1 Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was published in 1872, the same year as that in which the foundation stone was laid for the Festival Theater in Bayreuth. Politically and emotionally it is, like his next substantial · discussion of art, Richard Wagner at Bayreuth (1876), dominated by the figure of Richard Wagner. The work is not only dedicated to Wagner (to whom, at this period, Nietzsche was accustomed to refer as Meister) but is conceived as, above all, a work of propaganda on behalf of the Wagnerian cause. (If one attempted to summarize the essence of its complex argument the following might be offered: we stand in need of a “solution” to the suffering and absurdity of life. The Greeks found such a solution in the art of their great tragedians. Our only hope for a solution – given the untenability of Christianity in the modern age – lies in the rebirth of such art in the music-dramas of Richard Wagner.) Nietzsche was dedicated to Wagner's cause and made proposals, both before and after the publication of The Birth, to abandon his professorship at Basle in order to work exclusively for the realization of the theater at Bayreuth.

Philosophically, however, the figure of greatest importance for the work is Arthur Schopenhauer. This is in no way inconsistent with its Wagnerianism, for the Wagner Nietzsche came to know (they first met at the end of 1868), the Wagner who had completed his whole musico-dramatic æuvre save for Götterdämmerung (1874) and Parsifal (1882), had been, since his discovery of Schopenhauer in 1854, himself dominated by the philosophy of the great pessimist.