Parsifal, Dostoyevsky, and a ‘Well-Intentioned’ Earthquake

The year 1887 began with a deep freeze: ‘Europe’, Nietzsche wrote Elizabeth, sweltering in Paraguay, ‘has transformed itself into a snow-mountain and polar bear’. Though there was none in Nice itself, the hills surrounding his winter quarters were powdered with snow. In spite of his new, south-facing room in the Rue des Ponchettes (p. 436 above) the ‘blue-finger’ problem persisted, as did a lowering of health and spirits, the cumulative effect, he thought, of two months of frost and rain. Towards the end of January, however, his spirits received a lift from an unexpected quarter: a visit to Monte Carlo to hear the prelude to Parsifal. ‘Leaving aside the question of the use of such music and regarding it purely aesthetically’, he wrote Köselitz,

And in the notebooks he calls it ‘the greatest masterpiece of the sublime that I know’. ‘Nothing else grasps Christianity so deeply or brings one to have such intense sympathy with it’, he writes, adding that ‘no painter had painted such a dark, melancholy vision’ as do its final bars, ‘not Dante, not Leonardo’.