248 music, philosophy, and modernity
self-contradictions. He notoriously admitted in a letter to Carl Fuchs in
1888 that his stated preference for Bizet over Wagner inNietzsche contra
Wagneris only meant as an ‘ironicantithesis’ (ibid.: 3 , 1347 )sothat he
could avoid what, had the comparison been with Beethoven, would have
been tasteless, and that it was not to be taken seriously. In the same letter
he says thatTristanis ‘of a fascination which is without compare not only
in music, but in all the arts’ (ibid.), and he repeats this praise inEcce
Homo. EvenParsifal,orthe prelude at least, is judged wholly differently
in a letter to Peter Gast in 1887 : ‘Apart, besides, from all inappropriate
questions (what such musiccanbe good for, orshouldbe good for), but
asked purely aesthetically: has Wagner ever done anythingbetter?...
There are things like that only inDante, nowhere else’ (ibid.: 3 , 1249 ).
He praises the piece for being ‘a synthesis of states which will be seen as
incompatible by many people’, and as involving ‘sympathy with what is
seen and judged in the music’, claiming that it ‘does Wagner the high-
est honour’ (ibid.). Such sympathy (which is something he regularly
attacks elsewhere as part of his assault on Christianity) must presum-
ably be good for more than ‘purely aesthetic’ purposes.
What is to be done with these contradictions? There are numerous
psychological accounts of what is going on (e.g. Magee 2002 ): the vehe-
mence of Nietzsche’s attacks on something he so obviously also loved
provides plenty of material for these. However, such approaches do
not explain how personal factors should result in a conflict which has
paradigmatic significance well beyond what may have occasioned it.
Nietzsche’s project from the time when he rejects Schopenhauer in the
later 1870 s onwards is an attack on philosophy as metaphysics, in the
sense of a grounding of Truth in a timeless sphere beyond the every-
day world. This attack is accompanied by his turn away from Wagner,
and his reasons for his critiques of Wagner are, significantly, often the
same as those for which he seeks to overcome philosophy. Nietzsche
might seem to be an obvious resource in the use of music to interro-
gate philosophy. He opposes the idea of truth as correspondence and
he attacks the representationalist epistemology that dominates so much
philosophical thinking about music. However, his rejection of Wagner
means that what would appear to be an obvious example of a musical
alternative to philosophy, which he himself terms, referring toTristan,
‘theopus metaphysicumof all art’ (Nietzsche 2000 : 1 , 408 ) becomes just
part of a wider problem. Does the perceived wider problem with meta-
physics really invade Wagner’s music to the extent to which Nietzsche
claims it does?