Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

Schopenhauer’s Followers, Wagner, and German Music

Optional full-text route · Station 11 of 35

Read: Book II, §§99–103, in full, from the original 1882 edition. Begin at §99 and stop before §104.
Allow: About 55–75 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. The five sections total about 2,300 words in the free edition, and §99 alone is about 1,400. If you need two sittings, stop after §99.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Thomas Common, The Joyful Wisdom): begin at §99 · §100 · §103.

Quotations on this page follow Common’s free translation, including his section titles. Kaufmann’s wording differs, and none of it is quoted here; this lesson has not been compared with Kaufmann’s text. Where a word drives the interpretation, this page notes the German, from the Projekt Gutenberg-DE text.

Before you read

Station 10 asked how artists’ ambitions shape what they say they see, and it read §87’s portrait of a musician who does not know his own gift. §99 now names a musician: Richard Wagner, “the most celebrated of the living Schopenhauerians.” In 1882 Wagner was alive; he died in February 1883. Nietzsche had been his friend and public champion in the 1870s, and had broken with him by the time of Human, All Too Human (1878). The four short sections that follow turn from one master and his followers to homage, court style, philology, and what German music expresses.

The main question: What changes when Schopenhauer and German music are judged—and can an artist’s philosophy be separated from his art?

Use the marks from station 2: P, H, V, and ? for Nietzsche’s own hedge only. Much of this station is H: claims about named people, a meeting in 1812, and the effects of the French Revolution.

What to notice

1. What followers take first. §99 opens with a claim about “barbarians” who meet a higher civilization. Watch how the comparison is applied to Schopenhauer’s German followers.
2. Two lists. §99 lists what Schopenhauer could have taught and what actually enchants. Which list does Wagner take from?
3. Politics heard in music. §103 hears the Revolution, the masses, and the old nobility in German music. Keep that beside §99’s claim that an artist’s philosophy matters little.

Close reading

One way to group the sections

These groups are this guide’s, not Nietzsche’s.

• A master, his followers, and Wagner: §99.
• Homage, court style, and philology: §§100, 101, 102.
• German music: §103.

What followers take first

§99 begins with a general law. When civilized peoples meet “barbarians,” the lower civilization first accepts “the vices, weaknesses, and excesses of the higher,” then feels its charm, and only through the borrowed vices lets something valuable in. Mark it H and V. It ranks civilizations as higher and lower and offers no evidence for the pattern. The section then applies it “close at hand”: Schopenhauer’s German followers are the barbarians, “barbarously fascinated and seduced” by a superior culture.

What could they have learned? Schopenhauer’s “hard matter-of-fact sense,” his “intellectual conscience,” his purity in matters of the Church, so that he lived and died “as a Voltairian,” and his doctrines of the intellect and the “non-freedom of the will.” What they take instead are his “mystical embarrassments and shufflings”: the “undemonstrable doctrine of one will,” the denial of the individual (“all lions are really only one lion”), the “fantasy about genius,” and “his nonsense about sympathy.” §99, what enchants

Common’s “sympathy” translates Mitleid, the word that other translations, and Common elsewhere, often render “pity.” It matters here because Schopenhauer made Mitleid “the source of all morality,” and the book will keep returning to it. Mark the list V: it sorts one philosopher’s work into what is valuable and what is “nonsense.”

The most celebrated Schopenhauerian

Wagner, the section says, “misunderstood the unexpressed philosophy of the art peculiarly his own.” Hegel misled him until middle life; then he read Schopenhauer into his characters. But nothing is more contrary to Schopenhauer than “the innocence of the supremest selfishness,” the “belief in strong passion as the good in itself”: “the Siegfried trait in the countenances of his heroes.” Schopenhauer “would probably have said” that it all smacked more of Spinoza; the German has vielleicht, so mark that guess ?. §99, the Siegfried trait

The charge is serious: the enchantment made Wagner blind “even towards science itself,” and his art renounces “the higher ambition to become the counterpart and complement of human knowledge and science.” Then comes a list of what is “Schopenhauerian” in Wagner: his indignation about the German language, his turgid style, his Buddhist reading of Christianity, his preaching of pity toward animals, and his hatred of science.

The list also includes this: “Schopenhauerian is Wagner’s hatred of the Jews, to whom he is unable to do justice, even in their greatest exploit.” Common continues with an exclamatory question, “are not the Jews the inventors of Christianity!” The German is a flat statement, die Juden sind ja die Erfinder des Christenthums: the Jews are, after all, the inventors of Christianity. §99, Wagner and the Jews

Read that sentence in two steps. First, it names Wagner’s hatred of the Jews as a flaw, and as a failure of justice. Second, its reason is double-edged. For Wagner, who (the section says) was seeking a “temporary approximation to Catholic-Christian formulas and sentiments,” refusing the Jews credit for Christianity is inconsistent. For the author of this book, whose later judgments of Christianity are severe, “greatest exploit” may be praise, irony, or both. Mark it V and H, and keep the question open until Book III’s sections on Christianity. Do not reduce the sentence to either a simple defence of Jews or a simple attack on them.

