Nietzsche, Wagner and the Philosophy of Pessimism

Roger Hollinrake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135175221
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Nietzsche's relationship with Wagner has long been a source of controversy and has given rise to a number of important studies, including this major breakthrough in Nietzsche scholarship, first published in 1982. In this work Hollinrake contends that the nature and extent of the anti-Wagnerian pastiche and polemic in Thus Spake Zarathustra is arguably the most important factor in the association between the two. Thus Wagner, as the purveyor of a particular brand of Schopenhauerian pessimism, is here revealed as one of the principle sources – and targets – of Zarathustra. Whilst addressed primarily to students of German Literature, this book will also be of interest to musicians, philosophers and students of the history of culture and ideas.

Part I:
Zarathustra and Der Ring

Er widerspricht mit jedem Wort, dieser jasagendste aller Geister; in ihm sind alle Gegensätze zu einer neuen Einheit gebunden.

(He contradicts with every word, this most affirmative of all spirits; in him all contradictions are bound together into a new unity.)

Ecce homo, ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, § 6

Chapter 1
Der Ring des Nibelungen

I

‘Damit ein Ereigniss Grösse habe, muss zweierlei zusammenkommen: der grosse Sinn Derer, die es vollbringen, und der grosse Sinn Derer, die es erleben’ (For an event to be great two different things must come together: greatness of sentiment in those who bring it to pass, and greatness of sentiment in those who experience it): with these words, Nietzsche opened his ‘Festschrift’, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, on the occasion of the first performance of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in 1876.

The student who wishes to establish Nietzsche’s opinion of Der Ring and its bearing on Also sprach Zarathustra is hampered by the dearth of material. In 1873, Nietzsche adjudicated in a prize essay competition on the subject of the trilogy; and four years later he remitted an exegetical study by Otto Eiser to Wahnfried for inclusion in the first issues of the Bayreuther Blätter. References to the music-drama in his own writings are, however, few; and the notebooks in which he poured forth a stream of critical comment about Wagner give it hardly more than perfunctory recognition. Yet it would be to over-simplify in this case if what at first appears to be calculated coolness were to be taken as real lack of interest.

Briefly, it is to be remembered that Der Ring des Nibelungen engrossed Wagner’s energies between 1868–76. There are few developments during this momentous period in the artist’s life with which Nietzsche cannot to some extent be associated and identified, so that the history of the first eight years of his friendship with Wagner reads as a sustained commentary on the founding of the Bayreuth Festival.

Nietzsche came to Wagner’s music in the spring of 1861, when still a pupil at Pforta, by way of Hans von Bülow’s vocal score of Tristan und Isolde (published in 1860). After this he started to study the music-dramas at the piano. When he met Wagner in Leipzig in 1868, Der Ring was unfinished and only two of Karl Klindworth’s vocal scores were to hand. With these scores Nietzsche was thoroughly conversant: he had been introduced to Das Rheingold (vocal score 1861) by Gustav Krug in a paper written for the ‘Germania’ society at Pforta in May 1862; and he had followed Krug’s dissertation with a paper on Die Walküre (vocal score 1865) in 1866. These studies were resumed after he came into residence at Basel in 1869. Siegfried, nearing completion at the time of his first holiday visit to the Vierwaldstättersee, and Götterdämmerung are fairly frequently mentioned in Wagner’s and Cosima’s correspondence; and in the course of his twenty-three visits to Tribschen in the first three years of his tenure of the chair of classics at Basel University, Nietzsche was kept regularly informed of the latest developments, following them with a lively sense of personal participation and regaling his family and friends with news of his latest discoveries.

