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Author : Jos Hermans
WAGNER'S HEIR
Upon Wagner's death, Nietzsche writes to Malwida von Meysenbug : "It was hard, very hard, to have been the opponent for six years of one whom one has revered so much and whom one has loved as much as I have loved Wagner" (13.02.1883). What a display of hypocrisy! The first letter Nietzsche writes to Heinrich Köselitz after Wagner's death does not immediately give the impression that this event was close to his heart. He calls Wagner's death "the most important relief that could now happen to me." And as if it were about the disappearance of an obstacle that blocked his way to Bayreuth, he proclaims : "and so I still want to become his heir to a great extent" (19.02.1883)
When one does not know the connections, it will seem very absurd that Nietzsche should suddenly begin to see himself as the heir to the man from whom he has torn himself away and to whom he has only recently hurled malicious reproaches in his Zarathustra. Those who know the history of his passion for Bayreuth understand that he simply wants to pick up the thread that had been broken off in the summer of 1876.
Initially, as a future heir, he hopes to win back to his cause all those whom Wagner took from him. But the ambition extends much further: he soon sees himself as the leader of the Bayreuther Festival. Indeed, the same letter to Köselitz states : "By the way, old friend, the sky has cleared for you too with this death. Several things are now possible, for example that we will sit again in the temple of Bayreuth to listen to you."
That Köselitz takes his mentor's words seriously proves this letter he sends to his fiancée from Venice: "For a long time I stood under the pouring rain in the courtyard of the palace, above the lights and in my imagination the dismay of the Wagner family: the suddenly changed picture of the musical situation in Germany, Wagner's whole life course, his greatness, his weaknesses ( ...) in short, all sorts of things were going on in me, as I stood there more or less as Wagner's son and heir." (Letter to Cäcilie Güsselbauer, 14.02.1883). This Köselitz writes 4 days before Nietzsche mentions his own claims as heir.
Nietzsche is even naive enough to think that Wagner's widow will roll out the carpet for him. With Cosima he always had the best relationship in Tribschen. In Tribschen, Cosima had always been a model of tact and courtesy when the atmosphere once again became tainted after one of Wagner's outbursts. Increasingly addressing his letters and publications to her personally, he also gifted her his Sylvester Night composition. In letters, he proudly calls her "my friend Cosima," and he always felt that because of the smaller age difference, he suited her better than Wagner himself. He yearns for her appreciation and affection, and the Homeric contest he gradually engaged in with Wagner went hand in hand with a contest for Cosima's attention. But Cosima remains a friend, nothing less but also nothing more. By nothing does she betray whether she senses the state of his affection, how she unwittingly awakens his repressed love, how he bumps and hurts himself at the barriers. She sees him primarily through Wagner's eyes and especially appreciates his service to Wagner. When the Wagners leave Tribschen, it marks a low point in his amorous illusions. No doubt he envied Wagner for this woman who played so many roles for him: as a lover, as a housewife, as an apprentice, as a collaborator, as a diplomat. Nietsche's fixation on Cosima, drenched in resignation, jealousy and impotence, will never quite disappear.
LOU VON SALOME
When he meets the 21-year-old Russian Lou von Salome in 1882, he believes he has found his Cosima. He makes several marriage proposals but Lou declines. In his erotic advances, he does not go beyond a kiss. Lou gives him a taste of heaven and hell. One day he takes her to Tribschen. Later Lou will report on this as follows: "For a long time he sat there in silence on the shore of the lake, absorbed in intense memories; then, drawing with his stick in the damp sand, he spoke in a low voice about those bygone times. And when he looked up, he wept." It is certainly not merely nostalgic memories of the Tribschen idyll that move Nietzsche to tears. He must surely also have thought of Cosima, how she interacted with Wagner and what she meant to Wagner, and how his Lou behaved quite differently. Resa von Schirnhofer will also remember a tearful complaint about the loss of their friendship.
