Month: June 2025

This is the second excerpt from my upcoming book titled The Initiation of Nietzsche. For anybody who has not read the previous post in this series, the text below should make some sense, but it does build on the earlier argument. For the best reading experience, you might consider reading the earlier post first. With that said, here is the second excerpt.

*****

To answer the question which guides this book, What was the true nature of the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner and what role did it play in Nietzsche’s life?, we need to set aside the biases that we bring to the matter, including and especially the aforementioned error of taking the end state as the definitive truth. To overcome this bias, we do not merely need to pay closer attention to the circumstances or events that occurred during the relationship, we need a framework to understand the meaning of those events. Indeed, it is the application of this framework to the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner that will be the sole contribution of this book to our understanding of the two men. This book contains no new evidence, no new translations of the German, no new information at all that has not been covered by other commentators or contained in biographies and compilations of letters and notes. What we will provide is a new framework of understanding. In Nietzschean terms, this book is a re-evaluation and it implies a new philosophy of how human development works.

The name of that philosophical framework is archetypology. As the name suggests, archetypology places the concept of the archetype at the centre of analysis. The theory is inspired by the work on archetypes introduced primarily by the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung. Archetypology posits that there are four main stages of development we go through in life. We name these stages according to four archetypes: the Child, the Orphan, the Adult, and the Elder. Each of these maps to the biological terms of childhood, adolescence, maturity, and senescence, but the core notion of archetypology is that the archetypes are not merely biological or psychological in nature. They are integral. We can think of each archetype as a complex symbol that points to biological, socio-cultural, and psychological truths. For example, the Child phase of life has distinctive biological properties, but it also has distinctive psychological and socio-cultural properties. These are all aligned with each other and therefore form a natural unit of analysis.

By segmenting the human lifecycle into these four archetypes, we are able to identify and understand the unique qualities that each phase of life denotes. We are also able to understand the progression that occurs, including the difficult transitions between the archetypes. When archetypology is applied to analysing the life of an individual, our first task is to identify which of the archetypal phases they are going through. In relation to historical figures such as Nietzsche and Wagner, this helps us overcome the natural error of judging earlier events by the standards of later ones. When we apply archetypology to the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship, we ask which archetype each man was manifesting during the relationship. The answer is surprisingly clean-cut. We can see that Nietzsche first met Wagner just as he was graduating from university and was about to enter the Adult phase of life. Furthermore, we know that Nietzsche first encountered Wagner’s music right at the beginning of the Orphan phase of his life i.e. the early teenage years. Since teenagers, and teenage boys in particular, are eager for heroes, it makes sense that Wagner became a hero to Nietzsche during the Orphan years of his life.

By contrast, Wagner was in the mature Adult phase of his life when he first met the young university student, and he had no prior knowledge or expectations of Nietzsche. It’s easy for us to understand why Nietzsche was interested in a potential relationship with Wagner but not so easy to understand why Wagner reciprocated. In fact, there is no evidence that Wagner had any desire for an ongoing relationship with the younger man after their initial, unexpected meeting. This seemingly minor detail has enormous ramifications for the manner in which the relationship would proceed and especially the way it would end. It is not an exaggeration to say that the evolution of the whole relationship can be found here. Of all the asymmetries between the men we mentioned earlier, this will be the most important one: Nietzsche was looking for an Elder but Wagner was not looking for an Orphan. This makes sense. Why would a famous and accomplished middle-aged composer of operas be interested in a student of philology?

Of course, there is a far more to it than that, and it will take an entire book to work through the ramifications of this seemingly insignificant detail. In doing so, we will show the power of archetypology as a method of biographical analysis which works by placing the relationship between the two men into their respective phases of life. Nietzsche first heard of Wagner as a young teen, he first met him as a young man, and his final writings on Wagner occurred when he was in middle age, just weeks before his descent into madness. Although our focus will mostly be on Nietzsche in the pages ahead, it is also true that the relationship had profound implications for Wagner. Indeed, we will make the case near the end of the book that his final opera, Parsifal, was born out of the Nietzsche relationship.

Still, as just noted, Nietzsche is our main focus and so let’s begin by sketching out the period of his life that led up to his first meeting with Wagner.