Loyalty to what is original

The section then turns. “It is of little importance what the philosophy of an artist is, provided it is only a supplementary philosophy, and does not do any injury to his art itself.” One should not dislike an artist for an “occasional, perhaps very unfortunate and presumptuous masquerade” (a hedge: mark it ?); “the dear artists are all of them something of actors—and must be so.” §99, artists as actors

The ending asks for a particular kind of loyalty: “Let us be loyal to Wagner in that which is true and original in him,” and, in the same breath, “remain loyal to ourselves in that which is true and original in us.” Wagner’s life calls to each of us: “Be a man, and do not follow me—but thyself! thyself!” The section closes by quoting, at length, Nietzsche’s own Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876): “all who wish to be free must become so through themselves.” §99, follow thyself

Notice what the self-quotation does. The words of praise from 1876 are kept, but they now teach independence from Wagner. For how Nietzsche’s judgment of Wagner developed afterward, see the theme page on Wagner and decadence.

Homage, court style, and philology

§100 follows naturally. “One must learn the art of homage, as well as the art of contempt.” Whoever leads others on new paths discovers how awkward they are in expressing gratitude; those who have been changed seem to feel “profoundly injured” and assert their independence “by all kinds of improprieties.” The section names no one. Read after §99, it describes both sides of a relationship between a master and his followers. Mark it P.

§101 says that wherever there was a court, the courtier, who has no profession, set the standard of style, so technical terms became a blemish. Voltaire, scrupulous on this point, was the “perfecter” of court taste, from which “we are now, all of us, emancipated.” §102 praises the “noble belief” behind philology: that whole generations of painful labour are worth doing for a few readers who are always “to come.” Its last phrase, in usum Delphinorum, recalls the expurgated classical editions prepared for the heir to the French throne. Nietzsche had been a professor of classical philology at Basel; the section speaks from inside the discipline. §102, philology

What German music expresses

§103 claims that German music has become European music because only it expresses the changes of the Revolution: “the agitation of popular masses,” which Italian opera cannot. It also hears in German music “a profound bourgeois jealousy of the noblesse,” especially of esprit and élégance. Mark both claims H and V.

To picture “the man of this music,” the section sets Beethoven beside Goethe at their meeting at Teplitz (1812): “as semi-barbarism beside culture, as the masses beside the nobility,” and finally as the “untamed man.” That, the section says, is how Goethe conceived him. The attribution has a basis: Goethe’s letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter of 2 September 1812 calls Beethoven eine ganz ungebändigte Persönlichkeit, and the German of §103 uses the same adjective, der ungebändigte Mensch. The ranking is plain: the aristocratic, self-possessed Goethe stands above the plebeian, tormented Beethoven. §103, Beethoven beside Goethe

The section ends by asking whether the growing German “contempt of melody” should be understood as “a democratic impropriety and an after-effect of the Revolution.” Melody delights in “conformity to law” and sounds like “a note out of the ancient European regime.” Mark it V. It is posed as a question, not a finding, but its political preference is not hidden. Compare station 9’s §84, where melody (Melos) was traced to a soothing charm. §103, melody and the old regime

A difficulty

Can an artist’s philosophy be separated from his art?

§99 says that the philosophy of an artist is “of little importance,” provided it is “only a supplementary philosophy” that does no injury to the art. Yet the same section says that Wagner’s enchantment made his “entire art” incline to become the “counterpart and complement” of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. And §103 hears politics—the Revolution, the masses, bourgeois jealousy—directly in the sound of German music.

• The proviso does the work: Wagner’s philosophy was not merely supplementary, so it does matter.
• §99 distinguishes an artist’s stated philosophy, which can be ignored, from the “unexpressed philosophy” of his art, which cannot.
• The sections pull against each other, and the tension is left to the reader.

These are three possible readings. Decide which the text best supports, naming a sentence from §99 and one from §103.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

What kind of loyalty does the end of §99 ask for, and is it consistent with the criticism that comes before it?

• Quote no more than two short phrases.
• Say what the section keeps from Wagner and what it rejects.
• Use §100 to test the idea of a follower who does not simply follow.

A successful response distinguishes Wagner’s stated philosophy from his art, reports the section’s judgments of Schopenhauer and of Wagner accurately, and keeps its own evaluation distinct from the section’s.

Continue

Continue to station 12: German Tones and the Fool’s Cap →

Read next: Book II, §§104–107, closing Book II. Its question: why might an honest investigator still need art?

Previous station: station 10, §§85–98. Return to the route list in the book guide.

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised September 27, 2026.

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