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I. Daddy issues and manipulation

Wagner completed the works in this stately estate Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Siegfried, he continued to work there on the Götterdämmerung continued and composed the March of Homage as well as that Siegfried idyll. In that country house, however, he also reworked his devastating pamphlet Judaism in music. A few weeks after Wagner moved into Tribschen, his lover Cosima von Bülow visited him there. Cosima and Richard's first child together, Isolde born in 1865, had been able to subdue Cosima to her husband as a cuckoo child.¹ First commuting between her daughters and her husband Hans in Munich and Wagner in Tribschen, Cosima finally moved permanently to Lake Lucerne with her children. Daughter Eva was born here in 1867 and Wagner's only son Siegfried was born here in 1869. In the same period, Hans von Bülow, also a devoted Wagner fan, had agreed to divorce Cosima so that she could marry Richard in August 1870 in the Protestant community of St. Matthew's Church in Lucerne. As Wagner's representative home, Landhaus Tribschen has now developed into a meeting place for its prominent sponsors and admirers, including in particular: the Bavarian King Ludwig II, Cosima's father Franz Liszt and of course — Friedrich Nietzsche.

The friendship between Nietzsche and Richard Wagner, which was fragile from the outset and was charged with high expectations on both sides, lasted ten years and finally turned into severe aversion. More specifically, it was not an equal friendship, but a father-son relationship: Wagner served as a (substitute) father figure² and the much younger Nietzsche was much more influenced by this relationship than Wagner. Nietzsche looked up enthusiastically at Wagner's “genius” in particular at first, while Wagner also looked at Nietzsche in terms of usefulness. The hospitality that Nietzsche enjoyed in Wagner's villa in Tribschen between 1869 and 1872 and which led him to spend a total of twenty-three stays there was beneficial in this sense. The Wagners had even furnished a separate room for him in the house. Looking back, he described the time there as the happiest of his life.³ In addition, Nietzsche considers himself one of the chosen few who wanted Wagner's genius to be fully recognized early on. He is always welcome in Tribschen, even when Cosima's due date is due, Nietzsche should not postpone a visit planned long in advance, but should arrive as a lucky charm and godfather for little Siegfried. He has close family ties and is virtually adopted by Wagner, who only became a father late: “Strictly speaking, after my wife, you are the only profit that life has brought me: luckily Fidi [his son; note CS] is added, but between him and me there is a need for a link that only you can form, like the son to the grandson. ”⁴ Cosima and Richard temporarily see Nietzsche as a potential mentor and educator for their first son, who is to receive an exceptional education. It is astonishing today that the brilliant mind Friedrich Nietzsche also takes on highly mundane household tasks during his visits, such as setting up a puppet theater or decorating the parlour for Christmas, and he also runs errands and paperwork for Richard. But Nietzsche is happy to carry out these services, as they were a sign of his integration into the family and the trust of his surrogate father Richard.

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II. Worship and Betrayal

At that time, Nietzsche appeared as a devoted fan of Wagner and promoted him among his circle of acquaintances. According to Werner Ross, Wagner de facto hired Nietzsche as an academic PR powerhouse and personally ensured that he received a professorship in Basel.⁵ Wagner needed an aspiring intellectual to attest to the high quality of his musical project. The influence on Nietzsche is reinforced through family involvement. This promptly delivers: The birth of tragedy, Nietzsche's first important work, contained a preface to Richard Wagner and was explicitly dedicated to him. In it, Nietzsche portrayed Wagner as a possible new founder of a culture comparable to Greek and, as an avowed Wagnerian, at the same time distanced himself from scientific philology. Following the academic failure of his Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche is temporarily considering leaving the university in order to promote the Bayreuth Festival in lectures throughout Germany. The Wagners advise against this and rather try to confirm Nietzsche that he will remain in the philological profession of academics, because he seems to be more useful to them as a full professor.⁶ However, the negative reception of Birth of Tragedy through his Nietzsches academic peer group further scientific career — as a philologist, he is virtually ruined and thus becomes worthless as an academic key witness for Wagner. She had already tried out the erotic-platonic decoy role that Cosima played in relation to Nietzsche on the young Bavarian King Ludwig II. It was Richard Wagner himself who initiated the pen pals between Ludwig II and Cosima. In Cosima, Ludwig thought he had found a soul mate with whom he could pay homage to Wagner on a spiritual level. His disappointment was all the greater when he found out about Cosima's very prosaic and physical liaison with Wagner. His open-hearted and enthusiastic exchange with Cosima had now ended abruptly. Until 1885, he wrote only rarely, briefly and factually. It later became clear — as in the case of Nietzsche — how disparaging the Wagners, who on August 25 of all days, on Ludwig's birthday (and the later day of Nietzsche's death!) were married, thought and talked about him in Lucerne. Cosima called him a “Crétin” in her diary in 1869⁷ with “rafters in the head” (ibid.). And Cosima quotes her husband, who judged the love triangle as follows: “You are the sister of the King of Bavaria, you have joined hands to preserve my life, he of course as a foolish being, you as a good wife.” (ibid.)

