These essays represent a tremendously important transitional period in Nietzsche's life. All the forces that haunted Nietzsche through Schulpforta and Leipzig up to the beginning of his teaching career at Basel -- the creative arts of literature and music, the rejection of a career in theology, the embrace and ultimate rejection of philology, the embrace of philosophy, but most of all the development of genius -- have broken through into direct, confident exposition. While The Birth of Tragedy clearly postured many of these interests and motifs within a philologist's thesis about Greek tragic drama, the Untimely Ones shed any semblance of the philologist's craft and ventured directly into a philosopher's critical thinking. Even in the domain of philosophy, Nietzsche was leaving scholars well behind and inventing (perhaps only "following" Schopenhauer), as he put it (in Ecce Homo), "how I understand the philosopher -- as a terrible explosive, endangering everything . . . worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic ruminants and other professors of philosophy."
What is "Wagner in Bayreuth" about, we may ask? If it is a realistic account of the actual Wagner and the actual Bayreuth, it is enormously inflated. Nietzsche attended the ceremonial cornerstone laying, at Bayreuth, in May of 1872. It was a dismal day --- dark clouds and rain --- and Wagner's mood was darkly pessimistic. Nietzsche's mood was similar. By late 1872, there is correspondence to indicate problems in the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche. The whole history of the Wagner-Nietzsche correspondence clearly shows that misunderstandings and suspicions were constantly generated by periods of absence. Wagner, in particular, seems to have needed (and demanded) constant personal interaction in order to remain confident of his friends' allegiance. For Nietzsche, as close as Tribschen was to Basel, the demands of teaching often stood in the way. But of critical importance to the long-term health of the relationship was the fact that the Wagners moved to distant Bayreuth to oversee the building of the Festspielhaus in April 1872. Constant direct interaction was now impossible.
In February 1873, Wagner writes Nietzsche, "Therefore --- have patience! Just as I am often obliged to have it with you." Nietzsche is significantly upset by what his association with Wagner has done with his career and reputation as a classical philologist. This upset spreads into issues of "authorship" --- the actual origins of specific portions of both Nietzsche's and Wagner's writings. Nietzsche eventually accuses Wagner of appropriating many of his original ideas about classic Greek culture. Misunderstandings became compounded throughout the period up to the summer of 1875; yet Nietzsche began the Wagner essay and worked hard on it, apparently still with many strong positive feelings toward Wagner. Nevertheless, for some reason, by the summer's end, he proclaimed the piece unpublishable and put it away (ending, in effect, after section 8).
During the winter Nietzsche's health deteriorated to the point where he was forced to take a leave of absence; during that time, there was an exchange of correspondence that seemed to put Nietzsche into a more favorable mood. Nietzsche picked the work back up and wrote sections 9 through 11; it was published in June of 1876. Elizabeth Nietzsche writes, "Strangely enough, my brother feared that the book would meet Wagner's disapproval, and as a matter of fact, it contains many passages which reveal something of the contradictory feelings with which my brother was then struggling. But in my opinion, Wagner was too much absorbed at the time to read carefully between the lines." (Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence, 264) Consider, for example, the discussion of Wagner's writings in #10 -- "Wagner as a writer is like a brave man whose right hand has been cut off."
The rushed completion of "Wagner in Bayreuth" honored the forthcoming Bayreuth opening, August of 1876, with a full performance of the Ring Cycle. Nietzsche himself referred to it as a "Bayreuth Festival sermon" in a letter to Wagner. Wagner wrote back, "Your book is simply tremendous!" and Cosima wrote, "To you, dear friend, I now owe my sole refreshment of mind and elevation of spirit." (N-W C, 265-7) But Nietzsche's real mood of the time can be gauged by his reaction to the Festival, quoted by Elizabeth, "I made the mistake of going to Bayreuth with an ideal in my breast, and was, therefore, doomed to suffer the most bitter disappointment. The preponderance of strong spices, the ugly and the grotesque thoroughly repelled me." Elizabeth herself writes, "we must ask ourselves the question: What did Nietzsche expect from Bayreuth both for himself and for like-minded natures?" And she answers by quoting from the essay, "Bayreuth signifies for us the morning sacrament on the day of battle." (N-W C, 269)
It is well to recall that Nietzsche had seen little of the Wagners after their removal from Tribschen to Wahnfried, near Bayreuth. After publication and general criticism of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was struggling to rediscover his own intellectual center. And finally, Nietzsche was clearly involved in a son-father psychological complex with Wagner to which rebellion was as predictable an end as was adulation, a beginning. In November of 1876, Nietzsche saw the Wagners for the last time. Nietzsche's mind had broken free in his preliminary work on Human, All-to-Human; Wagner was hard at work attracting bourgeois Christian money to Bayreuth by remodeling the Parsifal myth into a story of Christian redemption. The comments, quoted earlier, from Ecce Homo should be understood in this light. "Wagner in Bayreuth" explores an ideal; doubtless, however, it was Nietzsche's ideal, to which Wagner was an increasingly clumsy figure of attachment.
As a development of Nietzsche's own thought, this essay takes us beyond the materials of Birth of Tragedy in at least two significant ways. First, like the other three essays in the series, it explores the concept of "modernism" thoroughly and critically. Consider, for instance, (UM#4, 258) "There is danger and despair in the life of every true artist who is thrown into modern times. . . in the nausea over the modern ways of gaining pleasure and prestige, and in the rage which turns against all the egoistical pleasure of modern man as a type." Second, it has gone well beyond the earlier naive embrace of the Germanic people and has begun to sound the depths of Nietzsche's future pessimism about Germans of his own age. Note (UM#4, 301) "But, in general, the generous impulse of the creative artist is too great, the horizon of his love of man too extensive for his sight to remain enclosed within the national reality. His thoughts are, like every good and great German, supra-German, and the language of his art speaks not to nations but to men. But to men of the future!"
In this work, Nietzsche's theory of art, music in particular, receives much more direct attention and becomes very much more sophisticated than its earlier version a la Schopenhauer. But Nietzsche's presumptions about the cultural role of art, coupled with his damning criticism of German culture, represent merely the beginning of deeper questioning about culture itself. What is culture except a question about what we value? Hence, ultimately Nietzsche will have to raise all the value questions directly.
Copyright 1995, 1998 by Tad Beckman