The Case Of Nietzsche: A Wagnerian Riposte
Bernard Wills2010
Noble morality, master morality, conversely, is rooted in a triumphant Yes said to oneself-it is selfaffirmation, self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime symbols and practices, but only because "its heart is too full". All of beautiful, all of great art belongs here: the essence of both is gratitude." 1 Thus does Friedrich Nietzsche encapsulate the positive aspect of his ethical outlook in The Case of Wagner, his ferocious polemic against the composer of Tristan, Parsifal and the Ring cycle. This polemic is part and parcel of Nietzsche's attack on Christianity and Platonism. Of course, Nietzsche's relation to these two traditions is complex and not at all easy to define. Still, whatever is the case with Nietzsche the deep thinker, Nietzsche the conscious polemicist identifies Christianity and Platonism with asceticism, self-denial founded not in the will to a higher life beyond the immediacy of passion but rather in simple negativity: a resentful turning of life against itself in loathing and self hatred. This self hatred issues in modern liberalism and utilitarianism (with its misguided notions of sympathy and compassion) and in the spirit of modern science, which carries forward the ascetic outlook of Christian-Platonism even as it pretends to attack it. Thus does Nietzsche diagnose the sickness that saps modern civilization of its life and robs it of the joyous affirmation of its will to power. What is more, he finds in the operas of Richard Wagner a dangerous and corrupting expression of this malaise. In the following paper I wish to examine the complex relationship that Nietzsche had to the art of Richard Wagner. For Nietzsche, Wagner came to typify the arch-ascetic: the very embodiment of the world and life denying will expressed in Christianity, Platonism and modernity. 2 Ironically, this is for the exact same features as drew Nietzsche to Wagner in the first place. There is a self-overcoming in Wagner that the young Nietzsche takes for Dionysian and naturalistic self-forgetting but that the older Nietzsche rejects as ascetical. How can Wagner's operas ground such disparate perceptions? Indeed, what actually happens in those operas apart from Nietzsche's polemic against them? Wagner's most passionately erotic opera, Tristan, does seem (at first glance) to bear out something of Nietzsche's critique for it involves an apparent valorization of the death instinct over life ; ironically, this is the Wagnerian music drama most praised by Nietzsche in his pro-Wagner phase and least dammed in his 1 Nietzsche, Friedrich The Case of Wagner trans. W. Kaufmann (Random House, Toronto 1967) p. 191 2 This is, at least, is his general point though he has more immediate objectons as well. Wagner is, according to Nietzsche, incapable of large scale musical form. (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 170-171) He cannot let go of an intense moment of passion but stretches it to absurdity. (Nietzsche, p. 172) He is incapable of melody and cannot be danced to. (Nietzsche, p. 168) He is as impotent to construct a dramatc crisis as he is to resolve one. (Nietzsche, p. 175) He is an actor who became a musician and had his revenge on music by subordinatng it to text. (Nietzsche, p. 174-1750) One can go on and on. I will not be addressing such objectons in this paper both because they strike me, by and large, as unpersuasive and because I do not think they really refect what Nietzsche is angry about. Nor will I be addressing casual jibes, such as the (textually inaccurate) observaton that Wagner's heroines are never pregnant (unlike Nietzsche's beloved Carmen?). (Nietzsche, p. 176) This later though, is indicatve of a note of ant-feminism that is a persistent undercurrent in Nietzsche's diatribe. That said I will try to concentrate in this essay on what I take to be Nietzsche's philosophical objectons to Wagner.
