Nietzsche on Parsifal
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 riedrich Nietzsche had turned
against the idol of his youth long before he heard
the Prelude to Parsifal for the first time
in Monte-Carlo in January 1887. Despite his apostasy,
Nietzsche was greatly moved:
 When I see you again, I shall
tell you exactly what I then
understood. Putting aside all
irrelevant questions (to what end such music
can or should
serve?), and speaking from a purely aesthetic point
of view, has Wagner ever written anything
better? The supreme psychological
perception and precision as regards what can be
said, expressed, communicated
here, the extreme of concision and directness of
form, every nuance of feeling conveyed
epigrammatically; a clarity of musical description
that reminds us of a shield of consummate
workmanship; and finally an extraordinary sublimity
of feeling, something experienced in the very
depths of music, that does Wagner the highest
honour; a synthesis of conditions which to many
people - even "higher minds" - will seem
incompatible, of strict coherence, of "loftiness"
in the most startling sense of the word, of a
cognisance and a penetration of vision that cuts
through the soul as with a knife, of sympathy with
what is seen and shown forth. We get something
comparable to it in Dante, but nowhere else. Has
any painter ever depicted so sorrowful a look of
love as Wagner does in the final accents of his
Prelude? 
[Letter to Peter Gast (Heinrich Köselitz),
January 1887]
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 month
later, Nietzsche wrote to his sister:
I cannot think
of it without feeling violently shaken, so
elevated was I by it, so deeply moved. It was
as if someone were speaking to me again,
after many years, about the problems that
disturb me - naturally not supplying the
answers I would give, but
the Christian answer, which after all has
been the answer of stronger souls than the
last two centuries of our era have produced.
When listening to this music one lays
Protestantism aside as a misunderstanding -
and also, I will not deny it, other
really good music, which I have at
other times heard and loved, seems, as
against this, a misunderstanding!
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 n May
1888, Nietzsche produced his brilliant tirade
against Wagner, Der Fall Wagner (The
Case of Wagner). Here he wrote that the
sensuousness of Wagner's last work made it his
greatest masterpiece:
In the art of
seduction, Parsifal will
always retain its rank - as the
stroke of genius in seduction. - I
admire this work; I wish I had written it
myself; failing that, I understand
it. - Wagner never had better
inspirations than in the end. Here the
cunning in his alliance of beauty and
sickness goes so far that, as it were, it
casts a shadow over Wagner's earlier art -
which now seems too bright, too healthy. Do
you understand this? Health, brightness
having the effect of a shadow? almost of an
objection? - To such an
extent have we become pure
fools. - Never was there a greater
master in dim, hieratic aromas - never was a
man equally expert in all
small infinities, all that
trembles and is effusive, all the feminisms
from the idioticon of
happiness! - Drink, O my friends, the
philtres of this art! Nowhere will you find a
more agreeable way of enervating your spirit,
of forgetting your manhood under a rosebush.
- Ah, this old magician! This Klingsor of all Klingsors! How he thus wages
war against us! us, the free
spirits! How he indulges every cowardice of
the modern soul with the tones of magic maidens! - Never
before has there been such a deadly
hatred of the search for knowledge!
- One has to be a cynic in order not to be
seduced here; one has to be able to bite in
order not to worship here. Well, then, you
old seducer, the cynic warns you -
cave canem.
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Nietzsche's objection to Wagner preaching
chastity might have been motivated partly by
envy; since Nietzsche (right) was famously
unsuccessful with women. In this photograph
it is Lou Salome (left) who is holding the
whip.
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