The stunning opening of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra may remind some listeners of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The program note will tell them what Strauss had in mind: a sunrise on the mountaintop from which the philosopher Zoroaster contemplates the world with infinite detachment. This Zarathustra is the creation of Friedrich Nietzsche – whose reputation is more durable than the Stanley Kubrick film.

‘Bond’ is an all-girl string quartet which in 2001 hit the classical charts in the UK, before being booted off for not being classical enough. Haylie Ecker, the Australian from Perth who leads Bond, is reported to carry around a copy of The Portable Nietzsche.

The fascination of this German professor’s writings has scarcely ever waned. Musicians who have drawn on his words and inspiration, apart from Strauss, include Mahler in his Third Symphony and Delius in his Requiem and A Mass of Life.

Nietzsche speaks to non-conformists, to those who think of themselves as alienated from ‘bourgeois’ society, and from Christianity. ‘God is Dead’ is one of Nietzsche’s mottos, and he was profound on the subject. German existentialist philosophy, in Heidegger and Jaspers, with echoes in France’s Jean-Paul Sartre, developed partly by commentary on what Nietzsche had written.

Photo of Nietzsche by Gustav-Adolf Schultze, 1882. Public Domain

Nietzsche exposed the limitations of empirical science as a basis for understanding, believing it separated the activity of reason from the totality of the person, beginning with Socrates. Modern knowledge since the Enlightenment was leading Europe to a crisis of nihilism. Only a few free spirits would be strong enough to face the death of God, the collapse of traditional values, and to create their own values, without illusions. The new human creature who would achieve this was The Superman. Nietzsche’s idea of ‘the will to power’ was appropriated and misunderstood by Fascists.

The author of these and other powerful ideas was a scholar, originally of classical texts. Suffering ill-health most of his life, sensitive and solitary, he compensated for his own weaknesses by declaring war on the ‘Christian’ values of pity and charity, proclaiming the handsome, ruthless Superman, and rationalising his own inner loneliness as superiority to the common herd. In 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown and spent a year in an asylum. He spent his last decade in mental darkness attended by his mother and later his sister.

The power of Nietzsche’s writing comes from his intellectual insight and his command of the German language, of which he proclaimed himself the greatest master since Luther, Goethe and Heine. Many of his readers have agreed.

Nietzsche was also a musician. The most important encounter of his life was with the major musical force of his time, Richard Wagner. Nietzsche’s eventual apostasy, his falling out with Wagner, the god that failed, is a famous parting of the ways. Turning from classical philology to philosophy, Nietzsche abandoned his early idea that music was the way to the salvation of Western culture. But it was with sadness: nothing could compensate Nietzsche for the loss of Wagner and his sympathy.

"...began composing as an eight-year-old"

The son of a Lutheran pastor from Saxony, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) began composing as an eight-year-old. He played the piano well enough for Wagner to comment ironically, ‘No, Nietzsche, you play much too well for a professor!’ Nietzsche’s early musical enthusiasms, reflected in his compositions, were for Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and, among contemporaries, Schumann. But Wagner was his great epiphany: ‘The moment there was such a thing as a piano reduction of Tristan…I was a Wagnerite.’ Wagner became curious about the young scholar who was enthusiastic about his music. They met in Leipzig; Wagner played and sang from his new The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and talked with Nietzsche about Schopenhauer. Both men owed much to this philosopher, whom Wagner claimed was the only one to recognise the essence of music. Nietzsche was fascinated to discover Wagner shared his interest in the musical drama of Greek antiquity.

Wagner was now living with his lover Cosima in the villa Tribschen near Lucerne, a powerful incentive for Nietzsche to accept the offer of a professorship in nearby Basel. A brief but intense intimacy with Wagner began. Nietzsche was staying at Tribschen when Wagner’s son Siegfried was born, and when the Siegfried Idyll was first performed as Richard’s surprise birthday present for Cosima.

The young professor began to write his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Famous for Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses, the book hails tragedy as the supreme achievement of Greek culture, revising the then dominant view of the serenity and cheerfulness of the Greeks, arguing that these ‘Apollonian’ qualities cannot be understood unless we feel the unrestrained Dionysian energies which the Greeks managed to harness in tragedy: ‘Music and tragic myth are equally expressions of the Dionysian capacity of a people, and they are inseparable.’

