Friedrich Nietzsche’s Attack on Richard Wagner

Jaeden Izik-Dzurko

In Nietzsche contra Wagner and Der Fall Wagner, published in 1888 and 1889 respectively, Friedrich Nietzsche takes aggressive and strident aim at his long-time friend and past idol, Richard Wagner. Nietzsche criticizes Wagner’s art on both philosophical and musical grounds. The severe tone of his invective can perhaps be explained by his fervent, initial support of and advocacy for Wagner’s music. H. L. Mencken observes that “in Wagner Nietzsche saw a man of colossal originality and sublime courage.”[1] In his earlier years, Nietzsche was a strong proponent of the philosophy of individualism preached by Artur Schopenhauer. Nietzsche’s famous dichotomy of Apollo and Dionysus led him to view Wagnerian Romanticism as a triumph over Classicism; he saw in Wagner’s music an “expression of a Dionysian powerfulness of soul.”[2] Yet, as his thought developed and he strayed from the doctrines of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche began to view Wagner’s work as not merely of a low quality, but in fact as harmful, both to the listener and to the broader German culture. As Roger Hollinrake writes, “It is precisely an ingrained preoccupation with the state of culture that informed Nietzsche’s denunciation [of Wagner].”[3]

Nietzsche’s primary concern, both in his pamphlets and, arguably, in his broader philosophy, is with what he refers to as ‘decadence.’ He was not alone in this concern. Indeed, many authors toward the end of the nineteenth century began to view their age as one of degeneration. Max Nordau, the renowned Zionist and social critic published an influential work in which he decries Baudelaire, Zola, Wagner, Poe, and even Nietzsche himself as symptoms of increasing European decadence. This preoccupation is perhaps a more general characteristic of Western thought at large, and by no means limited to Nietzsche’s time. As Douglas Murray notes, “one of the notable characteristics of Western culture is precisely that it permanently fears itself to be in decline.”[4] Nonetheless, this is the element of Wagner’s work which Nietzsche deems most harmful. He describes what he refers to as decadence by first identifying it in literature, writing that in decadent writing “life no longer animates the whole. Words become predominant and leap right out of the sentence to which they belong, the sentences themselves trespass beyond their bounds, and obscure the sense of the whole page, and the page in its turn gains in vigour at the cost of the whole, - the whole is no longer a whole.”[5] He views a similar musical phenomenon to be present in Wagner’s operas, and derisively refers to Wagner as “our greatest musical miniaturist.”[6] Though he lauds Wagner’s “inventiveness in small things, [and] his elaboration of details,” he maintains that in Wagner’s work, “there is always anarchy among the atoms, disaggregation of the will.”[7] Scruton takes Nietzsche to mean that Wagner’s musical techniques “are incapable of generating real development, [and] that the whole thing is a kind of confidence trick, a simulation of musical life.”[8]

Nietzsche takes further issue with the moral vision that Wagner puts forth in his operas, notably in Parsifal, which he deemed an unprincipled compromise with the false morality of the Christian faith. This too stems from Nietzsche’s concern for degeneration and decline. His view is that good art ought to “[affirm] life and health against decline and sickness.”[9] As he maintains elsewhere, “the sickly are the greatest danger to man: not the wicked, not the ‘beasts of prey.’”[10] As Roger Scruton eloquently observes, this view “is in direct conflict with the Christian justification, which elevates meekness [and] compassion.”[11] Nietzsche held these to be life-denying virtues, and resented Wagner’s rejection of his own “life-affirming virtues on which the future of mankind depends.”[12] Conversely, Wagner viewed art as a redemption from life, rather than a means by which to affirm and vindicate our existence. As such, stories of redemption are common throughout his operas. As his philosophy developed, Nietzsche began to view this form of redemption as “a denial of life and an invocation to decadence.”[13] He viewed Wagner as forsaking health and life for “a bogus spiritual purity.”[14] Scruton suggests that Nietzsche “regarded the Wagnerian ‘redemption’ as a kind of cliché, an idea worn thin by too much use, brought in to the later dramas only because the characters, lacking the will and integrity that makes true tragedy possible, have to be content with ‘redemption’ as second best.”[15] H. L. Mencken takes a similar view, suggesting that “Wagner agreed with Nietzsche, perhaps, that European civilization and its child, the European art of the day, were founded upon lies, but he was artist enough to see that, without these lies, it would be impossible to make art understandable to the public. So in his librettos he employed all of the old fallacies - that love has the supernatural power of making a bad man good, that one man may save the soul of another, that humility is a virtue.”[16]

