ABSTRACT
There is a certain irony in the fact that Wagner’s Parsifal, the music-drama with which Nietzsche is most closely associated in the popular mind, should be the major work with which he had least familiarity in performance: so much so that when in December 1886 he heard the prelude for the first (and only) time in Monte Carlo, it came as something of a revelation, eliciting in his notes and correspondence some of the most appreciative comments on Wagner that he ever set on paper.1 Despite this, he was certainly no stranger to the work, and his observations have a consistency frequently absent from his other polemical writings about Wagner. Rather than consummation, Nietzsche here saw only acquiescence and defeat; rather than victory only another attitude of the inveterate attitudinizer, the more insidious because of the refinement of the language in which it was expressed. ‘Was Goethe über Wagner gedacht haben würde?’ he asks in Der Fall Wagner, § 3:
Goethe hat sich einmal die Frage vorgelegt, was die Gefahr sei, die über allen Romantikern schwebe: das Romantiker-Verhängniss. Seine Antwort ist: ‘am Wiederkäuen sittlicher und religiöser Absurditäten zu ersticken.’ Kürzer: Parsifal-
(What would Goethe have thought of Wagner? Goethe once asked himself what the danger was that hovered over all Romantics: the Romantics’ fate. His answer was ‘to stifle by ruminating over moral and religious absurdities.’ In short: Parsifal-)2
From Cosima’s diary we know that on Christmas Day in 1869, Nietzsche was present at a reading of the extended prose synopsis Wagner had prepared in response to a request from Ludwig II of 21 August 1865.3 The project was under constant review in the years that followed; and it must surely have been discussed in Sorrento, shortly after the first Bayreuth Festival of 1876, when Nietzsche for the last time found himself in Wagner’s proximity.
