/lit/ - Literature

>Prof. N. departed, having caused R. many difficult hours. Among other things, he maintains that the German language gives him no pleasure, and he would rather talk Latin, etc. R. mentions his own rules for treating the German language, says one should first look to see whether a foreign term is completely necessary to express the sense; if it is, then use it boldly, and untranslated.

I'm trying to find all of Wagner's published criticisms of Nietzsche and am hoping to collect them into a book. So far these statements have received very little attention. I have found them in the essays Public and Popularity, Shall We Hope? and Religion and Art. Do any Wagnerians know any other works that contain criticisms of, or at least references to, Nietzsche?

Nietzsche in Human, All too Human:
>The erotic relation of men to youths was the necessary and sole preparation, to a degree unattainable to our comprehension, of all manly education (pretty much as for a long time all higher education of women was only attainable through love and marriage). All idealism of the strength of the Greek nature threw itself into that relation, and it is probable that never since have young men been treated so attentively, so lovingly, so entirely with a view to their welfare (virtus) as in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.— according to the beautiful saying of Holderlin: “denn liebend giebt der Sterbliche vom Besten”. The higher the light in which this relation was regarded, the lower sank intercourse with women.

Meanwhile Wagner in his Brown Book:
>What we can never understand in any language about the Greek way, is what wholly separates us from it, e.g. their love — in — pederasty.

>It is, I think, characteristic of our psychology that we find on the threshold of the new age two figures who were destined to exert an immense influence on the hearts and minds of the younger generation: Wagner, the prophet of love, whose music runs the whole gamut of feeling from Tristan down to incestuous passion, then up again from Tristan to the sublime spirituality of Parsifal; and Nietzsche, the prophet of power and of the triumphant will for individuality. Wagner, in his last and loftiest utterance, harked back to the Grail legend, as Goethe did to Dante, but Nietzsche seized on the idea of a master caste and a master morality, an idea embodied in many a fairhaired hero and knight of the Middle Ages. Wagner broke the bonds that fettered love, Nietzsche shattered the “tables of values” that cramp individuality. Both strove after similar goals while at the same time creating irremediable discord; for where love is, power cannot prevail, and where power prevails, love cannot reign.

>While Nietzsche was prophetically responding to the schism of the Christian world with the art of thinking, his brother in spirit, Richard Wagner, was doing the same thing with the art of feeling, music. German prehistory comes surging up, thunderous and stupefying, to fill the gaping breach in the Church. Wagner salved his conscience with Parsifal, for which Nietzsche could never forgive him, but the Castle of the Grail vanished into an unknown land. The message was not heard and the omen went unheeded. Only the orgiastic frenzy caught on and spread like an epidemic. Wotan the storm-god had conquered. Ernst Junger sensed that very clearly: in his book On the Marble Cliffs a wild huntsman comes into the land, bringing with him a wave of possession greater than anything known in the Middle Ages. Nowhere did the European spirit speak more plainly than it did in Germany, and nowhere was it more tragically misunderstood.

Was Nietzsche just jealous of Wagner?

>Wagner redeemed woman; woman built Bayreuth for him. All sacrifice, all devotion: they have nothing that they would not give him. The woman becomes impoverished in favor of the master, she becomes touching, she stands naked before him. – The Wagnerianerin – the gracefullest ambiguity that exists today: She embodies Wagner's cause, in her sign his cause triumphs. Ah, this old robber! He robs us of our youths, he robs us of our women and drags them into his cave... Ah, this Minotaur!

