A MUSICIAN'S PROBLEM

A LETTER FROM TURIN, MAY 1888

"RIDENDO DICERE SEVERUM.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}"

Preface

I am writing this to relieve my mind. It is not malice alone which makes
me praise Bizet at the expense of Wagner in this essay. Amid a good deal
of jesting I wish to make one point clear which does not admit of levity.
To turn my back on Wagner was for me a piece of fate, to get to like
anything else whatever afterwards was for me a triumph. Nobody, perhaps,
had ever been more dangerously involved in Wagnerism, nobody had defended
himself more obstinately against it, nobody had ever been so overjoyed at
ridding himself of it. A long history!--Shall I give it a name?--If I were a
moralist, who knows what I might not call it! Perhaps a piece of
_self-mastery_.--But the philosopher does not like the moralist, neither
does he like high-falutin' words.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}

What is the first and last thing that a philosopher demands of himself? To
overcome his age in himself, to become "timeless." With what then does the
philosopher have the greatest fight? With all that in him which makes him
the child of his time. Very well then! I am just as much a child of my age
as Wagner--_i.e._, I am a decadent. The only difference is that I
recognised the fact, that I struggled against it. The philosopher in me
struggled against it.

My greatest preoccupation hitherto has been the problem of _decadence_,
and I had reasons for this. "Good and evil" form only a playful
subdivision of this problem. If one has trained one's eye to detect the
symptoms of decline, one also understands morality,--one understands what
lies concealed beneath its holiest names and tables of values: _e.g._,
_impoverished_ life, the will to nonentity, great exhaustion. Morality
_denies_ life.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} In order to undertake such a mission I was obliged to
exercise self-discipline:--I had to side against all that was morbid in
myself including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including the whole of
modern _humanity_.--A profound estrangement, coldness and soberness towards
all that belongs to my age, all that was contemporary: and as the highest
wish, Zarathustra's eye, an eye which surveys the whole
phenomenon--mankind--from an enormous distance,--which looks down upon
it.--For such a goal--what sacrifice would not have been worth while? What
"self-mastery"! What "self-denial"!

The greatest event of my life took the fo