# Question on Nietzsche and Wagner?



## ericdxx (Jul 7, 2013)

So apparently Nietzsche's was obsessed with Tristan and Isolde and he thought it was the greatest piece of art ever. Later he would storm out of opera house during the first act of Rheingold because he was offended by the nationalistic themes.

1. What is about Tristan and Isolde that is so intellectually stimulating? Nietzsche was a Bright man right? Whether you like his teachings or not. 

2. What is it that is so (potentially) offensive about Rheingold?


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## rgz (Mar 6, 2010)

#2 - The Nibelungen and Giants were both presented as others - the former being a twisted, sub-human money- and power-hungry race (complete with big noses), the latter dim-witted slave labor that it was ok to exploit. Both should of course be kept out of the home of the gods at all costs as that would sully the demesne of the gods. It's not a huge stretch to be able to read anti-semitism, endorsements of slavery and exploitation of different races, and approval of genetic purity into Rheingold.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

ericdxx said:


> So apparently Nietzsche's was obsessed with Tristan and Isolde and he thought it was the greatest piece of art ever. Later he would storm out of opera house during the first act of Rheingold because he was offended by the nationalistic themes.
> 
> 1. What is about Tristan and Isolde that is so intellectually stimulating? Nietzsche was a Bright man right? Whether you like his teachings or not.
> 
> 2. What is it that is so (potentially) offensive about Rheingold?


1. The Schopenhauerian motives. Love and the will to love that causes suffering, death as the only way to attain peace and release from suffering, denunciation of self etc. I am reading a book right now, which contains a chapter on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner and their mutual influence on one another. When I am done, I will probably be able to tell you more.

It is very stimulating emotionally too, everyone likes a good love story.

2. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.


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## Couac Addict (Oct 16, 2013)

#2 Perhaps he coughed up $300 to see this


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## Itullian (Aug 27, 2011)

Couac Addict said:


> #2 Perhaps he coughed up $300 to see this


I saw that.
It was a joke.


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## Revenant (Aug 27, 2013)

Maybe by the time he saw Rheingold, Nietzsche's brain was already experiencing alteration from the syphillis he contracted as a wartime nurse, from ministering to some infected soldier (as Walter Kaufmann presumes). Also, he may have grown envious of the iconic stature Wagner had achieved by 1876. N writes somewhere about "parting from our cause when it triumphs", a saying that never made very rational sense to me. Perhaps it was a pre-existentialist thing.


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## Cavaradossi (Aug 2, 2012)

SiegendesLicht said:


> 1. The Schopenhauerian motives. Love and the will to love that causes suffering, death as the only way to attain peace and release from suffering, denunciation of self etc.


Yup. If you are aware the Schopenhauer connection, all that seemingly cryptic night/day, dark/light talk in Act II makes a lot more sense.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

1. Dear old Richard - he was so good at the denunciation of self, wasn't he?


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## waldvogel (Jul 10, 2011)

Nietzsche changed his musical tastes drastically sometime between 1872 (when he wrote _The Birth of Tragedy_, a book highly complimentary to Wagner), and 1878 (when he wrote _Human, all too Human_ - which was anything but complimentary). By this point Nietzsche had also embraced "the South" with its direct, colorful music in opposition to "the North" with its gloomier, more analytical style.

Nietzsche came about this change rather slowly, and his disappointment with the original Bayreuth production of the Ring in 1876 had more to do with the celebrities and noblemen that showed up to satisfy their curiosity than with the actual music. He had heard much of the Ring in piano transcription and in salon settings prior to this point, and was enthralled by what he had heard. Keep in mind that the first music in Rheingold was composed when Nietzsche was about ten years old, and that Nietzsche himself was a competent pianist and did some musical composition on the side.

By 1888, Nietzsche's last sane year, in _The Case of Wagner_, he was writing about the warm, sunny passion of Carmen as opposed to the dark, slow strains of Parsifal, which Nietzsche found to be repelling in its Christian symbolism and renunciation of earthly pleasures. By this point he had emphatically rebelled against any kind of German nationalism and he was, for the most part, living in Italy as a self-exile.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

ericdxx said:


> Later he would storm out of opera house during the first act of Rheingold because he was offended by the nationalistic themes.
> 
> 2. What is it that is so (potentially) offensive about Rheingold?


The Ring Cycle is a musical instance of a trend in German romanticism that was already in full swing by the 1840s: the fascination with authentic German folk culture. The generation prior to Wagner's included figures like J. G. Herder and the Grimm brothers, all of whom promoted the idea that national identity should be defined by a nation's folk culture (i.e. the lore, languages, and customs of the people whose origins lie in the nation's "peasant" regions) rather than by its modern, cosmopolitan culture (the "civilized" peoples inhabiting the big cities). Wagner himself wrote, in his essay _German Art and German Politics_, that the distinction between modern civilization and folk culture is exactly the thing that makes the French different from Germans: the French have only the former while Germans have the latter. Wagner would later cite Jacob Grimm in his essay _What is German?_, written in 1878.

Much of Herder's work was devoted to studying the original languages of German peoples, just as much of the Grimm brothers' work was devoted to compiling and retelling authentic German folk tales. Wagner's interest in authentic Germanic mythology, of which the Ring Cycle is a product, comes out of this broader German romantic movement. What they all have in common is an interest in that which is quintessentially German, that which cannot be attributed to foreign assimilation.


