PART I

Wagner

The Encyclopaedia gives us:

Wagner, Richard (1813-1883) German composer. Name means ‘Cartwright’. His father died when he was six months old and his mother married Ludwig Geyer nine months after that. His early operas, ‘Rienzi’ (1842) and ‘The Flying Dutchman’ (1843) led to his appointment as conductor at the Dresden Opera House where ‘Tannhäusser’ was successfully performed (1845). During the composition of ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’, an operatic treatment of German mythology, he fell in love Mathilde Wesendonck (1828-1902), who inspired the opera ‘Tristan und Isolde’. Wagner later married (1870) Cosima von Bülow (1837-1930), Liszt’s daughter. In 1863 he produced “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’ and began building a theatre in Bayreuth for the first performance of ‘The Ring’ (1876). His last opera, ‘Parsifal’, was produced in Bayreuth in 1882.

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Nietzsche’s compositions couldn’t have been that bad. When Wagner was shown a piece for piano which he had written, he expressed approval and demanded to see the composer. The introduction had come about quite fortuitously through a friend of the sister of his professor at Leipzig university. This professor was Friedrich Ritschl whom Nietzsche had followed to Leipzig from Bonn. Wagner was travelling around incognito as he often did and was staying with his friends, the Brockhauses, on his way through Leipzig. Nietzsche received an order to come to the house and meet the master in a tête à tête on the following Saturday. He duly made his appearance only to discover that Wagner had whisked himself off for another incognito meeting elsewhere. So incognito were Wagner’s incognitos that they were incognito even to those in the know. However, there were apologies and cups of coffee all round and the family asked Nietzsche to return the following evening when there would be a larger party which it would be more difficult to disappoint. Nietzsche accepted and decided that he ought to dress up for what he assumed was going to be a more formal occasion. He was influenced in this decision by the fact that his tailor had promised to finish a new suit for him in time for the great occasion.

The day started out with snow and rain and Nietzsche’s excitement could not be dispelled by his usual walk. The afternoon was spent with a fellow student discussing the place of God in philosophy but when dusk had already passed and there was still no sign of the suit he began to get worried. He went out to the tailor’s and found the assistants working hard on his order which they assured him would be ready in forty-five minutes.

A little mollified, he walked over to a cafe and ordered a drink. There was a periodical on the table which he picked up. Glancing through it he read with some surprise that Wagner was away in Switzerland. This gave him a feeling of being involved in an intrigue. When he got home an hour later, there was still no sign of the tailor so he settled down to wait with a dissertation on Eudocia. Not long after, he heard noises outside. He opened the window and saw the tailor’s old assistant standing at the gate below, grasping a packet under his arm. He yelled down through the rain that he should come up. The suit had arrived at last and it was time to get changed. Nietzsche tried on the suit and found it to be a perfect fit but the assistant had instructions to wait until he had been paid. Nietzsche was now very excited and told the man that he would only pay the tailor himself and not the assistant. However, the man stood his ground and refused to leave without the money. Time was now getting short ‘Finally, a show of dignity, a solemn threat, a curse on my tailor and his assistant, an oath of revenge. End of Act II. Myself brooding in a shirt on the sofa, wondering whether a black jacket is good enough for Richard. Outside, pouring rain’.

Thus he arrived in the charming drawing room of the Brockhauses with much excitement but no suit. Apart from the family, only Wagner himself was there. They were introduced and Nietzsche muttered a few compliments. Spurred on by this display of admiration and his own egomania, Wagner immediately asked how familiar Nietzsche was with his music. Then, hardly waiting for a reply, he began to rail against almost every production of his operas, the companies and their conductors. His energy and confidence impressed Nietzsche, ‘He is a wonderfully lively and ebullient man, who speaks very quickly and is very witty. He makes such a private meeting quite cheerful’.

At the end of the evening Wagner shook hands with the young student. He offered to show Nietzsche’s music to his sister and other relatives and invited him to visit again for a discussion on music and philosophy. Nietzsche had been visibly impressed and, on Wagner, people who were visibly impressed made an impression.

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The friendship was helped by Nietzsche’s move to Basle. In 1869 the chair of classical philology fell vacant and Ritschl recommended his number one student for the post. He was appointed ten days before receiving his doctorate, the youngest professor ever at Basle. In fact, he was so young that the examiner often turned out to be younger than the examinee. Ritschl wrote, ‘never have I known a young man […] who became so mature so early and so young as this Nietzsche’. Eventually the university gave him his doctorate without either dissertation or examination. Nietzsche wrote to Rohde, ‘We are certainly fate’s fools. Last week I had the idea […] of tossing philology into the antique junk heap where it belongs. Now the devil ‘fate’ tempts me with a professorship in philology’.

He converted to Swiss nationality and moved. One of the attractions of his new home was its proximity to Wagner’s new home, Tribschen, on Lake Lucerne.

Tribschen was a large, square house which overlooked the lake. On his very first visit Wagner had decided to make the purchase. He began a new life there, being joined almost immediately by Cosima and her three children. Nietzsche was soon a regular visitor, often staying over weekends and holidays. He made the place a kind of second home. A room was put aside for him and the Wagner children were soon calling him uncle.

Tribschen was something else. A large square three-storied house which had been redecorated for Wagner in rococo style with a great deal of pink satin and masses of small cupids. In the drawing room were large busts of Wagner and Ludwig II, and an oil painting of Wagner, a Tannhäuser picture, and Genelli’s ‘Dionysus among the Muses’. Gifts from the king were displayed, including silver bowls, an oil painting and statues of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. Wagner had converted one of the rooms into what he called his ‘gallery’ were he hung engravings and photographs of sequences from productions of his operas and a Buddha given to him by the Comtesse d’Agoult.

Wagner’s egomania and exhibitionism were apparent in everything he did, in private as well as in public. At the second Christmas which Nietzsche spent at Tribschen he gave Wagner one of Dürer’s prints, ‘Knight, Death and the Devil’ which pops up every now and then in these stories and which Wagner probably mistook for a representation of himself in armour doing battle with his enemies. Nietzsche later gave the same print to Förster. Equivalence can be damning.

In the matter of birthday presents, however, Wagner outdid his young protégé. He put an entire orchestra on the stairs outside his wife’s bedroom and perched above to conduct them in the ‘Siegfried Idyll’. She remembers the present in her diary, ‘In came Richard with the five children to put the score of his symphonic birthday present into my hands. I was in tears, but so was the whole household’.

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A quick biography of Wagner

1813

22nd May. Richard Wagner born in the Jewish quarter of Leipzig to a police actuary and Johanna Pätz who had been the mistress of Prince Constantin of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. He was only five months old when the city was surrounded by the cannons of the patriotic forces trying to set the fatherland free from the French. 22nd November his father and a sister died of the typhus brought by the armies.

1814

28th August. His mother married Ludwig Geyer perhaps just a little too soon for comfort. He became a very loving father.

1815

26th February. He got a half-sister (or sister) Cäcilie.

1816

The new family moved to Dresden where Geyer worked for the court theatre.

1821

Geyer died in September. Richard was at the deathbed and recalled playing a couple of little tunes on the piano. Geyer’s comment? ‘Might he perhaps have a talent for music?’ But his mother decided instead that he should make something of himself and discouraged his theatrical interests.

1822

2nd September. Entered the Dresden Kreuzschule where he was put on the register as Richard Geyer. One day a schoolmate keeled over and died and commemorative poems were requested. Wagner’s effort won.

1827

Took possession of a large collection of Geyer’s books which had been left to him.

1828

21st January Entered the Nicolaischule in Leipzig when he decided to call himself Richard Wagner and produced, at some expense to his regular studies, a tragedy called Leubald. This he tried to set to music. Had an early infatuation for Leah David, daughter of a Leipzig banker.

1830

The July revolution in Paris reverberated in Leipzig where the students were on the march. Wagner joined in with some relish. This gave him a taste for student life. On to University in Leipzig as studiosus musicae. Saved from a duel by the fact that his opponent was killed in another duel earlier the same day.

1833

Was given the post of chorusmaster at Würzburg.

1836

4th November. Married Minna Planer, an actress who was really a calm German hausfrau. She was lead actress in Heinrich Bettmann’s theatre company and he spent some time following them around.

1837

Minna fled to her parents leaving him horribly in debt and. 21st August. He arrived in Riga and took up a post there as director of the theatre and stayed two years composing Rienzi.

1839

Fled from his creditors in Riga and, after an awful journey across half of Europe, arrived on 13th August, in London. Soon left for Paris where he stayed, half starving but, nonetheless, composing Tannhäuser.

1842

Rienzi accepted in Dresden where, on 20th October, it was received in triumph. Wagner accepted the post of Royal Kapellmeister for life. Security at last.

1844

Nietzsche was born and Wagner finished Tannhäusser and Eugene Sue . . . and Disraeli . . . and Schopenhauer . . .

1845

19th October. Tannhäuser produced at Dresden.

1848

The year of revolutions and Wagner was caught up in the liberal ferment of the time even reading a paper on republicanism in public. This made him a rebel against the King of Saxony, the man he should have loved, the man who gave him the post of Kappelmeister at the Royal Opera House. Even so he managed to keep his court appointment. Started to work on a poem about Siefried, a hero who dies for the cause of revolutionary socialism. In March Lohengrin was finished.

1849

When the battle was taken to the streets, Wagner took fright and scurried away to Weimar where Liszt was preparing to put on Tannhäuser. On 19th May a warrant was issued for his arrest and he had to slip away once again, this time to Switzerland where he had to stay for twelve years. Until 1853, when he started on Rhinegold, he wrote hardly any music, producing instead a torrent of pamphlets including ‘Art and Revolution’, ‘The Artwork of the Future’, the gigantic ‘Opera and Drama’ and, of course ‘Judaism in Music’.

1850

Second attempt at success in Paris ended in failure. He returned to Zurich and published ‘Judaism in Music’ in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik under a pseudonym.

1852

Christmas. Met Mathilde Wesendonck. Finished the Ring and had it privately printed.

1853

Got Otto Wessendonck to fund a trip to Italy. Began composing Rhinegold.

1854

Finished Rhinegold and went straight on to Walküre.

1855

Visit to London where he kept on with Walküre and gave eight concerts for the Philharmonic Society.

1857

Cosima Liszt married Hans von Bülow. Wagner at work on Siegfried. He completed half of the opera and then stopped. He didn’t take up the Ring again for twelve years. Soon in love with Cosima.

1861

Visited the Wesendoncks in Venice and saw the death of his hopes in that area.

1862

Went to Dresden to visit Minna. She was ill and full of forebodings that she would not see Wagner again. She was right.

1863

Began his affair with Cosima.

1864

3rd May. A visit from the secretary to the King of Bavaria whose master, Ludwig II, granted his protection to Wagner and lots of money. Returned to Munich with the von Bülows.

1865

Cosima had a daughter, Isolde, by Wagner.

1866

Found refuge in Tribschen. Death of Minna. Returned to Munich.

1868

1st June. Premier of Meistersinger conducted by Von Bülow. By the autumn he was with Cosima in Tribschen. Bülow says, ‘If it had been anyone but Wagner I would have shot him’. 25th July. Birth of Siegfried.

1869

Republished ‘Judaism in Music’ under his own name. 15th May. Nietzsche’s first visit to Tribschen where unfortunately Wagner was working. Invited to return a couple of days later on Whit Monday for lunch. He soon became a member of the household.

1870

Cosima divorced von Bülow and married Wagner. Nietzsche was present at the first performance of the Siegfried Idyll on the staircase at Tribschen on Cosima’s birthday, Christmas eve.

1871

First visit to Bayreuth.

1872

22nd May. Wagner’s Birthday. Laying of the foundation stone for the new theatre which would have highly raked seating and a sunken orchestra pit.

1873

Move to Bayreuth.

1876

13th - 17th August. Bayreuth opened with a performance of the Ring.

1877

Visit to London to raise money to pay off the debts of the Festival Theatre. There the composer, along with Hans Richter, conducted eight concerts at the Albert Hall. He also read ‘Parsifal’ to Queen Victoria. Cosima confided to her diary, ‘All Israel is working against us’. Later in the year he was composing ‘Parsifal’.

1882

The Parsifal Year. 26th July. First performance of Parsifal. Something quite new. Wagner asks, ‘Can a drama in which the most sublime mysteries of the Christian faith are shown upon the stage be produced in theatres like ours, in front of audiences like ours, as part of an operatic repertoire like ours?’

1883

13th February. Died in Venice

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The Wagner myth was created as much by Cosima as by Wagner himself. The perfect wife for the monomaniac she was able to keep up her side of most conversations and was also prepared, indeed revelled in, his endless monologues. She treated him as much like a god as it is possible to do on this side of the grave, worshipping him to the point of hagiography. She kept his eyelashes about her, carrying them around as if they were some kind of holy relic. So much better to be idolised by an attractive, intelligent disciple than one with fewer qualities. Above all she was devotedly reliable and efficient, always struggling on his behalf, acting as his secretary, organising his household, answering his letters and screening those who asked to see him. Like a chief minister she had put herself in his service but, also like a chief minister, she revelled in the power the position gave her.

