PR E FA C E
THE following chapters have been selected from
past works of mine, and not without care. Some
of them date back as far as 1877. Here and there,
of course, they will be found to have been made a
little more intelligible, but above all, more brief.
Read consecutively, they can leave no one in any
doubt, either concerning myself, or concerning
Wagner: we are antipodes. The reader will come
to other conclusions, too, in his perusal of these
pages: for instance, that this is an essay for
psychologists and not for Germans. . . . I have
my readers everywhere, in Vienna, St Petersburg,
Copenhagen, Stockholm, Paris, and New York—
but I have none in Europe's Flat-land–Germany.
. . . And I might even have something to say to
Italians whom I love just as much as I .
Quousque tandem, Crispi . . . Triple alliance: a
people can only conclude a mésalliance with the
“Empire. ” . . .
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
TURIN, Christmas 1888.
## p. 56 (#92) ##############################################
## p. 57 (#93) ##############################################
NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
-—
WHEREIN I ADMIRE WAGNER.
I BELIEVE that artists very often do not know
what they are best able to do. They are much
too vain. Their minds are directed to something
prouder than merely to appear like little plants,
which, with freshness, rareness, and beauty, know
how to sprout from their soil with real perfection.
The ultimate goodness of their own garden and
vineyard is superciliously under-estimated by
them, and their love and their insight are not
of the same quality. Here is a musician who is
a greater master than anyone else in the dis-
covering of tones, peculiar to suffering, oppressed,
and tormented souls, who can endow even dumb
misery with speech. Nobody can approach him
in the colours of late autumn, in the indescribably
touching joy of a last, a very last, and all too short
gladness; he knows of a chord which expresses
those secret and weird midnight hours of the soul,
when cause and effect seem to have fallen asunder,
and at every moment something may spring out
of nonentity. He is happiest of all when creating
from out the nethermost depths of human happi-
57
## p. 58 (#94) ##############################################
58 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
ness, and, so to speak, from out man's empty
bumper, in which the bitterest and most repulsive
drops have mingled with the sweetest for good or
evil at last. He knows that weary shuffling along
of the soul which is no longer able either to spring
or to fly, nay, which is no longer able to walk; he
has the modest glance of concealed suffering, of
understanding without comfort, of leave-taking
without word or sign; verily as the Orpheus of
all secret misery he is greater than anyone, and
many a thing was introduced into art for the first
time by him, which hitherto had not been given
expression, had not even been thought worthy of
art—the cynical revolts, for instance, of which only
the greatest sufferer is capable, also many a small
and quite microscopical feature of the soul, as it
were the scales of its amphibious nature—yes
indeed, he is the master of everything very small.
But this he refuses to be His tastes are much
more in love with vast walls and with daring
frescoes' . . .
He does not see that his spirit
has another desire and bent—a totally different
outlook—that it prefers to squat peacefully in the
corners of broken-down houses: concealed in this
way, and hidden even from himself, he paints his
really great masterpieces, all of which are very
short, often only one bar in length—there, only,
does he become quite good, great and perfect,
perhaps there alone. —Wagner is one who has
suffered much—and this elevates him above other
musicians. —I admire Wagner wherever he sets
himself to music. —
## p. 59 (#95) ##############################################
WHEREIN I RAISE OBJECTIONS.
With all this I do not wish to imply that I
regard this music as healthy, and least of all in
those places where it speaks of Wagner himself.
My objections to Wagner's music are physiological
objections. Why should I therefore begin by
clothing them in aesthetic formulae P AEsthetic is
indeed nothing more than applied physiology. —
The fact I bring forward, my “petit fait vrai,” is
that I can no longer breathe with ease when this
music begins to have its effect upon me; that my
foot immediately begins to feel indignant at it and
rebels: for what it needs is time, dance, march :
even the young German Kaiser could not march to
Wagner's Imperial March,--what my foot demands
in the first place from music is that ecstasy which
lies in good walking, stepping and dancing. But
do not my stomach, my heart, my circulation also
protest? Are not my intestines also troubled P And
do I not become hoarse unawares? . . . in order to
listen to Wagner I require Géraudel's Pastilles. . . .