According to Ludwig, Friedrich is also settled. The Wagners' forced family involvement may also explain the subsequent intense resentment, the Wagners' sense of “betrayal of the father” towards Nietzsche after he had distanced himself from Richard. The subsequent disenchantment of the Tribschen idyll was also a disturbing event for Nietzsche, and the confrontation with Wagner remained highly emotional for him until the very end. Thomas Mann has in his Considerations of an apolitical (1917) spoke of Nietzsche's “grotesque late style,” an expression of a “life tragedy in which the giggling of clinical megalomania is already audibly consistent.” This also explicitly affected Nietzsche's statements about Wagner: “His psychology of Christianity, Wagner, and Germanism, for example, was grotesque-grumpy fanatic psychology. ” (p. 338 f.) When evaluating the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche, one should not forget that Wagner was an idealized (substitute) father figure, not an equal friend of Nietzsche. “In order to find in Wagner what he was looking for, he first had to enlarge Wagner's real personality to an ideal image,” Rudolf Steiner said in his Nietzsche memorial speech on September 13, 1900 in Berlin, and commented on the division between the two: “Nietzsche did not fall away from the real Wagner, because he was never his follower, he only became aware of his deception. ”⁸ It was impossible for Nietzsche to make a factual judgment about Wagner; he vacillated between formerly ardent love and later cold contempt. Cosima played an ambiguous and important role in this context.

In several letters to various addressees, Cosima talks about the deceased Nietzsche; her such “obituaries” are incredibly common. Cosima Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagner's son-in-law and an influential anti-Semite of his time⁹, discussed several times in correspondence the idea that Chamberlain could write a book about Nietzsche in order to counter the flourishing reception of Nietzsche, which was extremely disgusting to both. After all, these are the “works of a madman.”¹⁰, who now reaped fame posthumously, “donated by a neglected educational canaille” (ibid.), chamberlain frothed. Chamberlain saw the increased veneration of Nietzsche in the art scene and in the educated middle classes around 1900 as a true “epidemic.”¹¹, which cannot be stopped by a book, a counternote. Against this “delusion” (ibid.), “there is not much you can do with opposition. You have to isolate what is still intact, let the disease let off steam and then be at hand with something positive.” (ibid.) With regard to Nietzsche's personality, Cosima points out: “Race also speaks here. It was of Slavic origin. ”¹² Both posthumously denounce Nietzsche and his world of thought as something sick, contagious, foreign — more betrayal of their former “son” by this “terribly nice family” is hardly imaginable.

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III. Visiting the museum

In 1931, the city of Lucerne bought the Am Rhyn family's country house and soon after converted it into the “Richard Wagner Museum”¹³. In the following years and decades, a number of pieces of furniture, instruments, works of art and documents were purchased or permanently borrowed by the museum, so that today a rough idea of the original furnishings of the house is possible. On the ground floor, especially in the lake-view living room, you can once again see antique and richly decorated furniture. There are several works by Franz von Lenbach on the walls, depicting Cosima and her first husband Hans von Bülow. The original furnishing of the rooms was even more magnificent. Wagner had a striking preference for expensive and tactilely attractive fabrics such as velvet and silk as well as for extravagant clothing. Thanks to the extensive sponsorship of the King of Bavaria, Wagner was able to achieve this obsession (which was possibly fetishist-sexually or transvestitally motivated)¹⁴ Live fully in the rooms of Villa Am Rhyn. Silk slippers in the collection still bear witness to this today. However, the jewel of the permanent exhibition is Wagner's Paris Érard grand piano (built in 1858), to which he had close ties. Wagner had it sent to him several times during moves, but one day had to sell it out of necessity — in order to buy it back after a few years when it was “liquid” again. After several and extensive restorations, it is still used today when concerts take place on the occasion of public museum tours.¹⁵

