Redemption through Art 107spectators to this artistic event who were in search not of redemption
but of a good meal—they made a mad dash to the restaurant after each
performance. Nietzsche returned home from Bayreuth after just a few
days. Before visiting Bayreuth, he had written: "Here you will find qual-
ified and dedicated spectators, the ardor of people who are at the zenith
of their happiness and who feel that their whole being is condensed in
this very state of happiness, which invigorates them for further and
higher aspirations" (1,449; WB § 4). Once he had attended the event, he
was forced to conclude that his ideal spectators had been a mere figment
of his imagination and had no counterpart in reality.
Had he perhaps expected altogether too much of Wagner's music and
music drama? After the disappointment of Bayreuth in 1876, Nietzsche
began his work on the book Human, All Too Human in order to inure
himself to disappointment for the future.
However, between 1872 and 1874, when Nietzsche wrote the first
three Untimely Meditations, he had not yet reached this point. He still con-
sidered Wagner's project capable of "enigmatic profundity, even infinity
... a comet's tail pointing into the uncertain, defying clarification"
(l,80f.; BT% 11), and believed that this project would succeed in falling
under the spell of "monstrosities" (1,81; BT% 11), perhaps with his
assistance. He hoped that a sense of the great "incommensurability"
(1,81) of being would reawaken. In his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche
was to take issue with a Zeitgeist that replaced "metaphysical solace"
with "an earthly consonance and even its own special deus ex machina,
the god of machines and crucibles" (1,115; BT§ 17).