The Ur-Bromance
How Wagner and Nietzsche came together, and how they exploded apart.
Rob James
September 7, 2025
My father Gad Llewellyn James (1914-1992, to get his name and biography onto the Internet) introduced me to classical music early in life, and I have played piano and guitar in many traditions over the years. He was no fan of opera or classical song, and well into adulthood I followed his cue and shied away from the genre. In particular, I was warned to avoid Richard Wagner (1813-1883). As Caroline Lamb said of Lord Byron, Wagner was considered “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” I read something that said attending Tristan und Isolde entailed five hours in the dark hearing about nothing but death and the composer’s love affair with Matilde Wesendonck. That was enough for me to stay away.
Operatic arias in movie soundtracks began to get to me, though, and I started appreciating the art form, ultimately and inevitably leading to Wagner. The prelude to Lohengrin first grabbed my attention. While driving and listening to the end of Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), I picked out the motifs that were woven together and practically had to pull over to the shoulder of the road. So I have become very wrapped up in Wagner the composer, and have had to make a very uneasy peace with Wagner the writer and especially with Wagner the person, whose moral faults are as large as his musical achievements.
I even made what is seriously called a pilgrimage to the 2007 Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Bavaria.
I will post and write more on Wagner over time. Today, though, I am conveying the substance of a great set of lectures by Nicolas Krusek, an instructor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, on what I call the “Bromance” of Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. (I’ll say more about Nietzsche later as well!)
These lectures addressed (i) what philosophical ideas influenced Wagner, (ii) what philosophical ideas influenced Nietzsche, and (iii) what brought them together in 1868, sustained an eight-year friendship, and completely sundered their relationship shortly after 1876.
Philosophical background
Neither can be considered a professional, systematic philosopher, but each has had an enormous impact on intellectual history. Philosophy is the science of examining the fundamental questions—the nature of reality, the nature of human knowledge, and the source and content of human values (including political and social organization, ethics, and religion).
Four German thinkers are most important to understanding the influences on both men.
Immanuel Kant was the preeminent philosopher of the late Enlightenment, the latter part of the eighteenth century. He started as a rationalist in the Continental tradition of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, holding that all truly reliable knowledge comes from ideas and reason, distrusting sensory data. Reading Hume woke him from his “dogmatic slumbers” and attuned him to the British empiricists, including Locke, Berkeley, and Hobbes, who said that our only knowledge, unreliable as it may be, comes from the senses and from reflections in a blank-slate mind upon that sense-data.
In Kant’s synthetic formulation there are two worlds. The world as we experience it is the phenomenal world, and we apprehend it only through our sensory and cognitive apparatus. It is that apparatus that imposes temporality (time), extension (space), and causation—those are constructs of our apprehension. I like to say that we behold the universe while wearing “cognitive goggles.”
The “thing as such” (Ding an sich) is the noumenal world, and we cannot access it through reason. But some attributes, absolute values of morality in particular, come to us from that world. Kant felt he had limited the scope and reach of reason in order to leave room for faith.
Georg Wilhelm Hegel was the preeminent philosopher of the early nineteenth century. Relevant here is his philosophy of History (Wagner read his Philosophy of History and Nietzsche must have read much more deeply). History is not just one damned thing after another, it is the World Spirit, and it has a purpose—it is evolving in dialectics through thesis, antithesis and synthesis toward ever and ever greater freedom and self-knowledge. Hegel is an idealist, where reality is rooted in the world of ideas.
Hegel’s successors liked the dialectic and the purpose. Some, the Right Hegelians, moved toward the role of the state and centralized government. Others, the Left Hegelians, rejected his idealism and the Prussian and Lutheran institutions.
Ludwig Feuerbach was an anthropologist of sorts, and undertook a kind of anthropological critique of Christianity. Man takes what is imperfect in himself (knowledge, power, goodness) and projects a perfect version of those attributes onto a deity. Man takes things for which he craves (ample food, absence of disease and care) and projects a perfect version of those attributes onto an afterlife or Heaven. He was an atheist and a materialist—“man is what he eats.” All his books, especially The Philosophy of the Future, were important to Wagner, who dedicated a book to Feuerbach and used his “of the Future” tagline for anything that Wagner liked, including in the present and even in the past.
Arthur Schopenhauer followed Kant’s vision of two worlds, but he said there was a lot we do know about the noumenal world (what he called the World as Will as opposed to the World as Representation). “Will” does not mean a human volition; instead it is an impersonal, blind, irrational, dangerous and destructive force that pervades the cosmos. Since extension comes only in the phenomenal world, the Will is universal and indivisible. Schopenhauer’s famous pessimism derives from the inevitability of human disappointment and the desirability of resignation.
