The Case of Wagner

Towards the end of Götterdämmerung, the last opera of Wagner’s Ring cycle, Brünnhilde, standing on a rock and surrounded by the flames of the funeral pyre of Siegfried, is holding the cursed ring. She apostrophizes, murmuring to Wotan that he can rest at last, and that she will restore the ring to Rhine and put an end to the drama and the gods.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his book, The Case of Wagner, published in 1888:

And I was even one of the most corrupted Wagnerians… I took Wagner seriously… Oh, this old magician! How he had us all taken in! The first thing his art presents us with is a magnifying glass: you look through it and you do not believe your eyes - everything looks big, even Wagner looks big . . . What a clever rattlesnake! All his life he rattled on at us about ‘sacrifice’, ‘loyalty’, ‘purity’, he withdrew from the corrupted world with a praise to chastity! […] I still need to tell the story of the Ring. This is the right place for it. It is a story of redemption too: only this time it is Wagner who gets redeemed. - For half of his life, Wagner believed in the Revolution as only a Frenchman could. He looked for it in the runic language of myth, he thought he had found the archetypal revolutionary in Siegfried. ‘‘Where do all the world’s problems come from?”, Wagner asked himself. “From old contracts”, he answered, like any ideologue of the revolution. In plain language: from customs, laws, morals, institutions, from everything the old world, the old society, is based on. ‘‘How do you get rid of all these problems? How do you abolish the old society?’’ Only by declaring war on ‘contracts’ (tradition, morality). This is what Siegfried does. He gets started early, very early: his origin already amounts to a declaration of war on morality - he comes into the world through adultery, through incest . . . This is not the saga - Wagner invented this radical streak; he corrected the saga on this point … Siegfried kept going the way he began: he always followed his first impulses, he overthrew all tradition, all respect, all fear. He strikes down whatever he does not like. He knocked down all the old deities without the least sign of respect. But his main enterprise was the emancipation of woman - ‘‘the redemption of Brünnhilde’’ … Siegfried and Brünnhilde; the sacrament of free love; the dawn of the golden age; the twilight of the gods, as far as the old morality is concerned - all wickedness has been abolished … For a long time, Wagner’s ship ran gaily along this course. There is no doubt that this is where Wagner looked for his highest goal. What happened? A misfortune. The ship hit a reef; Wagner was stranded. The reef was Schopenhauer’s philosophy; Wagner was stranded on a contrary worldview. What had he set to music? Optimism. Wagner was ashamed of himself. Even worse, an optimism that Schopenhauer had coined a nasty epithet for - reckless optimism. He was ashamed of himself all over again. He thought long and hard, his situation seemed desperate … Finally, a solution dawned on him: the reef he had broken down on, what if he interpreted it as the goal, the secret intent, the true meaning of the journey? To be shipwrecked right here - that was a goal too. And he translated the Ring into Schopenhauerian. Everything goes wrong, everything is a disaster, the new world is just as bad as the old one: - Nothingness, the Indian Circe beckons … Brünnhilde, who, according to the old conception, was to say goodbye with a song in honour of free love, leaving the world to the hope of a socialist utopia where ‘‘all will be well’’, is now given some thing else to do. She has to study Schopenhauer first; she has to set the fourth book of the World as Will and Representation to verse. Wagner was redeemed … In all seriousness, this was a redemption. Wagner has a lot to thank Schopenhauer for. It took the philosopher of decadence to give the artist of decadence himself – The artist of decadence - that’s the term for it. And this is where my seriousness begins. I am not going to look helplessly on while this decadent ruins our health - and our music at the same time! Is Wagner even a person? Isn’t he really just a sickness? He makes everything he touches sick, - he has made music sick.

But also Nietzsche, a few more paragraphs later:

[…] Wagner is admirable and gracious only in the invention of what is smallest, in spinning out the details. Here one is entirely justified in proclaiming him a master of the first rank, as our greatest miniaturist in music who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of sense and sweetness. His wealth of colors, of half shadows, of the secrecies of dying light spoils one to such an extent that afterward almost all other musicians seem too robust […] Quite apart from the hypnotist and fresco-painter Wagner, there is another Wagner who lays aside small gems: our greatest melancholiac in music, full of glances, tendernesses, and comforting words in which nobody has anticipated him, the master in tones of a heavy-hearted and drowsy happiness. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner (1888).