Redemption through Art 99Nietzsche was in attendance at the ceremonial laying of the foundation
stone on May 22, 1872, Richard Wagner's fifty-ninth birthday. In the
fourth and final Untimely Meditation of 1876, he wrote that for an under-
taking like the Bayreuth Festival there had been no "divinations;... it is
the first circumnavigation of the wodd in the sphere of art; as it appears
to have turned out, it was not just a new art, but art itself that was dis-
covered" (1,433; WB§1).
Nietzsche concluded that Wagner was returning art to its origins in
Greek antiquity. It was becoming a sacral event in society once again,
celebrating the mythical meaning of life. Art was regaining the arena in
which a society could come to an understanding of itself and in which
the significance of all activities would grow evident to the community at
large.
Nietzsche did not dwell on the mythological details of Wagner's text.
He focused on the mythical dimension of Wagner's art almost exclu-
sively in his music, which he called a language of true feeling, and con-
tended that it would be necessary to have suffered through the infirmity
of our culture to embrace Wagner's music with a sense of gratitude. For
Nietzsche, music drama was a redemption from his displeasure with our
culture. "Art exists so that the bow does not break" (1,453; WB § 4).
Nietzsche wrote that Wagner had diagnosed a poor state of health for
language. Scientific progress had undermined clear-cut views of life, and
the realm of thought had become murky. At the same time, civilization
was becoming ever more complex and elaborate. Specialization and divi-
sion of labor were on the rise; the chains of events through which each
individual was linked to the whole were growing longer and longer and
getting tangled in the process. Those who tried to grasp the totality of
their existence found that language failed them. This excessive over-
reaching drained civilization as a whole, and language in particular, and
people were barely capable of achieving their real functions, namely
communication of the "barest necessities of life" (1,455; WB § 5).
Language no longer comprised the totality of which we are a part and
no longer reached into our innermost selves. It proved to be impover-