Nietzsche's Attack on Wagner

Nietzsche makes a very critical analysis of the German culture of his time in several of his works, beginning with his assessment of history and culture in The Birth of Tragedy and modified in later works as he rethought his position and changed some of his views. Nietzsche makes a comparison between historical knowledge about past cultures and culture itself. He sees true culture as a unity of the forces of life with the love of form and beauty. Nietzsche considers life as terrible and tragic, but he also views it as transmuted through art, the work of creative genius. Nietzsche discovers the proper role of art in his study of the Greeks, who also knew that life was tragic and terrible but who never gave in to the pessimism that this might entail. Instead, they transmuted life through art. They did this through two different aesthetics, one Dionysian and the other Apollonian. Modern culture did not affirm life and had given in to the pessimism that Nietzsche wished to avoid. Part of the sterility of modern culture was its dedication to historical learning as a substitute for a living culture. Nietzsche's attack on decadence included an attack on Richard Wagner, a man whom Nietzsche had supported . In his analysis on modernity, though, Nietzsche changed his mind in effect and came to view Wagner's music as decadent and overly bound to the past.

Nietzsche uses the metaphor of disease in describing Wagner and his music in The Case of Wagner, one of two major attacks

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t the idea of art for art's sake, as seen in Baudelaire, and in some ways saw Baudelaire as the physical and cultural embodiment of stylistic decadence. Some Marxist writers have erroneously associated Nietzsche's aesthetic with romanticism, but this is not correct: "Nietzsche did not see art as an inward or self-justifying activity, devoted to its own specific ends and internal discourse. Art is less about bourgeois comfort and more concerned with development and enhancement of life as Nietzsche attempted to assert in The Will to Power" (Stauth and Turner: p. 233). Heller (1965) notes how Nietzsche's thought changed over time. He says that when Nietzsche was a young man and wrote The Birth of Tragedy, he believed in the power of art to transfigure life by creating images of true beauty out of the meaningless chaos of life: "It had seemed credible enough as long as his gaze was enraptured by the distant prospect of classical Greece and the enthusiastic vicinity of Richard Wagner's Tribschen" (p. 194). His deeply held Romantic belief in art soon turned to skepticism and scorn, however, and he saw as "metaphysical counterfeiters" those who glorified the trinity of beauty, goodness, and truth. The Case of Wagner deals with the i

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