Although Macaulay called Horace Walpole a "wretched fribble," that
gossip knew a trick or two in fancy fencing. "Oh," he wrote, "I am sick
of visions and systems that shove one another aside and come again like
figures in a moving picture." This was the outburst of a man called
insincere and fickle, but frank in this instance. Issuing from the
mouth of Friedrich Nietzsche this cry of the entertaining, shallow
Walpole would have been curiously apposite. The unhappy German poet
and philosopher suffered during his intellectual life from the "moving
pictures" of other men's visions and systems, and when he finally
escaped them all and evoked his own dream-world his brain became
over-clouded and he passed away "trailing clouds of glory." It is an
imperative necessity for certain natures to change their opinions, to
slough, as sloughs a snake its skin, their master ideas. Renan went
still further when he asserted that all essayists contradict themselves
sometime during their life.
With Nietzsche the apparent contradictions of his Wagner-worship and
Wagner-hatred may be explained if we closely examine the concepts
of his first work of importance, The Birth of Tragedy. It was a
misfortune that his bitterest book, The Wagner Case, should have
been first translated into English, for Wagner is our music-maker
now, and the rude assaults of Nietzsche fall upon deaf ears; while
those who had read the earlier essay, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,
were both puzzled and outraged. Certainly the man who could thus
flout what he once adored must have been mad. This was the popular
verdict, a facile and unjust verdict. What Nietzsche first postulated
as to the nature of music he returned to at the close of his life;
the mighty personality of Richard Wagner had deflected the stream
of his thought for a few years. But as early as 1872 doubts began
to trouble his sensitive conscience--this was before his pamphlet
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth--and his notebooks of that period were sown
with question-marks. In the interesting correspondence with Dr. Georg
Brandes, who literally revealed to Europe the genius of Nietzsche, we
find this significant passage:
I was the first to distil a sort of unity out of the two
[Schopenhauer and Wagner].... All the Wagnerians are
disciples of Schopenhauer. Things were different when I
was young. Then it was the last of the Hegelians who clung
to Wagner, and "Wagner and Hegel" was still the cry in the
'50s.
Nietzsche might have added the name of the philosopher Feuerbach.
Wagner's English apologist, Ashton Ellis, repudiates the common belief
that Wagner refashioned the latter part of the Ring so as to introduce
in it his newly acquired Schopenhauerian ideas. Wagner was always
a pessimist, declares Mr. Ellis; Schopenhauer but confirmed him in
his theories. Wagner, like Nietzsche, was too often a weathercock. A
second-rate poet and philosopher, he stands chiefly for his magnificent
music. Nietzsche or any other _polemiker_ cannot change the map of
music by fulminating against Wagner. Time may prove his true foe--the
devouring years that always show such hostility to music of the
theatre, music that is not pure music.
The spirit of the letter to Brandes quoted above may be found in
Nietzsche Contra Wagner (The Case of Wagner, page 72). Nietzsche wrote:
I similarly interpreted Wagner's music in my own way
as the expression of a Dionysian powerfulness of
soul.... It is obvious what I misunderstood, it is
obvious in like manner what I bestowed upon Wagner and
Schopenhauer--myself.
He read his own enthusiasms, his Hellenic ideals, into the least Greek
among composers. Wagner himself was at first pleased, also not a little
nonplussed by the idolatry of Nietzsche. Remember that this young
philologist was a musician as well as a brilliant scholar.
Following Schopenhauer in his main contention that music is a
presentative, not a representative art; the noumenon, not the
phenomenon--as are, for instance, painting and sculpture--Nietzsche
held that the unity of music is undeniable. There is no dualism,
such as instrumental music and vocal music. Sung music is only music
presented by a sonorous vocal organ; the words are negligible. A poem
may be a starting-point for the composer, yet in poetry there is
not the potentiality of tone (this does not naturally refer to the
literary tone-quality of music). From a non-musical thing music cannot
be evolved. There is only absolute music. Its beginning is absolute.
All other is a masquerading. The dramatic singer is a monstrosity--the
actual words of Nietzsche. Opera is a debased genre. We almost expect
the author to deny, as denied Hanslick, music any content whatsoever.
But this he does not. He is too much the Romantic. For him the poem
of Tristan was but the "vapour" of the music. Music is the archetype
of the arts. It is the essence of Greek tragedy and therefore
pessimistic. Tragedy is pessimism. The two faces of the Greek art he
calls the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses. One is the Classic,
the other the Romantic; calm beauty as opposed to bacchantic ecstasy.
Wagner, Nietzsche identified with the Dionysian element, and he was
not far wrong; but Greek? The passionate welter of this new music
stirred Nietzsche's excitable young nerves. He was, like many of his
contemporaries, swept away in the boiling flood of the Wagnerian sea.
It appeared to him, the profound Greek scholar, as a recrudescence of
Dionysian joy. Instead, it was the topmost crest of the dying waves of
Romanticism. Nietzsche later realised this fact. To Brandes he wrote:
Your German romanticism has made me reflect how the whole movement
only attained its goal in music (Schumann, Mendelssohn, Weber, Wagner,
Brahms); in literature it stopped short with a huge promise--the French
were more fortunate. I am afraid I am too much of a musician not to be
a Romanticist. Without music life would be a mistake.... With regard to
the effect of Tristan I could tell you strange things. A good dose of
mental torture strikes me as an excellent tonic before a meal of Wagner.