***

We begin with the Child phase of Nietzsche’s life, which is difficult because we have the least amount of information about this time. However, there were two dramatic events that occurred when Nietzsche was still a young boy. The first was the death of his father when he was five and then the subsequent passing of his brother almost immediately afterwards. It’s very difficult to know how much of an impact this had on Nietzsche. Some commentators have used his father’s death to speculate that Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner had an Oedipal dimension to it, since Wagner was about the same age. One piece of evidence against this reading is that Nietzsche very rarely mentioned his father in both his philosophy and his personal writings. For a writer who was so open about his inner thoughts in most other areas of his life, this absence signals that his father’s death was not an ongoing problem for the older Nietzsche. By contrast, Nietzsche never stopped writing about Wagner. In fact, two of his last three books had the composer as their main theme.

One important outcome of the untimely death of his father and brother was that Nietzsche spent most of his childhood raised as the sole male in female-dominated homes. Despite achieving independence later on, his mother and sister remained pervasive influences throughout his life. Indeed, they became his primary caregivers when he later lost his mind. This was certainly an important influence on Nietzsche and may explain, among other things, his inability to form romantic relationships with women. In the case of Nietzsche’s failed attempt at courting Lou Salome, both his mother and sister were actively involved in subverting that relationship.

Nevertheless, all these seem to be minor points. The overall impression we get is that Nietzsche’s Child phase of life had no extraordinary influence on his later development. By contrast, the developments that occurred at the beginning of Nietzsche’s Orphan phase were crucial to his later identity. The name of the Orphan archetype derives from the fact that the primary mission of this time of life is to separate from our parents and begin to forge an independent identity that will reach maturity during the Adult phase. Nietzsche’s life shows us a prime example of this since he was able to escape the female-dominated household of his childhood by receiving a scholarship to study at the prestigious Schulpforta. Because the school was too far away from home for daily travel, Nietzsche became a boarder, and this gave him a physical separation from his mother and sister. Schulpforta was also renowned for the subject that Nietzsche would later become a professor of: philology. In both respects, this was a major turning point in his life. 

The Orphan phase of life is the beginning of the development of the full range of identities that we carry into adulthood. For analytical purposes, we can divide that identity formation into several categories. One of these follows from the onset of biological maturity, and that is our sexual identity. Most societies have strict regulations around the expression of sexuality in young teens with the intention of channelling the sexual instinct into marriage. In the post-war West, we have largely thrown away the rule book, but that was definitely not the case when Nietzsche came of age. The Victorian era was notorious for its repressive attitudes towards sexuality, and even though these were less restrictive for young men than their female counterparts, the result was much the same. Especially in the case of the educated and upper classes of society, sexuality began with marriage, and marriage did not take place until the individual had established themselves in society. In short, sexual identity did not begin to develop until the Adult phase of life. Nietzsche made two famously clumsy attempts to get married later, but during the Orphan years, he had next to no contact with females. Schulpforta was an all-boys school, and women were not allowed to study at university during this time. As a result, Nietzsche would never properly develop a sexual identity.

The other domains of identity outside the family are the economic, political, and military ones. For each of these, the Orphan phase of life represents an apprenticeship period. No society expects its Orphans to instantly transition from childhood to adulthood. There must be a time when we learn and build up our skills. Thus, the Orphan phase of life manifests in the socio-cultural domain as a time of education and training, and seemingly all cultures have a set of predefined roles, both formal and informal, to demarcate this fact. Common terms for the Orphan include ‘student’, ‘apprentice’, ‘novice’, ‘trainee’, ‘recruit’, ‘learner’, ‘beginner’, ‘debutant’, ‘fledgling’, or ‘probationer’. Note that almost all of these terms imply a relationship with another person. A student implies a teacher. An army recruit implies a drill sergeant. A trainee implies a trainer, and so on. If all of the former roles pertain to what we have called the archetypal Orphan, all of the latter pertain to the archetype of the Elder. Thus, the Orphan-Elder relationship in all its variations is a crucial component of the Orphan phase of life. Our separation from our parents coincides with the beginning of these Orphan-Elder relationships.

There is one other domain of identity we have not yet mentioned, and that is the religious. The anthropological literature tells us that most cultures have religious ceremonies and practices that mark the onset of the Orphan phase of life. These can take a wide variety of forms, but we can say that the main purpose of any religious initiation is the communication of the core meanings of the culture. These are inculcated via rites of passage and also by stories and myths. In the modern West, we also communicate our core values through the scholarly-style instruction provided in the education system. Thus, Nietzsche’s education at the Schulpforta was primarily religious in the broadest meaning of that term. It occurred at a time when mass education was not yet fully-developed. Thus we would say that Nietzsche was working towards the mature archetype of the Scholar-Monk that had existed since the medieval period in Europe. (In this respect, an unspoken vow of chastity makes sense).

