ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844, the son of a Lutheran pastor who died – probably of a degenerative brain disease – when Nietzsche was 5 years old. In 1869 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 and the world – led to his close friendship with the composer Richard Wagner which began about three years later. Four years after that, however, claiming to have discovered them both to be ‘sick’, Nietzsche broke with both Schopenhauer and Wagner. Though an honoured and invited guest at the First Bayreuth Festival of Wagner’s operas in 1876, he walked out, in disgust, half-way through.
