There is much in the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship that neither ever discussed in writing. Elizabeth Nietzsche gives us many insights into these dimensions of their relationship, in her book The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence; but Elizabeth herself is not to be entirely trusted as an accurate analyst of her brother's life. We have to remember that Wagner was essentially the same age as Nietzsche's father and that the latter had died when Nietzsche was only five years old. Nietzsche's whole family was strongly Christian and strictly moralistic. As a young man, Nietzsche embraced music and classics probably very much in the mood of the "naive artist" described in Birth of Tragedy. It seems clear that he had no social experiences with women of his age and was naive about male-female relationships. Imagine, then, the impact of finding Wagner, a genius whom he had admired through his early works and writings, living outrageously with the young wife of Hans von Buelow in Tribschen, the beautiful country house in Switzerland's lake country. Between Schopenhauer and at least three major affairs with married women, Wagner embraced atheism and immoralism. Wagner had been a political exile for twenty years and was author of numerous revolutionary tracts on music, the theater, and the future of German culture. It was not only a heddy experience, being welcomed into the family of a genius of huge proportions, but it also had to be a profound social-sexual revolution for Nietzsche, who certainly became infatuated with Cosima, an attractive woman in her early thirties.
From Genoa, in February 1882, Nietzsche wrote to his sister, "Certainly those were the best days of my life, the ones I spent with him at Tribschen . . . But the omnipotence of our tasks drove us apart, and now we cannot rejoin one another --- we have become estranged. I was indescribably happy in those days, when I discovered Wagner! I had sought for so long a man who was superior to me and who actually looked beyond me. I thought I had found such a man in Wagner. I was wrong. Now I cannot even compare myself to him --- I belong to a different world." (Middleton, Selected Letters . . ., 180) Only six months later, Nietzsche revisited the site of Tribschen with Paul Ree and Lou Salome, Nietzsche told Lou, "I have suffered so much because of this man and his art. It was a long, long passion; I find no other word for it. The required renunciation, the necessary return to myself belong to the hardest and most melancholic experiences of my life." And Lou observed that Nietzsche's eyes were full of tears. (Peters, My Sister, My Spouse, 103) What was involved in Nietzsche's commentaries on Wagner was by no means mere criticism of the master; it was Nietzsche's own intellectual and psychological growth.
In reading The Case of Wagner, we have made an enormous jump; all of Nietzsche's other works are in between. After his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche began to write in aphorisms, short sections that fall only loosely into a directly organized thesis. Many of these are notes that Nietzsche wrote or dictated and later organized and edited. Nietzsche's health had deteriorated dramatically, throughout the period, and his constrasts between north and south, Germany and Italy (Africa), are virtually physiological. The theme of women (or should we say, "woman") has become prominent in this work. Nietzsche has known three women intimately --- his sister Elizabeth (incest), Cosima Wagner (Oedipal), and Lou Salome (rejected true love). If Wagner awakened Nietzsche's sexual understanding, he obviously failed to convince Nietzsche of his own sense that man is "redeemed" through love of woman. While Nietzsche understands the sexual energy, he sees the relationship as warfare. But preeminently, the theme of modernism is everywhere. Is Nietzsche discussing Wagner or modernism? "Wagner is the modern artist par excellence." But "Wagner's art is sick." Wagner is a neurosis. (CW, 5, 166) One should remember, too, that psychoanalysis is emerging in the 1880s. Whatever the problem of modernism is (was) it is emerging in the form of hysteria, of the neurotic.
It is difficult to take this work seriously as a criticism of Wagner; more nearly, it is a criticism of the world in which the real Wagner lived. Wagner is under fire because he was of that world. The ideal Wagner, in Nietzsche's mind, wasn't supposed to be of that world. Wagner was supposed to be a revolutionary. Nietzsche isn't entirely to blame for this image, either; Wagner himself advanced it. But Nietzsche took the image far beyond its humble beginnings. In "Wagner in Bayreuth" we see much more than the real Wagner; we see the ideal that Nietzsche erected in place of Wagner. Wagner is not merely a revolutionary in music; he is a revolutionary against all modernity. Note at the beginning of this work that our challenge is to overcome being the child-of-our-times, of modernity.
In the end, this is the one thing that makes The Case of Wagner an essential part of Nietzsche's writings. Through Wagner, Nietzsche continues his critique of modernity and especially, the decadence and nihilism of the modern world. Perhaps, in Nietzsche's mind, the greatest example of this was Parsifal, Wagner's last opera. What makes Parsifal so despicable? This was an opportunity for Wagner to continue his use of mythic themes, lying at the roots of the German spirit. But Parsifal is a late myth, developed throughout Europe within the Twelfth Century; it has both pagan and Christian forms. Wagner, obviously anxious to please patrons of Bayreuth, chose the Christian myth. It is also the tale of an old wounded, suffering king and a young, naive prince (Wagner and Nietzsche). The king cannot heal himself; only Parsifal's maturation will lead to that. Along the way, Wagner employs two systems of symbols both of which are calculated to anger Nietzsche. The first is an older woman who initiates the naive Parsifal, leaving the general message that man is incomplete without woman and grows to maturity only through relationship with a woman. The second is the Christianized grail, the cup with the blood of Christ. While mysterious, pagan forces abound, Parsifal learns to employ Christian signs to dispell them and, in the end, when he touches the magic spear to the king's wounds, both the spear and the grail cup glow with Christian energy. The chorus sings a final thrilling line; "their redeemer (king) is redeemed (by the Christian rites through Parsifal)." All of this is very far away from tragedy, in Nietzsche's mind, and very far away from reality, too. For Nietzsche, there is no sin, original or otherwise, from which to be redeemed. There is chaos, at the basis of life, but there is no redemption from that, certainly none in Christian institutions. In the pagan version, the grail is not the blood of Christ but rather an image of self-illumination and maturation. These are what heals.
copyright 1995, 1998 by Tad Beckman