Wagner and Nietzsche

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The topic of this team-taught graduate seminar (crosslisted for qualified advanced undergraduates) will be the thought and work of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche and their complex relationship. Neither figure needs an introduction: they both exerted extraordinary influence in their respective realms, reaching far into the twentieth century and beyond, and both left legacies that became entangled in some of the worst developments of the past one hundred years. We plan to focus, however, on the works themselves: Wagner's operas, particularly Der Ring des Nibelungen, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal; some of Wagner's musicological and cultural-critical writings, such as Opera and Drama and Religion and Art; Nietzsche's own books, beginning with his very first one, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1871), which was inspired by and dedicated to Wagner, and concluding with the scathing denunciation of him in The Case of Wagner, written in 1888, the last frenzied year before Nietzsche's mental breakdown. The course materials will all be in English. We will also offer a one-credit companion reading course on selected texts in the original German, discussing them with particular emphasis on their grammatical and stylistic qualities. This reading is intended to help students who already know some German to develop their capacities and to encourage those who have not yet begun studying German to do so.