She was not averse to angling for money to advance his plans. When Ludwig allowed him a grant of some 40,000 florins, his officials at the treasury, who were hell-bent on obstructing the scheme, thought up a really good wheeze to obstruct their royal master. When Cosima came to collect the donation, they placed before her a huge pile of sacks containing the money in small coins. Without flinching, she personally loaded them into the carriage with the aid of her maid and drove off. Both before and after his death she worked tirelessly for him.

Just as Elizabeth did for her brother. In fact the parallel between the two women doesn’t stop there. When Elizabeth wrote about Cosima and Wagner she did so without realising, or only half realising, that what she was writing might just as easily have applied to herself and her brother. As follows, ‘Cosima was the personification of will-to-power in the noblest sense of the term. As long as he lived she exercised influence by and through him by which I do not want to imply that she ruled him, only that his art, his fame, his greatness and his puissance were the instruments of her power. It is only since his death, or so at least it seems to me, that his illustrious gifts have been given the fullest expression. To judge Cosima by any other standards would be to misunderstand her splendid character, her abandonment of Bülow for Wagner, her entire rich and full life and her later development into the “Margravine of Bayreuth”’. Only a couple of words need to be changed.

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An odd story in reference to Geyer. The question of the geier or vulture which impregnates the Wagner story. Nietzsche had himself suggested a vulture for Wagner’s coat of arms which he wanted for the title page of his latest theoretical piece ‘On Conducting’. At this time Nietzsche was still enthusiastic enough about Wagner and Tribschen to agree to Wagner’s constant demands upon his time, demands which he found very difficult to meet due to the pressure of his own work. Wagner wrote to him, ‘The coat-of-arms turned out very well; we have every reason to thank you for your meticulous care. But here my old vulture draft has risen anew, the bird of prey that everyone takes for an eagle until told that scientifically there is such a thing as a ‘cinerary vulture,’ closely resembling the eagle. Now since, because of the relationship, the ‘vulture’ absolutely has to be recognised at once; may we ask you to prevail upon the engraver to give our bird its characteristic ruffle - using any available picture of the beast’.

Nietzsche agreed and co-opted an all too willing Elizabeth in the hunt for a picture. She, however, unlike her brother, was annoyed that there would be no proud eagle on Wagner’s crest of arms. It was Nietzsche who divulged to her that the reference was to Wagner’s paternity. And there was another myth about vultures, an Egyptian one, to place in this story of myths, that procreation by a vulture is possible without male intervention. The vulture is thus a fatherless bird, a bastard, and this leads us neatly to a coda, a tail, as we might now naturally mention Freud’s interpretation of a vulture’s tail placed in the mouth of the baby Leonardo da Vinci as the male organ. This meant that ‘he had had a mother but no father’, or that he was a child ‘who was aware of his father’s absence and found himself alone with his mother’. Leonardo, like Wagner and also Cosima, was illegitimate.

It was not only the request to correct the image of the vulture on Wagner’s coat of arms that came to Nietzsche from both Wagner and Cosima but a hundred other demands. Too many of Wagner’s letters were demands, some of them for the most trivial things. When Hans Richter was at Tribschen to help with the orchestration of ‘The Ring’ Cosima wrote ‘Dutch herrings are greatly in demand…’ When Nietzsche was ill after the fighting in 1870 it was more of an inconvenience to them than a concern. These herrings also needed his expert attention.

But Nietzsche was being reserved for even greater things and was soon co-opted as philosopher to the court of King Wagner. His first book, ‘The birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music’, was, in the final sections, a deep and submissive bow in the direction of the maestro. It was, until section sixteen, an academic study of Greek drama showing how Socrates, in league with his friend Euripides, managed to kill off tragedy as the genuine embodiment of the dionysiac and irrational abysses in apollonian form replacing it with a new one which was later spotted and defined by Aristotle and which was rational and philosophic, theoretical, a view of tragedy which governed the form down the centuries until . . .

These early sections were based on lectures he had given at Basle two years before that first meeting with Wagner. Sections 16-25 are tacked onto the end. Here the argument is a grovel. If Socrates and Euripides destroyed the music of pre-tragic drama then a new master was needed to return it to its original place. Magistra ex machina. This ‘German spirit is still alive, and in marvellous health, like a knight who dreams far underground in an enchanted sleep. From out of these depths rises a Dionysiac song, letting us know that this German knight is still dreaming of the ancient Dionysiac myth in his blissfully serious visions […] One day the knight will find himself awake in all the morning freshness of his immense sleep, He will slay dragons, destroy the cunning dwarves, rouse Brünhilde, and even Wotan’s spear will be unable to bar his way’. Wagner gobbled this up along with his breakfast to put him in the mood for composing.

Nietzsche suppressed his own thoughts at the bidding of his admiration for the master. He writes of ‘the huge task I had to perform for Wagner and which really provoked many and weighty contradictions within me’. He was incredibly sycophantic and wrote to Wagner about the Birth of Tragedy, ‘On every page you’ll find me trying to thank you for all you’ve given me, and the only doubt that plagues me is whether I’ve always received it properly’. And again, ‘I would rather tell you in person how many purely scholarly problems have been gradually clarified for me because of your absolutely unique and memorable personality’. He tells Gersdorff that Wagner ‘is filled with such an absolute idealism, such a profound and moving humanity, such a sublime eagerness for life, that when I’m in his presence I feel I’m in the presence of the divine’. A man with his forehead on the ground, Nietzsche had become Wagner’s ‘literary lackey’.

One more piece of help from the serviceable writer after the ‘The Birth of Tragedy’. The new theatre got into endless financial difficulties which the usual appeals to royalty had failed to alleviate so Wagner decided to call on the German people to pull it out of the mess. Nietzsche was asked to write a call to arms for the project. He produced his ‘Manifesto for the Germans’ in which Wagner is called the ‘great, courageous and indomitable champion of German culture’. This he took with him to Bayreuth where a visit to the building site had been arranged in the hope of encouraging the visitors to put their hands in their pockets. Unfortunately, it poured and Nietzsche lost his new hat to the Bayreuth cause. After the visit he read them his manifesto which they loudly applauded and then rejected. They accepted instead one less strident in tone. Rejection not from Wagner but from the Wagnerians.

Wagner even considered making Nietzsche legal guardian to his only son, Siegfried, so that he could watch over his education. Wagner hoped at one point that Nietzsche would give up his professorship for a time in order to assist in the preparations for the festival at Bayreuth.

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But there were rumblings of discontent. As early as 1873 Nietzsche had had the temerity to leave the score of Brahms ‘Triumphlied’ on Wagner’s piano in Bayreuth which led to a furious argument. Wagner couldn’t stand Brahms either as man or musician and there is little evidence that Nietzsche liked him much either so this action must have been malicious. He sat at the piano and played bits from the score in Wagner’s hearing and when one of the maestro’s retinue removed it, Nietzsche found it and put it back. It was a large score with Brahms’ name in huge letters across the cover and every time Wagner came into the room the hated name was there glaring up at him from his piano. Eventually this led to words, Wagner apoplectic and Nietzsche pale faced and silent. Nietzsche must have sublimated the experience until it exploded years later in his anti-Wagner outbursts of 1888.

Two years later there occurred a telling little episode recalled by Elizabeth. Cosima had written to Nietzsche asking him to send his sister to Bayreuth to look after the children for weeks on end while the two parents went off on their travels. This Nietzsche obligingly did, writing to his sister and asking her to help them out. She went to Wahnfried with presents from ‘Uncle Nietzsche’ and stayed after the return of Wagner and Cosima. She wrote in her diary, ‘I shall never forget the quiet evenings when the children had been sent off to bed and we sat together in the library talking of all manner of things. At first my brother was the chief topic of conversation and I can still see the significant looks exchanged between Wagner and Frau Cosima as I related how cheerful my brother had been during the Christmas holidays and how many diverting things he had to tell about the Basle circle, “Then why does he always write us such melancholy letters?” asked Wagner almost angrily, “Does he do that?” I replied, genuinely astonished and, upon receiving an affirmative answer, hastened to explain that, in writing to Wahnfried, he was always made to realise how far away he lived and could no longer share all their intimate family experiences as in the good old days at Tribschen’. Wagner seemed somewhat mollified. She remembered later her careful caressing of the maestro’s ego.

More rumblings. Nietzsche sent Cosima a piece for violin and piano. She wrote of it, ‘I once received ‘New Year’s Bells’ in Tribschen. I sat down and played. Jacob Stock, who was then my butler and would always say to me through the various vicissitudes of life, ‘One just has to be fin ,’ stopped setting the table, listened attentively, and finally turned away with the words ‘Don’t like it’. I must confess that I laughed so hard I couldn’t play any further’.

Cosima certainly saw in Nietzsche a useful tool in her drive to create the Wagner myth. But as soon as she suspected that Nietzsche was not behaving like a true courtier, she began to treat him with disdain. It was quite natural for her to look down her nose at people, being taller than a good many of them.

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After all that, another question asked by Nietzsche in ‘The Case of Wagner’, ‘Was Wagner German at all?’ A question which is not as strange as it may seem at first sight, ‘Great learner that he was, he naturally learned to imitate a great deal that was German, but that is all. His very soul contradicts everything which until now has been thought of as German; not to speak of German musicians!’ ‘It is’, he writes, ‘difficult to find any German peculiarities in his character’.

One step further and Nietzsche is maintaining not only that Wagner may not have been German but that might even have been a Jew. Both Wagner himself and his official biographer said that his father was Carl Friedrich Wagner, a petty police actuary from Liepzig. Nietzsche tells us that Wagner had confided to him that he was really the son of his step-father, Ludwig Geyer, a Jewish actor and painter. Ernest Newman, in his Life of Wagner, after carefully sifting all the evidence, comes to the same conclusion.

The relationships are, on the surface at least, fairly straightforward. The story is as follows. Friedrich, Wagner’s father, adored Schiller and was an avid theatre-goer and amateur actor and these activities led him into the company of Ludwig Geyer. This Geyer was a man of some ability. He painted, wrote poetry and even a comedy called ‘The Murder of the Innocents’. For much of his life he earned his living as a portrait painter and had the reputation of being an able musician. Wagner’s father, Friedrich, died of Typhus when Wilhelm Richard was only six months old. Nine months after that his mother, Johanna, married Geyer and, until his mother was left a widow, the boy carried the surname of his new step-father who seems to have been a loving parent. Geyer was obviously very fond of the boy, more so than of the other children and called him ‘the cossack’. Wagner remembered happy moments later in his life and even repeated them to Cosima who jotted them down in her diary. Geyer died when the boy was eight and Wagner tells of the three hour trudge to be at the dying man’s bedside. Wagner is a Cartwright, a wagoner, Geyer a vulture. Wagner’s name is, therefore, already a second coming.

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During his time in Paris Wagner was invited to breakfast with Halevy for whom he was doing some paid transcription work. Present were several journalists all talking with the composer in French which was his mother tongue but which Wagner spoke hardly at all. At one point Wagner said a few words to Halevy in German to which Halevy responded. The journalists were surprised and told Wagner that they hadn’t realised that Halevy spoke German. Wagner’s reply was, ‘Oh, didn’t you know? All Jews can speak German!’

Do we sense just a soupçon of the fear of contamination here? German, like the geier are touched with the bug of Judaism and are both of them to be driven away and distanced.

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There is another Geyer, the last human being to whom Bela Bartok confided. This was the violinist Stefi Geyer to whom the first two movements of his violin concerto were dedicated and which includes the five note subject which he called Stefi’s leitmotiv. In 1907 he told her that, although as a child he had been ‘a devoted Catholic’, he had become ‘a new man - an atheist’. He called himself ‘a follower of Nietzsche’, an atheist who was striving for ‘the highest degree of indifference’. Is this the result of ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, both that of Nietzsche and of Strauss?

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This question of paternity, of origins, refuses to die and inhabits the dark corners of so much of the Wagner story. An oddity which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Geyer was Jewish. In 1912 a certain Otto Bournot did a doctoral thesis on the question of Wagner’s paternity. Delving into the Saxon parish archives, he worked his way right back to Wagner’s great-grand-stepfather, Benjamin Geyer who, lo and behold, had been organist at the Church of Eisleben at the end of the seventeenth century. Not a single one of this family that had not been a member of the Evangelical church. Thus the Geyer step-paternity contained ‘nothing unfavourable’. Whew! Forget the assumptions behind such research that it accepted more of the step-paternity than it may have wanted. Anyway, the jokers who dubbed Wagner ‘The Rabbi of Bayreuth’ should have kept their pens in their pockets. But perhaps better to follow, not Heine’s uncle but another Solomon, another Jew who had written some three millennia before of things which were too wonderful to be understood. One of them was the vulture in the sky.