>I gather from your brief allusions that our old friend Nietzsche has been holding himself aloof from you as well. There is no doubt that very striking changes have taken place in him; but anyone who observed him and his psychic spasms years ago could almost be justified in saying that a long-dreaded and not entirely unpredictable catastrophe had now overtaken him. I have retained sufficient friendship for him not to read his book – which I glanced through as I was cutting the pages – and can only wish and hope that he will thank me for it some day.
- Letter to Franz Overbeck 5/24/78

>How could I ever forget this friend of mine [Nietzsche] who was driven from me so forcefully? Although I constantly had the feeling that, at the time of his association with me, Nietzsche’s life was ruled by a mental spasm, and although it was bound to strike me as odd that this spasm could have produced so spiritually radiant and heart-warming a fire as was manifest in him to the astonishment of all, and although, finally, the ultimate decision which he reached in the inner development of his life filled me with the utmost horror when I saw how intolerable a pressure that spasm was finally causing him – I must no doubt also admit that in the case of so powerful a psychic process it is simply not possible to argue along moral lines and that one’s only response can be a shocked silence.
- Letter to Franz Overbeck 10/19/79

>I gather from your brief allusions that our old friend Nietzsche has been holding himself aloof from you as well. There is no doubt that very striking changes have taken place in him; but anyone who observed him and his psychic spasms years ago could almost be justified in saying that a long-dreaded and not entirely unpredictable catastrophe had now overtaken him. I have retained sufficient friendship for him not to read his book – which I glanced through as I was cutting the pages – and can only wish and hope that he will thank me for it some day.
- Letter to Franz Overbeck 5/24/78

How could I ever forget this friend of mine [Nietzsche] who was driven from me so forcefully? Although I constantly had the feeling that, at the time of his association with me, Nietzsche’s life was ruled by a mental spasm, and although it was bound to strike me as odd that this spasm could have produced so spiritually radiant and heart-warming a fire as was manifest in him to the astonishment of all, and although, finally, the ultimate decision which he reached in the inner development of his life filled me with the utmost horror when I saw how intolerable a pressure that spasm was finally causing him – I must no doubt also admit that in the case of so powerful a psychic process it is simply not possible to argue along moral lines and that one’s only response can be a shocked silence.
- Letter to Franz Overbeck 10/19/79

>>20203967
>in a draft of the preface to the second part of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche described his relationship with Wagner as "my only love-affair," before striking the phrase from his proofs.
>"I always think of him with gratitude, because to him I am indebted for some of the strongest incitements to intellectual independence" (letter, 14 January 1880).
>"I declare Wagner to have been the greatest benefactor of my life. The bond which unites us is the fact that we have suffered greater agony, even at each other's hands, than most men are able to bear nowadays, and this will always keep our names associated in the minds of men" (Ecce Homo, 1888).
- Nietzsche

>The friendship deepened into something like a father-son connection. "Strictly speaking, you are, aside from my wife, the one prize I have received in life," Wagner wrote to his disciple in 1872.
>"I lack the ability to keep bad experiences in mind; with Nietzsche, for instance, I can think only of his friendly aspects" (Cosima's Diaries, 28 December 1881)
- Wagner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOc6iZtukrs

>'Wotan’s relationship with Siegfried is something wonderful, like no other poetry in the world: love and enforced enmity and the desire for destruction. This is highly symbolic for the understanding of Wagner’s character: love for that which redeems, judges, and destroys; but splendidly perceived!'

>The confrontation between Zarathustra (as ‘Untergehender’) and his progeny, the ‘Übermensch’, appears as a free paraphrase of the confrontation between Wotan and his progeny, ‘the man of the future’, in Siegfried, Act III, where Wotan (in Wagner’s own words) rises to the tragic height of willing his own fall. Nietzsche’s attempt to improve on the scene he described as comparable to no other poetry in the world will be evident to the student in the long excursus of ‘Zarathustra’s Vorrede’, beginning

>'What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal. What can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a going-down.'

>By availing himself of material culled from the dramatic climax of the trilogy, he prepares to deliver his own answer to the question propounded in both works.

>>19974899
>I suppose I know better than any one the prodigious feats of which Wagner was capable, the fifty worlds of strange ecstasies to which no one else had wings to soar; and as I am alive to-day and strong enough to turn even the most suspicious and most dangerous things to my own advantage, and thus to grow stronger, I declare Wagner to have been the greatest benefactor of my life. The bond which unites us is the fact that we have suffered greater agony, even at each other's hands, than most men are able to bear nowadays, and this will always keep our names associated in the minds of men. For, just as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, so, in truth, am I, and ever will be.