And then I ask myself, what is it that my whole
body must have from music in general? for there
is no such thing as a soul. . . . I believe it must
have relief: as if all animal functions were accele-
rated by means of light, bold, unfettered, self-reliant
rhythms; as if brazen and leaden life could lose its
weight by means of delicate and smooth melodies.
My melancholy would fain rest its head in the
haunts and abysses of perfection: for this reason
I need music. But Wagner makes one ill—What
do I care about the theatre P What do I care
59
## p. 60 (#96) ##############################################
6O NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
about the spasms of its moral ecstasies in which
the mob—and who is not the mob to-day P-
rejoices? What do I care about the whole panto-
mimic hocus-pocus of the actor? You are beginning
to see that I am essentially anti-theatrical at heart.
For the stage, this mob art par excellence, my soul
has that deepest scorn felt by every artist to-day.
With a stage success a man sinks to such an extent
in my esteem as to drop out of sight; failure in
this quarter makes me prick my ears, makes me
begin to pay attention. But this was not so with
Wagner; next to the Wagner who created the
most unique music that has ever existed there was
the Wagner who was essentially a man of the stage,
an actor, the most enthusiastic mimomaniac that
has perhaps existed on earth, even as a musician.
And let it be said en passant that if Wagner's
theory was “drama is the object, music is only a
means”—his practice was from beginning to end,
“the attitude is the end, drama and even music can
never be anything else than means. ” Music as
the manner of accentuating, of strengthening, and
deepening dramatic poses and all things which
please the senses of the actor; and Wagnerian
drama only an opportunity for a host of interesting
attitudes l—Alongside of all other instincts he had
the dictatorial instinct of a great actor in everything:
and, as I have already said, as a musician also. -On
one occasion, and not without trouble, I made this
clear to a Wagnerite pur sang, clearness and a
Wagnerite I won't say another word. There
were reasons for adding; “For heaven's sake, be a
little more true unto yourself! We are not in
## p. 61 (#97) ##############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 61
Bayreuth now. In Bayreuth people are only
upright in the mass; the individual lies, he even
lies to himself. One leaves oneself at home when
one goes to Bayreuth, one gives up all right to
one's own tongue and choice, to one's own taste and
even to one's own courage, one knows these things
no longer as one is wont to have them and practise
them before God and the world and between one's
own four walls. In the theatre no one brings the
finest senses of his art with him, and least of all
the artist who works for the theatre, for here
loneliness is lacking; everything perfect does not
suffer a witness. . . . In the theatre one becomes
mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, electing cattle, patron,
idiot—Wagnerite: there, the most personal con-
science is bound to submit to the levelling charm
of the great multitude, there the neighbour rules,
there one becomes a neighbour. ”
WAGNER AS A DANGER.
I.
The aim after which more modern music is
striving, which is now given the strong but obscure
name of “unending melody,” can be clearly under-
stood by comparing it to one's feelings on entering
the sea. Gradually one loses one's footing and one
ultimately abandons oneself to the mercy or fury
of the elements: one has to swim. In the solemn,
or fiery, swinging movement, first slow and then
quick, of old music—one had to do something quite
different; one had to dance. The measure which
was required for this and the control of certain
## p. 62 (#98) ##############################################
62 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
balanced degrees of time and energy, forced the
soul of the listener to continual sobriety of thought.
—Upon the counterplay of the cooler currents of
air which came from this sobriety, and from the
warmer breath of enthusiasm, the charm of all
good music rested — Richard Wagner wanted
another kind of movement, he overthrew the
physiological first principle of all music before his
time. It was no longer a matter of walking or
dancing, we must swim, we must hover. . . . This
perhaps decides the whole matter. “Unending
melody” really wants to break all the symmetry
of time and strength; it actually scorns these
things—Its wealth of invention resides precisely in
what to an older ear sounds like rhythmic paradox
and abuse. From the imitation or the prevalence
of such a taste there would arise a danger for
music—so great that we can imagine none greater
—the complete degeneration of the feeling for
rhythm, chaos in the place of rhythm. . . . The
danger reaches its climax when such music cleaves
ever more closely to naturalistic play-acting and
pantomime, which governed by no laws of form,
aim at effect and nothing more. . . . Expressive-
ness at all costs and music a servant, a slave to
attitudes—this is the end. . . .
