ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844, the son of a Lutheran pastor who died – probably of a brain tumour – when Nietzsche was five years old. In 1865 he discovered Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in a second-hand bookshop, a book he found to be written ‘especially for me’. Mutual reverence for Schopenhauer – mutual conviction that Schopenhauer had courageously told the truth about life – led to his close friendship with the opera composer Richard Wagner. A decade later, however, claiming to have discovered them both to be ‘sick’, Nietzsche broke with both Schopenhauer and Wagner. Though an invited and honoured guest at the first Bayreuth Festival of Wagner’s operas in 1876, he walked out, in disgust, half way through.