The individual foolishly thinks himself the center of the world, ready to annihilate everything else in order to save himself. The ultimate in egoism, even solipsism. When animals and humans kill one another, it is one mode of the Will attacking other modes of itself—it sinks its teeth into its own flesh. (In Wagner’s Meistersinger, the morning after the citywide bumfight, Hans Sachs essentially quotes this—when you bite others, you bite yourself.) The tormented and the tormenter are one. The heart is enlarged by knowledge that every living thing is part of our inner being. He studied Hindu and Buddhist texts of similar import (the Upanishads, tat tvam asi, “Thou Art That”).
In addition to those four thinkers, two broader movements are relevant. The Young Germany of the 1830s led by Heinrich Laube was a social reaction against the stuffy, prudish Lutheran and Prussian bulwarks. (Wagner picked up on this in depicting the ruler’s hypocrisy in Das Liebesverbot, his take on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.) The Young or Left Hegelians after Feuerbach were an unorganized pack, including Marx and Engels who turned Hegel on his head (or right side up) with materialism and class conflict, not idealism, liberty and self-knowledge, being the stuff of history. Wagner toyed with this movement, really only as a means to releasing musical and dramatic performance from its authoritarian fetters—at least through his encounters with the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and his comic-opera participation in the Dresden uprising of 1848, which nearly got him imprisoned or killed.
Wagner and Nietzsche before the Bromance
Wagner (1813-1883) read Feuerbach possibly in Paris in 1840, and his influence shows in his early works like Tannhäuser (we would soon be bored in Heaven; pain is part of the human soul). Wagner came across Schopenhauer in 1854, after he had written the libretto for the entire Ring and the score of Rheingold. In his untrustworthy autobiography Mein Leben he says he suddenly realized he had been espousing Schopenhauer’s ideas in his works—it was a moment of recognition, not revelation.
Wagner had already turned from the leftist politics of 1848 toward a withdrawal from political and social concerns. What mattered in Schopenhauer and the later Wagner was the annihilation of the personal will and complete self-abnegation, embracing the essential nothingness of the world of appearances. This shows most clearly in Parsifal.
Wagner and Schopenhauer differed on the role of sex and women. Schopenhauer was a thoroughgoing misogynist (read his incendiary essay “On Women”) and while he thought sex might impart something of the Will, he found its manifestations in our world dangerous and debilitating. Wagner championed sexual passion and placed the ideal love of an ideal woman as the key to redemption in many of his works. Schopenhauer thought music the art that led most clearly to the Will, which delighted Wagner, but it appears that Schopenhauer was not a fan of Wagner’s music in particular!
Nietzsche (1844-1900) was raised in a family of pastors. (His father, who died when he was four, was born in 1813—so Wagner was a kind of father figure.) He started toward a religious and musical career but got derailed. He was a superstar in philology and philosophy in school and astoundingly at age 24 was a full professor of philology at the University of Basel.
Feuerbach shows up to a limited degree in Nietzsche, who rejected not only religion but most of metaphysics altogether. “This world is the only world.” Nietzsche admired that “Schopenhauer never poses”—the fabled pessimist never deceived himself or others. He maintained that respect even after he otherwise broke with Schopenhauer.
By 1867, Nietzsche heard Wagner’s music in a piano reduction of the Tristan prelude and it struck him, as it has struck so many others, like a thunderbolt. By this time Wagner was very famous and (long story short, after being humiliated in Paris, escaping the Dresden dragnet, and always being hounded by creditors) now enjoyed the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Nietzsche started chasing Wagner performances whenever and wherever he could. He was a frustrated musician himself, turning out pedestrian compositions.
The Bromance
In November 1868, Nietzsche (while still a student) first met Richard Wagner and his then companion Cosima von Bülow at Tribschen in Switzerland. By 1869 he was a full professor in Basel and through 1872 a frequent visitor to Tribschen, as recorded in Cosima’s unreliable diaries. (The thenietzschechannel.com website has all the excerpts from the diaries that mention Nietzsche.) The entries around Christmas 1870 are remarkable (the week of the Siegfried Idyll, performed on Cosima’s birthday, Christmas). Nietzsche read an early version of the Birth of Tragedy, which of course delighted Wagner.
Nietzsche was kind of a gofer for Cosima, doing her shopping, and may have been infatuated with her (she was 25 years younger than Wagner, who finally married her in 1870, but only 6 years older than Nietzsche). Dietrich Fischer-Deskau has written a light work on the relationship.