Was Wagner schizophrenic with regard to this step-father? On the one hand he wrote a loving memoir to him. On the other he treated Jews along with other enemies as threatening, as if they were extensions of the castrating stepfather, the uncle Claudius, who made his way into his mother’s bed. On the one hand the man to whom he owed his life, on the other the man he had to suppress, the Jewish intruder. This threat had to be controlled and as soon as it escaped from this control it became a threat again. Nietzsche was surely one of the primary examples of this, loved while under the total sway of the master but hated when he had made his escape.

On Wagner’s sixtieth birthday the celebrations included a performance of Geyer’s ‘The Murder of the Innocents’. In Wahnfried, his house in Bayreuth, he had a picture of Geyer on the wall.

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Wagner’s megalomania met with a string of failures. Why? Because performances of his music were being contaminated by compromises forced on him by theatre managements and Jews. He had grumbled about it for years. His tirade on that day in Leipzig when Nietzsche first met him had been on this theme. He now came up with a solution; to build a new theatre to his own design in the little town of Bayreuth in Bavaria, a place which was judenfrei and where he could control everything himself. The family moved from Tribschen to their new home, Wahnfried, at Bayreuth. Nietzsche paid his final visit to Tribschen between the 25th and 27th of April 1875 where only Cosima had been left behind to do the packing. On Wagner’s birthday 22nd May, Nietzsche shared Wagner’s carriage when he rode into the town to lay the foundation stone for the new theatre. Nietzsche describes the moment, ‘The stone was laid […] in the midst of the pouring rain and under a darkened sky. Wagner drove back with us to the town; he was silent and seemed to be gazing into himself with an expression not to be described in words […] We know that at times of exceptional danger or, generally, at any decisive turning point in their lives, men compress together all they have experienced in an infinitely accelerated inner panorama’. That evening Wagner conducted Beethoven at Bayreuth and Nietzsche met Malwida von Meysenbug who remained friendly with both composer and philosopher.

The following year he wrote to Malwida after Christmas at Naumberg, ‘Yesterday was the first day of the year. I looked into the future and trembled. Life is dreadful and hazardous. I envy anyone who is well and truly dead’. Various posthumous existences were fructifying around this time. Wagner had submitted to the Wagnerian. The great period was over. Nietzsche’s subservience to Wagner was shuddering to a close and a great time of creative sickness was beginning which lasted until the uncreative existence of the asylums and the villa Silberblick. And Elizabeth met Bernhard Förster at Bayreuth.

The last letter which Nietzsche wrote to Wagner accompanied a copy of ‘Human All Too Human’ the tone of which is anti-Wagnerian if not anti-Wagner. Cosima immediately understood why the break had taken place, ‘Israel intervened in the shape of Dr Rée, the Jew, very polished, very cool, apparently wrapped up in Nietzsche and dominated by him, although outsmarting him’ - the relationship between Judaea and Germany in miniature.

Wagner himself took a different line. He put it about that Nietzsche was mad. He even went to the length of writing to Nietzsche’s doctor suggesting that his sickness was the result of too much masturbation. With this Nietzsche was not well pleased. Neither was Elizabeth who, bearing the same name, was no longer an acceptable figure at Bayreuth. She was pulled both ways. Towards her brother in one direction and towards Bernhard and Wagner in the other.

The first of all the first nights at Bayreuth. Three separate performances of the whole of ‘The Ring’. Nietzsche was present for part of the first but gave away his tickets for the second and, by the third, was back in Basle. When Lou Salomé spoke of Nietzsche at Wahnfried, Wagner left the room in a huff demanding that he should never be spoken of again in his presence. Another posthumous existence. ‘The Wagnerian had become master of Wagner’. Wagner had become Teuton and anti-semite.

Nietzsche had escaped from the scene with Rée.

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What did the master look like?

Paley tells us that, ‘like other great men, he was short of stature, but neither stumpy nor dwarfed’ and he continues, ‘His forehead was immense, and the whole expression vivid, decisive and commanding’. Elizabeth’s description of him at Tribschen, ‘He was dressed in a Flemish painter’s costume consisting of a black velvet coat, black satin knickers, black silk stockings, a light blue satin cravat tied in a costly bow, with a part of his fine linen and lace shirt visible below, and a artist’s tam-o’-shanter on his head, which was at that time covered with luxuriant brown hair’. But let’s be fair. Wagner suffered badly throughout his life from an itchy skin complaint called Erysipelas and couldn’t stand rough material to touch him. This explains in part his wardrobe of twenty-four silk dressing gowns. In part.

Wagner’s creativity was always enhanced by his setting. He needed his satins and velvets, tulle and lace and silks. The first thing to be done when Wagner moved house was to create an environment in which he could work. He would dress himself in satins and silks and install himself in a room hung with drapes in soft colours. Once he had the public purse at his command he didn’t stint himself. In the house at 21 Briennerstrasse, a present from King Ludwig II, his luxurious habits quickly became offensive and later, at Tribschen, he created a temple to himself; a museum to his muse. Elizabeth, on her first visit to the house, noted that the decorations were ‘disagreeably extravagant with its pink satin and cupids’. At the end of his life, while composing ‘Parsifal’, he had a secret correspondence with a French Jewess, Judith Gautier. He had become infatuated with her at Bayreuth during the second Ring cycle. He asked her to send him perfumes, bath essence and silks to help in the task. She did. They had the required effect and, tiring of the correspondence, he handed it over to Cosima who accepted the job apparently with no hesitation.

Unlike Nietzsche, the publicist in Wagner loved being painted and photographed. Especially surrounded by a tastefully arranged collection of sycophants. Occasionally even an equal was permitted. Franz Liszt was allowed to sit at the piano. Cosima gets special treatment. Little idea is given by these images of the man’s stature. Musically gigantic maybe but physically small. In a photograph with Cosima he gazes down into her admiring eyes, towering head and shoulders above her, an effect obtained by seating her in a chair and leaving him standing.

He appeared to Renoir in a black velvet gown with sleeves of thickly padded satin and the famous painter did a sketch of him. Wagner said that it made him look like a Protestant pastor. Nietzsche’s father, of course, was a Protestant pastor.

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Royalty was fascinated by Wagner. Ludwig II of Bavaria was spell-bound. He called Wagner his ‘Friend and Only One, the fount of all rapture, my one and all, embodiment of my bliss, divine one. My mission is to live, fight, and suffer for him’. Ludwig was a neurotic princeling, brought up by tutors. His father, Maximilian, was a disciplinarian. It was feared at court that the young man would lose himself in a private world of dreams and be unable to carry out his duties as king. In 1861 he begged his father to arrange a performance of Lohengrin and was brought to the verge of hysterics by the effect it had on him. In the Hohenscwangau he strolled to and fro in rooms lavishly decorated on his orders with paintings of Siegfried and the Teutonic pantheon and, as he did so, his mind echoed with the words of Wagner’s preface to the poem of the Ring in which he dreamed of a prince who would build a theatre dedicated to real German music drama and ended with the words, ‘Would such a prince ever he found?’ Indeed he would. Indeed he had.

When Maximilian died Ludwig was only eighteen and a solitary whose dreams were the same as Wagner’s. His father’s fears were realised. Hating all the panoply of state and everything to do with politics, he nonetheless had a dream which was as political as any, if impractical, a dream of ends without means, a dream of a regeneration of German culture (reach for your gun) through German theatre. Wagner wrote an essay at the king’s request. It is called ‘The State and Religion’. Here the composer describes the king’s ‘mission’. It is ‘so uncommon’ as to be ‘almost superhuman’. If the ordinary man were to be faced with such a mission he would commit suicide, but a king ‘is rescued from this consequence by the exalted earnestness of that inner ur-knowledge of the world essence which has become the standard of all his beholdings. At each instant he is prepared for the terrible phenomenon. And it is art that is his vital aid in this task’.

The young man spent his time strolling in the Bavarian Alps, dreaming his dream. It is an interesting reminder of the theme of madness that Newman, seeing things from a Wagnerian perspective, writes of Ludwig that ‘he exhibited so many signs of exceptional sanity that it was a foregone conclusion that the world would some day declare him to be mad’. When Wagner was forced out of Munich it is hardly surprising to read that he took it to be the machinations of ‘Jesuits and Jews’, of ‘the Jewish German masses (those horrors)’. Ludwig wrote him a note in which he called out ‘Heil! to my beloved friend’.

However, Wagner always had the interests of number one at the centre of his plans so, when the war with France in 1871 left the Prussians in control of a regenerated German empire, he discarded the insignificant little king of Bavaria and turned instead to Berlin. Here was where the real power and influence now lay in the persons of Wilhelm I, Kaiser of a newly united country, and his chancellor, Bismarck. Wagner’s patriotism, stoked by Cosima, knew no bounds. Plans for productions of his operas and for the national festival theatre veered northwards and went to Berlin, bypassing Bavaria. Ludwig, left out on a limb, now turned to building as a means of satisfying his theatrical impulses. He proceeded to construct a series of rococo follies in the Bavarian mountains in the name of German artistic regeneration. Inverted shadow of Speer. Inevitably Wagner turned to building as well.

A site for the theatre was found at Bayreuth and an announcement made that it would be opened in 1873. It would be darkened, have an unlit, hidden orchestra pit below stage and steeply raked seats, a bit like a proto-cinema. The burgers of the place were thrilled even though they already had a wonderful opera house which boasted the largest stage in the whole of the new German empire but this was quite unsuitable for Wagner’s grandiose schemes. Old opera had to be by-passed and new opera had to be rebuilt from the ground up.

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Although, perhaps, not quite so new as all that. Years before, at his first appointment in Riga, Wagner had worked at the opera there, a building which had three peculiarities: it was dark, it had stalls that were raked up like an amphitheatre and an orchestra pit which was sunk and almost invisible. A germ in the mind for later?

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Wagner left Tribschen for Bayreuth in 1872. The foundation stone for the new theatre was laid on his birthday, 22nd May, with Nietzsche in attendance and Liszt staying away. They moved into their new house, Wahnfried, a name which means peace from torments, madness, illusion and fantasy. The design for the sepulchre to house them in their posthumous existence was finalised at the same time.

Wagner met both Bismarck and the Kaiser. Bismarck invited him to his private house. Cosima notes, ‘R is absolutely delighted by his genuine, unforced kindness, no hint of reserve, a light voice, the most delightful communicativeness, exuding trust and sympathy’. Unfortunately, however, Wagner realised that, ‘I will not be able to win his support for my cause’. For the Kaiser he gave a concert which was all his own work plus Beethoven’s fifth. One of the incidental items was a Kaisermarsch. This was a big hit with the Kaiser who had it repeated again and again. But no help in coin from that direction. So, a new decision, ‘The expenses of my enterprise will have to be borne by private persons’.

Circles of patrons, the Wagner Vereine, were organised to achieve this end. They consisted of private persons who were expected to contribute to the scheme. The idea was that each member would purchase one ticket valued at 300 thalers. Those who could not afford so much joined anyhow and purchased a ticket between two or three. One of the purchasers was Nietzsche. These groups were not too successful and Wagner soon discovered that the contributions were nowhere near covering the costs of the festival and, on top of that, their members expected him to feel obligated for their munificence and even conduct the occasional concert for them. Neither sufficient money nor sufficient subservience. In 1876 he cursed the vereine roundly and demanded their liquidation.

So still no money. The vereine had let him down. The German princes, who might have helped, preferred to put their money into ‘Jewish or Jesuit undertakings’. Who saved the day? Ludwig. ‘No, no and no again! It will not end thus; help must be given! Our plan must not fail!’ Ludwig was the ‘wise fool who was needed’. Bavaria paid the crucial balance into the festival’s capacious pocket specifying that the money was a loan and should be repaid. The surprising thing is that it was, mostly by Wagner’s heirs out of the profits made by the festival.

Ludwig had come to the rescue and earned himself a special private performance of the Ring. The king arrived secretly by train and met Wagner for the first time in eight years at a signal box in the middle of a field. The performance left the usual impression, ‘You are a God-man who cannot fail […] the true artist who has, by the grace of God, brought down from heaven the holy flame to inspire, ennoble and redeem us on earth’. The Kaiser arrived three days later to a public welcome. Cheering crowds. He couldn’t manage to sit through the whole of the cycle and left to supervise military manoeuvres. It must be noted that Nietzsche also fled but that, unlike the kaiser who survived two whole operas, he managed only two acts.

