The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms.
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~25,100 words · 119 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms.. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-case-of-wagner-nietzsche-contra-wagner-and-selected-aphorisms
- MLANietzsche. The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms.. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-case-of-wagner-nietzsche-contra-wagner-and-selected-aphorisms.
- ChicagoNietzsche. The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms.. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-case-of-wagner-nietzsche-contra-wagner-and-selected-aphorisms.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888): the end of the most famous divorce in cultural history.
Context and history
Wagner had been dead five years. Nietzsche attacks him as a symptom — of décadence, of romanticism, of Christianity disguised as art — and at the same time cannot hide that this was the love of his intellectual life. It reads best beside Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, in the catalogue, from twelve years earlier. 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, which is also in the catalogue: Der Fall Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
dying light, so pampers our senses that afterwards almost every other musician strikes us as being too robust. If people would believe me, they would not form the highest idea of Wagner from that which pleases them in him to-day. All that was only devised for convincing the masses, and people like ourselves recoil from it just as one would recoil from too garish a fresco. What concern have we with the irritating brutality of the overture to the “Tannhauser”? Or with the Walkyrie Circus? Whatever has become popular in Wagner’s art, including that which has become so outside the theatre, is in bad taste and spoils taste. The “Tannhauser” March seems to me to savour of the Philistine; the overture to the “Flying Dutchman” is much ado about nothing; the prelude to “Lohengrin” was the first, only too insidious, only too successful example of how one can hypnotise with music (—I dislike all music which aspires to nothing higher than to convince the nerves). But apart from the Wagner who paints frescoes and practises magnetism, there is yet another Wagner who hoards small treasures: our greatest melancholic in music, full of side glances, loving speeches, and words of comfort, in which no one ever forestalled him,—the tone-master of melancholy and drowsy happiness.… A lexicon of Wagner’s most intimate phrases—a host of short fragments of from five to fifteen bars each, of music which _nobody knows_.… Wagner had the virtue of _décadents_,—pity.… 8.