Wagner the Philosopher

Richard Wagner may have read Schopenhauer but he sure as hell did not understand Schopenhauer! Perhaps apes also read the great pessimist with as little understanding as they bring to Nietzsche?!

Anyway, Wagner, by his own account, read The World as Will and Representation several times, impressed by the idea of music as the striving of the will. But he was equally impressed by the notion of the denial of will. His enthusiasm was expressed in a letter to Franz Liszt: "I have...found a sedative which has finally helped me to sleep at night; it is the sincere and heartfelt yearning for death; total unconsciousness, complete annihilation, the end of all dreams-the only ultimate redemption."

He comes closest to Schopenhauer's ideas in Tristan und Isolde, when the lovers express their longing for their individual existence to end. But Wagner transforms this gloomy abnegation to a climax of erotic love, effectively turning Schopenhauer upside down. Tristan and Isolde do not escape the blind force of Will; they just become yet another link in its ongoing evolution. But, what the hell? The sex was good!

Der Fall Wagner

One can trace Nietzsche's disenchantment with the Wagner cult in his notebooks, where he discusses the master's addiction to luxury and glitter at his Bayreuth shrine; his misuse of the music medium; the false liberation his music brings; his desire to submit audiences to the power of his will; and above all his vanity, and yet again his vanity.

Nietzsche was maturing beyond the kind of abject devotion that Wagner, a monster of egoism, demanded. His task was "Neither to suffer so intensely from life, nor live in such a flat and emotionally deficient way, that Wagner's art would be needed as a medicine." Wagner was undermining Nietzsche's efforts to lay hold of life, so he removed himself physically from his orbit and intellectually from his cult, as he shows in Human, All Too Human and still later in The Wagner Case.