In 1872 came “peak Wagner” with The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Nietzsche was just 29 years old. It is dedicated to Wagner, to whom the author says, “I was conversing with you as I wrote.” To that point in intellectual history, ancient Greece had been considered a rational, orderly culture; but an irrational, chthonic side was now being explored. Nietzsche distinguished the Apollonian strain (light; poetry, sculpture, visual arts; Schopenhauer’s World as Representation) from the Dionysian (dark; music; World as Will). The Dionysian shows in the myths and in Aeschylus and Sophocles, but disappears with the advent of Socrates and Euripides (who eliminated the Chorus from his plays). Nietzsche called for a reunion of music, drama and poetry in a communal art form. As one might imagine, Wagner ate all of this up.
The Bromance was decidedly asymmetrical, as Wagner does not seem to have been overly influenced by Nietzsche; it was mostly the other way around, both “pro and contra Wagner.” Asymmetric romances of any type are usually unhappy and what we would now call psychologically unhealthy; having been on either side of such an asymmetry from time to time, I can relate.
The Wagners shortly left Tribschen for Bayreuth in Bavaria. Nietzsche was no longer visiting and under the dominant personality of the great composer. It seems that when free of the sorcerer’s spell, he had room to be his own man. This coincided with Nietzsche’s mature thought, rejecting pretty much all of the Western tradition after Aeschylus and Sophocles!
Nietzsche could finally say out loud that he detested Wagner’s pro-Germanic and anti-French prejudices, intensified by the prevalent jingoism after the Franco-Prussian War (in which Bavaria played a belated part) and the founding of the German Empire or Second Reich. And he especially resented Wagner’s extraordinary anti-Semitism, which was remarked on even by other anti-Semites. (Nietzsche broke off relations with his sister Elisabeth for a time after she married the anti-Semite Bernhard Förster.)
Nietzsche was aghast at the social-climbing spectacle of the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. He beheld Wagner hobnobbing with royalty and nationalists, bourgeois, and other “Philistines.” He was also then in great physical pain, and all his ailments erupted at once while sitting in the festival hall all those hours.
The last of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations 1873-1876 was “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.” It is a curious essay that mostly evokes disenchantment, and has little to say about Wagner himself. In 1877 came the visit of Nietzsche to a doctor, who infamously and unethically wrote Wagner detailing the ailments, and Wagner infamously wrote back, saying they all resulted from his habit of, uh, self-abuse. Word of the humiliating correspondence reached Nietzsche and many in their social circle.
The Bromance had crumbled. The two only saw each other twice after that inaugural festival.
After the Bromance
Human, All Too Human (1878) criticized music with “endless melody” as a narcotic that prevents us from thinking and makes us lose our bearings. We cannot dance, we can only swim to stay afloat. Wagner is clearly implied.
The Gay Science (1882) stated that Wagner’s music is reflective of a decadent and subsiding German bourgeois culture. It was pathetic for him to lean on old Scandinavian sagas and early German works. His music cannot convey its ideas clearly, only through effeminate obscurity; “musica is a woman.” It is unhealthy, it leads to physical ailments. The theater is “mob art par excellence.”
Wagner’s response was to treat the reversal as “ordinary pettiness” and to claim not to read the attacks, though he must have felt hurt and betrayed. Cosima suggested that what they were now seeing was the real Nietzsche; the one who visited them in Tribschen was an impostor. Wagner died in Venice (cue Thomas Mann) in 1883.
The magnum opus Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885) is more of a literary work of art than a treatise (more to come on that book in a later post; I like many others was first exposed to it through Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, which thanks to my dad was a piece I knew even before 2001: A Space Odyssey). It was followed by publications 1886-1888 with more prosaic statement, ending in the harsh The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner.
Nietzsche was ill for much of his life—he had terrible migraines lasting weeks and bad vision. In 1889 he became insane (due to syphilis?), and his body died in 1900. His sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche selectively published posthumous works that edged toward totalitarian screeds, tarnishing his later reputation.
Parsifal influences and reactions
The great writers of the nineteenth century (Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Matthew Arnold, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy among them) wrestled with the source of morality in a world where religious faith was declining. Some like Kierkegaard clung to some form of religion, calling for a “leap of faith.” Kant tried to save space for religion with his Categorical Imperative, intuiting an obligation to conform to a morality, but both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche attacked him for his “backdoor Christianity.”
Schopenhauer, for all his fabled pessimism, had an exit route in the form of a call for compassion—for all fellow beings including animals (he loved his poodles more than he loved people). He was a “mystical atheist.” He looked to Hinduism and Buddhism, which were finally being translated into European languages. Religious ideas, and rites, are still useful in order to understand ourselves and our relation to the Will.
