Nietzsche’s writings belong to a hybrid genre that pertains as much to literature as to philosophy. The first wave of French Nietzscheanism, dating from the 1890s to the First World War, occurred primarily in the field of literature. By contrast, in the eyes the philosophers who held sway in the university system, Nietzsche was considered too much of a poet and brilliant essayist to be a serious philosopher. A further explanation for the seductive power Nietzsche exercised on French writers is that he himself had a predilection for writers and thinkers in the tradition of Montaigne and Pascal over the French moralists, including his most immediate contemporary in France, Hippolyte Taine. Nevertheless, the reception of Nietzsche among French writers was selective and critical. André Gide saw in Nietzsche a fellow immoralist, but he kept a distance from Nietzsche the philosopher. Paul Valéry was happy to acknowledge the pleasure that reading Nietzsche’s prose gave him, but he was a harsh judge of what he deemed Nietzsche’s disregard for conceptual precision. Marcel Proust treated Nietzscheanism as a social phenomenon in À la recherche du temps perdu, sprinkling remarks about the author of The Case of Wagner across his characters while remaining himself a committed Wagnerian.

This chapter explores the environment of programmatic music-making that centered on the so-called “progressive” composers Liszt, Wagner, and their acolytes, contextualizes the ongoing debates between absolute music and program music that they occasioned, and considers various programmatic compositions outside of that narrow tradition. It gives particular attention to the forty-year period between the appearance of most of Liszt’s symphonic poems and Strauss’s tone poems, in which Hans von Bronsart, Hans von Bülow, Alexander Ritter, Felix Draeseke, and other students of the New German School sought to develop tenets of program music with limited success. Just as integral to the success of program music were the sites and contexts of its performance, as Vienna, Paris, Madrid, and New York welcomed and rejected program music in equal measure. These circumstances shaped Strauss to be a composer open toward, but also healthily suspicious of, program music and its past practitioners.