If we now apply these considerations directly to the life of Nietzsche, we find that the beginning of the Orphan phase of his life was marked by two primary forms of initiation. The first was his induction into high school, which was an intense and difficult transition involving the military-style practices of the 19th-century Prussian education system. The second form of initiation would have been his Confirmation ceremony at the Lutheran church of which he was a member. Confirmation is the coming-of-age ceremony given to Christians. The purpose of the rite is to instil the Holy Spirit in the initiate. It also marks a change of status within the congregation as the individual begins working towards full membership, i.e. adult status. In both of Nietzsche’s initiations, we can identify the Elder whose role was to induct him. In the case of high school, that would have been his teachers. In the case of the church, the priest or bishop is the Elder who initiates the Orphans during the rite of Confirmation.

Since it will become crucial later in our analysis, let us now give a formal definition of the role of the Elder. The Elder is responsible for the initiation of an Orphan into an institution of society with an associated duty of care to the younger person to train, educate, and guide them to full membership in that institution. Institutions can be both highly formal or highly informal in nature. The army is a classic example of a formal institution, while voluntary and ad hoc associations are examples of informal ones. In both cases, however, the Elder archetype is fulfilled by the individual who has the authority to grant admission and who subsequently initiates the Orphan. Since many formal institutions have an internal hierarchy of command, we can also distinguish between the Elders in leadership roles who have ultimate responsibility versus the lower-level Elders who are responsible for day-to-day activities. For example, a general is an Elder with ultimate authority to grant admission to new recruits to the army, while the drill sergeant is the lower-level Elder who is responsible for the actual training of those recruits.

Every Orphan initiation into an institution implies a change of identity for the individual, even for seemingly minor examples. In more extreme cases, the change of identity can be far more dramatic. Let’s take the example of the initiation of an army recruit.

The recruit must leave their civilian identity at the front gate. Normal, everyday clothing is exchanged for combat fatigues. For those with inappropriate hairstyles, a new haircut is in order, probably involving a short razor. New forms of address are learned. New forms of behaviour are inculcated. In highly formal environments like the army, the exoteric, outward-facing identity of the recruit is strictly determined, and all recruits are expected to live up to the mark. In some sense, we might say that the army denies or suppresses the esoteric or inner identity of the trainee. But another way to look at it is that the esoteric identity must conform to the exoteric. Whatever the recruit happens to feel about the training being given to them is irrelevant. What is relevant is that they do as they are told i.e. that their exoteric behaviour matches expectations. We might more accurately say that the recruit must reconfigure their esoteric identity to develop the discipline and determination required to maintain the exoteric behaviour required of them. The recruit is required to learn a completely new set of exoteric behaviours as well as the esoteric states that facilitate them. There is both an exoteric and esoteric reconfiguration. Because this new form of identity does not come naturally, it must be learned by the recruit (the Orphan archetype), and it must be strictly taught by the drill sergeant (the Elder archetype). 

Nietzsche would go through army training in his early twenties in accordance with the laws of Prussian society at that time. However, as we have already alluded to, his high school initiation was already of military-grade intensity. We must remember that this was the 19th century, and the Prussian discipline that had earned its military a fearsome reputation also manifested itself in the way in which education was conducted. Nietzsche’s school regime required him to rise at 4am to be ready for the start of class an hour later. Classes continued through the day and into the evening before an early bedtime of 9pm. Saturdays were also school days, with only Sunday reserved for rest. The teenage Nietzsche initially struggled to get used to this military-style education, but once the difficult period of adjustment was over, he excelled, and it was this environment which prepared him for his meteoric rise through the ranks of academic philology later.

