Mark Berry, The Positive Influence of Wagner upon Nietzsche

There has been much written on the subject of Wagner and Nietzsche, beginning with Nietzsche himself. It is a notoriously difficult theme, which suffers not so much from vigorous partisanship on either side of the eponymous ‘and’, as from the frequent accompaniment of such partisanship by a quite extraordinary level of ignorance of the opposing figure. Were I to write, for example, on ‘Kant and Hegel’, I should probably take the trouble first to inform myself on Kant as well as Hegel. Yet anything approximating to Queensberry rules would appear to be suspended when we come to ‘Wagner and Nietzsche’.