Using a piano score, he prepares Lou and his sister for the premiere of Parsifal. The two women travel alone to Bayreuth. When visiting Wahnfried, Lou is said to have dropped mocking remarks about Nietzsche, such as : "He is a madman who does not know what he wants." Subsequent comments by Nietzsche indicate that at the time -probably due to an indiscretion by Wolzogen- Wahnfried would also have gossiped about his anxiously kept secret (the contents of Wagner's letter to Dr. Eiser). Fueled by his jealous sister, he will take Lou to task and also criticize his rival Paul Rée, thus heralding the end of his stormy idyll. About his future pupil, lover and wife he now writes : " This skinny, dirty, smelly monkey with her fake breasts " (letter draft addressed to Georg Rée, brother of Paul Rée, mid-July 1883)
After the traumatic experience with Lou, Nietzsche sets his sights on Cosima again. When news of Wagner's death reaches him, he sends her a letter of condolence. It reads almost like a declaration of love. Between the lines you read how he offers his services to the widow. Nietzsche is so focused on his own ambition that he almost forgets to mention Wagner. In Menschlich, Allzumenschlich he had still called Cosima a "willing sacrificial animal of a genius grown old." Cosima will never answer the letter. It would also have been rather strange if she had responded other than with silence to what she could read between the lines. Nietzsche - as a mentor and a husband - would have been the last person Wagner's widow would have wanted by her side in directing the festival. Cosima wanted to die after her husband's death. Cautious, then increasingly determined, she soon takes the leadership of the festival into her own hands. One of Nietzsche's later letters of insanity will be addressed to "Princess Ariadne, my beloved" (03.01.1889). Upon his admission to the insane asylum in Jena, he will declare to the doctors : "My wife Cosima Wagner brought me here".
It is also at this time that Nietzsche begins to feel accomplished as a philosopher and that he begins to long for disciples. He had always envied Wagner for the mob of followers he managed to rally around him. When Nietzsche meets 27-year-old Heinrich von Stein in August 1884, he is over the moon. But Stein is a Wagnerian pure and simple, and when 4 months later he asks Nietzsche to collaborate on a Wagner-Lexikon, a bitter disillusionment follows. It takes Nietzsche 4 months to answer the request with his characteristic arrogance: "What would you think of me if I said that I deplore Richard Wagner as much as I despise him? You would think I was mad. It is my fate to show myself only under masks (...) I like you very much; only you must want to be a serious poet and not an aesthetician and philosopher (...) As for Richard Wagner, about whom your letter speaks: he is one of the people I have loved most and also deplored most. But I never confuse or compare myself with him: he belongs to an entirely different kind of people - and especially to the great actors."
A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM
In the pamphlet Der Fall Wagner Nietzsche's obsession with music plays an essential role. Der Fall is not least the revenge of an aggrieved dilettante on the music of his mortal enemy. While he does not tire of propagating a bright, lighthearted "music of the South," his own later compositions represent the crass opposite in their melancholy and dark pathos. Even Köselitz is visibly troubled by it. To his girlfriend he writes : "Nietzsche comes home and plays his heavy music, which I cannot quite bear. To the devil with these terrible sounds." (to Cäcilie Gusselbauer, June 5, 1884)
Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Köselitz soon escalates into a jubilant proclamation: "Here is a new Mozart - I have no other feeling: beauty, warmth, fullness, abundance of invention and the lightness of contrapuntal mastery - these have never been found together so much, I can already hear no other music. How shabby, artificial and theatrical all Wagnerian music sounds to my ears now!" (Letter to Overbeck, 10.11.1882)
It is a wonderful spectacle, the desperate persistence with which Nietzsche urges his friend and especially himself to believe in his genius. Possessed by revenge against Wagner, he now forces his friend into the role of an angel of revenge, a role that poor Köselitz is not up to. To Overbeck he writes : "His music is a matter of the first order, of Mozartian goodness and transfiguration, the master Richard cannot match it." (07.05.1885). To Malwida von Meysenbug: "I praise the brave and innocent music of my pupil and friend Peter Gast (Heinrich Köselitz), a true musician: he may one day see to it that the gentlemen stage players and sham geniuses no longer spoil the taste" (26.03.1885). To Hermann Levi he writes: " I believe that there can be a hundred times better music than Wagner's (...) This leads me to recommend to you a friend (...) Gently whispered in your ear: this musician, Mr. Peter Gast, seems to me the new Mozart". (10.11.1882)
The new Mozart is burned down by Levi in Cosima's diaries as an "absolutely incompetent musician." Köselitz's opera Der Löwe von Venedig Nietzsche tries to sell to the Dresden conductor Ernst Schuch, to Felix Mottl, to Arthur Nikisch. All to no avail. To Mottl he writes: "I predict that this opera will be a success like Carmen was." After Mottl's thank you note he tries to console Köselitz by saying, "I maintain that I am right about your music and not Mr. Mottl (...) For the time being it is Wagnerianism that stands in your way." (21.04.1886)
Possessed to the very last with the ambition of being recognized as a composer, Nietzsche publishes his Hymnus an das Leben in 1887. He sends fifteen copies to prominent conductors and composers including Brahms, Levi, Mottl, Riedl and also to Bülow. To the latter he writes: "There was a time when you pronounced the most just death sentence on a piece of mine that is possible in rebus musicis et musicantibus. And now, in spite of everything, I dare to send you something again (...) Moreover, it is possible that as a musician I have also learned something in the last ten years." Bülow no longer finds it worth responding and has his second wife send a thank you. Incidentally, Nietzsche does not mention that the instrumentation was performed not by himself but by Köselitz.
