Richard Wagner in Bayreuth

Abstract

The final chapter of the book argues that in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Nietzsche elaborates the artistic characteristics of the culture-creating genius whose philosophic characteristics were presented in its prequel on Schopenhauer. Nietzsche says that Wagner was a creator of history whose relationship to it “closely resembles […] the relationship one has to things one shapes or poeticizes.” Wagner’s dramas thus serve as examples of the value-creating monumental history whose mythical foundations Nietzsche demonstrated a need for in the second Untimely Meditation. Wagner’s art provides the Germans with a new historical horizon beneath which life can flourish anew, and gradually reshapes their ethical nature. The chapter also gives an account of how Nietzsche thought the young Wagner became who he was. This account focuses on Nietzsche’s argument that Wagner was driven by a “ruling passion,” which I argue is an early form of Nietzsche’s later doctrine of the will to power.