In 1871 when this was written Nietzsche believed that in Wagner the Greek synthesis had been re-born. Much of the book is written as a dialogue with Wagner the man, his music and his theories of art. Wagner, for his part, was delighted to find in the young scholar an advocate who would give him greater credibility than the ‘Wagnerites’ who had flocked around him. Nietzsche was the first to glorify Wagner intelligently, but he was already transcending him, thinking of himself as a musical Socrates, looking forward to a philosophy that would admit the Greek tragic sense of life, but without sacrificing the critical intellect or the visions and resources of art.

An artist who expressed the decadence of the age

The falling out between Wagner and Nietzsche was partly a matter of one genius’ jealousy of another. Wagner was piqued that Nietzsche’s books weren’t all about him; Nietzsche, like most fastidious people, soon found Wagner as a person unendurable, and as a philosopher a dilettante. When Nietzsche’s New Year’s Echoes for piano four hands was played as his birthday gift for Cosima, a reference to the Siegfried Idyll sent Wagner out of the room to roll on the floor convulsed with laughter. Nietzsche for his part began to find himself laughing at Wagner, with pain, because he still loved him.

Nietzsche’s contacts with Wagner and the Bayreuth Circle continued until the two men’s last meeting, at Sorrento in 1878. But more and more of what Nietzsche was writing gave Wagner offence, and eventually, years after Wagner’s death in 1883, and just before his lapse into insanity, Nietzsche published his witty and dismissive The Case of Wagner (1888). Wagner was now for him an artist who expressed the decadence of the age, who had made music sick – a neurosis. Wagner manipulated sensation, but without the overall control of a style; at bottom, he was by instinct an actor rather than a musician, out for the theatrical effect that the ‘revolt of the masses’ was making the only popular kind of art. This bad continuation of German Romanticism was false to the true spirit of music, it was ‘the most un-Greek of all possible art forms – moreover, a first-rate poison for the nerves…a narcotic that intoxicates and spreads a fog’. Bayreuth’s music drama was nothing other than grand opera à la Meyerbeer, ‘and not even good opera’.

As an antidote to Wagner, Nietzsche famously chose Bizet’s Carmen, which seemed to him to embody a Mediterranean fatalism much more in harmony with the tragic outlook of the Greeks:

I know of no case where the tragic joke which is the essence of love is expressed so strictly…as in Don José’s last cry, which concludes the work:
Yes. I have killed her.
I – my adored Carmen!
Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare: it raises a work of art above thousands.

Nietzsche also enjoyed Bizet’s music as light, supple, and pleasant – ‘it does not sweat.’ Though fatalistic, it is still popular. Bizet addresses himself to all his listeners as if they were musicians, and unlike Wagner does not hector, saying something over and over again until one believes it. Nietzsche admitted that what he said about Carmen and Bizet wasn’t to be taken too seriously – ‘as an ironic antithesis to Wagner, he produces a great effect.’ Turning his back on Wagner was for him, said Nietzsche, a fate. To like anything at all after that, a triumph. At issue was much more than music. Nietzsche sympathised with any philosopher who would declare: ‘Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian.’

Nietzsche’s choice of a musician to put on the pedestal to replace Wagner suggests that he remained the type of musical amateur who has strong views but no deep musical judgment. He chose a Basel student of his called Johann Heinrich Köselitz, who became Nietzsche’s confidant and amanuensis in his later years, and his ‘faithful Kurwenal’ [after the character in Tristan und Isolde] during his madness. Köselitz composed under the name Peter Gast. His music is a mere curiosity of history, yet Nietzsche hailed him as ‘a new Mozart’. The choice of a musician as soulmate, nevertheless, shows what a large place music took in Nietzsche’s life and thought. Nietzsche’s correspondence with Peter Gast is chiefly valuable for light on his encounter with the most influential musician of his time, Wagner. And, hearing music inspired by Nietzsche, it is well to remember that it would be hard to find a philosopher who had as much to do with music.

David Garrett © 2001