Nietzsche Wagner Quotes & Sayings

It was the mutual study of the Spear and the significance of its legend and their strikingly opposite views about it which finally parted these inseperable friends
the master musician (Wagner) and the cynnical philosopher (Nietzsche). A parting which led them both to experience a bitter and pathetic lonliness, and later a growing hatred and contempt for one another which spilled over into a stormy controversy to shatter the emerging Pan-Germanic mystic-pagan idealism to its very foundations. — Trevor Ravenscroft

At present, however, science, spurred on by its powerful delusion, is hurrying unstoppably to its limits, where the optimism hidden in the essence oflogic will founder and break up. For there is an infinite number ofpoints on the periphery ofthe circle ofscience, and while we have no way of foreseeing how the circle could ever be completed, a noble and gifted man inevitably encounters, before the mid-point of his existence, boundary points on the periphery like this, where he stares into that which cannot be illuminated. When, to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form ofknowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and as medicine."
Friedrich Nietzsche, "Foreword to Richard Wagner" in The Birth of Tragedy, ed. R. Geuss & R. Speirs, Cambridge, 2007, 163. (p.114) — Friedrich Nietzsche

What stands most explicitly as critique in Nietzsche's late work in not a development from earlier interests but a return to two problems of enduring personal involvement for him, those of Wagner and of Christianity. Der Antichrist , to take one case, is not a response to a resuscitating public interest in Christian religion; it is primarily a renewed attempt to resolve for himself the question of piety. — John Carroll

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Wagner took off a glove, "How dare you," he exclaimed while slapping in Nietzsche in the ear.

This sent Nietzsche's hypothalamus into overdrive. His frontal lobe shut down; he stopped thinking. Without delay, his arms shot forward, jabbing Wagner in the face twice.

"Oh yeah!?" Wagner screeched, losing his composure. He pushed Nietzsche into the opening that was cleared for the stilts walker. Unskilled in boxing, Wagner flailed his arms around Nietzsche's face. — Dylan Callens

So, he eagerly drove from Basel to Bayreuth before the festival began to watch the last rehearsals of The Ring Cycle. As he watched, it hit him like Odin's bowel movement: the opera was shit. — Dylan Callens