The German Genius

Wagner was at the height of his fame. The Mastersingers had been premiered that year and received with greater enthusiasm than any of his previous works.
    Nietzsche, like Wagner, came from Saxony in east Germany, and belonged to a family of Lutheran pastors. 31 Scholarships sent him to the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, where his subject was classics, not philosophy. He was such a brilliant student that, at the age of twenty-four, when still an undergraduate, he was offered an associate professorship in classical philology at the University of Basel, becoming a full professor a year later. So advanced was he that the University of Leipzig awarded him his degree without his having to submit a thesis or wait for the examination. He moved to Basel immediately.
    These highly unusual accolades had made his reputation at the time he met Wagner. The two men remained good friends from 1868 until 1876, after which the younger man relinquished his academic post in Basel to devote himself full time to philosophy (he had tried to switch within the university but had been turned down). Following the break from Wagner, which we shall come to, Nietzsche developed his idiosyncratically itinerant lifestyle and, over a period of about twelve years, when he was between thirty-two and forty-four, he “poured out” the writings for which he is now famous. 32 His friendship was formed too late to have any influence on Wagner but he did influence other composers—Gustav Mahler, Frederick Delius, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss, whose tone-poem Also Sprach Zarathustra is based on Nietzsche’s best-known book. Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche had a great interest in music—his great pleasures centering on Schumann, Schopenhauer, and solitary walks. He paralleled Wagner in that it was his discovery of Schopenhauer that proved the intellectual turning point in his life.
    After they met, the friendship ripened, and Nietzsche became a frequent visitor to Tribschen, Wagner’s house. Nietzsche spent Christmas there, helped with the printing of Wagner’s autobiography, read the proofs, and was the copyist on the urtext of Siegfried . When Wagner went for walks, Nietzsche was allowed to play his piano. 33 Nietzsche’s first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus der Geist der Musik ( The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music ; 1872), is dedicated to Wagner, and Nietzsche goes so far as to say that his book is a “crystallisation” of his conversations with the composer. 34
    Nietzsche’s argument is that we have—or had then—essentially misunderstood the ancient Greeks. A close reading of Greek tragedy, in particular the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles, shows that their concern is the “oceanic and irrational” feelings that swirl through human affairs—passion, eroticism, aggression, and intoxication, experiences he called “Dionysian.” But this passion was rendered through mythic stories that channeled the imagination in a particular way, the “Apollonian,” suitable to the linear—and therefore essentially rational—form of plays in the theater. While the plays themselves are one thing, the Dionysian side to life was destroyed by the development among the Greeks of “critical and self-critical intelligence,” a relentless drive that culminated in Socrates, the “supreme critical intellect.” Intellectual understanding, critical self-consciousness, became the prevailing methodology, arousing, as Nietzsche said, “terror and misconceptions.” 35 Even morality, according to Nietzsche, was, in Socrates’ world, a function of knowledge, the whole of human existence accessible to the “conceptualising intelligence.” 36 This approach to experience culminated in Euripedes’ tragedies, which made a mockery of what had been the essence of Aeschylus and Sophocles, namely their exploration of the irrational, of what, in Nietzsche’s day, was already being called the unconscious. Nietzsche felt that Euripides was shallow, that his works forfeited the ability to move people and that this was how Greek art had declined and decayed. In Nietzsche’s view, Wagner’s music—with its emphasis on compassion as the basis for morality, and on the irrational—marked a return to Aeschylus and Sophocles, restoring drama to its former completeness as an art form. 37 Wagner loved the book and said Nietzsche was in a closer relationship with him than anyone except his wife.
    This situation did not last. Around 1874, as