The origin of Nietzsche’s disillusionment with Wagnerian episodes of myth and legend can perhaps be found in his view of the role of the philosopher, who he declares must “overcome his age in himself, [and] become ‘timeless’”[17] He continues, “with what then does the philosopher have the greatest fight? With all that in him which makes him the child of his time.”[18] Though at first he deemed Wagner a great reviver of the grandeur of Greek tragedy, he came to view Wagner’s characters as mere counterfeits of the ancients, replete with all of the modern pathologies he perceived in contemporary Europe. As Hollinrake notes, “far from standing at a distance from his age, Wagner, like the Greek dramatists he discusses, turns out to be its embodiment.”[19] Scruton summarizes Nietzsche’s view, writing “Wagner’s portentous music does not offer [his characters] redemption, since it merely disguises the fact that they are the ordinary sick refuse of nineteenth-century society – as far from tragic grandeur as Flaubert’s Emma Bovary.”[20] Thus, Nietzsche states emphatically, “how intimately related must Wagner be to the entire decadence of Europe for her not to have felt that he was decadent! He belongs to it, he is its protagonist, its greatest name.”[21]

Finally, Nietzsche viewed a kind of dishonesty and obscurantism in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerke, particularly in his excessive concern for drama. Nietzsche viewed this as a fundamentally unmusical approach to composition. He writes, "Wagner never calculates as a musician with a musician's conscience, all he strains after is effect, nothing more than effect.”[22] For Nietzsche, this provides a kind of ersatz profundity to Wagner’s music, a bombastic distraction concealing mere vapidity. As he writes, “nothing is cheaper than passion!”[23] He notes elsewhere that “in declining civilizations, […] genuineness becomes superfluous, prejudicial, unfavourable. The actor, alone, can still kindle great enthusiasm.”[24] Nietzsche perceives the melodrama and histrionics in Wagner’s work as a kind of cover for a lack of true aesthetic and moral purpose. In the place of a true affirmation of life and of health, Wagner instead plays upon the passions. On Wagner’s philosophical and theoretical writing, Nietzsche notes that “not every kind of music hitherto has been in need of literature; and it were well to try and discover the actual reason of this. Is it perhaps that Wagner's music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear precisely the reverse - that it was too easy, that people might not understand it with sufficient difficulty?”[25] Here again is expressed a perception of dishonesty in the Wagnerian drama. Indeed, it is this perception that seems to inform Nietzsche’s general dislike of the theatrical medium; elsewhere, he describes himself as “essentially anti-theatrical at heart.”[26] In the closing section of Der Fall Wagner, he makes his view plain, wishing “that the stage should not become master of the arts, […] that the actor should not become the corrupter of the genuine, [and] that music should not become an art of lying.”[27]

Along with his more philosophical criticisms, Nietzsche attacks Wagner on purely musical grounds as well. He takes issue with the three most fundamental elements of Wagner’s music: harmony, melody, and rhythm. When discussing Wagnerian harmony, which had untold inspiration on European composers for several decades, Nietzsche decries it as “‘a rope of enharmonics,’ on which ugly things perform their gymnastics.”[28] He viewed Wagner’s shifts between chords of different tonal centres as a mere striving for effect, nullifying true harmonic pull and movement and, in Roger Scruton’s words, creating music that “slops around like a sea, instead of moving forward like a river.”[29]