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Later Hitler, another Wagnerite of a more menacing variety, would stay for the entire cycle. August Kubizek writes in his book about Hitler’s youth, ‘From the very first moment that Wagner entered his life, his genius had him in its grasp. With incredible tenacity and will-power he immersed himself in his life and works. He had experienced nothing like it before. He identified entirely with Wagner’s personality. His heart beat faster as he read everything that he could find about the master, whether good or bad, admiring or critical. He was especially interested in biographical work, scribblings, letters, diaries and even the Autobiographical Sketch. He dug ever deeper into Wagner’s life’. Adolf had no greater desire than to get to Bayreuth, the national shrine of German music. ‘He sought for much more than a model and an example in Wagner. He literally appropriated Wagner’s personality as if he needed to make it an integral part of his individuality’. His book, ‘Mein Kampf’, had some superficial similarities with Wagner’s ‘Mein Leben’ apart from the title which was clearly an influence. Both of these books were dictated. Wagner’s largish one to Cosima who acted as amanuensis. Hitler’s little one to Hess, his gaoler at Landberg who wrote that, ‘All day long and late into the night the typewriter would be tapping and one could hear him in his little room dictating to his friend Hess. On Saturday evenings he would generally read the completed section to his fellow prisoners who sat round him like schoolboys’. Incidentally, the book was typed on paper sent to him in prison by Winifred Wagner. In his ‘Table Talk’, Hitler divided the people of his epoch into Wagnerians and those who had no special name.

Of course, with all this reading, Wagner’s anti-semitism must have rubbed off. Is not Hitler’s anti-semitism much like Wagner’s? Hitler’s hatred of Jews can possibly be traced back to those couple of years when he lived in poverty in Vienna and had to sleep in a doss-house, Wagner’s to a different couple of years of neglect in Paris. Both suffered destitution at a formative moment of their lives and both, in their megalomania, blamed the Jews. They were both nurtured as sons of the petty bourgoisie who so often saw the Jew as the cause of their misfortunes. Both were later resurrected as the genius of their epoch but failed to overcome their earlier hatreds. No point in thinking of these men’s notion of revolution in your liberal democratic sense, one which seeks to free the world from bourgeois capitalism. For them revolution was centred on the hope that ‘Germans and only Germans were able to lead the world to freedom and deliver it from […] the taint of Judaism’. For them Judentum meant not simply Judaism, not even Jewishness but the Jews themselves. This menacing certainty is so often there in German revolutionary tracts and especially those written by Wagner and the führer.

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German anti-semitism springs from a long history of Jew hatred which began as the church emerged from secrecy into open acceptance in the Roman Empire and the story of Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ, the disciple who bears the name of the Jewish people, began to find its way into the original gospel texts. John Chrysostom was one of the formulators of the doctrine, ‘Where Christ-killers gather, the cross is ridiculed, God blasphemed, the father unacknowledged, the son insulted, the grace of the Spirit rejected’. The dichotomy is clear, ‘If the Jewish rites are holy and venerable, our way of life must be false. But if our way is true, as indeed it is, theirs is fraudulent’. Christian and Jew share a Bible. If the Christian interpretation of the texts is correct then the Jewish one must be false. This is the basis of medieval anti-semitism. German enlightenment anti-semitism is embedded in this hatred and merely adapts itself to the loss of religious belief. In fact German anti-semitism is deeply embedded in German idealism from its beginnings in Kant. Here is the old master being critical in quite the wrong sense, in ‘Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone’, hidden away in a footnote we can find, ‘In its original form, the Jewish faith was merely a collection of statutory laws over which was established a political organisation; as whatever moral additions were then or later appended to it in no way whatever belong to Judaism as such. Judaism is not really a religion at all but merely the union of a number of people’. Later, in a note to the ‘Anthropology’, he adds a few more comments and creates what has been called by someone who has not opened his Chaucer or his Luther among so many others, ‘the most anti-semitic page in world literature’. Here we go again ‘The Palestinians […] have […] earned a not unfounded reputation for being swindlers because of their spirit of usury since their exile’. The Jews are ‘a nation of cheats […] the great majority of whom […] seek no civil dignity and try to make up for this loss by the advantage of cheating the people among whom they find refuge and even one another. […] They make the slogan “let the buyer beware” the highest principle in their dealing with us’. He tells us that they are traders because of their history and that ‘it cannot be considered a curse […] but a blessing especially since their per capita wealth is probably greater than that of any other people of the same number’. Unfortunately Christianity has ‘certain sacred writings in common with them’ and thus ‘their constitution cannot be consistently abolished’. Here already is the German attitude to the Jews, a people lacking all that is self-evidently good, ‘love, reason and freedom’ and could, therefore never be good human beings. They were, above all and quite self-evidently a people who had rejected the very course of history and had failed to collapse quietly into oblivion like all other ancient systems of belief once it had performed its essential task and given Christianity to the world’. Saul Ascher understood the danger of an anti-semitism that thought itself to be ‘rational and noble-minded’.

Fichte takes up the torch, ‘In the breast of almost all the European nations there spreads a powerful state goaded by hostile feelings which is continually at war with all the others, and which in certain states dreadfully oppresses the citizens. I speak of Judentum’. These people ‘are barred […] from our meals, from our pleasures, from the affectionate interchange of well-being from heart to heart’. They are ‘condemned to petty trading which weakens the body and shuts off the mind to all noble feeling’. And he adds, in case you are still in any doubt, that these people are so dangerous that they threaten the very core of civilisation and must be annihilated. The Germans must take over the role of chosen race from the Jews.

A follower of Fichte, Jakob Fries. who was professor of philosophy at Jena, called for the ‘extermination of this Jewish commercial caste’. Of course he didn’t mean it literally. He was speaking merely of a ‘metaphorical, not a practical, extermination’.

Not practical but philosophical, an inner change was called for. On to Hegel who tells us that, although Judaism had been crucial to the march of history, it had been superseded by its antithesis, Christianity and its state taken over by Rome. The Jews should thus accept the facts and give up their separate existence and assimilate into the world that they had been instrumental in creating. Hegel unfortunately died before he could explain how the Jews had managed to survive against the great sweep of historical inevitability but, nonetheless, driven up against this wall, Hegel began to see in Jewish stubbornness something more like ‘admirable firmness’ and publicly called for the protection of Jews during the Hep-hep riots but the young Hegelians didn’t take any note of these later ‘ramblings’.

Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer took this all one stage further and Bauer’s pupil Karl Marx continued the process. Where Feuerbach speaks of the Jewish God as being ‘the ego of Israel’, Marx writes of a more practical egotism, the desire of gain, of power and of cash. The Jews were the perfect metaphor for capitalism, indeed had survived in spite of history, had ‘maintained and developed itself through history, in and with history’. The development of Jewry ‘is to be perceived not with the eye of the theologian but only with the eye of the man of the world because it is to be found, not in religious theory, but only in commercial and industrial practice. ‘ The Jewish Question was no longer a religious question but had a secular, real basis for ‘once Jewry was stripped bare of its religious shell and showed its empirical, worldly, practical kernel, the practical really social way in which this kernel is to abolished may be indicated’. Of course a practical problem is that much easier or possible to deal with than a strictly religious one.

Thus can we read a supplement to the great sweep of German idealism.

And even at the very beginnings of humanism there is Luther. Luther! What constipation there was amid the avid flow of your thought. Did you ever hope that it might lead to . . ? ‘Know Christians, that after the Devil you have no enemy more cruel, more poisonous or more violent that a true Jew’. These creatures should be punished because ‘they hate the divine law in their very hearts and, as is the way with all hypocrites, they habitually condemn others. These are precisely the people who hate God’s goodness, and pile up the divine wrath by their hardness of heart’. Cosima notes in her diary that ‘in his thoughts Richard always lives with Luther’ and ‘feels related to him in many ways’. And, of course, Luther was Hitler’s favourite reading.

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Nietzsche’s attitude to the Jews as if seen in a mirror.

Before leaving Naumberg in 1866 he placed an advertisement in the ‘Leipziger Tageblatt’ for a new room in order ‘to get away from the Jews’.

Adulatory letter to Wagner hailing him as Schopenhauer’s spiritual brother. Very sycophantic letter which praises Wagner for his awareness of the spiritual world which ‘we poor Germans have got lost in the night through every possible kind of political misery, philosophical mischief and Jewish pushiness’.

Disparaging remarks in some of his letters from Leipzig also. A few days after the French surrender to Bismark, Nietzsche wrote, ‘So far not everything has been destroyed by Franco-Jewish trivialization and “elegance”’.

For Christmas 1871 Elizabeth asked for a book on the history of art by Springer but Nietzsche sent her one by Lübke instead because he would have had to order the other from ‘a scandalous Jewish second-hand bookshop’.

Karl Mendelssohn Bartholdy, son of the composer asked Nietzsche to spend Easter 1871 with him in Greece. Cosima wrote, ‘The son of Felix! This is very strange. I think I know what your decision will be’. He refuses.

The very day that he broke with Wagner is the day that he broke also with his anti-semitism. On 27th August of 1876, after his visit to Bayreuth where Wagner was busy with rehearsals for the Ring, he left with Paul Rée who was a Jew. At the beginning of October of the same year he was at Veytaux with Rée who wrote that ‘it was the honeymoon of our friendship’. Cosima says that the Wagners didn’t discover that Rée was Jewish until five months later but Nietzsche couldn’t have kept the friendship of both parties. His acceptance of Rée was his dismissal of the Wagners and their anti-semitism.

At St Moritz in May 1877, he read a book by Siegfried Lipiner called ‘Prometheus Unbound’. Rohde had called him ‘the most bow- legged of Jews’ and Rée said that he was ‘not an appetising creature’ but Nietzsche wrote, ‘If this poet is not a “genius”, I no longer know what genius is’. And, in a letter to Lipiner, ‘Tell me honestly whether in respect of origin you have any connection with the Jews. The fact is that I have recently had many experiences which have raised in me the highest of expectations from young men of this origin’.

In ‘Human all too Human’ he wrote of the Jews, ‘in so far as their energy and higher intelligence, their capital in spirit and will accumulated in a long school of suffering from generation to generation, must come to preponderate to a degree calculated to awaken envy and hatred, so that there is gaining the upper hand in almost every nation - and the more so the more nationalist a gesture the nation is again adopting - the literary indecency of leading the Jews to the sacrificial slaughter as scapegoats for every possible public or private misfortune’. Nietzsche agreed that the Jew has ‘unpleasant, indeed dangerous, qualities’ and even agreed with Marx that ‘the youthful stock-exchange Jew is the most repulsive invention of the entire human race’ but he continued, ‘Nevertheless I should like to know how much must be forgiven a people who, in a total accounting and even though not all of us are to blame, have had the most grief-laden history of any people and whom we have to thank for the noblest human being (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the mightiest book and the most effective moral code in the world’.

In ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ he wrote of ‘anti-Jewish idiocy’ as an infection ‘Let in no more Jews […] Thus commands the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and unresolved, so that it could easily be erased, easily extinguished by a stronger race. The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest, the toughest and the purest race living in Europe at present; they know how to prevail under the worst conditions […] The Jews could […] predominate if they wanted […] but it is equally certain that they are not planning and working towards that end […]rather they want and wish to be absorbed and assimilated by and into Europe, […] to be respected and put an end to the nomadic life, to the ‘Wandering Jew’. One ought to pay attention to this inclination and impulse and go out to meet it’.

In a letter to Overbeck, late in 1885, ‘Generally speaking, there are good reasons for distrusting the anti-semites. By the way, their cause is more popular than one thinks it is from a distance; it appears to be warmly embraced, particularly by the whole Prussian nobility’.

‘I see, by a decree of the Leipzig city council, that war has been declared on garlic - this is the only form of anti-semitism which smells good to your old cosmopolitan rhinoceros’.

According to Förster, Christ and the Jews are opposites, ‘Christ appeared among the Jews because, on the dark background of the most depraved of all the nations, the bright figure of the Saviour of the world could stand out the more impressively’. For Nietzsche, however they were identified, ‘Jesus and Saul are perhaps the two most Jewish Jews who ever lived’. And, ‘Christianity issued from Judaism’.

Nietzsche’s attitude to Förster is clear. He wrote to Elizabeth after her engagement, ‘Through this absurd step which you have taken […] you show too clearly that you wish to sacrifice your life, not to my exalted aims, but to the ideals which I have gone beyond and must now fight against. You have gone over to my Antipodes […] I will not hide from you that I consider this engagement an insult - or a stupidity which will hurt you as much as me’ […] ‘In all my reproaches you may trace my pain at having lost you, at seeing your name connected to a party with which I have no ideas in common’ […] ‘For my personal taste such an agitator is something impossible for closer acquaintance’.

Elizabeth herself spoke of her husband’s Anti-semitism and tried to combat the idea that the Paraguayan colony had anything to do with it, ‘the anti-semitic party did nothing whatever for my husband’s colony’. But Nietzsche replied, ‘You say that New Germany has no connection with anti-semitism, but I know for certain that the colonising scheme is fundamentally anti-semitic. I know this from the ‘Correspondenzblatt’ which is circulated in secret and sent to only the most trustworthy members of the party. (I hope your husband doesn’t show it to you, it’s becoming increasingly unpleasant)’.