2.
What? would it really be the first virtue of a
performance (as performing musical artists now
seem to believe), under all circumstances to attain
to a haut-relief which cannot be surpassed ? If
this were applied to Mozart, for instance, would
Z
## p. 63 (#99) ##############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 63
it not be a real sin against Mozart's spirit,
Mozart's cheerful, enthusiastic, delightful and loving
spirit? He who fortunately was no German, and
whose seriousness is a charming and golden serious-
ness and not by any means that of a German
clodhopper. . . . Not to speak of the earnestness
of the “marble statue. ” . . . But you seem to think
that all music is the music of the “marble statue”?
—that all music should, so to speak, spring out of
the wall and shake the listener to his very bowels?
. . . Only thus could music have any effect! But
on whom would the effect be made? Upon some-
thing on which a noble artist ought never to deign
to act, upon the mob, upon the immature! upon
the blasés 1 upon the diseased upon idiots! upon
Wagnerites 1 . . .
A MUSIC WITHOUT A FUTURE.
Of all the arts which succeed in growing on the
soil of a particular culture, music is the last plant
to appear; maybe because it is the one most
dependent upon our innermost feelings, and there-
fore the last to come to the surface—at a time
when the culture to which it belongs is in its
autumn season and beginning to fade. It was only
in the art of the Dutch masters that the spirit of
mediaeval Christianity found its expression—, its
architecture of sound is the youngest, but genuine
and legitimate, sister of the Gothic. It was only
in Händel's music that the best in Luther and
in those like him found its voice, the Judeo-heroic
trait which gave the Reformation a touch of great- |
!
## p. 64 (#100) #############################################
64 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
ness—the Old Testament, not the New, become
music. It was left to Mozart, to pour out the epoch
of Louis XIV. , and of the art of Racine and Claude
Lorrain, in ringing gold; only in Beethoven's and
Rossini's music did the Eighteenth Century sing
itself out—the century of enthusiasm, broken ideals,
and fleeting joy. All real and original music is a
swan song—Even our last form of music, despite
its prevalence and its will to prevail, has perhaps
only a short time to live: for it sprouted from a
soil which was in the throes of a rapid subsidence,
—of a culture which will soon be submerged. A
certain catholicism of feeling, and a predilection
for some ancient indigenous (so-called national)
ideals and eccentricities, was its first condition.
Wagner's appropriation of old sagas and songs,
in which scholarly prejudice taught us to see
something German par excellence—now we laugh
at it all, the resurrection of these Scandinavian
monsters with a thirst for ecstatic sensuality and
spiritualisation — the whole of this taking and
giving on Wagner's part, in the matter of subjects,
characters, passions, and nerves, would also give
unmistakable expression to the spirit of his music
provided that this music, like any other, did not
know how to speak about itself save ambiguously:
for musica is a woman. . . . We must not let our-
selves be misled concerning this state of things,
by the fact that at this very moment we are living
in a reaction, in the heart itself of a reaction. The
age of international wars, of ultramontane martyr-
dom, in fact, the whole interlude-character which
typifies the present condition of Europe, may
## p. 65 (#101) #############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 65
indeed help an art like Wagner's to sudden glory,
without, however, in the least ensuring its future
prosperity. The Germans themselves have no
future. . . .
WE ANTIPODES.
