If you’d told me a year ago that I was going to write a book about Nietzsche and Wagner, I’d have said you were mad. I stumbled ass-backwards into the whole concept about nine months ago when I realised a correspondence between Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamzov and Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal. Thinking that I’d finally cracked the code of Parsifal (famously Wagner’s most difficult story), I remembered that Nietzsche had hated the opera and went back to see what he wrote about it. That led me to investigate the relationship between the two men in more detail.

I’d never really known much about how the two men came together or how they had split up. Imagine my surprise, then, when I realised that Wagner was not just an accidental episode in Nietzsche’s life but the man responsible for turning him into a philosopher in the first place. That’s incredible enough, but the way in which it happened is even more incredible.

This book tells the story of the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner from beginning (1868) to end (1878). Although the analysis has major implications for an understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I avoided any discussion of this since it would not be of interest to those who haven’t read Nietzsche, and anybody who has will quite easily be able to draw the relevant conclusions. In short, the book is written for anybody who loves a good story. What makes this so incredible is that nobody wrote this story. It happened in real life, and yet it has all the hallmarks of a Wagnerian opera (not to mention more famous stories).

Here is the introduction to the book for those who want more of a feel for the work. Details on where to buy it can be found here.

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Introduction

About one hundred and fifty years after their deaths, why should we in the modern West care about the relationship between Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche? This question is worth asking at the outset since many commentators have sensed something special in the bond between the two, and yet very little in the way of satisfactory explanations has been forthcoming. What’s more, as time has gone on, the influence of Nietzsche has arguably now surpassed that of Wagner in the broader culture. This has had the result of adding a further layer of confusion due to the fact that most analysts approach the subject through the prism of Nietzsche’s mature works, all of which are vehemently anti-Wagner. It could be argued that these have served to subdue interest in Wagner. The story is more complex and much more interesting than that, however.

Although the composer retains a hardcore following who gather each year at the Mecca of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth to pay homage to his works, and although many of those works still form part of the canon of classical music, Wagner’s influence on modern culture is limited. In many respects, this is deeply unfair since Wagner can be seen as the forerunner to a number of modern trends. The Gesamtkunstwerk, his modification to the operatic art form, had anticipated almost all of the qualities of modern film. Like film, Wagner had insisted that the story be the centrepoint of the work. Like film, Wagner made use of music to highlight and accentuate the story. He also paid great attention to acting, costume, props, sets, and all the rest. A Wagner opera required a small army to put into production, something that is also true of a modern film.

The parallels do not end there. Wagner also presaged the rise of modern pop culture by demanding that his Gesamtkunstwerk be a true expression of the culture of a people (a Volk) and not just a frivolous amusement for the elites of society. Furthermore, in order to break the dependence on aristocratic money, Wagner experimented with modes of fundraising that bear an uncanny resemblance to modern crowdfunding. Thus, a very strong argument can be made that Wagner laid the groundwork for both modern film and modern pop culture. That is true not just in theory, but in practice. At the height of his popularity, he really had turned the art of opera into something very similar to the modern blockbuster.

A final correlation between Wagner’s work and more modern counterparts is that his use of grand quasi-mythological narratives and characters can also be seen as the precursor to the modern genres of fantasy and science fiction. Consider how popular Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars trilogy are in modern culture, and then consider that Wagner had explored very similar motifs in his Ring Cycle and final opera, Parsifal.

Bearing in mind how much Wagner seemed to be ahead of his time and had anticipated many of the artistic innovations of the twentieth century, it is an irony that he is now put in a nice neat little box with the label “Opera Composer” on the front. In his own time, he had explicitly tried to distance himself from that world by stating that his art should not be called opera at all. He wanted to call it “Drama” and he wanted it to be popular outside of the snobbish and cloistered world of classical music.

We could find all kinds of ad hoc reasons why this happened, including technological changes, social and political ructions, or the fact that history tends to simplify reality down into easily memorable categories and it’s simply easier to remember Wagner as a composer of operas. What we will see in this book, however, is that there is some justice to the way in which Wagner has been treated by history because, despite the successes he had, he really did fail to achieve the vision he set out earlier in his life. He did so by quite explicitly betraying that vision. His posthumous punishment is therefore to be included with the group of people who he despised and who despised him in return. He is now thought of as just a composer, when he had always wanted to be so much more.

That is only half of the story, however. The other half is that there was one, and seemingly only one, man who realised that Wagner had betrayed his ideals, and that man was none other than Friedrich Nietzsche. The historical misunderstandings that surround Wagner are only amplified when we add Nietzsche into the mix. If we assume that Wagner was just a composer and Nietzsche was just a philosopher, then the relationship between the two seems rather strange since these are seemingly discrete fields of endeavour with little to do with each other. Things get even weirder when we understand that Nietzsche was not even a philosopher when the two men first met; he was a university student studying philology, a discipline that doesn’t even exist anymore.