Nietzsche later complained of this accursed anti-semitism which ‘spreads its shadow over my entire existence. It has led to the fact that Wagner and I have become enemies and is the reason for the radical break between me and my sister’.

Writing before she leaves for Paraguay he calls himself ‘an incorrigible European and anti-anti-Semite’ and Förster the organiser of a movement which is three parts bad […] There can be no question of reconciliation with a vengeful anti- Semitic goose’.

Writing to her in Paraguay he told her he was pleased that ‘this species of men […]exile themselves voluntarily from Europe’.

In another letter there he wrote, ‘One of the greatest stupidities that you have committed - for yourself and for me - is your connection with an anti-semitic chief which expresses a foreigness to my entire way of life which fills me again and again with anger and melancholy […] It is a matter of honour with me to be in relation to anti-semitism absolutely clear and unambiguous, namely opposed, as I am in my writings […] My loathing of this party is as outspoken as possible’. He complained that his name and writings were being used in anti-semitic tracts and that this ‘has already made me almost sick several times’.

And, he added, ‘in vain do I seek among them for some sign of tact, of délicatesse in relation to me. From Jews, yes; never yet from Germans’.

He called Georg Brandes ‘the most intellectual Dane of the day - that is to say, a Jew’.

He meets Helen Zimmern and wrote, ‘of course, she is a Jewess; it is amazing to see the extent to which this race now had the spirituality of Europe in its hands’.

Again ‘Those who we call German musicians, especially the greatest, are foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Netherlanders - or Jews’.

And again, ‘Our new Emperor grows more and more to my liking. The latest thing is that he is setting his face strongly against anti- semitism’.

To sum up ‘Once more in dealing with my whole attitude towards anti- semitism and the anti-semites. I can find a good deal to say in their favour, as there are many among them deserving of all respect, efficient and strong-willed people. Yet this does not prevent me from waging war upon anti-semitism - no, rather it forces me to fight a movement which dissipates and weakens so much vital power’.

In the margin of his last letter to Burckhardt he scrawled, ‘abolish Wilhelm, Bismark and all anti-semites’.

He grumbled that ‘Goethe was always offensive to Germans. He had honest admirers only among Jewesses.

His last note to Overbeck ended, ‘Just now I am having all anti-semites shot’.

It might be worth noting that a man who is a convinced anti-anti-semite from birth is one thing but being raised in anti-semitic surroundings and changing his mind quite another. Just the opposite of Wagner who, before the appearance of ‘Judaism in Music’ showed not the slightest sign of anti-semitism.

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Another note. Nietzsche’s hatred of the Germans may have had something to do with their persistent lack of interest in the masterpieces he was producing. He had to publish many of his manuscripts at his own expense including ‘Beyond Good and Evil’. In the case of the final part of ‘Zarathustra’, he paid out for four hundred copies of the text but a year later only seventy had been sold. When his publisher, Schmeitzer, was close to bankruptcy he put Nietzsche up for sale - for 20,000 marks - but could find nobody brave enough to take him on.

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Another anti-German Friedrich and Nietzsche’s favourite poet was Hölderlin who also ended up by himself in a little room in the house of Zimmer the carpenter. He would also have visitors who were welcomed as Your Highness or Your Majesty and were received with continual bows and other signs of deference. His room was also on the first floor with a window giving out over a wonderful view. He also trumpeted the glories of the ancient Greeks and denigrated the Germans writing that the Germans were ‘always barbarians, made more barbarous by industry and science and even by religion, profoundly incapable of all divine emotion, corrupted to the marrow, so that the heavenly graces cannot but pity them; offensive in every degree of exaggeration and wretchedness, they are insensible to every finer spirit and without harmony like the shards of a discarded vessel’. In Germany ‘You see handymen, but no men; thinkers, but no men; priests but no men; masters and servants, young and old, but no men. Is it not like a battlefield, where hands, arms, and other limbs lie around in fragments as the spilt life-blood oozes away into the sand’. And the conclusion of all this, ‘I wished to leave Germany again and sought nothing further amongst these people. I was offended enough by intractable humiliations and did not wish my soul to bleed to death amongst such people’. In spirit at least he left to roam, a wanderer who another lover of Lou von Salomé called a ‘wandering most wandering, spirit […] you only move as the moon does’. Poor poet, for his soul did bleed to death among such people but at least his tower was guarded by the good Zimmers.

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Thus Nietzsche’s break with Wagner was as much to do with his thinking as with his music for Wagner was also a ‘thinker’. Alongside the music he published his collected works. Carl Glasenapp wrote a hagiography of the man which came out in 1876 and treated his writings as seriously as his music. He was presented as a good man surrounded by sinners who knew not his worth. Not long after, Houston Stewart Chamberlain who became the ideologist at the court of widow Cosima and married her daughter, Eva, called him one of the regenerators of the Nordic world.

Surprisingly Wagner was not at first an anti-semite. There is nothing before the appearance of ‘Judaism in Music’ that hints at the furious tantrums which were to come. He had perfectly normal relations with numbers of Jews. One or two examples, perhaps, stand out. During 1838 he was in debt to a Jewish moneylender by the name of Gottschalk who demanded to have his money back. Wagner threatened to take him to court but amid all the acrimony never once mentioned his Jewish origins. Again, there was the relationship with Moritz Schlesinger, a music publisher who employed Wagner to correct proofs. The great maestro in waiting must have rankled under this kind of paid labour and referred to Schlesinger as a scoundrel and frequently grumbled quite violently about him in letters without, however, once mentioning that he was a Jew. Then came ‘Judaism in Music’, written in 1851 under the pseudonym of K Freigedank which means ‘free thought’ a book which has been called ‘arguably the seminal text of modern German anti-semitism’ and, at the time of its publication, was almost entirely without parallel and thus yet another proof of Wagner’s amazing originality. Wagner changed his mind about the Jews just like Nietzsche but in the opposite direction. From that moment until his death Wagner hardly wrote a single piece or had a single conversation which was not riddled with abuse of the Jews. When he was worried about payment for this anti-semitic tract he asked the publisher whether he would ever get his money, ‘Forgive me asking this Jewish question but it is the fault of the Jews that I have to count every penny’. Even his Jewish friends and helpers were not free from this almost lackadaisical censure. Bernhard Löser is called ‘the touching Jew Löser’. A Mr Seligsberg who sent an apostle tankard which Wagner craved is called ‘the indispensable Jew Seligsberg’. It only needed something to go wrong for this to turn into open vehemence. Anything which he found unpleasant in a Jew was instantly attributed to his ‘tribe’. For Wagner, the Jews were the direct cause of everything that was wrong with the world, ‘industrialisation, banking, the press, in fact, the whole of modern civilisation’. Jews were not capable of creative activity in any field. Because people ‘involuntarily want nothing to do with men of such appearance’. They are not suited to the profession of acting. They cannot write poetry because it always ends up sounding foreign. As for the field of music, any of their attempts at composition are horribly distorted by their background which includes the chants of the synagogue. ‘Who is not seized by feelings of horror and ridicule, when he listens to such gurgling, yodelling and prattling which confuses our sense and our minds?’ The whole of European culture, including its poetry and its music was foreign to the wandering Jew who must remain forever unattached to the ‘natural soil, the true folk soul’ from which all real art springs. And then we get inevitably to Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Heine. Mendelssohn’s music is for entertainment only and can never reach to ‘the deep and genuine feelings of the human heart’. Our fancy may indeed be effected but ‘the innermost purity of human yearnings for a clear artistic vision are scarcely touched’. The fact that he never manages any ‘heart or soul stirring effects’ is assumed and never demonstrated least of all why it should spring form Mendelssohn’s Jewishness even though it is admitted that he had ‘a fullness of talent [..] the finest and most varied education’, etc, etc. The same for Meyerbeer, this ‘Jewish operatic composer’ but without the compliments. Meyerbeer is said to have treated the opera house as if it were a synagogue not minding the constant chatter while the performance was in progress. For Heine the praise returns along with the paradox. Here, as with Mendelssohn, we have a brilliant mind, one which even went as far as to criticise Jewish musicians, ‘his fellow musical tribesmen’ and yet ‘deceived himself into thinking he was a poet’.

Is there any more that can be said about this mere theorising which reached out and touched the music? Well, there is always Beckmesser in ‘Meistersinger’ who turns out to be the stereotype of the Jew of Wagner’s essay. He is limping, shambling, blinking, cunning and devious and, of course, incapable of expressing himself properly in German. He hobbles about the stage and his gait is mirrored in the music. When he steals the prize song he destroys the metre and garbles the text, unable to match the music to the words. Beckmesser is a bass yet often he sings as a kind of whining heldentenor. And then there is Mime in ‘Siegfried’ who is left to the side of the scene making trivial interjections as he cooks eggs in tin pots while centre stage there is our hero belting out heroic sentiments to heroic music as he forges a sword of steel.

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And, just in passing, there is another question involving the relation of the great works of art which the writer of this diatribe was producing at the same time. There is even an answer here, too. In ‘Parsifal’ there is the sacred blood of the grail, the pure blood of a Christ of German descent, blood of the German spirit which was desecrated by the outsider. He called it a ‘staged festival of consecration’. No, Wagner’s philosophy is embedded in his operas. Hitler’s attitude to ‘Parsifal’? He saw it as a deeply racial opera, ‘an absolute experience […] the only thing that anticipates what I have to do’.

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But someone has overheard all this ranting and at this point there is a creaking of the floorboards, a trap door flies open and a head pops through. It is Heine’s and he is reciting his poem ‘The God Apollo’. This tells of a nun who falls in love with Apollo and desires nothing else but to find the source of the divine music which she hears. She searches over the whole world and eventually finds the singer she seeks. Her Phoebus is none other than Rabbi Faibusch who is cantor of a synagogue in Amsterdam and who comes from the humblest of stock. His father is responsible for circumcisions and his mother sells pickles and second-hand trousers in the markets. For Heine the outsider, it is the schlemiel, the pariah, who is the creative artist and can make heavenly music on his lyre. This Apollo is not gurgling or yodelling or prattling but singing divine music. As Hannah Arendt points out, ‘It is no longer the outcast pariah who appears the schlemiel but those who live in the ordered ranks of society and who have exchanged the generous gifts of nature for the idols of social privilege’.

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Back to Wagner and some more yodelling and prattling. The German must avoid social intercourse with the Jew because it ‘would mean the end of us Germans’. Nietzsche, on the other hand, calls ‘anti-Jewish stupidity’ an infection, ‘Let in no more Jews […] demands the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and undetermined’. In other words, the Germans.

At Wahnfried one of the most welcome visitors was the Comte de Gobineau who had written an ‘Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races’, a book which culminates in a paean of praise for the Germans. It is called ‘Art and Inequality’.

Wagner got progressively worse under the influence of Cosima who encouraged his anti-semitism along with a piquant stew of nationalism and xenophobia. The Wagner circle was always talking about the Jews, ‘The Germans are being used and ridiculed by the Jews’. This has made them lazy and undermined their trust and faith’. Brahms, whom he hated anyway, was of course turned into ‘a Jewish Czardas player’. Wagner even encountered Jews in his dreams. In one he was molested by two importunate Jewesses and in another he was met at the door of a synagogue by two threateningly large Jews. In one of Cosima’s nightmares he was even murdered by a Jew.

Wagner’s anti-semitism surfaces like flotsam from some deep part of the ocean and is left rotting and visible on the shore. He writes, ‘Our blood is corrupted by mixing the heroic blood of the noblest races with that of one-time cannibals. I regard the Jewish race as the born enemy of pure humanity and everything that is noble in it; it is certain that we Germans will go under before them, and perhaps, as a man loves art, I am the last German who knows how to stand up to the Judaism that is already gaining control of everything’. He rants on against Meyerbeer as the typical Jewish composer. In which way? Again as a man without a mother tongue, as an exile from the true core of language. As a man concerned merely with the rhetorical surface of speech. Where was he in respect of ‘the march of opera music’s evolution?’ He ‘followed this march, and never kept abreast of, to say nothing of outstripping, it’. A plagiarist, ‘Not one departure is his own, but each he has eavesdropped from a forerunner and exploited with monstrous ostentation’. And why? For fame. To place his ladder on the platform of success and rise up it step by step’. No interest beyond that. Peculiar inability to see the beam in one’s own. Wagner, of all the great composers was most interested in fame and money.