Nietzsche loved Wagner the man more than Wagner the musician. The news
of Wagner's death in 1883 was a terrible blow for him. He wrote Frau
Wagner a letter of condolence, which was answered from Bayreuth by her
daughter Daniela von Bülow. (See the newly published Overbeck Letters.)
Nothing could be more unfair than to ascribe to Nietzsche petty
motives in his breaking off with Wagner. There were minor differences,
but it was Parsifal and its drift toward Rome, that shocked the
former disciple. What he wrote of Wagner and Wagnerism may be
interpreted according to one's own views, but the Parsifal criticism
is sound. That parody of the Roman Catholic ceremonial and ideas,
and the glorification of its psychopathic hero, with the consequent
degradation of the idea of womanhood, Nietzsche saw and denounced.
"I despise everyone who does not regard Parsifal as an outrage on
morals," he cried. To-day his denunciations are recognised by wise
folk as wisdom. He first heard Carmen in Genoa, November 27, 1881.
To his exacerbated nerves its rich southern melodies were soothing.
He overpraised the opera--which is a sparkling compound of Gounod
and Spanish gypsy airs; an _olla podrida_ as regards style. He knew
that this was bonbon music compared with Wagner. And the confession
was wrung from his lips: "We must first be Wagnerians." Thus, as he
escaped from Schopenhauer's pessimism, he plucked from his heart his
affection for Wagner. He had become Zarathustra. He painted Wagner as
an "ideal monster," but the severing of the friendship cost Nietzsche
his happiness. An extraordinary mountain-mania attacked him on the
heights of the upper Engadine. All that he had once admired he now
hated. He had a positive genius for hatred, even more so than Huysmans;
both writers were bilious melancholics, and both were alike in the
display of heavy-handed irony. With Nietzsche's "ears for quarter
tones"--as he told Brandes--it would have been far better for him to
remain with Peter Gast in Italy, while the latter was writing that
long-contemplated study on Chopin. Nietzsche loved the music of the
Pole who had introduced into the heavy monochrome of German harmonies
an exotic and chromatic gamut of colours.
If Wagner erred in his belief that it was the drama not the music which
ruled in his own compositions (for his talk about the welding of the
different arts is an æsthetic nightmare), why should not Nietzsche
have made a mistake in ascribing to Wagner his own exalted ideals?
Wagner's music is the Wagner music drama. That is a commonplace of
criticism--though not at Bayreuth. Nietzsche taught the supremacy of
tone in his early book. He detested so-called musical realism. These
two men became friends through a series of mutual misunderstandings.
When Nietzsche discovered that music and philosophy had naught in
common--and he had hoped that Wagner's would prove the solvent--he
cooled off in his faith. It was less an apostasy than we believe.
Despite his eloquent affirmation of Wagnerism, Nietzsche was never
in his innermost soul a Wagnerian. Nor yet was he insincere. This may
seem paradoxical. He had felt the "pull" of Wagner's genius, and,
as in the case of his Schopenhauer worship, he temporarily lost his
critical bearings. This accounts for his bitterness when he found the
feet of his idol to be clay. He was lashing his own bare soul in each
scarifying phrase he applied to Wagner. He saw the free young Siegfried
become the old Siegfried in the manacles of determinism and pessimism;
then followed Parsifal and Wagner's apostasy--Nietzsche believed Wagner
was going back to Christianity. There is more consistency in the case
of Friedrich Nietzsche than has been acknowledged by the Wagnerians.
He, the philosopher of decadence and romanticism, could have said
to Wagner as Baudelaire to Manet: "You are only the first in the
decrepitude of your art."
If Nietzsche considered the poem a vaporous background for the
passionate musical mosaic of Tristan and Isolde, what would he
have thought if he could have heard the tonal interpretation of
his Also Sprach Zarathustra, as conceived by the mathematical and
emotional brain of Richard Strauss? I recall the eagerness with
which I asked an impossible question of Frau Foerster-Nietzsche
when at the Nietzsche-Archive, Weimar, in 1904: Is this tone-poem
by Richard Strauss truly Nietzschean? Her tact did not succeed in
quite veiling a hint of dubiety, though the noble sister of the dead
philosopher was too tender-hearted to suggest a formal criticism of
the composer's imposing sound-palace. It is not, however, difficult
to imagine Nietzsche, alive, glaring in dismay and with "embellished
indignation" as he hears the dance theme in Zarathustra. Nor would he
be less surprised if he had suddenly forced upon his consciousness a
performance of Claude Debussy's mooning, mystic, _triste_ Pélléas et
Mélisande, with its invertebrate charm, its innocuous sensuousness,
its absence of thematic material, its perverse harmonies, its lack of
rhythmic variety, and its faded sweetness, like that evoked by musty,
quaint tapestry in languid motion. (Debussy might have delved deeper
into churchly modes and for novelty's sake even employed pneumes to
lend his score a still more venerable aspect. Certainly his tonalities
are on the other side of diatonic and chromatic. Why not call them
_pneumatic_ scales?) Surely Nietzsche could not have refrained from
exclaiming: Ah! the pathos of distance! Ah! what musical sins thou must
take upon thee, Richard Wagner! Strauss and Debussy are the legitimate
fruits of thy evil tree of music!
Miserably happy poet, like one of those Oriental wonder-workers dancing
in ecstasy on white-hot sword-blades, the tears all the while streaming
down his cheeks as he proclaims his new gospel of joy: "_Il faut
méditerraniser la musique._" Alas! the pathos of Nietzsche's reality.
Reality for this self-tortured Hamlet-soul was a spiritual crucifixion
and a spiritual tragedy.