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Nietzsche experienced music as authentic reality and colossal power. Music penetrated to the core of his being, and it meant everything to him."1 That Rudiger Safranski opens his monumental biography by focusing on music should almost certainly come as a surprise, probably even for many Nietzsche scholars. After all, isn't the "real" Nietzsche all about such topics as the death of God, the will to power, the superman, and nihilism—topics that have kept the Nietzsche industry humming away? Indeed, the reality is that most scholarship on Nietzsche—even that by first-rate Nietzsche scholars—virtually ignores the prominence of music in both his life and thought. As Georges Liebert notes, "Nietzsche's repeated avowal is often cited: 'Without music, life would be an error,' but almost as though it were a quip. Rarely is the decisive importance music, in fact, had for the economy of his thought recognized." While it would be too much to say that no attention has been given to Nietzsche's relation to music,2 there is no full-scale work on Nietzsche that does this subject justice.
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Sadly, that remains true, despite the appearance of Liebert's Nietzsche and Music. Liebert suggests that Nietzsche's oft-quoted aphorism can be taken to mean that "music makes us forget life" or that "life [is] understood only as music." Clearly that first possibility could hardly be what Nietzsche intended. The second possibility is Liebert's ostensible point of departure, and yet he never really gives us a thorough investigation of how music affected Nietzsche's own thought, even though he is thoroughly aware of the profound influence of music in all of Nietzsche's works.
That said, Liebert does provide us with a rich exploration of Nietzsche's relation to music, which was key to his very existence. Some of Nietzsche's most memorable moments were those spent in improvising at the piano. He wrote to a friend that, at such times, he often felt as if he had moved beyond the realm of rationality. Perhaps not coincidentally, in the twilight of his sanity, Nietzsche's friend Peter Gast arrived in Turin in January 1889 to find him improvising endlessly. Nietzsche himself composed music, particularly in his youth, and Liebert spends some time analyzing those compositions—largely Schumannesque in character and not particularly memorable. Liebert contends that, while Nietzsche fails as composer of music, he succeeds as a philosophical composer. While that thesis is no doubt true, I wonder whether it is all that important. Already by age twenty, Nietzsche had admitted his shortcomings as a composer and largely moved away from musical composition.
What Nietzsche and Music principally gives us is a detailed description of how Nietzsche's musical and philosophical tastes developed in tandem. And that is a significant contribution. Liebert devotes much of the text to Nietzsche's relation to Richard Wagner, a relationship that ebbed and flowed over time but surely one that proved formative for Nietzsche's development both musically and philosophically. Although Nietzsche later claimed that he was "a Wagnerian" as soon as he heard the piano redaction of Tristan und Isolde, it actually took him a few years to warm to Wagner's music. But, once converted, Nietzsche turned his first book (The Birth of Tragedy) into a panegyric to the great musical seducer. Those early years as Wagnerian acolyte were heady ones indeed. Even long after the master's spell had been broken, Nietzsche still spoke of "days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime accidents—profound moments" spent at Wagner's home. Nietzsche was equally effusive regarding Wagner's music: upon hearing the prelude to Tristan and the overture to Die Meistersinger, he wrote that Wagner set his "every fiber and every nerve aglow."
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