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Wagner’s attitude to Meyerbeer had not always been so very hostile. Indeed, earlier it had been one of love and admiration. In 1839, when they first met, Meyerbeer was the uncrowned king of opera in Europe and did a great deal to help Wagner when he arrived in Paris ready to take his first steps in the world of music. Both Meyerbeer and his wife not only lent him money when he was a down and out in Paris but helped him to penetrate the influential musical circles of the city. Later Meyerbeer put on ‘Rienzi’ in Dresden even though it had been refused as ‘unfit for Germany’ at both Munich and Leipzig. He also arranged for ‘The Flying Dutchman’ to be put on in Berlin. Wagner was effusive, he called Meyerbeer his ‘adored protector’ and wrote, ‘Don’t let them criticise Meyerbeer. I owe him everything’. He compared Meyerbeer to Handel and Mozart and wrote that ‘It would be most inappropriate of me to break out in awkward eulogies of your genius, only so much as to say that I saw you entirely solve the problem of the German who made the qualities of the Italian and French schools his own and the creations of his genius universal’. He also thought that ‘Meyerbeer retained his German heritage, the näiveté of sentiment, a chaste inventiveness’ and even ‘an unblemished conscience’. Indeed, in some of his letters things even get a little out of control in the submissive department, ‘Neither my head nor my heart belong to me any more […] I have to be your slave in body and soul […] for I readily confess that my nature is to be slavish’. He wrote to his benefactor what he soon forgot, ‘I will never be able to say to you anything but thanks and thanks again’.

And, indeed, this effusiveness changed dramatically. Meyerbeer became a man ‘whose very smell repels me at a great distance’. He decided that it was Meyerbeer who had organised the critical attacks against him, ‘This fury assumed more of the character of slander and malice, for in the meantime the movement against me had been reduced by Meyerbeer, a great connoisseur in such things, to a clearly defined system, which he upheld and practised with a sure hand’. Against these attacks Meyerbeer calmly turned his other cheek just as Lou von Salomé did later against similar libels made against her by Elizabeth. Wagner rejoiced at Meyerbeer’s death, breaking into ‘boorish laughter’. Meyerbeer, of course, sounds just a little like Geyer.

Incidentally, Heine also turned against Meyerbeer allegedly because he had not been sent really good tickets for the first night of one of his operas.

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Two days before he died he is reported as saying, ‘One must really not keep company with Israelites! Either they are emotionally disturbed about it or it expresses itself in haughtiness’.

One wonderful bit of irony. Wagner’s anti-semitism was horribly influential precisely because of his fame, of his genius. It was taken up by Hitler and pronounced holy. It was this, his anti-semitism, that has done most harm to his reputation and most sullied his genius. If he was so wrong about that how can we trust that he was right about anything else?

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Wagner had two answers to this difficult Jewish question. One was, not unexpectedly, conversion. Not, however, merely the superficial inconvenience of a religious ceremony but a radical turning around which would have to reach down into the very depths of the Jew’s personality. Root and branch. In fact de-Judaization. No longer Jews who are still in their heart of hearts Jewish but true converts who have purged themselves of those ‘characteristics which are so difficult to eradicate and are so disadvantageous to our culture’. Something, of course, that can never really be done except in very rare cases, those ‘truly sympathetic friends’ of the maestro who ‘fate has delivered over to me from their tribal allegiance’. Echoes of this attitude much later in the process of de-Nazification which also left one or two inconvenient converts who went through the ceremony only and failed in the root and branch department.

The other answer was even more radical than this. It was ‘the violent expulsion of the destructive foreign element’. Violent. Expulsion. Destructive? Cosima mentions in her diaries that four hundred Jews were burned to death in a Viennese synagogue. Wagner’s comment, ‘Perhaps all Jews should be burned’. Here, then, in an early but quite well rounded form, we have an almost complete Nazi programme in relation to the Jewish question. Its author: Wagner not Nietzsche.

In an extraordinary turn of phrase Wagner told Hermann Levi, the conductor he chose for the great consecration festival that was ‘Parsifal’, that ‘he had to learn how to die’. He meant that he had to replace his Jewish dread of death with the Christian understanding of redemption but the words ring in the ear with quite another meaning.

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Then there is Cosima’s diary which is vast and, in rather too many ways, not unlike the operas of her second husband. It runs from 1st January 1869, six weeks after moving openly to join Wagner at Tribschen with her two daughters until 12th February 1883, the evening before his death in Venice. It contains self-importance and anti-semitism on almost every page.

Cosima’s diary was written for Siegfried who never read it. A note under the line. Siegfried became a composer in his own right and his opera ‘Herzog Wildfang’ was heard by Debussy in 1903. Debussy’s comment, ‘It sounds like a piece of homework by a pupil of Richard Wagner’. Poor Siegfried had an upbringing that sounds horribly like Nietzsche’s. His father died when he was fourteen and he was raised by his mother and his four older sisters and half-sisters. A boy surrounded by women. He died only two months after his mother.

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Wagner could still have said, and with every justification, that some of his best friends were Jews. He even called them, perhaps even with a little embarrassment, ‘our home-grown Israelites’. However, the inflexibility of his theoretical ranting turned into pragmatism in the face of actual, living and breathing Jews. As a race or tribe they may not have been capable as musicians because of the influence of synagogue chanting but when an individual Jewish musician of talent appeared he was welcomed. And these Jews were devoted. Joseph Rubinstein, for a time resident pianist at Wahnfried, made arrangements of Wagner’s music and played them to visitors that came to the house. This is the man who was saved from despair about his Jewishness by his association with Wagner’s music. When Wagner died he was so distraught that he committed suicide on his grave. The man who set up the Vereine to raise money for the festival theatre was Karl Tausig and it was in 1871, at the point when most of Wagner’s hopes for the festival theatre were invested in these groups, that he died. He had worked tirelessly for Wagner and the new theatre. Wagner blamed fate for taking from him the ‘devoted helpers and interpreters’ of his art at the very moment he needed them most. Tausig, of course, was a Jew but Wagner diplomatically ignored this. Cosima confides to her diary that ‘he threw himself into Bayreuth with a real frenzy’ and that he was ‘a great pillar to our enterprise’ but she also noted that he ‘is dying of typhus! A great shock. Even if he recovers, he is in any case lost to our undertaking; what a lesson to us! To us his death seems to have a metaphysical basis; a poor character, worn out early, one with no real faith, who, however close events brought to us, was always conscious of an alien element (the Jewish)’.

Angelo Neumann, Wagner’s best loved singer, was given the parts of both Siegfried and Lohengrin and, as impresario, took the Ring from one end of Europe to the other. Gustav Mahler conducted Wagner in Vienna to great acclaim and Arnold Schoenberg, who heard the performances called them ‘beautiful’. Otto Weininger went so far as to call Wagner ‘second only to Christ himself’. Wagner thought so much of the critic Heinrich Porges that he attempted to enlist him as his personal secretary. And, as we have seen, Hermann Levi, whose father was a Rabbi, was entrusted with the first performance of Parsifal, a ‘Christian-German sacred theatrical play’.

Wagner often needed money and he was shrewd enough to place the 40,000 thalers given to him by Ludwig II with the Jewish banker Hohenemser. He even agreed that the loudest applause at performances of his operas came from the Jews. He said to Cosima that ‘Wahnfried seems to be turning into a synagogue’. He wrote of these Jews, ‘I simply cannot get rid of them […] Because of their dealings in paintings, jewellery and furniture, the Jews have an instinct for what is genuine and what can be turned to lasting value’. Wagner’s operas?

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And in the middle of all this was the ‘Bayreuther Blätter’, Wagner’s own journal, which was sent out to all the Vereine and kept his followers in touch with the goings on in Bayreuth. It was designed to praise and justify the operas and the theatre and to this task bent many of Wagner’s closest collaborators, some of them his own home-grown Israelites, for example Porges and Rubinstein. Also involved, however, were a clutch of anti-semites who turned its pages into something not a little unpleasant. The editor, Hans von Wolzogen, ended up actively involved in the anti-semitic movement. Just another muddle and paradox from the group around the maestro.

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And how does Nietzsche sum up this substitute father? How does he describe Wagner’s music? Answer - as a sickness which stands over against the other, the clean, the healthy, the easy masterpiece. Which is? Carmen, ‘This music approaches lightly, with subtlety and politeness. It moves on tender feet, straightforward, honest and above all healthy. No masks, no lying, no sickness. What is good is light. This is not the music of the north, of a damp climate, but of the south, of Africa. It has a southern, brown, burnt sensibility. It is vital to Mediterraneanise music’.

All this against the lie of the grand style. The Wagnerian insistence. The constant repetition until one is driven to believe. The maestro raps his knuckle on the table and calls us to attention. Listen to this! he exhorts us. This is great music, important music. It contains the steam of the Wagnerian ideal. Driven on by pressure, Wagner imposes upon us. With that strange and slightly unconvincing smile on his face he holds out to us something in his hand. It is a magnifying glass. We take hold of it and instantly, as our fingers close upon its handle, we lose all trust in our own eyes, placing this glass in front of our faces, we see everything distorted and enlarged including Wagner himself. We see Wagner’s image of life magnified, magnificent, impressed upon us with every possible device which his enormous artistry could contrive and we lose ourselves in his vision of another world. We lose ourselves and drown. This is Wagner’s gift and it is the gift of death. His art induces breathlessness and sweating. The heat in the auditorium becomes more and more stifling. There is a slight smell of incense in the air and we feel as if some sickness has taken over, a sickness which we almost welcome, which we have brought upon ourselves through the medium of Wagner. ‘Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather an illness? He makes everything he touches ill - he has even made music ill. I feel the strongest urge to open all the windows. Air, more air! But we have no energy to open the windows. We don’t even want to breathe any more. It is a sign of our exhaustion that we stay in our seats and marvel’. Sometimes the sick are attracted by what harms them. Wagner increases sickness and that is why he is attractive to those who want to be sick, who want to put their lives into the hands of this anti-doctor who holds out in his hand a drug which is almost as much a poison as a cure, the same drug that, given in large enough quantities and in the right circumstances, can all too easily kill. His art is an appeal to inartistic people; all means are welcome which may help towards bearing the right fruit, ripe and ready to fall. It is calculated not to produce an artistic effect but an effect upon the nerves in general. Wagner excites the world-weary and weather-beaten who seek shelter and want to be easily convinced. To this end he has corrupted music and the drama. Exciting the nerves of the weary he also, at the very same stroke of the pen, convinces them of the significance of their tiredness, that only as exhausted and dead to the world can they appreciate what they hear and exalt in the fact - in the music that makes them want to be weary and the weariness they need to exalt in the music. Wagner gives us a heavy-hearted and drowsy happiness.

The secret of the magniloquent rantings at Nuremberg is the secret of the music of Wagner. They are one and the same. Exalt in the fact that you cannot help but exalt. What is needed is not beauty, not seriousness nor thinking. Why have beauty? Why not choose instead what is great, sublime, larger than life, gigantic - that which moves masses. After all it is easier to be gigantic than to be beautiful and easier, much much easier, to be persuaded than to think. Thinking, after all, is critical and demands, as well as listening, a certain resistance to what is heard. And who persuades the easily persuaded? Who convinces the throng who already believe what they have not yet heard? Only the tyrant whose skill is in hypnosis rather than beauty or thought. Wagner was not born a musician but became one because the tyrant within him, his actor’s genius, compelled him to it. His music has no law or style, no melody or counterpoint but is only theatrical rhetoric. One has to act to achieve great success with the public. Only the actor, the deceiver, can arouse great enthusiasms.

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Although expressed with great subtlety, this is not new in the writing of Nietzsche. The great philosophers of the ancient world knew all about the relation of art to spectacle, of the seeking after applause and the admiration of the masses. Nietzsche studied and wrote about Plato and Aristotle whilst Hitler never gave them a moment’s thought. Plato died writing the Laws while watching the Greek world fall apart. Listen to Plato at the consummation of his life, setting down laws for the Athenians, ‘There arose leaders of unmusical illegality, poets who were ignorant of the just and the lawful in music and because they were unduly possessed by a spirit of pleasure mixed up all the different kinds of music together and by so doing unknowingly bore false witness against music as a thing without any standards of correctness. The only way of judging the quality of this music is in the pleasure which it gives the audience and thus the audience came to think they were qualified to pass judgement on it. In the place of a genuine aristocracy of music there sprang forth a kind of theatrocracy, a rule of the theatre’. And here is the lesson for the Wagnerians which they fearlessly repeated; thinking that they knew, men became fearless and this fearlessness soon became effrontery. Aristotle followed Plato and also knew the dangers of displacing art with spectacle. He wrote his ‘Poetics’ as Alexander, the master of the Greek world, was marching his armies eastward in another massive and short lived conquest echoed by Napoleon and … Aristotle understood the relation between a people’s art and a people’s army. He knew that spectacle, though an attraction, is the least artistic of all the parts of tragedy and has the least (and I repeat the ancient master so as not to lose his point) has the least to do with the art of poetry. The tragic effect is possible without being put on a stage in front of the public for performance by actors. This, the spectacle, is more a matter for the costumier than for the poet or artist. The great man does not retreat from his greatness and displace it into his art, only the little man does that, ‘the Mozarts and the Haydns, the classics. These are the little men who are little because all their greatness is in their music, their greatness has gone out of them and into their art. ‘These are the anonymous men of art who move with light feet, with wit, with grace, with great logic, who dance with the stars, with exuberant spirits, who know the southern trembling of light and the smooth sea, who have, in a word, perfection’. Wagner is not like this. He is much more important. He knows that he is much more important. He has weight. With Wagner the greatness is never displaced. Wagner marches onward, like Christian soldiers, with drums and flutes at the head of all the artists of delivery, of presentation, of virtuosity.