With regard to melody, Nietzsche employs a similar comparison. He writes, “the aim after which more modern music is striving, which is now given the strong but obscure name of ‘unending melody,’ can be clearly understood by comparing it to one's feelings on entering the sea. Gradually one loses one's footing and one ultimately abandons oneself to the mercy or fury of the elements: one has to swim.”[30] He states further that “‘unending melody’ really wants to break all the symmetry of time and strength; it actually scorns these things - its wealth of invention resides precisely in what to an older ear sounds like rhythmic paradox and abuse.”[31] As can be observed, Nietzsche criticism of ‘endless melody’ is linked to his distaste for Wagnerian rhythm, which he views as destroying musical order. He notes that “in the solemn, or fiery, swinging movement, first slow and then quick, of old music - […] one had to dance.”[32] For Nietzsche, a feeling of dance is fundamental to good music, and a strong rhythmic pulse is necessary in creating this feeling. As Scruton notes, dance is also “a social phenomenon: we dance with others, and usually in groups.”[33] Therefore, “music is one part of a complex social whole, which is the group or tribe moving together, in response to a pulse whose significance lies deeper than reason. The primary form of this collective movement is religious ritual, and it is from religious ritual that tragedy is born.”[34] Therefore, Wagner’s loose and ever-changing conception of rhythm can be said to negate this primal element of music, robbing it of a spirit that affects us on a deep and subconscious level.

There exists a contentious debate regarding just how seriously one ought to take Nietzsche’s criticisms. Many have suggested that Nietzsche’s invective is largely fuelled by a bitter personal feud, and should thus be evaluated in this context. As Hollinrake observes, “it is easy to be led by the note of bitterness, of unveiled irony, as well as by the discontinuous course of the argument into believing that the philosophical and aesthetic implications are merely a convenient pretext, and that at the heart of the matter lies an implacable persona grievance that demands satisfaction and will have it at any price.”[35] Many who have commented on the Nietzsche-Wagner quarrel take this view, including renowned music critic Ernest Newman, who described Nietzsche’s pamphlets as “‘merely journalism of the cheapest, most ill-bred kind, the sort of mud-flinging that any man with a comprehensive faculty for hating, and a gift for coining malicious epithets and stabbing phrases, can indulge in.”[36] Scruton echoes this sentiment, writing that “Nietzsche’s early adoration of Wagner distorted his later rejection, so that the serious thinking has to be discerned within a cloud of self-loathing.”[37] This was the impression I had when first reading the pamphlets, due to their disorganized nature and frequent vindictive turns of phrase. However, Hollinrake argues against this view, writing that “Nietzsche had nothing to gain” in his attack; “his motives were bound to be misunderstood by a public under the spell of Wagner’s genius, not uninfluenced by splendid eulogies of Nietzsche’s own early writings.”[38] In this light, it is difficult to view the pamphlets merely as a public airing of a vicious personal dispute. Hollinrake notes further that “this is no personal matter. Wagner is to be regarded as the personification of a crisis in the history of art and ideas.”[39]

Many also point to Nietzsche’s own obvious musical shortcomings. Nietzsche’s compositional output is small, and largely comprised of trite and simple pieces for piano. Georges Liébert, a Wagner biographer who published a long work defending him against Nietzsche’s attacks, criticizes the latter on this basis: “that [Nietzsche] felt no embarrassment in submitting [a musical composition he’d written] to the composer of Tristan indicates that he […] lacked the clairvoyance and tact proper to the ‘first psychologist of Europe,’ as he [flattered] himself to be.”[40] Scruton analyzes this issue further, noting that “Nietzsche was at best what he so unjustly and outrageously accused Wagner of being - a miniaturist, whose short-breathed successes are inspired by solitary and lachrymose emotion that could not be pursued at great length without morbidity.”[41] He continues, writing “the works for which he would have wished to be remembered are formless improvisations, with lunatic basslines and grotesque progressions, entirely devoid of melody or harmonic logic.”[42] These criticisms of Nietzsche’s own musical work are rather uncontroversial and unsurprising. Nietzsche, after all, despite his lifelong love of music, did not style himself first and foremost a composer. The question becomes whether or not Nietzsche’s own musical shortcomings bear any relevance on his espoused views of Wagner’s compositional output. Mark T. Conrad, who penned a scathing review of Liébert’s defence of Wagner, makes the point that “if [one] were to compare Wagner as a philosopher to Nietzsche, the former would likewise come off badly in comparison - […] why should we want to do that in the first place? Wagner wasn’t a professional philosopher.”[43] This seems a sensible response to criticisms of Nietzsche’s own musical ability. However, his own limited compositional creativity can perhaps contextualize the aggressive tone of his invective against Wagner. Scruton suggests that Nietzsche may have held a deep-seated jealousy of Wagner’s musical brilliance, noting that “Nietzsche’s love-hate relation with Wagner was really a love-hate relation with himself, and in particular with his own self-image as a musician.”[44] Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that Nietzsche’s public pronouncements against Wagner differ somewhat from his genuine personal feelings toward the music itself; Scruton writes, “at the very moment when [Nietzsche] was publicly denouncing Parsifal as a work of sickness, decadence and deception, [he] sent to Peter Gast a wonderful description of the Prelude, [confessing] in his notes […] that he knows ‘of nothing that grasps Christianity at such a depth and that so sharply leads to compassion.’”[45]

