The Wagner case
The writing Der Fall Wagner is one of Friedrich Nietzsche's late works ; it is the last work that he himself published in 1888.
It belongs to the so-called " Turin estate ", the writings that Nietzsche wrote in 1888 shortly before his mental collapse . As in his Götzen-Twilight , a parodistic allusion to Wagner's Götterdämmerung , in Nietzsche contra Wagner and in Ecce homo , Nietzsche takes an increasingly critical look at Richard Wagner .
It said: “My greatest experience was a recovery. Wagner is just one of my illnesses. ”Nietzsche's criticism of Wagner is multi-layered, and although it was primarily inspired by his later work, Parsifal , he now also applied it to earlier works and the Ring of the Nibelung , which he still celebrates in the Untimely Reflections would have. As a former “student” of Schopenhauer (Schopenhauer as educator), who later opposed his teacher's pessimism , Nietzsche analyzed his influence on Wagner. While Wagner, as a revolutionary thinker, first saw the evil of the world in contracts, laws, institutions - the contract motif in the ring - his view of the world later changed and the Christian motive of redemption took center stage. Many of Wagner's characters were to be "redeemed" from now on. After the “ Götterdämmerung of old morality”, Wagner's “ship” ran “happily on this path” (of optimism ) for a long time until it hit the “reef” of Schopenhauer's philosophy. He then translated the ring into Schopenhauer's: Everything in the world is going wrong and everything is perishing. So it is only nothing, the extinction, the “twilight of the gods”, the redemption - and this nothing is now continuously celebrated by Wagner. Nietzsche repeated several times that Wagner was the artist of " decadence ".
literature
- Andreas Urs Sommer : Commentary on Nietzsche's The Wagner Case . Götzendämmerung (= Heidelberg Academy of Sciences (ed.): Historical and critical commentary on Friedrich Nietzsche's works, Vol. 6/1). XVII + 698 pages. Berlin / Boston: Walter de Gruyter 2012 ( ISBN 978-3-11-028683-0 ).
Web links
- The Wagner case , in: Critical Complete Edition edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin / New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1967 E-Text nietzschesource.org
- Text in German on zeno.org