In his notes of the spring of 1888 we find the following : "The best modern opera is my friend Heinrich Köselitz's opera, the only one free of Wagner's Germany (...) The second best opera is Bizet's Carmen - which is almost free of it; the third best is Wagner's Meistersinger." However, not without adding, "a masterpiece of dilettantism in music ". Boccaccio, an operetta by Franz von Suppé, brings tears to his eyes. Another discovery is Jacques Offenbach : "French music, with a Voltairean spirit, free, exuberant, with a little sardonic grin, but bright, witty to the point of banality."
DER FALL WAGNER
In 1988 the first real Wagner polemic Der Fall Wagner follows in which Wagner's art is denounced in a literarily brilliant way but which, looking back from the 20th century, with history as an ally, can rarely be taken seriously. Nietzsche's taste is the taste of a dilettante who has narrowed down to Bizet, Rossini, Chopin and Peter Gast in the ludicrous role of "the new Mozart." Nietzsche is a mere shadow of himself when he has abandoned all reason and his astute gaze seems to reach no further than his own obsessions. The unending melody he calls "the polyp in music," the Germanic myths he calls "Scandinavian unbeasts."
One must imagine Nietzsche's situation when he decides to publish Der Fall Wagner in the spring of 1888: his contest with Wagner could not have been worse. He, who saw himself as his rival's heir to the throne upon his death, had fallen from one disillusionment into another. Cosima and Bayreuth abandoned him. Of pupils there was no trace. The death of Heinrich von Stein had once again opened an old wound, and the decline of the "Wagnerei," which he had already believed to be a fact in 1885, had remained a pious hope. Instead, the old master had gained in importance and left his opponent far behind. He himself is still best known for Die Geburt der Tragödie and for the festive address. His other books did not sell at all. Gottfried Keller noted in 1887 that Nietzsche's name was "virtually absent from German periodicals." He has not forgotten the failure of the Sylvesternacht and Manfred. All his efforts to eclipse the Bayreuther with his own compositions failed grandly. All his attempts to unbalance the musician Wagner through an antagonist have failed. Nietzsche has clearly come to a dead end.
In the midst of this depressing period, a letter (03.04 1888) from the Danish literary historian Georg Brandes reaches him informing him of his intention to organize a series of lectures on his work. Dr. Georg Brandes is professor of literature at the University of Copenhagen and bearer of some prestige throughout Europe. He writes in several important newspapers and lectures in Moscow, Petersburg, Warsaw. For Nietzsche, the sun goes up. When Brandes announces the great success of his lectures on April 29, Nietzsche becomes euphoric. His self-esteem gets a boost and the need to demonstrate his new nimbus to his old rival, a dead musician, suddenly becomes a whole lot more urgent. "I am in a good mood (...) a little pamphlet about music keeps my fingers busy," he writes to Köselitz on April 20, 1988. It is very likely that the news of Brandes triggered the publication of Der Fall.
THUS SPOKE HANSLICK
The book appears on August 16, 1888. For many years Nietzsche has collected arguments against Wagner and his music, a whole arsenal in which he drew not only on Hanslick's reviews but also on the books of the French author Paul Bourget. Here, among other things, he found the concept of "décadence" that Bourget applied to the French authors of Romanticism. The illuminating critical-analytical spotlight that the Frenchman focuses on French Romanticism and its literary representatives in his Essais is projected by Nietzsche onto Wagner (whom Bourget does not mention in the above-mentioned essays) : "I find it far from innocent to watch how this décadent spoils our health - and music! (...) For he is a great ruiner of music". In his exorcist ecstasy, the self-proclaimed connoisseur proclaims, "Wagner's music (...) is just bad music, the worst music perhaps ever made."