Nietzsche wrote, ‘I recall that in 1870, during a study of ancient rhythmic patterns, I was seeking five and seven measure phrases and counted my way through Meistersinger and Tristan. In the process I discovered something about Wagner’s own rhythmic processes. He has such an aversion to anything mathematical, anything rigidly symmetrical […] that he tends to extend four beat phrases into five beats, six beat phrases into seven […] At times, even though this may be sacrilegious, I’m reminded of the style of Bernini, who can no longer bear to have even his pillars plain, but has to animate them from top to bottom with scrollwork’. This is an art full of over-excitement and glorified extravagance. Again, ‘Among the dangerous after-effects of Wagner, the will-to-animate-at-any-cost strikes me as one of the worst, because quick as a flash it becomes affectation, or cunning’.

More, ‘Wagner’s music is simply bad music, perhaps the worst ever created. When a musician can no longer count up to three he becomes dramatic, he becomes Wagnerian’. Not style, not counterpoint, not the substance or thought of music but merely the effects that music can be used to produce. To produce effects rather than beauty, to use music rather than to make music, that is the genius of Wagner, the genius of the tyrant. Beauty refuses to acknowledge its audience. It happens in spite of its audience. It faces in another direction altogether. At its core is a fatal refusal to convince, to produce effects. At its core is mystery. But Wagner knows his audience and writes for it, ‘Who equals the persuasive power of his gestures? Who else starts with gestures and then fits the music to them? What is his working method? He begins with the third scene in order to prove his work to himself by the strength of its ultimate effect and then builds around this a series of powerful scenes each one stronger than the other and then, between these, he puts a lot of crafty stupidity because it doesn’t matter what is in between. It will ride on the strength of what has gone before and what will certainly come in the next moment’. The only greatness of Wagner’s music is in their subservience to gesture and to the effect which gesture hopes to achieve. And is this not tyrannical?

Nietzsche describes Wagner’s audience and it is Hitler’s audience also, ‘The best among those who sit there - German youths, horned Siegfrieds and other Wagnerians - need the sublime, the profound, the overwhelming. And the others who sit there also - the culture morons, the petty snobs, those who thank the Lord that they have an easy digestion, in a word, the people. Those need the sublime, the profound, the overwhelming. Why is this so? Listen to the thoughtless reasoning of the people, of the mass, of those who lose their individuality in a crowd. This is what they say, “Who can throw us must be strong, who can elevate us must be divine and who can help us to have intimations must be divine”’. Not thought but something else, the expectation of thought, the hope of thought, the myriad of unborn thoughts that wait to spring up like magic in the mind. The willingness to be given a thought. The longing to be persuaded.

Wagner had learnt this lesson and decided to throw them, to elevate them and to give them intimations. This may not be easy, not everyone can do it, but it is far from impossible, almost as far from impossible as the creation of beauty which is itself impossible. Beauty only creates itself or always fails to create itself but thoughts can be inserted into the mind that is ready for them, that has suspended its ability to criticise, that is willing to be hypnotised. Wagner is like Hitler in this, that he is a master of hypnotic tricks and Nietzsche understood this perfectly. Listen to him again, ‘People are thrown by passion and brute strength but not by subtlety. Beware counterpoint. Beware melody. Beware beauty because it is difficult. Passion is ugly. The easy thought is like a sledgehammer. It effects the brain instantly and is irrefutable. I cannot like music that has no ambition other than to hypnotise the nerves’. Again, ‘People are elevated by ideals so let us have plenty of ideals. Let us walk on clouds and create a mythology of gods and demons’. Let us mythologise the Nordic and demonise the Jews, the gypsies, the disabled. Let us harangue the infinite and surround ourselves with symbols. The Germans hear great symbols approach from out of foggy distances and resound in his music with muted thunder. Is it any wonder that Hitler loved Wagner and Wagner’s music? Is it any wonder that Wagner hated the Jews? No wonder. No wonder.

Wagner is at heart, just as Hitler was at heart, a little bourgeois. And this is why each knew so well how telling their effects would be. ‘Wagner’s plots are all bourgeois plots. Retell his tales without their mythological proportions and they lose almost all of their power. Imagine Parsifal as a candidate for a degree in theology who entered college with a secondary school education. Stripped of their heroic skin Wagner’s plots are almost indistinguishable from Madame Bovary. Turn this around and you could imagine Flaubert making his heroines into Scandinavian or Carthaginian gods and offering them fully formed to Wagner for his next libretto’.

But this is more than a little unfair to Flaubert whose style is not at odds with his content. Wagner’s effect is deep, profound, strong, dangerous and with little relation to the little people it has turned into gods for the purpose. But his audience was not fooled. They knew he was telling them that they were godlike, that in the mass they could be clothed as gods and do great things. Onward Nordic soldiers. Actions not thoughts. With Wagner began the age of the Teuton. The arrival of Wagner on the stage of art coincides with the arrival of the Reich on the stage of politics, ‘Both of these are Teutonic - definition of the Teuton - obedience and long legs! Wagner commands and never has obedience been deeper’.

A call to action which leaves mere words behind. Not a call to thought which delves ever deeper into words. Rhetoric not dialectic. That is the great Wagnerian secret. Not mere music. Not music for music’s sake. A rose is not a rose but has its uses. Wagner repeated one basic proposition all his life long, ‘that his music was not merely music but much, much more, even infinitely more’. That music reached way beyond itself into the world of action. The music was subservient to this aim and has to conform to it. Music was a means to an end. A mere means. No musician, no real musician, would talk like that.

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After grumbling about Wagner, Brahms was asked to admit that his music had its glorious moments and Brahms reply was, ‘Yes, and its bloody boring quarters of an hour’. Mozart, looking down from his box in the magic theatre created by Hesse saw Brahms and Wagner, in their day the most extreme contrasts possible, each followed by thousands of men in black who represented the players of all those notes which according to divine judgement were superfluous and he told Steppenwolf who was in the box beside him that, ‘until they have paid the debt of their time it cannot be known whether anything personal to themselves is left over to stand to their credit so they can gain redemption’.

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And Nietzsche summed it up, ‘How shall we satisfy our thirst for wholesale homage! Could one not select from the composer’s music some hundred bars of good music which appeal to the heart because they have heart: could one not go aside with this little theft and forget all the rest!’

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The end of this relationship between the composer who thought and the thinker who composed is shrouded in mystery.

Nietzsche spent the winter of 1876-7 in Sorrento with Rée and another young man called Brenner in the house of Melwida von Meysenbug. It just so happened that the Wagners came on holiday there for a month from October 5th, escaping to the sun like Nietzsche, and had booked into the Hotel Victoria which was almost next door to Malwida’s residence, the Villa Rubinacci. These four were often invited to spend time with the Wagners. Nietzsche’s tense cheeriness was noticed but as he had said nothing of his change of opinion about Wagner and he never objected to spending time at their hotel, nothing was said openly.

One day the two went for a walk. They strolled up along the coast to the top of the hill where there was a magnificent view over the sea with its islands and inlets. It was a lovely autumn day and Wagner said that it made him feel in ‘a mood of departure’. He began to speak about ‘Parsifal’ but instead of telling Nietzsche about the opera he went into a long and complex description of a profound Christian mystical experience which he had recently had. The confirmed atheist now announced earnest sympathies with Christianity and spoke of his deep love of Holy Communion. Had he really dared to announce this to Nietzsche of all people? Was this a real conversion or merely an attempt to cuddle up to the preconceptions of his audience? After all he had said that ‘the Germans have no interest in heathen gods and heroes. They want to see something Christian’. Nietzsche’s response to all of this? A strained silence. He excused himself and left Wagner standing there under the darkening evening sky. They never met again.

This fantastical tale emanates, as you might expect, from the pen of Elizabeth who was keen to cover up all disagreements between the two men. In fact, Nietzsche would hardly have been surprised by Wagner’s conversion to Christianity which had clearly been on the cards for ages. Neither would he have been shocked by ‘Parsifal’, the libretto of which had been read to him during the Christmas of 1869, a good seven years earlier. Cosima records in her diaries that Nietzsche listened in complete silence and that it left ‘a deep impression’.

The real reason for the break might have been somewhat different. In October 1877 Wagner wrote that letter to Otto Eiser, Nietzsche’s doctor, suggesting that his patient’s illness was the result of too much masturbation and that he should persuade him to go and take the waters. Nietzsche was furious at this and calls it ‘a vicious and destructive coarseness on the composer’s part’. Wagner had caused him ‘mortal offence’.

However, Nietzsche’s reaction to ‘Parsifal’ is well known. In it ‘everything is too Christian. No flesh and too much blood (the communion in particular gets too full-bloodied)’. He said nothing about his reaction to the composer. Nietzsche’s reaction was not wrong. Cosima once made a public comparison between ‘Parsifal’ and the Gospel to which Wagner is said to have nodded in agreement. Hitler, of course, saw ‘Parsifal’ as ‘a glorification of our pure Aryan blood’. The critic Hartmut Zerlinsky, writing in 1982, suggested, in agreement with Hitler, that ‘Parsifal’ is a piece of anti-semitic pro-Aryan propaganda finding in the word ‘redemption (erlösung) the word ‘final solution’ (endlösung’) and suggesting that the piece should never be performed, a suggestion which has been taken seriously in Israel.

After Wagner’s death Nietzsche wrote, ‘It is hard to be for six years the enemy of the man one most honours’.

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Another aside. Wagner’s music makes people mad. Ludwig Schnorr died soon after his appearance as the first Tristan and Wagner understood that the opera had been the cause. Anders went insane working on the same part and Scaria died mad after performing ‘Parsifal’. Marie Wilt, learned the part of Brünnhilde in three weeks and admitted days before her suicide, ‘That finished me’. Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck, ‘This Tristan is turning into something frightful! […] Only mediocre performances can save me. Completely good ones are bound to make people mad’.

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Wagner’s was a death in Venice. He went there in 1882 and stayed in the Palazzo Vendramin, taking over the eighteen rooms on the first floor. As usual he had a study draped in silks and satins and heavily scented. Here he read his last Nietzsche book, ‘The Gay Science’. Neither the book nor the change of scenery could help and the chest cramps he had experienced earlier got worse. He was dosed with opium. Joukovsky, who was living with them, found Wagner playing the piano and sketched his head. The drawing is on graph paper and the master is smiling and his eyes are half closed as if playing from memory.

On February 13th he pulled urgently on the bell rope calling for the doctor and his wife. He died of a heart attack in Cosima’s arms. He was writing an essay for the ‘Bayreuther Blatter’ and the page lay open on his desk. The last word on the paper was ‘Tragik’. Before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his death.

A curious incident took place at his funeral. The Munich Wagner Association, the first of many of these associations soon to spring up, brought a wreath to place on the grave. On it they had put an inscription. It read, ‘Redemption for the redeemer’. This inscription immediately became famous. Everyone was lost in admiration for the lofty principles which had inspired it. But perhaps, one should be allowed to make just one small correction to this inscription. Not ‘redemption for the redeemer’ but rather ‘redemption from the redeemer’.

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Who is the art lover after Wagner? Who is the archetypal Wagner disciple? What did Wagner breed and multiply? Above all else the presumption of the layman, of the art-idiot, of the kind that organises art associations and visits to the opera and who knows how to judge art because he understands instinctively what his fellow art-lover is going to think, because he has been persuaded and even cudgelled by the very music he imagines he is then free to criticise. A falling back on the notions of genius as an excuse for such ignorance, not genius that overcomes rules but as an excuse for the failure of skill. The rise of the layman means the fall of the real artist, of conscientious training in the forms of art, of the nobility of real sweat, of the careful learning of rules before breaking them. Writing without any attention to the rules is not a breaking of rules but a careful tiptoeing around them, an ignorance of them. This layman is already persuaded before he walks reverently through the ornate portals of the concert hall with other believers who take their seats around him half terrified by the experience they are merely repeating, ‘To put this plainly, belief in dilettantism’. Or to put this even more plainly, Hitler’s paintings.

And doesn’t the famous marching song of the SA, the Horst Wessel Lied sound as if it might have been composed by Richard Wagner?

