THE MEANING OF WAGNER

(This is my third and last entry on Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: #4: Richard Wagner In Bayreuth.)

Turning this into a separate entry, I still have a lingering doubt whether I was right to separate it from the previous one: after all, Nietzsche’s uniquely original interpretation of Wagner’s Ring continues here!... But then, indeed, Nietzsche’s enormously powerful conclusion to the above, does stand apart from the rest, and thus deserves a separate entry.---

"And now ask yourselves, ye generation of today,--- Was all this composed for you? Have ye the courage to point up to the stars of the whole of this heavenly dome of beauty and goodness and to say: “this is our life, that Wagner has transferred to a place beneath the stars”?

Where are the men among you who are able to interpret the divine image of Wotan in the light of their own lives, and who can become ever greater while, like him, ye retreat? Who among you would renounce power knowing and having learned that power is evil? Where are they who, like Brunhilde, abandon knowledge to love, and finally rob their lives of the highest wisdom, “afflicted love, deepest sorrow, opened my eyes”? Where are the free and fearless, developing and blossoming in innocent egoism? Where are the Siegfrieds, among you?

He who questions thus and does so in vain, will find himself compelled to look around him for signs of the future; and should his eye, on reaching an unknown distance, espy just that “people” which his own generation can read out of the signs contained in Wagnerian art, he will, then, also understand what Wagner shall mean to this people—something that he cannot be to all of us, namely, not the prophet of the future, as perhaps he would fain appear to us, but the interpreter and clarifier of the past."

I guess, the question to myself ought to be whether I can in any way identify with Wotan. The honest answer is: no, I don’t think so. But the very next question is whether I can understand Wagner at all, and I think I can, which is surely the solid ground for my coming-soon extended comment. Until then this entry may be considered of no value, except for drawing the reader’s attention to Nietzsche’s little-known, but very valuable text. In this latter sense it surely serves its edificational purpose.