The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms.
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~25,100 words · 119 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms.. 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.." 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.. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-case-of-wagner-nietzsche-contra-wagner-and-selected-aphorisms.
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: 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.
I am writing this to relieve my mind. It is not malice alone which makes me praise Bizet at the expense of Wagner in this essay. Amid a good deal of jesting I wish to make one point clear which does not admit of levity. To turn my back on Wagner was for me a piece of fate, to get to like anything else whatever afterwards was for me a triumph. Nobody, perhaps, had ever been more dangerously involved in Wagnerism, nobody had defended himself more obstinately against it, nobody had ever been so overjoyed at ridding himself of it. A long history!—Shall I give it a name?—If I were a moralist, who knows what I might not call it! Perhaps a piece of _self-mastery_.—But the philosopher does not like the moralist, neither does he like high-falutin’ words.… What is the first and last thing that a philosopher demands of himself? To overcome his age in himself, to become “timeless.” With what then does the philosopher have the greatest fight? With all that in him which makes him the child of his time. Very well then! I am just as much a child of my age as Wagner—_i.e._, I am a decadent. The only difference is that I recognised the fact, that I struggled against it. The philosopher in me struggled against it. My greatest preoccupation hitherto has been the problem of _decadence_, and I had reasons for this. “Good and evil” form only a playful subdivision of this problem. If one has trained one’s eye to detect the symptoms of decline, one also understands morality,—one understands what lies concealed beneath its holiest names and tables of values: _e.g._, _impoverished_ life, the will to nonentity, great exhaustion. Morality _denies_ life.… In order to undertake such a mission I was obliged to exercise self-discipline:—I had to side against all that was morbid in myself including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including the whole of modern _huma