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Nietzsche
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer who revolutionized opera in the 19th century, pioneering a style called Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total works of art,” which synthesized musical, visual, dramatic, and textual elements in a single opera or production. Wagner was a profound influence on the young Nietzsche, who initially championed his music. Nietzsche later broke with Wagner, finding that he was increasingly pandering to both Christian morals and German nationalism. Wagner took a hardline and very public stance on the question of nationalism, promoting both anti-Semitism and racism in his writing and glorifying the German spirit in his operas, for which Nietzsche accuses him of devolving into grotesque “fatherlandishness.” Nevertheless, Nietzsche believes there is still something redeemable in Wagner’s art, arguing that Wagner does not have the right to decide what the moral or political meaning of his own work is and that listeners should interpret his music for themselves, ignoring Wagner’s own “misunderstandings.”
Richard Wagner Quotes in Beyond Good and Evil
The Beyond Good and Evil quotes below are all either spoken by Richard Wagner or refer to Richard Wagner. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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8. Peoples and Fatherlands
Quotes
In all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century, the over-all direction of the mysterious workings of their soul was to prepare the way for this new synthesis and to anticipate experimentally the European of the future: only in their foregrounds or in weaker hours, say in old age, did they belong to the “fatherlandish”—they were merely taking a rest from themselves when they became “patriots.” I am thinking of such human beings as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: do not hold it against me when I include Richard Wagner, too, with them, for one should not allow oneself to be led astray about him by his own misunderstandings—geniuses of his type rarely have the right to understand themselves.
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Richard Wagner Character Timeline in Beyond Good and Evil
The timeline below shows where the character Richard Wagner appears in Beyond Good and Evil. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
8. Peoples and Fatherlands
Describing the music of Richard Wagner, Nietzsche finds it expresses an important quality of the German spirit. This spirit, both old...
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...were dedicated to “the European of the future.” To Nietzsche, this explains the case of Wagner, whose own self-explanations should be disregarded. Despite their heroic efforts, Nietzsche finds that this quest...
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