At the risk of exciting your wrath ... Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde made an indelible impression on me. I once heard this opera in Berlin, in a despondent, altogether shattered state of mind, and I felt every note. I do not know whether the impression was so deep because I was so ill.
Nietzsche mischievously retorts:
As to the effect of Tristan, I, too, could tell strange tales. A regular dose of mental anguish seems to me a splendid tonic before a Wagnerian repast. The Reichsgerichtsrath, Dr. Wiener, of Leipzig, gave me to understand that a Carlsbad cure was also a good thing....
Only once irony passes into impatient sarcasm. Nietzsche expresses his regret at not knowing either Swedish or Danish. Yet Brandes continuously tantalizes him with such exclamations as, “What a pity that so learned a philologist as you should not understand Danish.” Back comes a flash: “Ah, how industrious you are! And idiot that I am, not to understand Danish!”
I am tempted to bring another illustration of the profound earnestness of the Priest as against the plausible light-mindedness of the Prophet.
Brandes writes:
I am delighted with the aphorism on the hazard of marriage. But why do you not dig deeper here? You speak somewhere with a certain reverence of marriage, which by implying an emotional ideal has idealized emotion—here, however, you are more blunt and forcible. Why not for once say the full truth about it? I am of opinion that the institution of marriage, which may have been very useful in taming brutes, causes more misery to mankind than even the church has done. Church, monarchy, marriage, property, these are to my mind four old venerable institutions which mankind will have to reform from the foundations in order to be able to breathe freely. And of these marriage alone kills the individuality, paralyzes liberty and is the embodiment of a paradox. But the shocking thing about it is that humanity is still too coarse to be able to shake it off. The most emancipated writers, so called, still speak of marriage with a devout and virtuous air which maddens me. And they gain their point, since it is impossible to say what one could put in its place for the mob. There is nothing else to be done but slowly to transform opinion. What do you think about it?
And this is what Nietzsche thinks about it:
I feel for you in the North, now so wintry and gloomy; how does one manage to keep one’s soul erect there? I admire almost every man who does not lose faith in himself under a cloudy sky, to say nothing of his faith in “humanity,” in “marriage,” in “property,” in the “State”.... In Petersburg I should be a nihilist: here I believe, as a plant believes, in the sun. The sun of Nice—you cannot call that a prejudice. We have had it at the expense of all the rest of Europe. God, with the cynicism peculiar to Him, lets it shine upon us idlers, “philosophers,” and sharpers more brightly than upon the far worthier military heroes of the “Fatherland.”
Think of the Lebensfreude that sparkles from these lines written by a man who a few months later had to be shut out from the world, who had suffered extremely painful and persistent headaches,—“hundred days of torment in the year”! It was his keen sense that “a sick man had no right to pessimism,” it was his extravagant love of life that led him to set for chorus and orchestra the Hymn to Life written by Lou von Salomé, from which we read an extract in the book of Brandes: