A review by nicktraynor
The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner by Friedrich Nietzsche

3.0

I spent more than 10 hours reading these short essays and looking into the various references and allusions that Nietzsche makes throughout. The Case of Wagner, I take it, is a lamentation about what Nietzsche perceived as the decay of society in general and music in particular, embodied by its decadence and nihilism, of which Wagner and Schopenhauer were the artist and philosopher in chief. Nietzsche believes Wagner is a failure because he is not an authentic or great musician, but instead an actor who cynically absorbs and perpetuates the culture of the masses at the expense of original, individual expression and creativity. Wagner apparently does this through his drama and grandiosity in theatrical arrangement and self-referential use of salvation as subject matter. For Nietzsche, Wagner both represents and cultivates the rise of Germanic ideals including nationalism and obedience to the common cause. He ties all this to his conceptions of master and slave moralities (from earlier works), which made a lot of sense in this context. The desire to formulate history as a science, which thinkers such as Marx, Tolstoy and Trotsky also attempted, does seem quaint and futile now though. There were some genuinely thrilling poetical moments as per the best of Nietzsche, but most of it was quite critical and analytical, and there were many of those confounded inconsistencies which are typical of his later writing. The translation was not a good one. It was inelegant at best and very crude at times.