Why I Am so Clever by Friedrich Nietzsche

Author:Friedrich Nietzsche
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780241251867
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

5

Here where I am speaking of the recreations of my life, I need to say a word to express my gratitude for that which of all things in it has refreshed me by far the most profoundly and cordially. This was without any doubt my intimate association with Richard Wagner. I offer all my other human relationships cheap; but at no price would I relinquish from my life the Tribschen days, those days of mutual confidences, of cheerfulness, of sublime incidents – of profound moments … I do not know what others may have experienced with Wagner: over our sky no cloud ever passed. – And with that I return again to France – I cannot spare reasons, I can spare a mere curl of the lip for Wagnerians et hoc genus omne who believe they are doing honour to Wagner when they find him similar to themselves … Constituted as I am, a stranger in my deepest instincts to everything German, so that the mere presence of a German hinders my digestion, my first contact with Wagner was also the first time in my life I ever drew a deep breath: I felt, I reverenced him as a being from outside, as the opposite, the incarnate protest against all ‘German virtues’. – We who were children in the swamp-air of the fifties are necessarily pessimists regarding the concept ‘German’; we cannot be anything but revolutionaries – we shall acquiesce in no state of things in which the bigot is on top. It is a matter of complete indifference to me if today he plays in different colours, if he dresses in scarlet and dons the uniform of a hussar … Very well! Wagner was a revolutionary – he fled from the Germans … As an artist one has no home in Europe except in Paris: the délicatesse in all five senses of art which Wagner’s art presupposes, the fingers for nuances, the psychological morbidity, is to be found only in Paris. Nowhere else does there exist such a passion in questions of form, this seriousness in mise en scène – it is the Parisian seriousness par excellence. There is in Germany absolutely no conception of the tremendous ambition which dwells in the soul of a Parisian artist. The German is good-natured – Wagner was by no means good-natured … But I have already said sufficient (in ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ §256) as to where Wagner belongs, in whom he has his closest relatives: the French late romantics, that high-flying and yet exhilarating kind of artists such as Delacroix, such as Berlioz, with a fond of sickness, of incurability in their nature, sheer fanatics for expression, virtuosi through and through … Who was the first intelligent adherent of Wagner? Charles Baudelaire, the same as was the first to understand Delacroix, that typical décadent in whom an entire race of artists recognized themselves – he was perhaps also the last … What I have never forgiven Wagner? That he condescended to the Germans – that he became reichsdeutsch … As far as Germany extends it ruins culture.

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