Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation

When Friedrich Nietzsche first met Richard Wagner in 1869, the magisterial composer was more than twice the age of the fledgling philologist. Wagner had also just been banished from the royal court of Bavaria for his adulterous affair with Cosima von Bülow. Although the friendship between the two men began rather well, it would famously degenerate into a bitter intellectual and emotional feud, over which Nietzsche would continue to obsess even after Wagner's death in 1883 (but then, Cosima--who'd married Wagner as soon as possible after her divorce--was more than happy to keep up her late husband's end of the battle, and Nietzsche's own death in 1900 did nothing to change that).

Joachim Köhler's densely compact Nietzsche and Wagner draws heavily upon available correspondence from all parties--and Nietzsche's early writings--to examine this turbulent relationship. The point is not so much that Wagner was a manipulative jerk (although he certainly was that) or that Nietzsche and Cosima, who both suffered miserably in youth, were psychologically vulnerable to Wagner's seductive but emotionally abusive behavior; rather, the idea seems to be an examination of the effects of the relationship on the philosopher's thinking, both before and after their breakup. It's an academically rigorous account, so while it is fraught with traces of melodrama, they are buried under careful analytic prose, making this book far more suitable for scholars than general readers interested in biographical data on any of the principals involved. --Ron Hogan