Nietzsche, Bizet, and Wagner: Illness, Health, and Race in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

“Sick” and “healthy” remain categories in our contemporary evaluation of the aesthetic—especially music, or at least Western popular music. In 2002 the American rapper Eminem featured “sound bites from Congressional hearings and newscasts describing him as vulgar, degenerate, homophobic, antisocial, misogynistic and ‘noise and mind pollution.’ He did not disagree.”1 In today's China some popular music is censored as “unhealthy.” It risks infecting the youth with the disease of “moral pollution.”2 Certainly it was Giorgio Vasari who first evoked this category within the frame of aesthetic evaluation in the Renaissance, where he commented about Jacopo della Quercia that there are aesthetic forms that could “degenerate” over time.3 By the nineteenth century, that age of hygiene, no more powerful comments could be made about a work of art than to say that it was “ill,” “degenerate,” or, on the contrary, “healthy” and “regenerative.” There is a moment in the history of the contemporary reception of Richard Wagner's operas that falls clearly within the rhetoric of “sick” opera, and that is when his major intellectual advocate and sometime disciple, the philosopher, poet, and composer Friedrich Nietzsche, breaks with him and finds a “healthy” alternative. “Wagner's art is sick … Wagner est une névrose” (622). Wagner is a neurosis, an illness of the nerves. Or so Nietzsche writes in his screed Der Fall Wagner [The Case of Wagner: A Musician's Problem], published in September 1888. Wagner is a physiological problem for the modern world. But in contrast, Bizet is “healthy” and heals: I heard yesterday—would you believe it?—Bizet's masterpiece for the twentieth time. Again I stayed there with tender devotion; again I did not run away. … This music [Carmen] seems perfect to me. It approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is pleasant, it does not sweat. “What is good is light; whatever is divine moves on tender feet”: first principle of my aesthetics. This music is evil, subtly fatalistic: at the same time it remains popular. … I become a better human being when this Bizet speaks to me. … Bizet makes me fertile.4