Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche

Billy Connolly, in his recent TV programme ‘Made in Scotland’, remarked that whereas in our youth we add to our capacities, when it comes to old age we find capacities being subtracted from us. We don’t see as well, we can’t hear as well, we can’t walk as far, we forget things more and so on.

Slavoj Zizek says, according to the New Statesman, that he doesn’t aspire to happiness because ‘Happiness is for wimps’.

I say, ‘Happiness is for the stupid’.

How can anyone be happy in a world which includes so much suffering and inequality? You either have to ignore the injustices of the world or not know about them to be happy. Either seems to me to be stupid.

Aging is a universal experience, but we each experience it in our own personal and unique way.

I am prompted to write this blog because I have recently experienced a big change in how I perceive myself as a 72 year old male. Before last October I regarded myself as fit and active, though I had had a melanoma several years ago and occasionally I had days when I could feel that my heart was not quite right. I could walk 20 miles in a day without a problem. Until a couple of years ago I was still running having been a runner all my life.  I also enjoyed cycling 30 or more  miles challenging myself to climb some steep hills. I could run and play football with my grandchildren, and playfully chase our spaniel, Bessie.

All that changed after a 21 mile walk in the Peak District on Saturday 29th October (2017). I led  a LDWA walk on the first two legs of the Peak Boundary Walk (devised by the Friends of the Peak District) from Buxton to Hayfield. It’s a challenging walk with some steep climbs, but what made it even tougher was the wind and rain that blew into our faces from about 1pm until the end of the walk. We managed to get to Hayfield in daylight, but only just.

The following day I could feel that my heart was beating very irregularly and fast, and since it was the same on Monday I went to A&E where they assessed my heart. After 8 hours in the hospital I was prescribed beta blockers (Bisoprolol) and a blood thinning agent  (Apixaban 5mg tablets). I was already on a medicine to control my blood pressure (Amlodipine). My life of pharmaceutical dependency had begun.

Jan 5th 1871 R. said 'He is the only living person, apart from Constantin Frantz, who has provided me with something, a positive enrichment of my outlook.’

 April 5th 1871 Prof N reads to me from a work (the Origin and Aim of Greek Tragedy) which he wants to dedicate to R; great delight over that; in it one sees a gifted man imbued with R's ideas in his own way.

 May 22nd Prof Nietzsche tells me that he intends to found a periodical under R.'s auspices

 June 25th Read Prof N's pamphlet with great interest, He is certainly the most outstanding of our friends.

·        By this time in 1870, after his return from the war, Nietzsche had become a trusted friend of the Wagners and as given the task of negotiating with the publisher of Wagner's Life which he had been dictating to Cosima (at the request of the King)

Nietzsche was working on drafts that became The Birth of Tragedy while Wagner was writing Beethoven - in both cases the debt to Schopenhauer is made explicit.

·        N’s comment on Beethoven on 10th Nov was that 'I fear contemporary aestheticians will regard you as a somnambulist whom it be not only inadvisable, but positively dangerous and even impossible to follow’. Wagner taks this asa less than 100% endorsement and takes  serious offence.

·        Yet in a letter to Rhode, Nietzsche says, ‘Wagner’s new book says much of what I want of the future’ (letter to Rhode)

·        An indication of how close Nietzsche was to Richard and Cosima, was that on 24 Dec 1870 he was summoned to Hotel du Lac in Lucerne for secret rehearsal of Siegfried's Idyll.

Nietzsche felt duty bound to contribute and so on August 11 he became a medical orderly in August and contracted dysentery and diphtheria but was invalidated from army by September 4th.

The Wagners became very nationalistic and anti-French. We get a hint of Nietzsche's reticence about the war from Cosima's comment that she tried to arouse Nietzsche's his enthusiasm for Prussia's right to represent Germany.

Nietzsche made clear his dislike of nationalism in his 1882 work The Gay Science:

Nietzsche on nationalism 'we are not nearly "German"  (in the sense in which this word is used at present) to advocate nationalism and race-hatred, or take delight in the national heart-itch and blood poisoning on account of which the nations of Europe are at present bounded off and secluded from one another as if by quarantines. We are too unprejudiced for that, too perverse, too fastidious; also too well-informed, and too much 'travelled'. Gay Science section 377 (1882)

The Wagner's welcomed the young professor, He returned...in all, making 23 visits to Tribschen – Was Wagner a surrogate father? Perhaps, but it was  Schopenhauer who brought them together.

Nietzsche's ambitions to be a composer also, in N's mind but probably not Wagner's, gave them something in common.

A week after his first visit, on Wagner's birthday (May 2nd) he wrote the first of many letters and signed himself 'your most faithful and devoted follower and admirer.' (Hollingdale, 2001 (1965)) p57

Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Wagner can be gauged by this letter to Rhode, written four weeks after meeting RW:

Wagner, as I know him, is a living exemplar of what Schopenhauer calls a genius…I wish we could read his poetic writings together…We could walk the bold, nay, dizzying path of his subversive and constructive aesthetics together, we could let ourselves be carried away by the emotional sweep of his music, by this Schopenhaurian ocean of sound, whose most secret undulation I can sense, so that my listening to Wagner’s music is a jubilant intuition, nay, an amazed finding of myself.’ (Fischer-Dieskau, 1974)(p26)

On 6th June1870 while Nietzsche was staying at Tribschen, Siegfried was born, a momentous day in the life of Richard and Cosima, shared with the young Professor.

Letter to Rhode on 4th Aug 'There dwell in him such uncompromising idealism and deep and affecting humanity'