The Case of Wagner (German : Der Fall Wagner) is a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1888. Subtitled "A Musician's Problem".
The book is a critique of Richard Wagner and the announcement of Nietzsche's rupture with the German artist, who had involved himself too much, in Nietzsche's eyes, in the Völkisch movement and antisemitism. His music is no longer represented as a possible "philosophical effect," and Wagner is ironically compared to Georges Bizet, a French composer who gained fame during the Romantic Era. However, Nietzsche presents Wagner as only a particular symptom of a broader "disease" that is affecting Europe: that is, nihilism. The book shows Nietzsche as a capable music critic and provides the setting for some of his further reflections on the nature of art and its relationship to the future health of humanity.
This work is in sharp contrast with the second part of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, wherein he praised Wagner as fulfilling a need in music to go beyond the analytic and dispassionate understanding of music. Nietzsche also praised Wagner effusively in his essay "Wagner at Bayreuth" (part of the Untimely Meditations ), but his disillusion with Wagner the composer and the man were first seen in his 1878 work Human, All Too Human . As Aaron Ridley writes in his book Nietzsche's The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, "He takes Wagner’s alleged miniaturism to mark a decline not merely in form, including rhythmic form, but also (and hence) in the material that occupies those ‘smallest spaces’ in which Wagner’s real mastery is displayed." [1] One of the last works that Nietzsche wrote returned to the critical theme of The Case of Wagner. In Nietzsche contra Wagner , Nietzsche pulled together excerpts from his works to show that he consistently had the same thoughts about music, only that he had misapplied them to Wagner in the earliest works. He considered Wagner's theatre to be a form of demolatry. [2] [3]
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1869, at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.
The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music is an 1872 work of dramatic theory by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It was reissued in 1886 as The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism. The later edition contained a prefatory essay, "An Attempt at Self-Criticism", wherein Nietzsche commented on this earlier book.
The dithyramb was an ancient Greek hymn sung and danced in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility; the term was also used as an epithet of the god. Plato, in The Laws, while discussing various kinds of music mentions "the birth of Dionysos, called, I think, the dithyramb." Plato also remarks in the Republic that dithyrambs are the clearest example of poetry in which the poet is the only speaker.
Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future is a book by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that covers ideas in his previous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra but with a more polemical approach. It was first published in 1886 under the publishing house C. G. Naumann of Leipzig at the author's own expense and first translated into English by Helen Zimmern, who was two years younger than Nietzsche and knew the author.
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits is a book by 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1878. A second part, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, was published in 1879, and a third part, The Wanderer and his Shadow, followed in 1880.
Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is is the last original book written by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche before his death in 1900. It was written in 1888 and was not published until 1908.
Zarathustra's roundelay, also called the Midnight Song (Mitternachts-Lied) or Once More, is a poem in the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885) by Friedrich Nietzsche.
This is a list of writings and other compositions by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche contra Wagner; Out of the Files of a Psychologist is a critical essay by Friedrich Nietzsche, composed of selections he chose from among his earlier works. The selections are assembled in this essay in order to focus on Nietzsche's thoughts about the composer Richard Wagner. As he says in the preface, when the selections are read "one after the other they will leave no doubt either about Richard Wagner or about myself: we are antipodes." He also describes it as "an essay for psychologists, but not for Germans". It was written in his last year of lucidity (1888–1889), and published by C. G. Naumann in Leipzig in 1889. Nietzsche describes in this short work why he parted ways with his one-time idol and friend, Richard Wagner. Nietzsche attacks Wagner's views, expressing disappointment and frustration in Wagner's life choices. Nietzsche evaluates Wagner's philosophy on tonality, music and art; he admires Wagner's power to emote and express himself, but largely disdains what the philosopher deems his religious biases.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) developed his philosophy during the late 19th century. He owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and said that Schopenhauer was one of the few thinkers that he respected, dedicating to him his essay Schopenhauer als Erzieher, published in 1874 as one of his Untimely Meditations.
Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer is a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, written in 1888, and published in 1889.
Untimely Meditations, also translated as Unfashionable Observations and Thoughts Out of Season, consists of four works by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, started in 1873 and completed in 1876.
The ideas of the 19th century German philosophers Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche have been compared frequently. Many authors have discussed apparent similarities in their writings, sometimes raising the question of influences. In Germany, during the early years of Nietzsche's emergence as a well-known figure, the only thinker who discussed his ideas more often than Stirner was Arthur Schopenhauer. It is certain that Nietzsche read about Stirner's book The Ego and Its Own, which was mentioned in Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Importance (1866) and Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), both of which young Nietzsche knew well. However, there is no irrefutable indication that he actually read it as no mention of Stirner is known to exist anywhere in Nietzsche's publications, papers or correspondence.
My Sister and I is an apocryphal work attributed to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Following the Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann, most consider the work to be a literary forgery, although a small minority argue for the book's authenticity.
Mein Leben is the autobiography of the composer Richard Wagner, covering the years from his birth in 1813 to 1864.
Andreas Urs Sommer is a German philosopher of Swiss origin. He specializes in the history of philosophy and its theory, ethics, philosophy of religion, and Skepticism. His historical studies center on the philosophy of Enlightenment and Nietzsche, but they also deal with Kant, Max Weber, Pierre Bayle, Jonathan Edwards, and others.
Idylls from Messina is a set of eight idylls composed by Friedrich Nietzsche. These poems were written in Sicily during the spring of 1882, where Nietzsche remained for three weeks after arriving from Genoa.
Magnum in parvo: A philosophy in compendium (1888), in German Magnum in parvo: Eine Philosophie im Auszug, is a project of work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) conceived in Sils Maria, Switzerland, at the end of August 1888, the last summer of his lucid life. This is a book that the Röcken philosopher planned as a rigorous and precise synthesis of his ill-fated capital project The Will to Power and in which the key themes of his thought are addressed. However, a sudden change of opinion in a context of growing mental excitement prior to Nietzsche's near psychophysical collapse determined that this unique work was finally published not in the planned unitary form, but dissolved and mixed with other materials in two different books: Twilight of the Idols (1889) and The Antichrist (1894).
On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life is a work by Friedrich Nietzsche published in 1874 and the second of his four Untimely Meditations. The treatise is considered an important work from Nietzsche's early creative period. In it, he criticizes his academic contemporaries who, in his opinion, either overestimate or misjudge the importance of history. This work also anticipates Nietzsche's later themes and has received comparatively great attention.