Wagnerian Secrets: Arnold Whittall assesses two books that grapple with Nietzsche’s rejection of Wagnerism

Reviews of Karol Berger, Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche (University of California Press, 2017); David Huckvale, Music for the Superman: Nietzsche and the Great Composers (McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017).

July 2017, Volume 11, Number 2, 83–90.

When David C. Large wrote that ‘Nietzsche’s refusal to discount the power of Wagner’s art despite a profound distaste for many of his social and aesthetic ideas would be echoed by legions of Wagnerians in the century to come’ it could easily be felt that Large had said all that needed to be said. And since 2005, with the publication of the English version of Georges Liébert’s Nietzsche and Music and Charles Youmans’s claims that Richard Strauss’s ‘anti-metaphysical mode of composition’ with its ‘anti-Wagnerian flair’ gains from being seen as a positive response to Nietzschean thought, one might indeed have assumed that Wagner studies could manage perfectly well without Nietzsche – even if Nietzsche studies still need Wagner, given the possibility that Wagner might in some ways have had a ‘positive influence’ on the young philosopher.

Judging by its title alone, Karol Berger’s new book would appear to reject such a sweeping judgment.