The 1870s saw the publication of some of Wagner’s most important speculative writings after a fallow period, as well as of numerous occasional articles designed to woo and influence public opinion. Now, with encouragement from Nietzsche, earlier plans for a music-journal—eventually the Bayreuther Blätter—began to take a more definite shape. Besides this, the compilation of the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, which contained the tracts of the Dresden period for which there was an urgent public demand¹ and a revised version of the text of the trilogy (which had not seen the light of day since the first public edition of 1863), gave scope for further research. The new edition of Wagner’s literary works was of particular personal interest. In 1871, at Cosima’s request, Nietzsche prepared for it the text of the ‘Große Heldenoper’, Siegfried’s Tod, by transcribing in longhand the whole of the copiously amended manuscript. Since Siegfried’s Tod corresponds to Götterdämmerung in many respects, the commission could not have failed to bring him close to Wagner’s dramatic conception in Der Ring des Nibelungen. We shall see that before long, probably as a result of the experience, the history of the cycle was recounted to him in some detail.

It can therefore be said that in the early years when Nietzsche was most responsive to W agner’s personality and most eager to get to know his works, Der Ring des Nibelungen was the object of sustained study. Considering the zeal Nietzsche had displayed in promoting Wagner’s cause and the frequently appreciative comments in his early letters, the reader may be puzzled by his claim—frequently reiterated in the later writings—that his repudiation of the artist coincided with the première of the cycle. Scholars have pointed out that the account of his violent reaction against Wagner at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 advanced in the preface to Menschliches, Allzwnenschliches, Part II, Ecce homo, Nietzsche contra Wagner, in the open letter to Ferdinand Avenarius the editor of Der Kunstwart in 1888, and elsewhere, is incompatible with the evidence. We are reminded in particular that Nietzsche’s precarious health—which was to give him only twelve more painful years of active life—was at a very low ebb. Nonetheless, it is easy to see why, retrospectively, when attempting to pin down the precise moment that he came to his senses and realized his total antipathy to Wagner, he chose to dwell on the event that marked the fulfilment of the artist’s most extravagant hopes and the attainment of his well-nigh unattainable ambitions. The obvious explanation is that Nietzsche accepted the Festival for what it clearly was: the climax of Wagner’s career; a personal triumph in the face of overwhelming odds; the ‘greatest victory any artist has ever won’ (MA II-Vorrede, § 1). In later years, therefore, when his unspoken misgivings had given way to open defiance, it became imperative for him to re-appraise the historic event which, for some eight years, he had striven to help to bring to pass. A process of rationalization began, and in consequence of this, the first performance of Der Ring assumed a new, strategic place in the story of his progress towards emancipation.

II

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

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

Als junger Liebe
Lust mir verblich,
verlangte nach Macht mein Muth:
(As the joys of young love faded, I began to lust for power.)

Ambition induces the dwarf Mime to rear the infant Siegfried through whom he hopes to win the hoard. Siegfried—a pawn in Wotan’s power strategy, who prizes the ring as a love-token and is largely indifferent to its other attributes—finds a counsellor in the woodbird (Siegfried, Act II), whose words he recalls (Götterdämmerung, Act III):

doch möcht’ er den Ring sich errathen,
der macht’ ihn zum Walter der Welt!
(But if he can unriddle the ring, it’ll make him master of the world!)

Nietzsche’s concept of ‘will to power’ is of particular importance. In Also sprach Zarathustra, the concept is for the most part implicitly discussed, being related to the process of self-conquest (‘Selbst-Überwindung’) that is to engender the future humanity of the ‘Übermensch’ and the teaching of eternal return. References to it in the published writings are few—this is true of some of Nietzsche’s most characteristic tenets; and it receives scant attention in Ecce homo, which otherwise offers a fairly comprehensive summary of his thought. Still, the importance of Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 36, and the emphasis that accrues to the term ‘Wille zur Macht’ in the unpublished papers—an emphasis exploited by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and her team of advisers in their presentation of this huge corpus of material—is widely acknowledged.

The advocacy of power, like the commendation of strife and friendship, owes much to Nietzsche’s classical studies; but the works of the Basel period show that the association with Wagner also contributed to the codification of the premiss. A letter to Rohde, 29 May 1869, soon after Nietzsche’s first visit t...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Facsimiles
• Translations
• Introduction: Also sprach Zarathustra
• Part I: Zarathustra and Der Ring
• Part II: Zarathustra and Parsifal
• Calendar November 1868—February 1883
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Sources and Abbreviations
• Select Bibliography