Schopenahuer’s approach shows up especially in the stunning Parsifal, first performed in 1882, the year before the composer’s death. Gurnemanz extensively castigates Parsifal for killing the innocent swan. And when Kundry kisses Parsifal, he finally understands how the fisher king was fatefully injured: “Amfortas! The wound! The wound!” “I saw the wound bleeding: now it bleeds in me.” The fool’s newfound compassion (Mitleid) and wisdom is compared with its polar opposite, Kundry laughing at the suffering of “the Redeemer” (Schadenfreude).
Nietzsche attacked its incorporation of Christian iconography and Redeemer allusions. (He didn’t mention the Eastern religious influences, which are certainly present in a libretto that started as a tale of the Buddha.) Wagner called it not simply Oper, an opera, or even Musikdrama, but the great German word Bühnenweihfestspiel, a “sacred festival stage play” (that word “sacred” must have infuriated Nietzsche). Nietzsche wished Parsifal was simply a prank, a bad joke, a satyr play. It is embarrassing “operetta material par excellence.” It was disgusting to exalt compassion and other soft Judeo-Christian ethics. “Is Wagner unable to laugh at this stuff?” It is “a bad work,” an “attempted assassination of basic ethics.”
In contrast, Nietzsche praised the music of Parsifal—but only in private. In 1887 letters, he wrote “Has Wagner ever written anything better?” It “cuts through the soul like a knife.” Listening to the orchestra parts at least, he felt “elevated, “deeply moved.” I wonder how often other critics have contradicted their public writings in their private confessions.
The rest of Nietzsche’s work
The second edition of The Birth of Tragedy (1886) featured a new preface, an “attempt at self-criticism.” Nietzsche disowned it as “an impossible book,” “poorly written” and “effeminate.”
Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Somewhere in here, Nietzsche parodies a typical Wagnerian Stabreim rhyming stanza. One of these works was dedicated to the Frenchman Voltaire, which would have irked the anti-French Wagner.
The Genealogy of Morals (1887) lays out the Zarathustra program in prose. “God is Dead” means the decline of traditional religious belief. The “slave morality” of Judeo-Christian ethics must be overthrown in favor of the pro-life, “master morality” where the great person can transcend herd morality and create his own values. Quoting Pindar, “Become who you are!” “Bring yourself up to the mark you have yourself created.”
This then is the Übermensch, the Overman. Nietzsche has in mind a Goethe or a Socrates, one who self-masters not necessarily one who masters others. (Contrary to modern readings after Hitler, this is not an argument for racism or eugenics. And the “blond beast” in the passages refers to a lion, not some mythical Aryan. Both Wagner and Nietzsche have had their reputations tarnished by those who championed them after their deaths.) The slave morality would inspire ressentiment, the desire to drag the great man down to their level. The distinction with Rousseau is clear here. Compare Shakespeare’s villainous Richard III: “Conscience is but a word that cowards use … to keep the strong in awe.”
Also in here are the other important concepts of Nietzsche’s mature thought: (1) The Eternal Recurrence is a thought experiment—live life such that you could make decisions the same way over and over and be satisfied. A healthy life is one in which you would say ‘yes’ to Eternal Recurrence. This is the ultimate rejection of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. (2) The “amor fati,” the love of fate. (3) Each of us has the knowledge we can bear at the time (later applied to entire cultures). (4) Early views of the unconscious and of repression of desires that show up in Freud shortly. (5) The controversial “will to power,” to self-mastery not the mastering or domination of others as later misread by fascists.
The Case of Wagner (1888); Nietzsche Contra Wagner (published during insanity, 1895). Wagner’s music “stimulates the nerves but not the spirit.” “Rome’s faith without the text.” “He has made music sick.”
Conclusion
Underlying the end of the Bromance for Nietzsche was that Wagner, like Goethe before him, had become a tawdry symbol that was flung around as a commodity of pride by a Philistinean, unthinking, decadent German culture. Nietzsche criticized Wagner, Goethe, Socrates and many other thinkers, but said he only criticized those he respected.
Nietzsche absolutely was grateful for his encounters with Wagner, notwithstanding the later personal and philosophical split. Wagner was after all the greatest world figure he ever met, making a huge impact on his early development. When the Bromance ended, Nietzsche had grown but had also grown up; he finally had the space to stand apart. (Compare Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, where the younger artist imposes a “map of misreading” upon the older artist, in order to gain his own territory to practice his craft.)
In his “last will” Ecce Homo (published posthumously), Nietzsche said he would never trade the wonderful Tribschen days with Wagner for anything. There, “our sky was never darkened by a single cloud.”