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

4 Cosima Wagner's Diaries: An Abridgement, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New Haven, 1994), entry for 2 August 1878 (pp. 317–18).Google Scholar

5 Hollingdale, R. J., Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy (Cambridge, 1965; rev. edn 1999), 97.Google Scholar

6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1992), 601–53 (p. 628).Google Scholar

7 Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, Untimely Meditations, trans. Hollingdale, ed. Breazeale, 223–4; The Case of Wagner, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, 628.Google Scholar

8 Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, Untimely Meditations, trans. Hollingdale, ed. Breazeale, 231.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., 227.Google Scholar

10 Ibid.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 246.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 233.Google Scholar

13 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer’, Untimely Meditations, trans. Hollingdale, ed. Breazeale, 1–55 (p. 4).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Nietzsche, ‘David Strauss’, 5.Google Scholar

15 Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations, ed. Giorgi Colli and Mazzino Montinari, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, 1999), notebook 32, note 32, p. 323.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., notebook 32, note 11, p. 316.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., notebook 32, note 16, p. 318.Google Scholar

18 Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, Untimely Meditations, trans. Hollingdale, ed. Breazeale, 224.Google Scholar

19 Ibid.; Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings, ed. Colli and Montinari, trans. Gray, notebook 32, note 10, p. 315.Google Scholar

20 Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgi Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich, 1980), i, 429–510 (pp. 469–70).Google Scholar

21 Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, Untimely Meditations, trans. Hollingdale, ed. Breazeale, 222.Google Scholar

22 Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, Untimely Meditations, trans. Hollingdale, ed. Breazeale, 222–3.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 223.Google Scholar

24 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974), section 368, 325.Google Scholar

25 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, 437–599, 542.Google Scholar

26 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1996), section 275, 130.Google Scholar

27 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Colli and Montinari, iii, 343–652 (p. 618): ‘da ist man Volk, Publikum, Heerde, Weib, Pharisäer, Stimmvieh, Demokrat, Nächster, Mitmensch’.Google Scholar

28 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche kontra Wagner, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Colli and Montinari, vi, 413–46 (p. 420): ‘Volk, Publikum, Heerde, Weib, Pharisäer, Stimmvieh, Patronatsherr, Idiot – Wagnerianer’.Google Scholar

29 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1954), 661–83 (pp. 664–5).Google Scholar

30 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, 640. Nietzsche adds: ‘Well then, you old seducer, the cynic warns you – cave canem [beware of the dog].’ The Greek kynikos (cynical) literally means ‘dog-like'.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., 638–9.Google Scholar

32 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, section 367, 324.Google Scholar

33 Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Kaufmann, 665.Google Scholar

34 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, section 368, 326. The passage was included in abbreviated form in Nietzsche contra Wagner, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Kaufmann, 666.Google Scholar

35 Alexandre Dumas fils, Preface to Un père prodigue, Théâtre complet, iii, 10, trans. in Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre(Ithaca, NY, 1984), 273.Google Scholar

36 Roland Barthes, ‘Les tâches de la critique brechtienne’, Essais critiques (Paris, 1964), 84–9 (pp. 87–8).Google Scholar

37 Nietzsche's charge of formlessness is read by Adorno as a sign that ‘even he was still listening with the ears of the Biedermeier listener’, as though someone with Nietzsche's awareness should somehow make the historical leap in perception and re-attune to the new. Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1981), 55.Google Scholar

38 Music drama's appeal to myth and timeless themes would seem to separate it from the period-specific, supposedly historically determined stage of realist theatre, but both traditions involve an ideological move in which the culturally specific nature of values is disguised and projected as universal (Wagner) or as freely transposable to a given setting (realist theatre).Google Scholar

39 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941; New York, 1969), 188; Jacob's Room (New York, 1959), 68–9.Google Scholar

40 Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London, 1980), 64–5.Google Scholar

41 Richard Sennet, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge, 1977), 210.Google Scholar

42 Jacques-François-Louis Grobert, De l'exécution dramatique, considérée dans ses rapports avec le matériel de la salle et de la scène (Paris, 1809), 265, cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley, 1995), 208.Google Scholar

43 Terence Rees, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas (London, 1978), 188.Google Scholar

44 Sennet, The Fall of Public Man, 208.Google Scholar

45 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, 628.Google Scholar

46 Ibid., 629.Google Scholar

47 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, section 361, 316.Google Scholar

48 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 35.Google Scholar

49 Nietzsche, ‘Assorted Opinions and Maxims’, Human, All Too Human, trans. Hollingdale, 215–300, no. 134 (p. 244).Google Scholar