Part of the purpose of these Orphan initiations is to demarcate the beginning of a new phase of life, one that is explicitly separate from the Child years. To reiterate, the reason why the archetype is called the Orphan is because it implies a break with the parents. This break is normally made in the psychological and socio-cultural domains, but in the case of Nietzsche there was a physical dimension to it as well since he was living away from home. In short, Nietzsche received the kind of initiation that matches what the anthropological literature tells us is common for young men across cultures. He was physically separated from family life and thrust into a new way of living. He was initiated into an institution of society that had a strong scholarly ethic. The Elders of that institution held its students to a very high standard; obedience and discipline were paramount. Nietzsche excelled in this environment which prepared him directly for university where he would become one of the most promising young philologists of his era.

Alongside his formal education, we have also seen his enthusiasm for extracurricular activities such as the aforementioned club Germania that he founded with a couple of schoolmates. This was a setting where the young men could present their own creative works of music, poetry etc. while also discussing leading figures of the day. Alongside the discovery of Wagner, Nietzsche was also reading popular new thinkers such as Feuerbach and David Strauss, who were directly challenging the dominance of the Church. This more self-directed education would have major implications for Nietzsche later on when it led him to renounce Christianity. But before we discuss those dramatic events, let’s first examine how the Orphan initiation fits more broadly into how cultures propagate themselves.

I’m pleased to report that my next book, whose working title is The Initiation of Nietzsche, is coming along swimmingly. In fact, it’s been an absolute joy to write. So, I thought that it would be a good idea to try something a little different and release the first couple of chapters of the book in advance. If my calculations are correct, this should break down into eight blog-sized posts or two months of reading. Barring unforeseen circumstances, the whole book should be available for purchase by the time we’re through. So, without further ado, here is the first excerpt.

***

Let’s begin this book with a thought experiment. We’ll pretend that neither Richard Wagner nor Friedrich Nietzsche were famous men but that everything else about their relationship remained the same. In this alternative world, two ordinary, non-famous individuals meet for the first time. The elder one is fifty-five years old and the younger one is twenty-four. The older man has a family and a successful career, while the younger is just coming to the end of a university degree. What sort of relationship could we expect to form between them? That would obviously depend on the context. It may be that the younger man is trying to enter the same field as the older. In that case, the older man might become an employer or some kind of mentor to the younger. Another option is that the two men happen to live in the same area and make acquaintance while passing each other’s houses or seeing each other around town. A third option would be some kind of family connection that brings them together, e.g. a relation via marriage.

However this relationship between our two hypothetical men begins, it is simply a fact that a generation gap exists between the two that will inevitably exert its influence. Barring any special circumstances, we can assume that the older man will have more resources, more connections, and an established place in society, while the younger man, who has not even graduated university, is likely to have none of those. The older man will almost certainly have more and varied life experiences than the younger man who is still going through his education. These factors form the background dynamic between the two and they dictate that the most probable relationship to emerge between the men will be a mentor-protégé one. This is true whether the relationship is formal or informal in nature. It follows from the fact that the older man has already done what the young man is only getting ready to do. He has established his career, gotten married, had children, and become involved in politics or religion or any of the activities undertaken by adults in his culture. A mentor-protégé relationship between the two men doesn’t need to be formalised or even consciously understood by the participants. It would follow naturally from the differences between them.

For these same reasons, a genuine friendship between two such men would be highly unlikely because a friendship implies a relationship between equals, where equality can relate to social standing, financial status, emotional maturity, and perhaps most importantly, life experience. Especially for the young man, a friend is somebody with whom he can share the experiences of that phase of life as an equal. The kinds of experiences that the young university student is likely to undertake with his friends are almost certainly not going to be participated in by a fifty-five-year-old, not just because of the social awkwardness that would obtain but because the older man is unlikely to be interested. He’s been there and done that, and, in any case, he now has a reputation to uphold and a family to think about. Unlike the younger man, he has something to lose.

If we accept these general truths about the kind of relationship that can exist between two men separated by a generation gap, then returning to the specific pairing between Nietzsche and Wagner, we can add more cultural context to enhance our perspective. Nietzsche and Wagner lived in Victorian-era Prussia, not exactly a society that was known for its free and easy-going cultural norms. In fact, it was a culture in which obedience to authority, including the authority of elders, was inculcated from a young age. Parents expected to be obeyed by their children, school teachers expected to be obeyed by their students, and an older man in a relationship with a younger would expect his authority to be recognised too, even in an informal setting. That would have been true in general, but it would have been even more true if the older man was a recognised master in his field, as Wagner was. We have to remember that the almost insolent attitude that post-war Western culture has towards age and experience did not exist in the 19th century and certainly not in Germany.

