The Initiation of Nietzsche: Part 1

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.

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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.