in 1849.
In a hortatory essay published that same year, Wagner called for a German cultural revolution. Taking as his model the tragic drama of ancient Greece, he proposed creating a new, neopagan art form that might displace what he regarded as the crippling effects on the German spirit of Christianity, a pernicious form of life that “adjusts the ills of an honorless, useless, and sorrowful existence of mankind on earth, by the miraculous love of God.” Not simply dreaming of a “perfect Art-work, the great united utterance of a free and lovely public life,” Wagner went on to spend two decades composing a “total” artwork that would combine word and image, music and theater, and bring back to life the pre-Christian ethos of the Teutonic peoples, as expressed in the The Nibelungenlied, an epic poem from the Middle Ages, portraying the Germanic ideals of fate and loyalty, and distinguished by violent emotion and acts of bloody vengeance.
By the time he met Nietzsche in 1868, Wagner had completed five additional operas, and, thanks to an amnesty, had been able to see them produced in Munich: Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger, The Rhinegold, and The Valkyrie. But because he had also become the lover in these years of Cosima von Bülow, the young daughter of the composer Franz Liszt and wife of the famous German critic and conductor Hans von Bülow, he went into exile again, this time under the patronage of the young king of Bavaria, who had installed him with Cosima at Triebschen.
Nietzsche had first met Wagner in Leipzig, where the two men had discussed Schopenhauer and philosophy, and Wagner had invited the younger man to visit him again. After Nietzsche moved to Basel a few months later, such visits became a routine. The villa at Triebschen where Wagner and Cosima lived was a rococo shrine to its master’s eccentric genius, decorated with pink satin curtains and various busts and portraits depicting Wagner as well as his royal patron. Every Sunday—the one day of the week he was free—Nietzsche traveled to Lake Lucerne. And every Sunday night, as one of his Basel friends recalled, “he came back full of his god and told me of all the splendid things he had seen and heard.”
Wagner in these years was completing his great cycle of four operas based on the German legend of The Ring of the Niebelung, and already planning to build a new theater at Bayreuth, meant to become the cynosure of a neopagan cult that would rally a regenerated body of strong and beautiful souls, forging them, through their ritual appreciation of a total artwork, into a unified national community. Old enough to be Nietzsche’s father, Wagner was a formidable presence. Nietzsche could scarcely hope to meet the composer on his own ground (though Nietzsche did continue to compose music). Instead, the young professor rose to the challenge of his example by throwing scholarly caution to the winds and composing a kind of prose poem, a paean to the revolutionary cultural ideals that Wagner claimed to embody.
Finished in 1871 and published the following year, The Birth of Tragedy was a bold, even reckless work for an aspiring philologist to publish, praising as it did the art worlds of dream and intoxication, and postulating a direct link between the cultural achievements of the ancient Greeks and the cultural challenges facing contemporary Germany—challenges met, he declared, by Wagner’s Ring, a modern “tragic myth, reborn from music.” Most of Nietzsche’s colleagues at the University of Basel—including Bachofen and Burckhardt—admired the audacity of Nietzsche’s argument. Wagner himself was naturally flattered.
Still, Nietzsche had to contend with the criticism of his academic peers. His old mentor, Ritschl, privately heaped scorn on the book, calling it in his correspondence “a piece of pseudo-aesthetic, unscholarly religious mystification produced by a man suffering from paranoia”—which would not be the last time that Nietzsche would find former friends impugning his sanity. Another academic critic, this time in a published review, spoke of Nietzsche’s “ignorance and lack of love of truth.”
In 1871, feeling estranged from philology and ever more interested in becoming a philosopher, Nietzsche had presented himself as a candidate for a chair of philosophy at the University of Basel. He was summarily rejected on the grounds that he lacked the proper academic training.
In the months that followed, as hostile criticisms of his book began to appear, he was plunged into self-doubt. Who was he? What should he become? Should he remain a professor of classics and live