Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~33,300 words · 158 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/richard-wagner-in-bayreuth
- MLANietzsche. "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/richard-wagner-in-bayreuth.
- ChicagoNietzsche. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/richard-wagner-in-bayreuth.
What it is about
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876): the homage written just before the break.
Context and history
It is still a disciple's praise, but an attentive reader already finds the doubts. A year later Nietzsche left Bayreuth and began an intellectual divorce that lasted his whole life — see The Case of Wagner, also in the catalogue. **Note:** this essay is also inside the volume Thoughts Out of Season, Part I, which appears separately. They are not a duplicate: they are different editorial units and both stay. It is one of the four Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 1873-1876). The catalogue holds three of them separately and also the whole of Part I. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN, and citation should follow the original: the catalogue holds two of them, Also sprach Zarathustra and Der Wille zur Macht; for the rest, only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
FOR an event to be great, two things must be united—the lofty sentiment of those who accomplish it, and the lofty sentiment of those who witness it. No event is great in itself, even though it be the disappearance of whole constellations, the destruction of several nations, the establishment of vast empires, or the prosecution of wars at the cost of enormous forces: over things of this sort the breath of history blows as if they were flocks of wool. But it often happens, too, that a man of might strikes a blow which falls without effect upon a stubborn stone; a short, sharp report is heard, and all is over. History is able to record little or nothing of such abortive efforts. Hence the anxiety which every one must feel who, observing the approach of an event, wonders whether those about to witness it will be worthy of it. This reciprocity between an act and its reception is always taken into account when anything great or small is to be accomplished; and he who would give anything away must see to it that he find recipients who will do justice to the meaning of his gift. This is why even the work of a great man is not necessarily great when it is short, abortive, or fruitless; for at the moment when he performed it he must have failed to perceive that it was really necessary; he must have been careless in his aim, and he cannot have chosen and fixed upon the time with sufficient caution. Chance thus became his master; for there is a very intimate relation between greatness