ABSTRACT
Offenbach’s opera buffa had few admirers in the nineteenth century to equal and none to surpass Friedrich Nietzsche in their enthusiasm: Offenbach: French music with a Voltairean spirit, free, frolicsome, with a little sardonic smirk, but bright, clever almost to the point of banality and without the mignardise of sickly or blond-Viennese sensuality. Wagner, the sanctimonious seducer, Offenbach, the laughing liberator, the image is fitting, far more so than Nietzsche himself seems to have realized, for Offenbach was certainly the complete antithesis of everything Wagner represented. The Case of Wagner is all about the deleterious effects of Wagner’s self-mythologizing, that is, with everything that today's Perfect Wagnerites, can with some justification, write off as irrelevant to forming an estimate of Wagner’s true brilliance. The importance of Offenbach consists precisely in the way his buffooneries deflate the pretensions of the romantic attitude to life and love, whose residues are clearly visible in Nietzsche’s characterization of the alternative to Wagner.