Perhaps a few people, or at least my friends, will
remember that I made my first plunge into life
armed with some errors and some exaggerations,
but that, in any case, I began with hope in my
heart. In the philosophical pessimism of the nine-
teenth century, I recognised—who knows by what
by-paths of personal experience—the symptom of
a higher power of thought, a more triumphant
plenitude of life, than had manifested itself hitherto
in the philosophies of Hume, Kant and Hegell—
I regarded tragic knowledge as the most beautiful
luxury of our culture, as its most precious, most
noble, most dangerous kind of prodigality; but,
nevertheless, in view of its overflowing wealth, as
a justifiable luxury. In the same way, I began by
interpreting Wagner's music as the expression of a
Dionysian powerfulness of soul. In it I thought I
heard the earthquake by means of which a primeval
life-force, which had been constrained for ages, was
seeking at last to burst its bonds, quite indifferent
to how much of that which nowadays calls itself
culture, would thereby be shaken to ruins. You
see how I misinterpreted, you see also, what I
bestowed upon Wagner and Schopenhauer—my-
self. . . . Every art and every philosophy may be
regarded either as a cure or as a stimulant to
->
5
## p. 66 (#102) #############################################
66 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
|
ascending or declining life: they always presuppose
suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds
of sufferers:–those that suffer from overflowing
vitality, who need Dionysian art and require a
tragic insight into, and a tragic outlook upon, the
phenomenon life, and there are those who suffer
from reduced vitality, and who crave for repose,
quietness, calm seas, or else the intoxication, the
spasm, the bewilderment which art and philosophy
provide. Revenge upon life itself—this is the most
voluptuous form of intoxication for such indigent
souls | . . . Now Wagner responds quite as well
as Schopenhauer to the twofold cravings of these
people, they both deny life, they both slander it
but precisely on this account they are my anti-
podes. —The richest creature, brimming over with
vitality, the Dionysian God and man, may not
only allow himself to gaze upon the horrible and
the questionable; but he can also lend his hand to
the terrible deed, and can indulge in all the luxury
of destruction, disaggregation, and negation,-in
him evil, purposelessness and ugliness, seem just as
allowable as they are in nature—because of his
bursting plenitude of creative and rejuvenating
powers, which are able to convert every desert into
a luxurious land of plenty. Conversely, it is the
greatest sufferer and pauper in vitality, who is most
in need of mildness, peace and goodness—that
which to-day is called humaneness—in thought as
well as in action, and possibly of a God whose
speciality is to be a God of the sick, a Saviour, and
also of logic or the abstract intelligibility of exist-
ence even for idiots (—the typical “free-spirits,”
## p. 67 (#103) #############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 67
like the idealists, and “beautiful souls,” are
decadents—); in short, of a warm, danger-tight, and
narrow confinement, between optimistic horizons
which would allow of stultification. . . . And thus
very gradually, I began to understand Epicurus,
the opposite of a Dionysian Greek; and also the
Christian who in fact is only a kind of Epicurean,
and who, with his belief that “faith saves,” carries |
the principle of Hedonism as far as possible—far
beyond all intellectual honesty. . . . If I am
ahead of all other psychologists in anything, it is -
in this fact that my eyes are more keen for tracing 9.
those most difficult and most captious of all deduc-
tions, in which the largest number of mistakes have
been made,-the deduction which makes one infer .
something concerning the author from his work,
something concerning the doer from his deed,
something concerning the idealist from the need
which produced this ideal, and something concern-
ing the imperious craving which stands at the
back of all thinking and valuing. —In regard to all
artists of what kind soever, I shall now avail
myself of this radical distinction : does the creative .
power in this case arise from a loathing of life, or
from an excessive plenitude of life? In Goethe,
for instance, an overflow of vitality was creative, in
Flaubert—hate: Flaubert, a new edition of Pascal,
but as an artist with this instinctive belief at heart:
“Flaubert est toujours haissable, l'homme n'est riem,
l'aeuvre est tout. ” . . . He tortured himself when
he wrote, just as Pascal tortured himself when he
thought — the feelings of both were inclined to
be “non-egoistic. ” . . . “Disinterestedness”—
## p. 68 (#104) #############################################
68 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
\
principle of decadence, the will to nonentity in art
as well as in morality.
WHERE WAGNER IS AT HOME.
Even at the present day, France is still the refuge
of the most intellectual and refined culture in
Europe, it remains the high school of taste: but
one must know where to find this France of taste.