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## Volve (Apr 14, 2013)

SiegendesLicht said:


> 1. The Schopenhauerian motives. Love and the will to love that causes suffering, death as the only way to attain peace and release from suffering, denunciation of self etc. I am reading a book right now, which contains a chapter on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner and their mutual influence on one another. When I am done, I will probably be able to tell you more.
> 
> It is very stimulating emotionally too, everyone likes a good love story.
> 
> 2. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.


What would be this book you're reading?


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Eschbeg said:


> Much of Herder's work was devoted to studying the original languages of German peoples, just as much of the Grimm brothers' work was devoted to compiling and retelling authentic German folk tales. *Wagner's interest in authentic Germanic mythology*, of which the Ring Cycle is a product, comes out of this broader German romantic movement. What they all have in common is an *interest in that which is quintessentially German, that which cannot be attributed to foreign assimilation.*


What is somewhat ironic in this is that elements of The Ring seems to show much influence from Norse and Icelandic mythology.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

tdc said:


> What is somewhat ironic in this is that elements of The Ring seems to show much influence from Norse and Icelandic mythology.


It's actually not as ironic as it seems. Wagner was aware of the Norse roots of the _Nibelunglied_, the 12th century German poem that served as the primary inspiration for the Ring Cycle. He studied the Scandinavian sources as well as the German ones when he was writing the Ring. But this didn't count as going "outside" German culture because Germany is partly descended from Scandinavian culture. That was more or less the point of all this scavenging for authentic folk culture: going back to the deepest, most quintessential roots of German culture. (The Scandinavian heritage is also why, in the 20th century, the Nazis promoted the blond-haired blue-eyed figure as the ideal type of German.)


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Eschbeg said:


> It's actually not as ironic as it seems. Wagner was aware of the Norse roots of the _Nibelunglied_, the 12th century German poem that served as the primary inspiration for the Ring Cycle. He studied the Scandinavian sources as well as the German ones when he was writing the Ring. But this didn't count as going "outside" German culture because Germany is partly descended from Scandinavian culture. That was more or less the point of all this scavenging for authentic folk culture: going back to the deepest, most quintessential roots of German culture. (The Scandinavian heritage is also why, in the 20th century, the Nazis promoted the blond-haired blue-eyed figure as the ideal type of German.)


Interesting, but if I am not mistaken within these Scandinavian myths there is a Mongolian influence as well, so I'm still not convinced that the ideal German purity he was striving for was really there.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

tdc said:


> Interesting, but if I am not mistaken within these Scandinavian myths there is a Mongolian influence as well, so I'm still not convinced that the ideal German purity he was striving for was really there.


Oh, I don't think it was either. But as the historian Benedict Anderson (I believe) once said, "Getting your history wrong is what being a nation is all about."


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

I'm not sure Tristan was about intellectual stimulation so much as almost anti-intellectual emotional seduction. He was most taken by the prelude itself. _("I simply cannot bring myself to remain critically aloof from this music; every nerve in me is atwitch, and it has been a long time since I had such a lasting sense of ecstasy as with this overture")_ .

He later became hostile to Schopenhauer's philosophy, yet his love for Tristan was unaffected (_Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan - I have sought in vain, in every art_)


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

Volve said:


> What would be this book you're reading?


Peter Watson, _"The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Industrial Revolution, and the Twentieth Century"_ - quite a thrilling account of German intellectual history and all the nation's contributions to the world during the last two and a half centuries, where Wagner has an honorable place. Here is what the author writes concerning Wagner and Schopenhauer:



> The second aspect of Schopenhauer's basic system - much easier to understand - is that he thought human life was bound to be tragic. Life, he said, was made up of endless "hoping", "striving", "yearning" - we are always, from our earliest days, reaching out for something. This endless yearning is inherently unfulfillable, for as soon as we get what we want, we want something else. This is our predicament.
> 
> It is a predicament that is made all the worse by the third element in his thought, that we are, most of the time, selfish, cruel, aggressive and heartless in our dealings with each other.... This was his famous - notorious - pessimism. Schopenhauer had a problem with what to call this terrible, blind, purposeless noumenal world, and though he eventually came up with the word "will", he was never entirely happy with it. He chose that word, and the phrase "the will to live" because it seemed to him to be the "ultimate impulse" within us. For Schopenhauer, we have to recognize the various manifestations of this will to exist, and to overcome them if we are to achieve contentment away from the world.
> 
> ... Schopenhauer's belief that music held a special place in the arts led him to make a number of specific comments about music, about acoustics as the ground for metaphysics, and to include a technical device in harmonics known as "suspension". This reference seems to have found immediate resonance with Wagner, so much that he decided to compose a whole opera based on the way suspension operates. The idea was "that music would move all the way through from discord to discord in such a manner that the ear was on tenterhooks throughout for a resolution that did not come". This was, in effect, pure musical Schopenhauer in that "the unassuaged longing, craving, yearning, that is our life, that is indeed, us" would only be resolved in the final chord, which, in dramatic terms, would also be the end of the protagonist's life. In Bayreuth, he even lowered the orchestra pit to help this effect.


Compare this with some of Wagner's own text:

_...das Wunderreich der Nacht,
aus der ich einst erwacht;
das bietet dir Tristan,
dahin geht er voran:
ob sie ihm folge
treu und hold, -
das sag' ihm nun Isold'! _

The wonderful realm of night,
From which I once awoke -
that offers you Tristan,
There he is going ahead of you,
If she will follow him, faithful and gracious,
Let Isolde now tell him.


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