Of course, when any group in society has a default power advantage over another, it inevitably happens that the powerful group abuses that dynamic. It is a curious coincidence then that, in all of Wagner’s mature operas, the use and misuse of the power dynamic between an older and a younger man sits at the core of the drama. King Marke’s domination of Tristan destroys the love between him and Isolde and leads to both their deaths. Although the ages are not precisely specified, we can be very sure that Hagen is the older man who uses his experience to bring down the younger Siegfried in the final opera of the Ring Cycle. The plot of Die Meistersinger revolves around the middle-aged Beckmesser trying to elbow aside his younger rival, Walther, in a contest over who gets to marry the young Eva. In Lohengrin, we see an almost identical dynamic to Meistersinger, with the titular hero set against a more experienced and well-connected adversary in Telramund. In The Flying Dutchman, the titular hero is the more experienced campaigner who steals the love of the young woman Senta from her contemporary Erik. Finally, the plot of Parsifal begins with the experienced Grail knight, Gurnemanz, sending the young hero away in a rage at his inability to understand a complex religious ceremony that has been conducted before him. Parsifal is made to wander alone and face his adversaries without the training or guidance of a teacher.

Part of the enormous appeal that Wagner’s operas had in his day surely came from the fact that the intergenerational conflict presented in his operas mirrored the broader social and political context. In the aftermath of Napoleon, the revolutionary spirit that still burned brightly in the hearts of the younger generations was severely repressed by the established powers of that era, primarily Prussia and Austria. This repression gave rise to a number of rebellions and uprisings, including the one in Dresden in 1849 that Wagner directly participated in and which would see him sent into a long period of exile. In his public and private writings, Wagner railed against what he saw as the dull, unimaginative, and moribund state not just of opera but of German culture altogether. From his perspective, the repression of the older generation was not just holding back political progress but cultural progress through the arts. Wagner saw himself and his contemporaries as the younger man being oppressed by the older, and it’s clear that this belief flowed through into his operas.

Putting all this together, considering the default general asymmetry in a relationship between a twenty-four-year-old and a fifty-five-year-old and considering the social and cultural factors of 19th-century Germany that exacerbated this asymmetry, it should strike us as strange that the default analysis made by commentators on the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche has been that they were “friends”. Not only was Wagner the older man with all the general advantages that we have just discussed, he was also a famous man and a man whose fame was growing. As if all that wasn’t enough, there are the personal factors involved. Wagner had one of the most dominating personalities of his age. He could be charming and witty but also abrasive and hurtful. He demanded loyalty and commanded attention. He did so not just among general company but even among some of the most distinguished and powerful people of his time, including the young king of Bavaria. Many of those people, who were highly accomplished in their own lives, fell under his spell and remained faithful to him even as he treated them appallingly. So, we must ask the question again and even more forcefully: why have seemingly all commentators on the Wagner-Nietzsche relationship taken the default position that the two men were “friends” when there are so many factors against such a reading and almost none in favour of it?

One of the primary reasons is certainly a bias that Nietzsche himself wrote about in his later philosophy. He said that we judge peoples, nations, and events based on their finished state. We judge ancient Greece based on the golden age of Athens. We judge Rome based on the achievements of the imperium. We judge individuals based on the peak achievements attained during the mature phase of their life. We use the properties of this end state to judge all prior states that led up to it. When we apply this bias to Wagner and Nietzsche, our starting point is a relationship between a great composer and a great philosopher. Since these epithets imply a level of equality, we assume a relationship of friendship must have existed between the two men, since friendship is based on equality. But this is the exact error Nietzsche was talking about. We take the end state as the basis for the whole analysis. When Nietzsche met Wagner for the first time, he was not a great philosopher. He was not a recognised philosopher at all. By contrast, Wagner was already considered a great composer, including by Nietzsche himself. From the very beginning, there was not equality but asymmetry.