Therein lies the secret to the story because Nietzsche was not a philosopher when he first met Wagner, but he would become one just a few years later as a direct result of the influence of the composer. Furthermore, what is regarded as Nietzsche’s mature philosophy began immediately after the break with Wagner and was, in fact, predicated on that break. We might even go a step further and argue that it was Wagner’s betrayal of his ideals that saw Nietzsche become the philosopher he is remembered as by history. In other words, it was Wagner who turned Nietzsche from a philology student into a philosopher, one of the greatest in the Western canon.

How on earth could an opera composer train a philosopher? Well, again, this comes back to the confusion around Wagner. He always considered himself more than just a composer. Although Wagner’s art was in many ways the precursor to modern film and modern pop culture, we have to remember that he was advocating for these ideas at a time when it was genuinely dangerous to do so. 19th century Germany, and Europe more generally, was a hotbed of competing ideologies and a time of major uncertainty where different visions for the future were all competing with each other for prominence and power. Wagner had dabbled in political revolution as a young man, but he would later channel his energy into what he believed was a revolutionary form of art and culture. It was Wagner’s thrilling and passionate avowal of these ideals that attracted Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s first published books were essentially co-written with Wagner in that the ideas they contained were jointly developed during the intimate discussions the two men shared over a three year period at Wagner’s house in Lucerne, a time which served as Nietzsche’s philosophical apprenticeship.

In response to the question of why we should care about the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, the first answer is that it’s a hell of a story in and of itself. Wagner was a grand visionary, a dangerous revolutionary who had been exiled from Germany for ten years, and then returned like the prodigal son to realise the vision he had laid out in his earlier life. Nietzsche was a brilliant young scholar who got swept up in the composer’s vision for the future and then, miraculously, met his hero and found himself a regular guest at Wagner’s idyllic mansion on the shores of Lake Lucerne. The series of events that made all that possible are incredible, and the entire relationship is as full of extraordinary coincidences and symbolic resonances as any of Wagner’s operas. Thus, the story of their relationship is worth telling just because it’s a great story.

The break between the two men would also be as dramatic as a Wagner opera, revolving around the betrayal of the younger man by the older. We said earlier that Wagner had sold out his ideals; well, Nietzsche was perhaps the only one at the time who realised that fact. Why this affected him so profoundly was because he had come to believe those ideals. He did so because Wagner taught them to him.

This leads us to the second reason why we should care about the story of Nietzsche and Wagner: because the ideals and ideas the two men explored are worth understanding in more detail. One of the main planks in Wagner’s thought was that art was the supreme metaphysical task of life. In his language, he wanted art to be fundamentally connected to Life and Nature. But Wagner was never interested in ideas for their own sake. He wanted to put them into practice. He genuinely dedicated his life to art, and he made that decision not while sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire but at a time when he was faced with complete ruin. As a result of his dedication, the differences between art and life started to break down. Wagner stepped into the archetype of the heroic Artist which was quite specific to 19th-century Germany and included great men such as Goethe, Mozart, and Beethoven. There was a quasi-religious tone to this in that the Artist was expected to fulfil a role that had been left vacant by receding Christianity. Thus, Wagner’s life can be thought of as an experiment in the idea that life and art could merge together. More poetically, he wanted to live life as if it were a work of art.

Wagner achieved his goal to a very large extent, and a big part of the reason why Nietzsche became so enamoured of the composer was because he found himself sucked up into the same vortex where the boundary between reality and art seemed to break down. From the very first time he met Wagner, Nietzsche remarked how it felt as if he was “living in a novel” and that the coincidences that kept occurring were like something out of a fairy tale.

Our analysis of the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche will therefore also be a case study in the idea that life and art can merge and what that might look like. What we will show in this book is that the evolution of the bond between the two men must be thought of in terms of a story. This is not a metaphor or vague symbolic statement. We can be very precise about what it means by following the scholarship on stories done in the 20th century, including and especially that of Joseph Campbell. Thus, we can show in detail that Nietzsche and Wagner’s relationship follows what we will call the Orphan Story pattern, a pattern it shares with two of the most important relationships in Western history. What we will argue is that Wagner was Socrates to Nietzsche’s Plato, Jesus to Nietzsche’s Peter.

It is fitting that our subjects will be two men from the 19th century since it was in that century that a question arose of whether life imitated art or vice versa. Our analysis will call into question whether there exists any meaningful difference to begin with. If reality is already structured in the form of art (i.e., a story), then life is already art and art is already life. Whether that is true by default or whether it was only true because Wagner and Nietzsche made it true is a question that is difficult to resolve. But, even if it is the latter, then that simply means that Wagner had successfully turned his life into a work of art such that the boundaries between the two broke down. Nietzsche would develop a similar idea in his mature philosophy, i.e., the notion of self-creation through art, philosophy, etc.

Thus, in answer to our original question of why we should study the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche, we have several answers. Firstly, to tell the incredible story of how Wagner took a young philology student under his wing and turned him into one of the greatest philosophers in Western history. Secondly, to show that the relationship between the two men must be understood in the form of a story (a journey into the sacred). Thirdly, to marvel at the incredible “coincidence” that the story between the two men would play out almost identically to those in Wagner’s operas. All of which will lead to a conclusion that Wagner and Nietzsche were right and that we can become the authors of our own story rather than just characters in someone else’s.