Nietzsche, the failed musician, understood Wagner, the failed actor. Both of them were co-opted as stars of the Third Reich by Adolf Hitler, the failed painter and architect.

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Before so much else, a crisis for Elizabeth in which she almost went under but finally overcame, a crisis which put her on her learning curve and which was a kind of dress rehearsal for so many later successes. A crisis that appeared in the form of Lou von Salomé. The occasion, the first performance of Parsifal. The place, Bayreuth. The year, 1882, the ‘Parsifal Year’ and the year of Wagner’s death. Under the full weight of Wagner worship the two women who were pulling Nietzsche’s soul in different directions met and the battle of the old world with the new took place in miniature. Elizabeth, the representative of petty bourgeois, small town, Naumberg conventionality against the free and feminist, the never in love against the always in love, the self-possessed against the intense, the dying against the almost born.

The core of that hatred that never died was the love that never died. Memories of Santo Giulio, the island in the lake called Monte Sacro in memory of Saint Francis of Assisi, memories of that moment among the hills that rose out of the lake. Here went Nietzsche with Lou von Salomé, the two irreverent atheists walking among the sacred ruins in the hearing of bells from a monastery which was a living ornament to the church they questioned. They trod the paths up the hillside. What happened on that walk is still a mystery. They spent too long on the island offending both Rée and Lou’s mother who they had left behind. According to Lou, they stayed to see the sunset on Santa Rosa but the sunset at Santa Rosa cannot be seen from the top of the island so it was not a sunset that held them back but something else. The closest Nietzsche ever got to a kiss? Or more? Enough to create a memory that stayed with him to the end of his life. Many years later Lou had not forgotten and told Ernst Pfeiffer, ‘I do not know whether I kissed Nietzsche on Monte Sacro or not’. And Nietzsche also never forgot, ‘To you I owe the most beautiful dream of my life’.

They had indeed been ‘6000 feet above man and time’ but returned to sea level, to a world three hundred feet below those hazy memories and to the certainty of witnesses who knew that they had tarried much too long. When Elizabeth got to learn of this she saw instantly that her closeness to her brother was at risk. She waited for she was nothing if not patient and was learning how to chose the moment.

Later a visit to Wagner’s empty house at Tribschen where Lou had to listen to the history of Nietzsche’s friendship with the maestro. She wrote in her book on Nietzsche, ‘For a long, long time he sat in silence on the shore of the lake profoundly engrossed in intense memories. Then, while drawing in the wet sand with his cane, he softly spoke of those past times. And when he looked up there were tears in his eyes’. Another dream which was fading, another love which stayed with him to the end of his life. He told her of happy memories that had ripened and faded. Did this earlier suffering prolong his suffering now? She agreed to spend time with him and his family in Tautenberg where Elizabeth had planned ‘an idyllic nest’ for the summer which had not included Lou. But first to Bayreuth.

Elizabeth came with Förster and Lou with Nietzsche. At first no disaster was anticipated, Lou writing to Nietzsche that ‘Elizabeth is almost my sister too’, but it was not long before the prim sister was being scandalised by Lou’s behaviour. She was involved in a series of horrors, allowing Joukovsky to design costumes for the opera on her lithe and almost naked body, strolling unaccompanied with men through public places and even attending a séance with no other women in the room. In Tautenberg Elizabeth exaggerated the snippets of rude conversation that she overheard and even noticed that Lou didn’t wash her underwear as often as she might and left her room untidy. In Tautenberg, however, Lou and Nietzsche got on famously, walking among the pine trees and talking endlessly. There was ‘a meeting of like thoughts, like feelings and ideas’, an openness that Elizabeth recognised as the worst kind of danger signal where her brother was concerned. There was even some talk of setting up home with Rée. She now became determined to split the two apart. Later she would deal with her brother but first she attacked this new follower of his. But she was still learning and not quite ready to show the kind of control she was later to learn so well.

When she and Lou returned together to Jena on their way to Tautenberg she began her campaign. She tried first with advise about morals. Taking Lou aside as if she were her ‘younger sister’ she told her that a girl’s most precious possession was her honour, something which was easily lost. She told her that a girl had to be so very careful and that a careless glance, a rash word and it would be lost for ever. How shocked she must have been when Lou could control herself no longer and burst out laughing. Elizabeth was hurt, but not so much as she was at Lou’s response to her next line of attack. Didn’t she know that her association with her brother was hurting his reputation. Had she simply failed to appreciate how very important a person he was? Did she not realise that, because she was associated with Nietzsche, her lewd behaviour was affecting his reputation with the Wagner circle. Lou was surprised by this as she had no idea that Nietzsche had any reputation either on his own account or with the Wagner circle and told Elizabeth that he was no longer spoken of among them, that as far as they were concerned, he was dead. This was more painful to Elizabeth than anything. She went pale and stuttered out that she would do anything to halt the arrangement that they had been planning for a ménage à trois with Rée, that such a thing might to acceptable among Russians but here among civilised people it was quite out of the question.

Lou exploded, ‘Don’t get the idea that I am interested in your brother, or am in love with him. I could spend the whole night in one room with him without getting in the least bit aroused. It was your brother who first spoiled our study plan with the lowest intentions. He was the one who started to talk about friendship when he realised that he could not have me for anything else. It was your brother and not I who was the first to suggest ‘free love’’.

Elizabeth had no way of responding to this other than to collapse in tears. Her face horribly pale, she rushed for the bathroom her hand over her mouth but, before she could reach it, she vomited, all her spleen coming out through her hands and onto the polished parquet flooring.

After this Elizabeth got to work spitting out venom in every way she could. Letters went out from her every which way. She wrote that Lou was a Finnish Jewess and worse, an ugly Jewess. She got under her brother’s skin and co-opted him as an ally in her strategy. She always knew how to twist his emotions to her own advantage. She told him that Lou had been cavorting with his Wagnerian enemies at Bayreuth, exactly the thing to destroy Nietzsche’s confidence. He heard her out with a white face and retired already half defeated. She insisted that Lou was a women who only wanted to suck up to the rich and famous and, as soon as she discovered that Nietzsche was neither of these, had backed off. It didn’t take much more of his sister’s nagging before he was calling Lou ‘a dry, dirty, bad smelling monkey with false breasts’. Nietzsche’s words or Elizabeth’s? She soon convinced the poor man that Lou had left him for Rée and that it was Rée who had poisoned her against him. A logical thing to think as it was partly true, ‘It is he who speaks of me as a low character and common egotist, who desires to use everything only for his own ends […] who reproaches me with having […] pursued the filthiest of designs on Fraulein Salomé’. Rée is a ‘liar and sneaking slanderer to the core’. He and Lou ‘are not worthy to lick the soles of my boots’. Again, ‘She unites in herself all the human qualities that are to me the most revolting and repulsive’.

But it didn’t take him long to realise where the venom was coming from. He speaks of his sister’s ‘revenge on Fraulein Salomé’ writing, ‘My sister has become Lou’s deadly enemy […] I have against me the Naumberg virtue […] I have become the victim of a merciless revengefulness’. Her life of Nietzsche, written in 1904 called the relationship between her brother and Lou Salomé a lamentable error and claimed that Nietzsche could never stand women of Lou’s type, a type that loved only enjoyment and creature comforts. A year later she repeated much of this in an article in ‘Die Zukunft’, commenting that Lou’s book on her brother was nothing more than a feeble effort to regain the love of Rée. In the first volume of her biography she went over the whole thing again adding a few more lies for good measure such as Lou’s supposed childhood affair with the priest Hendrick Gillot in St Petersburg. All the recriminations were repeated in 1935 in her ‘Nietzsche and Women’. Lou, in her dignified way refused to rise to these scurrilous baits and answered all this malice with silence. Years later Freud wrote, ‘I am very pleased to hear that you are working on your memoirs. It has often annoyed me to find your relationship with Nietzsche mentioned in a way which was obviously hostile to you and which could not possibly correspond to the facts. You have put up with everything and have been far too decent’. Even here in her summing up of that relationship she never says a word of Elizabeth’s slanders. Nietzsche later wrote of this incident as ‘the toughest I have ever had to chew’ and always blamed Elizabeth for destroying the one love of his life, ‘It is painful for me to hear my sister’s voice […] I am the victim of her merciless desire for vengeance’. For a long time he stopped speaking to her. Ironic that Salomé means ‘peace’.

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As for Nietzsche, after Lou his life was a posthumous existence of recriminations mixed with impossible hopes, ‘If I should take my own life, there would not be much cause for mourning. What do you care about my fantasies? - You did not even care for my truth. I want you to consider that I am, after all, nothing but a semi-lunatic, tortured by headaches, who has been completely unhinged by his long solitude. You have done harm, you have caused injury […] If I had created you I would have given you […] a little more love for me […] Remember this cattishness of yours that is not capable of love […] Farewell my dear Lou. I shall not see you again’. And yet, in his life of Salomé, Peters writes, ‘Try as he might he could not forget Lou […] She had shamefully deceived him. Frustrated in his efforts to hurt [her…] Nietzsche’s disappointed love turned against himself. He talked of suicide. He called himself a madman and boasted of taking overdoses of opium’. Later Nietzsche wrote ‘You have caused much damage. You have done harm not only not only me but all the people who have loved me. This sword hangs over you’. He even told her that one of her breasts was false and years later after an operation for cancer in which she had had a breast removed, she was forced to fill her blouse with padding and commented ‘Nietzsche was right. Now I do have a false breast’.

A note should, perhaps, be added to these memories. Lou wrote years later comparing Nietzsche and Rée as philosophers that ‘of the two […Rée’s] was the more acute mind’ and even Nietzsche wrote to Lou, ‘I always admire how well armed your arguments are from the point of view of logic. This is in fact something of which I am incapable’.

And then there is Nietzsche’s, ‘I thought they had sent me an angel […] but she was no angel’.

Overbeck wrote, ‘I have the impression of a light that flickers and am prepared for the worst’. But he didn’t understand the Nietzschian heart. The next book begins, ‘When Zarathustra was thirty years old he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he had the companionship of his spirit […] but at last his heart turned […] I must descend into the depths […] I must go down’. He commands, ‘Flee into solitude. You live too close to the trivial and the spiteful. Flee from their invisible revenge’. ‘Forget that happy hour […] Alas, to where has that happy hour now fled [..] To where did my tender longing flee?’ Nietzsche wrote ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, twisting free from the fate he had been handed. ‘He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. Man is something that must be overcome’. This is the first of his posthumous books which are riddled with the motif of the man who can overcome himself.

Elizabeth also never forgot an injury. The feud, in a quite different way, continued until her death. She was not exactly a forgiving woman and certainly persistent in pursuit of her aims. As soon as she heard of Lou’s break with her brother and that she was living in Berlin with Rée, she saw her way. After all, a criminal act is a criminal act and a useful threat should not be cast aside. She wrote to both the families of the offending couple threatening prosecution and demanding that Lou should be hustled back home. She made the letters public and caused a sensation which nearly overwhelmed her brother who even threatened to fight a duel with Rée and suffered mental agonies in his retreat. But Elizabeth, as always, forgot the side show when the main battle was being fought.

Lou, however, was equal to Elizabeth and stood her ground. She did not return to Russia. Neither did she give up Rée even when she found herself outlawed by everyone. In fact she gave Rée the kind of life that she had given Nietzsche. Their platonic relationship in Berlin was for him ‘a pseudo life’. He would roam the streets at night to avoid her sexual presence back in their little apartment and came to be known as her ‘maid-of-honour’, a fact which she relayed apparently quite innocent of the implicit criticism of his masculinity. He was quite happy to tag along behind her and she was quite happy to let him. She was her own woman and would not be ruled by anyone, least of all by Elizabeth Nietzsche.

Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth later denied any meddling, ‘my brother had broken off the relationship of his own accord without any outside influence’ and anyway he had always considered the idea of the three of them living together as ‘an offence against the proprieties’. She maintained that neither Rée nor Nietzsche ever had the slightest desire to marry her. The difficult question of Rée’s early suicide, the death of the man of ‘grey-haired philosophy, of the rationalist’, is not mentioned. He had always carried a small phial of poison in his jacket pocket but, in the event, he jumped off a cliff into the River Inn which winds its way through the Engadine where he had often walked with Nietzsche. His body was found by a workman in the early morning of 29th October 1901. Thus are the sensibilities of the bourgeois off-loaded onto others who had little thought of them. For Elizabeth, Lou’s refusal to marry either Rée or her brother was merely because she ‘was looking forward to a far more brilliant match’.

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And if Lou had not run off with Rée. If she and Nietzsche had married and there had been no posthumous existence? What kind of creative life would Nietzsche have followed? With such a wife and such a disciple he would hardly have had that particular posthumous existence and later, not so very much later, maybe no other posthumous existence of clinics and controls. Who knows? As it is, a new life opened with the first pages of Zarathustra.