Amerika

by Eric Castles

Fred Nietzsche (nyet-shuh) began as an enthusiastic supporter of Richard Wagner (VOG-ner). He initially believed Wagner’s music dramas could restore the intense, life-affirming force of ancient Greek tragedy. Their early relationship was close, and Nietzsche even dedicated The Birth of Tragedy to him.

The alliance did not last. Nietzsche came to see Wagner as having abandoned genuine art for theatrical effect and public spectacle. In later works and especially through the Bayreuth festival, Wagner prioritized atmosphere, emotional manipulation, and the cult of the performer. Nietzsche’s charge, laid out in The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner was that Wagner had opened a cultural door: a world in which entertainment value and the power of performance counted for more than artistic substance or living ideas. Showmanship and sensation began to outweigh depth.

Once that shift takes hold, the argument continues, standards keep declining. Music no longer needs to be beautiful, memorable, or rooted in human experience; it only needs to impress, to systematize, or to declare itself historically necessary. It was symbolic, “the Optics,” but not the transcendental experience of art when it connects the inner soul to the patterns of the external world.

That logic leads directly to Arnold Schoenberg (shon-burg). Wagner’s extreme chromaticism had already stretched traditional harmony to the edge. Schoenberg completed the break by abandoning tonality and imposing the twelve-tone method — an abstract, intellectual system that treats notes as material rather than as carriers of melody, tension, or feeling. The result, for many listeners, is music that sounds arbitrary, academic, and simply ugly. It privileges the idea of the system (or the gesture of rupture) over anything most people would recognize as art.

Nietzsche never heard Schoenberg, yet his critique of Wagner already contained the warning: when performance, effect, and clever technique become more important than vitality and genuine idea, the outcome is work that is impressive in theory and lifeless in practice. Schoenberg’s atonal and serial music stands as one of the clearest later illustrations of that trade-off.

Real art died 120 years ago. Will someone please revive it?

Tags: arnold schoenberg, art, Friedrich Nietzsche, music, richard wagner, symbolism