This error of starting at the end also applies to the way in which commentators have allowed Nietzsche’s own writing to cloud the issue of the relationship with Wagner. Nietzsche’s later writings are considered his greatest. In fact, they are considered some of the great writings of Western philosophy. Every one of them was written after Nietzsche’s break with Wagner, and most of them contain the scathing critique of the composer that Nietzsche made in his later years, labelling him a decadent. The forcefulness of this critique in Nietzsche’s classic works has led readers to believe that this was Nietzsche’s “true” opinion of Wagner. Starting from that proposition, many analysts have gone off in search of evidence for this same attitude in Nietzsche’s earlier works, even finding sentences in the 1876 essay Richard Wagner in Bayreuth which they claim show that Nietzsche had already begun to dissociate from the composer. But even if such sentences exist (if they do, I couldn’t find them), this would not negate the fact that Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is a gushing hagiography whose closest parallel can only be found in the gospels. Any marginal criticism that Nietzsche made of Wagner in that work is completely overshadowed by that fact. The real question of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is why Nietzsche felt the need to lavish such effusive praise on Wagner and why he just happened to do so right before the famous falling out between the two men.

But even these questions commit the error of judging events based on the end state. Nietzsche’s explicit criticisms of Wagner only show up in his later writings. Because those works are considered classics, their content is assumed to be “superior” or “more truthful” than what came before. Some take this attitude so far as to write off the earlier works as irrelevant. No less an authority than one of Nietzsche’s foremost English translators, R.J. Hollingdale, labelled the early philosophy of Nietzsche a “false start”. But, to say it one more time, this is the exact error of thinking that Nietzsche himself pointed out. It denies the process of becoming. Therefore, it denies the way in which all of us actually develop in our lives. It would be like saying that Michaelangelo’s early sculptures were a false start or Wagner’s early operas were a false start. That’s not how human development works. Our early attempts are never as good as our mature ones, but without those earlier efforts, we would never get anywhere at all. Such things cannot be a false start because there is no other way to start, unless one is a savant.

Nietzsche was not a savant. His early philosophy constituted the foundation for his mature works, and Wagner was crucial in his development, not just as an inspiration but as a public defender of his early writing. And here we get a glimpse of the real relationship that existed between the two men at the beginning, not at the end. As a first approximation, we can say it was a mentor-protégé relationship, although, as we will see shortly, there was something much more fundamental and important going on. What we need to do if we want to understand this strange relationship between a famous composer and a young university student is to take a leaf out of Nietzsche’s book and examine both men and their relationship as a process of becoming. That means we do not judge them solely from the great heights that they later achieved; we judge them as human beings who evolved from childhood through adolescence and into maturity. When we do this, we understand their relationship as taking place during a specific phase of their lives.

Nietzsche was a bookish twenty-four-year-old philology student coming to the end of a university degree. Wagner was a famous man with an imposing and dominating personality. At the time of their first meeting, Wagner’s fame had been growing in Germany for some time, predominantly among the class of people of which Nietzsche was a newly minted member, i.e. the educated elites. For his part, Nietzsche’s interest in Wagner had begun about eight years earlier, and the manner in which it was sparked tells us a lot about the young man. While at school in Naumburg, Nietzsche and two friends formed a musical and literary society called Germania. The friends were subscribers to a music magazine called the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which often featured positive reviews and news on Wagner. It was one of the other members of the group, Krug, who first introduced Nietzsche to Wagner’s music. Wagner was a prominent exponent not just of “new music” but of a new German culture. Nietzsche and his school friends were interested in that new culture not just as passive spectators but with an eye to actively contributing. In the years leading up to their meeting, Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Wagner grew. Thus, when they did meet for the first time in late 1868, Nietzsche knew a great deal about Wagner, but Wagner knew nothing of him. Once again, we see that the asymmetries involved are all in Wagner’s favour, and such an asymmetrical relationship can never be a “friendship”.

Further evidence against the friendship idea comes from the fact that Nietzsche always addressed Wagner by the epithet Meister (master) in the correspondence between the two. This touches on another subject that Nietzsche wrote about often in his later philosophy, where he criticised the “democratisation” process that had already begun levelling out social distinctions in the 19th century. Nietzsche lamented the erasure of gradations of rank between men. He would have seen the reduction of all relationships to “friendship” as not just sloppy scholarship but as yet another hallmark of this democratisation process. All the evidence suggests that Nietzsche saw Wagner as a superior man and accorded him the status that came from that position. Moreover, Nietzsche thought of Wagner as a teacher. Once the relationship was established and Nietzsche was a regular guest at the Wagner home in Switzerland, he eagerly wrote to friends stating how much he was learning from the Meister. 