Many also question the legitimacy of Nietzsche’s attack on Wagner on philosophical grounds. H. L. Mencken argues that “Nietzsche’s fundamental error” was to regard “the composer as a philosopher.” Nietzsche was “deceived by Wagner’s enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and his early, amateurish dabbling in philosophy.”[46] Wagner, Mencken claims, “was first of all an artist, and it is the function of an artist, not to reform humanity, but to depict it as he sees it, or as his age sees it - fallacies, delusions and all.”[47] Mencken reveals a possible error in Nietzsche’s line of attack. When the philosopher writes that “everything Wagner touches, he contaminates, […] he has made music sick,”[48] is he not vastly overstating Wagner’s influence on European art and broader European culture? Is Wagner not merely the imperfect voice of the desires, myths and spirit of his time? A possible counterargument to these questions is that Wagner was undoubtedly a revolutionary in both the political sense and the musical one, and the influence of his musical innovations on the composers that succeeded him is no doubt extensive. In this light, it seems possible that Wagner did in fact wield the enormous, transformative and, in Nietzsche’s view, corrosive influence that is alleged.

Some have argued that there exist many flaws in Nietzsche’s philosophical case against Wagner’s moral vision put forth in his works. His ceaseless accusations of ‘decadence’ in particular, seem to lack sufficient evidentiary basis. Roger Scruton eloquently argues that “if compassion for the weak is decadence, if sacrifice is decadence, if the transcendence of sexual desire is decadence, if the renunciation of power for love, and divine arrogance for human pity are decadence - the roll on decadence.”[49] As is made clear, in decrying the entirety of Wagner’s moral framework as decadence, Nietzsche’s fails to provide an adequate alternative, and his “advocacy of ‘life’ is […] at worst a surrender to all that is most destructive in human nature.”[50] As Scruton observes, “if health comes only with a life ‘beyond good and evil,’ in which pity and renunciation play no part, then away with health.”[51] Furthermore, Nietzsche’s musical criticisms of Wagner, and his advocacy for closed rhythms and hummable melodies fall short of a truly inspiring, aspirational and transformative musical vision. Given the current state of musical culture in the Western world, one may ponder if in fact it is Nietzsche’s vision of music that has ultimately prevailed, a vision which eschews any traditional moral and aesthetic justification, and any attempt to provide, through the musical art, a redemption from the suffering and imperfections of life. As Roger Scruton humorously ponders, were Nietzsche to hear the modern music of today, “would he be thereafter a little less inclined to apply the label ‘decadent’ to Wagner, […] would he recognize that there are forms of ‘life’ to which a dose of old-fashioned decadence might reasonably be preferred?”[52]

It is my own view that the cultural status of music in the Western world has fallen precipitously, and that it currently serves as the near antithesis of Wagner’s vision. Music is no longer seen to provide a sacred realm through which one can apprehend a timeless and enduring beauty and experience a redemption from all in life that demoralizes the spirit. Furthermore, the trend in the classical music world of rarely ever performing works of music less than a century old speaks to a lack of collective will to carry on the majestic artistic tradition handed down from the great artists of generations long past. To me, the real question that the Nietzsche-Wagner rift raises is the following: did Wagner’s musical vision precipitate this decline, or was he defiantly attempting to prevent it? Despite my profound love of Wagner’s music, I believe Nietzsche was correct in one regard. In Nietzsche Contra Wagner, he suggests that the Europe of Wagner’s time was suffering from a profound feeling of weariness and inertia, and that Wagner, in his music, “found the means of stimulating tired nerves, - and in this way he made music ill.”[53] Douglas Murray, in his brilliant book, The Strange Death of Europe, makes a very similar observation, writing that in the nineteenth century, Germany experienced “an exhaustion caused by a loss of meaning, an awareness that the civilization was ‘no longer accumulating’ but living off a dwindling cultural capital.”[54] He remarks that “as so often, the Germans have a word for it: Geschichtsmüde, meaning ‘weary of history.’”[55] Is Nietzsche correct in describing Wagner’s music as a kind of eulogy or a swan song for a declining European civilization, already well past its prime? Was he correct to opine of Wagner’s music that “despite its prevalence and its will to prevail, [it] has perhaps only a short time to live, for it sprouted from a soil which was in the throes of a rapid subsidence, - of a culture which will soon be submerged.”[56]

