106 Nietzsche
beaming images. Culmination in this "peak of rapture" fulfills the mean-
ing of culture.
Wagner's music drama was this kind of "peak of rapture" for
Nietzsche; initially, at least, Wagner himself was one as well. Nietzsche
admired the boldness with which Wagner placed art at the pinnacle of
all possible hierarchies of bourgeois life, the immodesty with which he
refused to see art as a pleasant trifle, and the sheer force of will with
which he virtually compelled society to take note of his art. Nietzsche
admired this Napoleonism coupled with enchantment, magic, and
priesdiness. By contrast, he regarded David Friedrich Strauss as the pro-
saic counterpart to Wagner. The first of his Untimely Meditations show-
cased Strauss as a negative example of how the sublime could turn
banal. Nietzsche's polemics against Strauss were aimed not at him per-
sonally but at a symptomatic and representative outlook in the juste-
milieu of the expanding German bourgeoisie. Nietzsche anticipated
that an oudook of this kind would inevitably be superseded by Wagner
and the Bayreuth project. Shordy before the opening of the first
Bayreuth Festival, Nietzsche again depicted the decay of art in the bour-
geois world: "A strange clouding of judgment, an ill-disguised craving
for amusement and entertainment at any cost, scholarly considerations,
pomposity and affectation with the solemnity of art on the part of the
performers, brutal financial greed on the part of the proprietors, hol-
lowness and thoughdessness of a society ... all of this in combination
yields the oppressive and ruinous atmosphere of the current situation of
art" (1,448; WB § 4).
To Nietzsche's great disappointment, Bayreuth did nothing to alter
this situation. On the contrary. Nietzsche, who traveled to Bayreuth in
late July 1876 to see the rehearsals and experience firsthand the whole
whirlwind of activity, was horrified, annoyed, and even nauseated to wit-
ness the ostentatious arrival of Kaiser Wilhelm I, Richard Wagner's
fawning demeanor on the festival hill and at Wahnfried (the Wagners'
villa in Bayreuth), the unintended comicality of the staging, the racket
made about the mythical enterprise, and the high-spirited, prosperous