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IV. Wagner's anti-Semitism

The intellectual climate in Wagner's house, whether in Lucerne or later in Bayreuth, was characterized by anti-Semitism. Wagner not only revised his pamphlet in Tribschen about Judaism in music, Cosima too, influenced by a conservative Catholic upbringing and by the anti-Semitism of her first husband, barely missed an opportunity to incite against Jews. “Exchanging nasty things about the Jews, laughing at each other in disparaging, was a recurring situation between Cosima and Wagner,” summarizes Sabine Zurmühl in her biography of Cosima Wagner.¹⁶ For a long time, Wagner's anti-Semitism barely played a role in the Wagner Museum's permanent exhibition. In recent years, the Lucerne city parliament has called on the museum, which is a municipal institution, to examine Wagner's anti-Semitism and its own founding history, which was still carried out in a Wagner-uncritical zeitgeist. The history of the house, the person Richard Wagner and the role of the city of Lucerne will be examined by an independent project group. In the new special exhibition Taboo Wagner? Jewish Perspectives Wagner's anti-Semitism has been explicitly addressed since April of this year. The aim is to discuss how Wagner and his anti-Semitism affect Jews today and to what extent his work can therefore be regarded as a taboo.

sources

Wagner's Érard Wing. At: Richard Wagner Museum, online: https://www.richard-wagner-museum.ch/geschichte/fluegel-von-erard/

Alschner, Stefan: Why is that? Richard Wagner's pink dressing gown. In: DHM blog, 11.05.2022. Online: https://www.dhm.de/blog/2022/05/11/wozu-das-denn-richard-wagners-rosa-schlafrock/

Bermbach, Udo: The woman who towered over Richard Wagner. In: NZZ, 13.08.2023. Online: https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/die-frau-die-richard-wagner-ueberragte-ld.1750646

Borchmeyer, Dieter: Nietzsche, Cosima, Wagner. Portrait of a friendship. Frankfurt am Main 2008.

Gohlke, Christian: The Fairytale King's sister thought he was a “Crétin”. In: NZZ, 31.05.2021. Online: https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/cosima-wagner-und-ludwig-ii-die-schwester-des-maerchenkoenigs-ld.1626954

Janz, Curt Paul: The law about us. Friedrich Nietzsche's Wagner Experience. In: Thomas Steiert (ed.): The Wagner case. Origins and consequences of Nietzsche's Wagner critique. Bayreuth 1991, pp. 13—32.

Man, Thomas: Considerations of an apolitical. Frankfurt am Main 1956.

Pretzsch, Paul (ed.): Cosima Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain in correspondence 1888—1908. Leipzig 1934.

Ross, Werner: The Wild Nietzsche, or the Return of Dionysus. Stuttgart 1994.

Steiner, Rudolph: Friedrich Nietzsche, a fighter against his time. Dornach 1963.

Zelger Vogt, Marianne: Delusion without peace. When a mother denies her own daughter. In: NZZ, 29.06.2023. Online: https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/wahn-ohne-frieden-als-cosima-wagner-die-eigene-tochter-verleugnete-ld.1744651

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footnotes

1: Cf. Zelger bailiff, Delusion without peace.

2: Cf. Yanz, The law about us, P. 21.

3: Cf. Borchmeyer, Nietzsche, Cosima, Wagner, P. 13.

4: Cite. ibid., p. 34.

5: Cf. The Wild Nietzsche, or the Return of Dionysus, P. 52.

6: See ibid., p. 43.

7: Gohlke, The Fairytale King's sister thought he was a “Crétin”.

8: Rudolf Steiner, Friedrich Nietzsche, a fighter against his time, P. 178.

9: Chamberlain laid with his Basics of the 19th century presented a compilation of Wagner ideas and theses by Arthur de Gobineau and concluded that the “Germanic race” was destined to lead the world. By 1915, there were eleven editions. A popular edition was distributed 100,000 times among German soldiers.

10: Paul Pretzsch (ed.), Cosima Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain in correspondence, p. 613 (Bf. v. 9/3/1901).

11: Ibid., p. 612 (from March 9, 1901).

12: Ibid., p. 502 (Bf. v. 6/1/1897). (Editor's note: On Nietzsche's alleged Polish roots, cf. also Paul Stephan's related article on this blog.)

13: For more information about the museum, cf. whose website.

14: Cf. Stefan Alschner, What's that for?

15: Cf. Wagner's Érard Wing.

16: Sabine Zurmühl: Cosima Wagner — a contradictory life (Cologne 2022). Quoted by Udo Bermbach, The woman who towered over Richard Wagner.