The North-German Gazette, for instance, or who-
ever expresses his sentiments in that paper, thinks
that the French are “barbarians,”—as for me, if I
had to find the blackest spot on earth, where slaves
still required to be liberated, I should turn in the
direction of Northern Germany. . . . But those
who form part of that select France take very
good care to conceal themselves: they are a small
body of men, and there may be some among them
who do not stand on very firm legs—a few may be
fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids; others may be
enervated, and artificial,—such are those who would
fain be artistic, but all the loftiness and delicacy
which still remains to this world, is in their posses-
sion. In this France of intellect, which is also the
France of pessimism, Schopenhauer is already much
more at home than he ever was in Germany; his
principal work has already been translated twice,
and the second time so excellently that now I
prefer to read Schopenhauer in French (–he was
an accident among Germans, just as I am—the
Germans have no fingers wherewith to grasp us;
they haven't any fingers at all,—but only claws).
And I do not mention Heine—l'adorable Heine, as
## p. 69 (#105) #############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 69
they say in Paris—who long since has passed into
the flesh and blood of the more profound and more
soulful of French lyricists. How could the horned
cattle of Germany know how to deal with the
délicatesses of such a nature! —And as to Richard
Wagner, it is obvious, it is even glaringly obvious,
that Paris is the very soil for him : the more French
music adapts itself to the needs of l'éme moderne,
the more Wagnerian it will become, it is far
enough advanced in this direction already. —In
this respect one should not allow one's self to be
misled by Wagner himself—it was simply dis-
graceful on Wagner's part to scoff at Paris, as he
did, in its agony in 1871. . . . In spite of it all, in
Germany Wagner is only a misapprehension: who
could be more incapable of understanding anything
about Wagner than the Kaiser, for instance? —To
everybody familiar with the movement of European
culture, this fact, however, is certain, that French
romanticism and Richard Wagner are most inti-
mately related. All dominated by literature, up to
their very eyes and ears—the first European artists
with a universal literary culture, most of them
writers, poets, mediators and minglers of the senses
and the arts, all fanatics in expression, great
discoverers in the realm of the sublime as also of
the ugly and the gruesome, and still greater dis-
coverers in passion, in working for effect, in the art
of dressing their windows, all possessing talent
far above their genius, virtuosos to their backbone,
knowing of secret passages to all that seduces, lures,
constrains or overthrows; born enemies of logic
and of straight lines, thirsting after the exotic, the
## p. 70 (#106) #############################################
7o NIETZSCHE COM 7TRA WAGNER
strange and the monstrous, and all opiates for the
senses and the understanding. On the whole, a
daring dare-devil, magnificently violent, soaring
and high-springing crew of artists, who first had to
teach their own century—it is the century of the
mob-what the concept “artist” meant. But they
were ill. . . .
WAGNER AS THE APOSTLE OF
CHASTITY.
I.
Is this the German way?
Comes this low bleating forth from German hearts?
Should Teutons, sin repenting, lash themselves,
Or spread their palms with priestly unctuousness,
Exalt their feelings with the censer's fumes,
And cower and quake and bend the trembling knee,
And with a sickly sweetness plead a prayer?
Then ogle nuns, and ring the Ave-bell,
And thus with morbid fervour out-do heaven?
Is this the German way?
Beware, yet are you free, yet your own Lords.
What yonder lures is Rome, Rome's faith sung
without words.
2.
There is no necessary contrast between sensuality
and chastity; every good marriage, every genuine
love affair is above this contrast; but in those cases
where the contrast exists, it is very far from being
necessarily a tragic one. This, at least, ought to
hold good of all well-constituted and good-spirited
## p. 71 (#107) #############################################
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST 71
mortals, who are not in the least inclined to reckon
their unstable equilibrium between angel and petite
béte, without further ado, among the objections to
existence, the more refined and more intelligent
like Hafis and Goethe, even regarded it as an
additional attraction. It is precisely contradictions
of this kind which lure us to life. . . . On the other
hand, it must be obvious, that when Circe's unfor-
tunate animals are induced to worship chastity, all
they see and worship therein, is their opposite—
oh and with what tragic groaning and fervour,
may well be imagined—that same painful and
thoroughly superfluous opposition which, towards
the end of his life, Richard Wagner undoubtedly
wished to set to music and to put on the stage,
And to what purpose 2 we may reasonably ask.