Douglas Murray, in his analysis of German thought, provides a possible explanation for these sentiments. He notes of German philosophy in the nineteenth century that it “was already characterized by a weightiness that too easily transferred into weariness and even fatalism.”[57] He suggests a possible cause of this “is the peculiarly German pursuit of continuously, relentlessly, pursuing ideas to their end point - wherever that might lead.”[58] This tendency is aptly described by the German expression, Drang nach dem absoluten, or ‘the drive toward the absolute.’ I struggle to come up with a more poignant description than this of Wagner’s artistic mission of the Gesamtkunstwerke; this impression is particularly palpable in the dizzying, intoxicating harmonies of Tristan und Isolde. One can experience the impression that Wagner has indeed pushed music to its very limit, reaching a kind of end point. Douglas Murray writes that while “German philosophy almost ruled the world of philosophy for a time, […] it also helped to crash it.”[59] Can the same be said of Wagner’s artistic innovations with the regard to the musical world?

[1] H.L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2003), 163.

[2] Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, 163.

[3] Roger Hollinrake, “Nietzsche, Wagner and Ernest Newman,” Music & Letters 41, no. 3 (July 1960): 252

[4] Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2017), 209.

[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (London: T. N. Foulis, 1911), 42.

[6] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 43.

[7] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 42.

[8] Roger Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner,” accessed April 8, 2020, https://www.roger-scruton.com/about/music/understanding-music/181-nietzsche-on-wagner

[9] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[10] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[11] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[12] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[13] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[14] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[15] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[16] Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, 163.

[17] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 20.

[18] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 20.

[19] Hollinrake, “Nietzsche, Wagner and Ernest Newman,” 253.

[20] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[21] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 33.

[22] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 45.

[23] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 45.

[24] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 55.

[25] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 51.

[26] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 74.

[27] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 58.

[28] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[29] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[30] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 76.

[31] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 77.

[32] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 76.

[33] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[34] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[35] Hollinrake, “Nietzsche, Wagner and Ernest Newman,” 245.

[36] Hollinrake, “Nietzsche, Wagner and Ernest Newman,” 245.

[37] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[38] Hollinrake, “Nietzsche, Wagner and Ernest Newman,” 253.

[39] Hollinrake, “Nietzsche, Wagner and Ernest Newman,” 246.

[40] Georges Liébert, Nietzsche and Music, trans. David Pellauer and Graham Parkes (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 49.

[41] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[42] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[43] Mark T. Conrad, “Nietzsche and Music,” Reason Papers 27 (Fall 2004): 164.

[44] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[45] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[46] Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, 166.

[47] Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, 166.

[48] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 33.

[49] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[50] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[51] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[52] Scruton, “Nietzsche on Wagner.”

[53] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 36.

[54] Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, 194.

[55] Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, 194.

[56] Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 79.

[57] Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, 202.

[58] Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, 202.

[59] Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, 204.

Works Cited

Conrad, Mark T. “Nietzsche and Music.” Reason Papers 27 (Fall 2004): 163-168.

Hollinrake, Roger. “Nietzsche, Wagner and Ernest Newman.” Music & Letters 41, no. 3 (July 1960): 245-255.

Liébert, Georges. Nietzsche and Music. Translated by David Pellauer and Graham Parkes. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Mencken, H. L. The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2003.

Murray, Douglas. The Strange Death of Europe. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2017.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici. London: T. N. Foulis, 1911.

Scruton, Roger. “Nietzsche on Wagner.” Accessed April 8, 2020. https://www.roger-scruton.com/about/music/understanding-music/181-nietzsche-on-wagner