RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH

The title of my entry quotes the title of Nietzsche’s fourth installment in the Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen series, first published in 1876.

Richard Wagner was Nietzsche’s hero, until eventually he fell short of Nietzsche’s expectations and came crashing down from his lofty pedestal. This is not to suggest that it was Wagner’s fault at all, nor that Nietzsche was wrong in his later opinion. It is probably impossible for a mortal human being (Wagner, in this case) to sustain the high level of adoration, such as he had in Nietzsche’s eyes, at least for a while. Well, at least at the time of Richard Wagner In Bayreuth Nietzsche idealized and nearly idolized Wagner as not just a “reformer of the theater,” but as a cultural revolutionary, a man of the future. To be fair to Nietzsche, his idealization of Wagner did contain strong elements of personal “objectivity,” and was not entirely flattering to the man, as such strong words as “idolization” may otherwise suggest.

Nietzsche’s Wagner is a huge cultural phenomenon, and as such he cannot be limited to the confines of one entry. There are at least three separate thoughts in connection with Richard Wagner In Bayreuth alone, and I am allotting this fairly short work three consecutive entries, rather than cramming them all into one. The reasons for Nietzsche’s disappointment in Wagner will be discussed in my future entries, according to their chronology, as it does not make sense to group all my Wagner entries in one place, in the first place.

This Wagner entry quotes a large excerpt from Chapter IV of Richard Wagner In Bayreuth. It discusses the place of Wagner in the development of Western culture. Fascinating stuff!---

“The history of the development of culture since the time of the Greeks is short enough, when we take into consideration the actual ground it covers, and ignore the periods during which man stood still, went backwards, hesitated or strayed. The Hellenizing of the world—and to make this possible, the Orientalizing of Hellenism—that double mission of Alexander the Great, still remains the most important event: the old question whether a foreign civilization may be transplanted is still the problem that the peoples of modern times are vainly endeavoring to solve. The rhythmic play of those two factors against each other is the force that has determined the course of history heretofore. Thus Christianity appears, for instance, as a product of Oriental antiquity, which was thought out and pursued to its ultimate conclusions by men, with almost intemperate thoroughness. As its influence began to decay, the power of Hellenic culture was revived, and we are now experiencing phenomena so strange that they would be hanging in the air as unsolved problems, if it were not possible, by spanning an enormous gulf of time, to show their relation to analogous phenomena in Hellenistic culture. Thus, between Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer and Empedocles, Aeschylus and Wagner, there is so much relationship, so many things in common, that one is vividly impressed with the very relative nature of all notions of time. It would even seem as if a whole diversity of things were really all of a piece, and that time is only a cloud which makes it hard for our eyes to perceive the oneness of them. In the history of the exact sciences we are perhaps most impressed by the close bond uniting us with the days of Alexander and ancient Greece. The pendulum of history seems merely to have swung back to that point from which it started when it plunged forth into unknown and mysterious distance. The picture represented by our own times is by no means a new one: to the student of history it must always seem as though he were merely in the presence of an old familiar face, the features of which he recognizes. In our time the spirit of Greek culture is scattered broadcast. While forces of all kinds are pressing one upon the other, and the fruits of modern art and science are offering themselves as a means of exchange, the pale outline of Hellenism is beginning to dawn faintly in the distance. The earth which, up to the present, has been more than adequately Orientalized, begins to yearn once more for Hellenism. He who wishes to help her in this respect will certainly need to be gifted for speedy action and to have wings on his heels, in order to synthetize the multitudinous and still undiscovered facts of science and the many conflicting divisions of talent so as to reconnoiter and rule the whole enormous field. It is now necessary that a generation of anti-Alexanders should arise, endowed with the supreme strength necessary for gathering up, binding together, and joining the individual threads of the fabric, so as to prevent their being scattered to the four winds. The object is not to cut the Gordian knot of Greek culture after the manner adopted by Alexander, and then to leave its frayed ends fluttering in all directions; it is rather to bind it after it has been loosed. That is our task today. In the person of Wagner I recognize one of these anti-Alexanders: he rivets and locks together all that is isolated, weak, or in any way defective; if I may be allowed to use a medical expression, he has an astringent power. And in this respect he is one of the greatest civilizing forces of his age. He dominates art, religion, and folklore, what would then have been done towards the accomplishment of that higher and more distant mission? Yet he is the reverse of a polyhistor, or of a mere collecting and classifying spirit; for he constructs with the collected material, and breathes life into it, and is a Simplifier of the Universe. We must not be led away from this idea by comparing the general mission which his genius imposed upon him with the much narrower and more immediate one (namely, effecting a reform in the theatre world) which we are at present in the habit of associating with the name of Wagner."

See my next entry The Ring According To Nietzsche, which quotes another subject of great interest, in the presently discussed Nietzschean work: his interpretation of Wagner’s Ring.