50 Richard Wagner, ‘Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth’ (1873), Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. Richard Sternfeld and Hans von Wolzogen (Leipzig, 1916), ix, 322–44 (p. 338). It is a state Wagner compares, paraphrasing Schopenhauer, to ‘hypnotic clairvoyance’, a state that ‘shuts us off from the outer world, as it were, to let us gaze at the innermost essence of ourselves and all things’ (‘Beethoven’, ibid., 61–126 (p. 78)).Google Scholar

51 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington, 1977), 66, 104.Google Scholar

52 Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Colli and Montinari, i, 470: ‘der Traum fast für wahrer gelten will, als das Wache, Wirkliche’.Google Scholar

53 Friedrich Kittler, ‘World-Breath: On Wagner's Media Technology’, Opera through Other Eyes, ed. David Levin (Stanford, 1993), 215–35 (p. 224).Google Scholar

54 Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, Untimely Meditations, trans. Hollingdale, ed. Breazeale, 240.Google Scholar

55 Sir George Grove, letter to Mrs Wodehouse (28 August 1889), quoted in Bayreuth: The Early Years, ed. Robert Hartford (London, 1980), 139. Albert Lavignac, The Music Dramas of Richard Wagner and his Festival Theatre at Bayreuth, trans. Esther Singleton (New York, 1898), quoted in Bayreuth: The Early Years, ed. Hartford, 202.Google Scholar

56 Eduard Hanslick, review in Neue Freie Presse (18 August 1876), trans. Hartford, Bayreuth: The Early Years, 84.Google Scholar

57 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, 639.Google Scholar

58 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, 1984), 184.Google Scholar

59 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX, 1981), 259–422 (p. 293).Google Scholar

60 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 3.Google Scholar

61 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, section 368, 326.Google Scholar

62 Ibid., section 370, 329–30.Google Scholar

63 Nietzsche, Morgenröthe, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Colli and Montinari, iii, 9–332 (pp. 207–8).Google Scholar

64 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, section 87, 143.Google Scholar

65 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 195.Google Scholar

66 Bakhtin centres his discussion of hidden polemic on Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, in which the narrator's sense of identity rests entirely on how he imagines others view him. In a letter to his friend Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche described his first acquaintance with Notes from the Underground: ‘The instinct of kinship (or how should I name it?) spoke up immediately; my joy was extraordinary … (It is two novellas, the first really a piece of music, very strange, very un-German music; the second, a stroke of genius in psychology, a kind of self-derision of the “know thyself”.)‘ Letter of 23 February 1887, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Kaufmann, 454–5.Google Scholar

67 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, 648.Google Scholar

68 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, ibid., III, section 15, 561–4.Google Scholar

69 Ibid., III, section 25, 589–92.Google Scholar

70 Nietzsche, unpublished note from 1887, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Colli and Montinari, xii, notebook 10, note 25, pp. 469–70.Google Scholar

71 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, III, section 2, 534.Google Scholar

72 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, ibid., 647.Google Scholar

73 Cosima Wagner's Diaries, ed. Gregor-Dellin and Mack, entries for 26 July 1882 (p. 482) and 11 August 1882 (p. 484).Google Scholar

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

75 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, 179–435, section 2, 200.Google Scholar

76 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, ibid., III, section 3, 536.Google Scholar

77 Ibid., III, section 2, 535.Google Scholar

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

79 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, 612.Google Scholar

80 Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999), 139–40. Expanding on Adorno's reading of Parsifal, Tomlinson relates the exchangeability of motifs to commodity form, while their self-sufficiency is seen as a trace of the modern subject's (futile) assertion of autonomy in the face of commodification (see pp. 129–31).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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

83 Nietzsche, Ecce homo, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, 655–800 (p. 731).Google Scholar

84 Ibid., 730.Google Scholar

85 Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings, ed. Colli and Montinari, trans. Gray, notebook 32, note 55, p. 331.Google Scholar

86 Nietzsche, Ecce homo, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Colli and Montinari, vi, 255–374 (p. 290): ‘die fünfzig Welten fremder Entzückungen, zu denen Niemand ausser ihm Flügel hatte’.Google Scholar

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

88 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Kaufmann, 103–439 (p. 278).Google Scholar

89 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, 634.Google Scholar

90 Nietzsche, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, Untimely Meditations, trans. Hollingdale, ed. Breazeale, 243.Google Scholar

91 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago, 1997), 224.Google Scholar

92 Ibid., 12.Google Scholar

93 Ibid., 223.Google Scholar

94 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, section 40, 241.Google Scholar

95 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, ibid., 612.Google Scholar