Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- Chapter 6 Basel
- Chapter 7 Richard Wagner and the Birth of The Birth of Tragedy
- Chapter 8 War and Aftermath
- Chapter 9 Anal Philology
- Chapter 10 Untimely Meditations
- Chapter 11 Aimez-vous Brahms?
- Chapter 12 Auf Wiedersehen Bayreuth
- Chapter 13 Sorrento
- Chapter 14 Human, All-Too-Human
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Chapter 12 - Auf Wiedersehen Bayreuth
from PART TWO - The Reluctant Professor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- Chapter 6 Basel
- Chapter 7 Richard Wagner and the Birth of The Birth of Tragedy
- Chapter 8 War and Aftermath
- Chapter 9 Anal Philology
- Chapter 10 Untimely Meditations
- Chapter 11 Aimez-vous Brahms?
- Chapter 12 Auf Wiedersehen Bayreuth
- Chapter 13 Sorrento
- Chapter 14 Human, All-Too-Human
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Returning to Basel on January 4, 1875, Nietzsche felt more oppressed than ever by the mountain of work facing him. In addition to the appalling burden of his university and Pädegogium teaching, he had foolishly promised Schmeitzner a further ten Untimely Meditations over the next five years. But those – his ‘real’ work of cleaning up the ‘soul’ of the age – he could only produce, he told von Bülow, during holidays and periods of sick leave. ‘Thank God’, he wrote, with the false hope of the chronically sick, that, apart from the ongoing eye problems, for once ‘there is no illness in sight, and the daily cold baths I take makes it extremely unlikely I will ever be sick again’. This was in January! Like his alter ego, Zarathustra, Elizabeth comments, Nietzsche liked to ‘mock the winter’. To Malwida von Meysenbug he wrote that he had so many professional duties that he stumbled from one day to the next in a ‘drugged’ condition. He envied, he wrote, the dead, but had resolved to grow old, not out of pleasure in life, but in order to complete his ‘task’.
By February, however, he had brightened up, somewhat. ‘It is a gift of Tyche’ (the goddess of luck), he wrote Rohde, ‘to live in these Bayreuth years’. Though the Bayreuth festival would not take place until the following year, Wagner had planned an elaborate series of rehearsals for 1875.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Friedrich NietzscheA Philosophical Biography, pp. 201 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010