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 14 - Human, All-Too-Human
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
On new year's Day, 1878, Nietzsche gifted his autographed copy of the score of Tristan to Köselitz and of Meistersinger to Köselitz's friend and his own sometime student, Paul Widemann. If he had thought to clear the decks of Wagneriana, however, he failed since the next day he received from Wagner a copy of the completed libretto of his final opera, Parsifal. To von Seydlitz Nietzsche wrote,
Impression on first reading: more Liszt [a Catholic] than Wagner, spirit of the Counter-Reformation. To me, accustomed as I am to the Greek, the universally human, it's all too limited to the Christian era. Pure psychological fantasy, no flesh and much too much blood…The language reads like a translation from a foreign language.
One might think of El Greco's boneless, fleshless, ghostly, already-almost-ascended-to-heaven saints and martyrs to get the point about Liszt and the Counter-Reformation. Wagner had anticipated this reaction by signing the copy ‘for his dear friend, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Church Councillor’, a self-deprecating joke that Nietzsche stubbornly refused to get. ‘Incredible’, he comments retrospectively in Ecce Homo, ‘Wagner had become pious’.
A few days later, Human, All-Too-Human was finally completed and sent off to Schmeitzner. It was planned to appear in May, timed to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Voltaire, Nietzsche's temporary hero, to whom the first edition of the work was dedicated. He was extremely nervous about the work's reception.
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- Friedrich NietzscheA Philosophical Biography, pp. 241 - 270Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010