Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Richard Wagner in Bayreuth Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

After Nietzsche had published his Birth of Tragedy, he began work on a series of long essays which came to be called Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen). There are four essays in all --- dealing with David Strauss (1873), Uses and Abuses of History (1874), Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), and Wagner in Bayreuth (1876). They appeared separately over this three year period. The German title literally meant discursive perspectives out of Nietzsche's own observations, intentionally out-of-spirit with modern times. In Nietzsche's late retrospective work, Ecce Homo, he referred to these as "The Untimely Ones." About the Schopenhauer and Wagner essays he wrote, "what I was fundamentally trying to do in these essays was something altogether different from psychology: an unequaled problem of education, a new concept of self-discipline, self-defense to the point of hardness, a way to greatness and world-historical tasks was seeking its first expression. Broadly speaking, I caught hold of two famous and as yet altogether undiagnosed types, as one catches hold of an opportunity, in order to say something. . . Plato employed Socrates in this fashion." He goes on to say, "Now that I am looking back from a certain distance upon the conditions of which these essays bear witness, I do not wish to deny that at bottom they speak only of me. The essay Wagner in Bayreuth is a vision of my future."