The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms

Written in 1888, during the final lucid year of his life, this volume gathers Friedrich Nietzsche’s two polemics against the composer he had once revered. The Case of Wagner treats Wagner as a symptom of cultural decadence, a diagnosis dressed up as music criticism, while Nietzsche Contra Wagner assembles passages from his earlier books to trace how admiration curdled into revolt. Anthony M. Ludovici’s translation closes with a set of Selected Aphorisms drawn from Nietzsche’s long retrospect on their friendship. What begins as a quarrel over opera opens into his broader argument about art, health, and the sickness he detected in modern taste. For readers it offers Nietzsche’s prose at its sharpest and funniest, and a compact way into his verdicts on European culture and the appetites that shaped it.