What exactly was Nietzsche learning from Wagner during this time? We know that the young man was a talented and enthusiastic musician. In fact, he and Krug had sat down at the piano and attempted to play the score of Tristan and Isolde back in 1861. We know that Wagner was not shy about playing his works for guests of the house, and so Nietzsche had the rare honour of receiving personal performances from the famous composer. No doubt, he would have informally picked up much about music theory and the art of composition while in Wagner’s presence. But Wagner was not giving musical instruction to Nietzsche, and he wasn’t particularly impressed with the young man’s musical abilities anyway. On the contrary, Nietzsche’s musical talents, or lack thereof, were the subject of one of the scathing jibes that Wagner often dished out to those around him when his mood turned sour.

Nietzsche was clearly not receiving any kind of technical musical instruction from Wagner, at least not in a direct sense. What he was receiving were Wagner’s broader ideas around the role of music and especially Wagner’s innovations in opera for the new German culture that the older man had become concerned with earlier in his life. As we will see later, Germany, which was not even a unified nation at the time when Nietzsche and Wagner first met, had been going through a cultural identity crisis for decades. Both Wagner and Nietzsche had been born into that milieu, but it was the older man who had not only sketched out a plan to address the problem but had also made significant progress towards implementing it. Wagner may have been a narcissist, a bully, and a prima donna, but he also had the ability to charm and inspire those around him. The elation that we read in Nietzsche’s letters from the first years of their relationship is testament to the fact that Wagner’s inspiring vision had worked its magic on the younger man.

When we approach the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner from the point of view of the stage of their lives that each was going through at the time, we get a very different perspective from that which has become common and which is heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s later writings. Nietzsche was one of many young men who were hungry for a new culture that addressed the identity and political crisis in Germany. Wagner had already identified the problem decades earlier and had quite literally made it his life’s mission to address it. What’s more, he had begun to succeed at that mission. Thus, when the two men met for the first time, not only was there the inherent age difference between them which made Wagner old enough to be Nietzsche’s father, not only was Wagner a famous man with all the drama that comes with that, but he was increasingly seen to be a heroic figure who was advancing a revolutionary new art form. That art form, the gesamtkunstwerk, was a combination of music, drama, poetry, acting, stage design, and more. It involved detailed and intricate reworkings of famous mythical stories. Nietzsche was not just an enthusiastic musician; he was starting to win acclaim as perhaps the most promising philologist of his generation. Nietzsche would have known all of the Germanic myths that Wagner was using in his operas as well as his numerous references back to the Greek tragedies that both admired. Of all the young men in Germany who were inspired by Wagner’s new art, very few were in a position to understand and appreciate that art more than the young philologist. The “education” which Nietzsche was receiving was to meet the kind of man who could create such art and see how he worked, how he lived, and how he thought. It was an initiation into greatness, with all the negative and positive qualities that come with it.

Thus, we can put to bed once and for all the idea that Wagner and Nietzsche were “friends”. The twenty-four-year-old Nietzsche would never have described the relationship that way. He had dreamed of greatness as a teenager, and now he had direct access to it. He was a young man meeting his hero. As a famous, powerful, and accomplished man, Wagner already had an inner circle of supporters who were helping to bring his vision of the new art and the new German culture to fruition. It was into that circle that Nietzsche would eventually be invited. It was an invitation that was Wagner’s to make and Wagner’s to cancel any time he liked. He made it some months after their initial meeting in a letter to Nietzsche where he all but ordered the young scholar to visit him and included the words, “Now let me see what kind of man you are.” Does this sound like the invitation of a friend? No. It is the invitation of a Meister to his new apprentice.

In the same letter, Wagner writes, “My experiences with my fellow Germans have been less than wholly delightful so far. Come and restore my not entirely unwavering faith in what I – together with Goethe and a few others – call German freedom.” Nietzsche had been invited into a small and select circle of people who were pursuing this German freedom, German culture, and the artwork of the future. Wagner was the hero at the centre of it all, and the word hero really is appropriate here because Wagner’s new art form required truly heroic dedication and passion not just in its performance but in its preparation and organisation. Nietzsche would later contribute directly to the fulfilment of that art. He would accept Wagner’s call and join the fight for German freedom. This was not a friendship. In fact, it was not even a mentor-protégé relationship. Wagner’s invitation to Nietzsche was to join him in the pursuit of grand, world-changing goals. When Nietzsche accepted, he became not a friend or student of the composer but a disciple. He became a Wagnerian.