The rest he finds in Hanslick. Nietzsche's music criticism in Der Fall consists mainly of brilliant restatements of ideas he had read elsewhere. Large parts of Der Fall are an overconfident Hanslick paraphrase. Manfred Eger devotes 15 pages to the analysis of Hanslick's texts and their similarities to the concepts used by Nietzsche. Hanslick himself was unsympathetic to the author of Also sprach Zarathustra : "Whoever, after reading this book (...) can seriously claim that Nietzsche was then still in his right mind cannot be helped." In 1894 he will say of the pamphleteer Nietzsche that his "strange book Der Fall Wagner was denounced by the Wagner party as a sign of incipient mental confusion, although it is much more clearly, wisely and convincingly written than the Wagner hymns of Nietzsche's earlier period." That Hanslick got along with Nietzsche should not be surprising as the arguments in Der Fall came from himself. Why didn't he see that himself? Manfred Eger believes that he did not want to let himself be known as a forerunner of Nietzsche who was like a red rag to his friend Billroth.
On September 18, 1903, Cosima will write to H.S. Chamberlain: " In the end we had been so mistaken about Nietzsche, for he had not a drop of his own blood, only a strange gift of appropriation." In doing so, she was varying what Wagner had said shortly before his death, "Nietzsche had no thoughts of his own, no blood of his own, everything was foreign blood poured into him. " (Diary, 04.02.1883)
To Malwida von Meysenbug she wrote how she had noticed his lack of originality. To Felix Mottl: " I believe that for every one of Nietzsche's statements you can prove where he got it from. The collected writings of Wagner, Schopenhauer, the Indians, the Greeks, the Encyclopedists, the English Humorists "(09.09.1900)
Hardly had the manuscript been sent to the publisher or Nietzsche made another attempt to market Der Löwe von Venedig. In August, he offers the opera to Bülow for performance in Hamburg. Bülow remains silent. After 4 months of silence, Nietzsche releases all brakes: "Dear Sir! You have not answered my letter. You will enjoy rest once and for all, I promise you. I think you know that the first spirit of our time has made you a wish. " (09.10.1888). Next to the word "rest," Bülow draws a cross and notes in the margin, "Iddio sia lodato! - Thank God!" Not only is his relationship with Bülow now definitively over, he must now bury his hopes for a performance of Der Löwe. Never will he experience a performance of the opera.
Nietzsche himself calls Der Fall a "brilliant pamphlet," elsewhere an "overconfident farce." Brandes, too, is forwarded a copy with the description "my attack on Wagner." The booklet causes some commotion all over Europe, as far away as America. The first 1,000 copies are soon exhausted. It is his first sales success since Die Geburt der Tragödie. Responses are divided. Not only Wagnerians think Nietzsche has gone too far. Theodor Billroth, an outspoken anti-wagnerian and close friend of Hanslick, calls Nietzsche "a nervous yapper." Josef Widmann, another vehemently anti-wagnerian, who 2 years before had lavishly praised Jenseits von Gut und Böse, now calls Nietzsche a "pen-pusher" and asks " whether a man who for years, as he himself admits, was one of the most corrupt wagnerians, should really announce his recovery and his departure from such a community by means of a public retreat in such a remarkably theatrical manner? There is also such a thing as shame in spiritual matters."
Malwida von Meysenbug: "I am of the opinion that one should not treat an old love, even if it is extinct, as one treated Wagner; one insults oneself (...) The phrase "buffoon" for Wagner and Liszt is downright abominable." (mid-October 1888). Josef Hofmiller calls Der Fall "a pamphlet by a dilettante who pretends to be a connoisseur." And furthermore, " Der Fall Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner contribute nothing to our knowledge about Wagner. They do, however, contribute much to our knowledge about Nietzsche."
"Is there anything more chilling in all intellectual and spiritual history than, after the days in Tribschen, the denials and self-denials of der Fall Wagner?" Ernst Bertram wonders in Nietzsche-Versuch einer Mythologie (1918).