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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
A central theme of Nietzsche's Wagner criticism is the theatre and acting. Nietzsche professes a deep suspicion of the ‘herd mentality’ promoted by theatre and the shallowness and persuasive power of the actor. Wagner and Bayreuth, he claims, embody these characteristics in their most intense form, compounding the theatre's worst features with a thoroughly modern set of blind contradictions. But Nietzsche's writings can also embrace theatrical masks and ‘histrionics’, presenting them as the key to a conception of identity as plural, mobile and random. In fact the very form of his writings, with its weave of multiple authorial identities, reinforces this view. This article argues that Nietzsche's anti-Wagnerian rhetoric is a mask that conceals more sympathetic attitudes. While repelled by Wagnerian theatre on many levels, Nietzsche also positions Wagner and the experience of music drama as a model for new definitions of identity.
Note on translations: Previously published English translations of German texts are used in this article (and cited in the footnotes) where they are satisfactory; elsewhere the translations provided are my own and the footnotes refer to editions of the original German texts.Google Scholar
1 For a reading of some possible identities within Nietzsche's Wagner criticism, see Tambling, Jeremy, Opera and the Culture of Fascism (Oxford, 1996), 62–9.Google Scholar
2 Thomas Mann detected in Nietzsche's Wagner criticism an ‘analysis whose most venomous insights are ultimately a form of glorification and a further expression, simply, of passionate devotion’. Mann, Reflections of a Non-Political Man, Thomas Mann: Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden (London, 1985), 51–65 (p. 52).Google Scholar
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge, 1997), 195–254 (p. 253). All italics in the Nietzsche quotations are the author's own.Google Scholar
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9 Ibid., 227.Google Scholar
10 Ibid.Google Scholar
11 Ibid., 246.Google Scholar
12 Ibid., 233.Google Scholar
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31 Ibid., 638–9.Google Scholar
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74 Diary entry for 6 September 1882, cited in Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, his Work, his Century, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (London, 1983), 508. Wagner was known to have developed an infatuation for one of the Flower Maidens, English soprano Carrie Pringle.Google Scholar
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78 Slavoj Žižek, ‘There is No Sexual Relationship’, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC, 1996), 208–49 (p. 225).Google Scholar
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81 Here we can detect a parallel with Nietzsche's own criticism and his reference to acquiring power through Wagner to use against him. Parsifal appears to demonstrate the advantages of knowing temptation in order to overcome it, but just as Nietzsche's logic proved reversible, so we can conclude that defeating temptation involves a first-hand knowledge of what temptation offers.Google Scholar
82 As Gilles Deleuze points out, Nietzsche's concept of the tragic is unthinkable without his pluralism, since it demands an embrace of the seemingly incompatible. For Deleuze the Nietzschean tragic ‘is only to be found in multiplicity, in the diversity of affirmation as such‘. See Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London, 1983), 17.Google Scholar
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87 Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Colli and Montinari, iii, 445: ‘er kennt einen Klang für jene heimlich-unheimlichen Mitternächte der Seele, wo Ursache und Wirkung aus den Fugen gekommen zu sein scheinen und jeden Augenblick Etwas “aus dem Nichts” entstehen kann’. This passage was incorporated verbatim into Nietzsche contra Wagner under the heading ‘Where I Admire’.Google Scholar
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93 Ibid., 223.Google Scholar
94 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, section 40, 241.Google Scholar
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