Is the Ring or Zarathustra a more important cultural achievement?

Why did they hate each other?

>During the night I noticed that R. was no longer lying beside me, I got up to look for him and found him sitting in his workroom, reading the Dues de Bourgogne; he told me he had congestions. In the morning he told me the dream which had woken him up: more and more people were forcing their way into his house, among them Klindworth, and finally Nietzsche, who said a lot of malicious things to him and poured scorn on the melody of the “Pilgrims’ Chorus” in Tannhauser, that is to say, sang a lampoon on it. R. said to him, “I suppose you treat me like this because I am unarmed?” — I inquired through a window what was the matter, and in order not to alarm me, he told me that Nietzsche was reading his new poem to him; then the uneasy magnitude of his distress woke him up.

>I suppose I know better than any one the prodigious feats of which Wagner was capable, the fifty worlds of strange ecstasies to which no one else had wings to soar; and as I am alive to-day and strong enough to turn even the most suspicious and most dangerous things to my own advantage, and thus to grow stronger, I declare Wagner to have been the greatest benefactor of my life. The bond which unites us is the fact that we have suffered greater agony, even at each other's hands, than most men are able to bear nowadays, and this will always keep our names associated in the minds of men. For, just as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, so, in truth, am I, and ever will be.

Why couldn't they just be friends?

>In the evening we are visited by Dr. Rée, whose cold and precise character does not appeal to us; on closer inspection we come to the conclusion that he must be an Israelite.
>R. reads some of Nietzsche's latest book [Human, All Too Human] and is astonished by its pretentious ordinariness. "I can understand why [Paul] Rée's company is more congenial to him than mine." And when I remark that to judge by this book N.'s earlier ones were just reflections of something else, they did not come from within, he says, "And now they are Rée-flections!"

Was Nietzsche really hanging around Jews? Did they influence his books?

>>18827074
>betrays Wagner
What do you think?

>>18803665
>What are some things that the average individual can partake in to feed their inner Dionysus?
Wagnerian drama, that's literally the conclusion of The Birth of Tragedy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMjpKEb4DDQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBvu_ESp3r0

>It is, I think, characteristic of our psychology that we find on the threshold of the new age two figures who were destined to exert an immense influence on the hearts and minds of the younger generation: Wagner, the prophet of love, whose music runs the whole gamut of feeling from Tristan down to incestuous passion, then up again from Tristan to the sublime spirituality of Parsifal; and Nietzsche, the prophet of power and of the triumphant will for individuality. Wagner, in his last and loftiest utterance, harked back to the Grail legend, as Goethe did to Dante, but Nietzsche seized on the idea of a master caste and a master morality, an idea embodied in many a fairhaired hero and knight of the Middle Ages. Wagner broke the bonds that fettered love, Nietzsche shattered the “tables of values” that cramp individuality. Both strove after similar goals while at the same time creating irremediable discord; for where love is, power cannot prevail, and where power prevails, love cannot reign.

>>18457083
You chose the wrong side.

>>18382520
Because he was gay.

>The friendship deepened into something like a father-son connection. "Strictly speaking, you are, aside from my wife, the one prize I have received in life," Wagner wrote to his disciple in 1872. Later, in a draft of the preface to the second part of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche described the relationship as "my only love-affair," before striking the phrase from his proofs.

Is /Platonism/ a Wagnerian or Nietzschean general?

>>18328287
He died a virgin.

>The friendship deepened into something like a father-son connection. "Strictly speaking, you are, aside from my wife, the one prize I have received in life," Wagner wrote to his disciple in 1872. Later, in a draft of the preface to the second part of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche described the relationship as "my only love-affair," before striking the phrase from his proofs.

>The friendship deepened into something like a father-son connection. "Strictly speaking, you are, aside from my wife, the one prize I have received in life," Wagner wrote to his disciple in 1872. Later, in a draft of the preface to the second part of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche described the relationship as "my only love-affair," before striking the phrase from his proofs.