On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 4.3)

In this matter there is, of course, another question we cannot circumvent: why was Wagner really concerned about that manly (alas, so unmanly) “simpleton from the country,” that poor devil and nature boy Parsifal, whom he finally turned into a Catholic in such an embarrassing way.* What? Was this Parsifal meant to be taken at all seriously? For we could be tempted to assume the reverse, even to desire it—that the Wagnerian Parsifal was intended to be cheerful, a concluding piece and satyr drama, as it were, with which the tragic writer Wagner wanted to take his farewell, in a respectful manner worthy of him, from us, also from himself, and, above all, from tragedy, that is, with an excess of the highest and most high-spirited parody of the tragic itself, of the entire dreadful earthly seriousness and earthly wailing of his earlier works, of the crudest form in the anti-nature of the ascetic ideal, conquered at last. That would have been, as mentioned, particularly worthy of a great tragedian, who, like every artist, first attains the final peak of his greatness when he knows how to see himself and his art beneath him—when he knows how to laugh at himself. Is Parsifal Wagner’s secret superior laughter at himself, the triumph of his achieving the ultimate and highest artistic freedom, the artist’s movement into another world [Künstler-Jenseitigkeit]? As I’ve said, we might wish that. For what would Parsifal be if intended seriously? Do we need to see in it (as it was put to me) “the epitome of an insane hatred for knowledge, spirit, and sensuality”? A curse on the senses and the spirit in one breath of hatred? An apostasy and going back to sickly Christian and obscurantist ideals? And finally even a denial of the self, a cancellation of the self on the part of an artist who up to that point had directed all the power of his will to attain the reverse, namely, the highest spiritualization and sensuousness in his art? And not only in his art, but also in his life. We should remember how Wagner in his day so enthusiastically followed in the footsteps of the philosopher Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s phrase about “healthy sensuality”—in Wagner’s thirties and forties, as with many Germans (—they called themselves the “young Germans”), that phrase rang out like a word of redemption. Did Wagner finally learn something different? It appears, at least, that he finally wanted to teach something different. And not only on the stage with the Parsifal trombones:—in the cloudy writings of his last years—as constricted as they are baffling—there are a hundred places which betray a secret wish and will, a despondent, uncertain, unacknowledged will essentially to preach nothing but going back, conversion, denial, Christianity, medievalism, and to say to his followers “It’s nothing! Seek salvation somewhere else!” In one place he even calls out to the “Blood of the Redeemer” . . . .

Parsifal: the hero of Wagner’s opera of the same name, first performed in 1882.