An Old Master, His Young Disciple, and the Deep Blue Lake

The old master sat alone, in a wing-back chair, in the cozy comfort of his study. It was a snowy January evening. The old master mused.




"I can't remember. It may come back to me. At the moment I just can't remember, really I can't. It's no good chasing it. It must have been Riga, in winter." He paused and corrected himself. "No, no!"

For a moment the close observer's mind refused to engage. Then he remembered a night at . . . ("Where?") "But of course!" "Ye-e-es," he muttered. There, there, in Leipzig Richard Wagner first met the young Friedrich Nietzsche, who was enchanted by the older man’s wit, awed by his greatness and overjoyed to hear him discuss his debt to Schopenhauer. The brilliant boy, less than a year older than Ludwig of Bavaria—Nietzsche's dead father and Wagner had been born in the same year—in turn made an extraordinary impression on the composer, who encouraged him to visit Triebschen —Tribschen, a villa standing just outside Lucerne on a wooded tongue of land projecting into the Vierwaldstaetter Lake—to continue their discussion of music and philosophy.

Nietzsche later recounted: "I knew that the idea of somebody saying 'Tell me everything' and meaning it was an unbearably exciting, heady thing for me. That somebody would first allow me to say everything that was in my mind, and then would understand it, promised a kind of intellectual and emotional utopia. It was the connection with another human soul that I was after."

No clouds shaded those early bewitching and refreshing days at the lake, where Nietzsche, submissively lost in adoration, passed golden hours stolen from his professorial duties at Basel.

For the rest of his life he would remember one summer morning on the lake. They were seated in the boat, facing each other like two mirrors, Nietzsche in the stern, Wagner rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nietzsche trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning. In the early morning on the lake, sitting in the stern of the boat with his mentor rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die. Years after his break with Wagner, he observed, "I pass over my other relationships lightly; but at no price would I have my life bereft of those days at Triebschen, days of confidence, of serenity, of sublime flashes, of profound moments." Nietzsche had no idea at the time how large this house would loom in his subsequent life.

Wagner liked him enormously. But completely disinterested friendship was a luxury he permitted himself infrequently. He sensed Nietzsche's abilities as a writer and wished to yoke them to his cause. Certainly he was impressed by the professor’s eminently articulate style. The relationship between the two men grew increasingly close, and during the war year of 1870—the high tide of their intimacy—each labored at a work reflecting this happiest time of their friendship, a brief period Richard Strauss considered one of the century's most significant moments.

"For me they were steps," Nietzsche wrote, "I have climbed up upon them—therefore I had to pass over them. But they thought I wanted to settle down on them."

Humanly speaking, they were worlds apart. On the one hand, an ebullient artist and man of the theatrical world who would gladly—health and wealth permitting—have been an epicurian, a go-getter whose life flowed past like a dream, a sensualist involved in the everlasting drama of existence, laughing and weeping as his emotions dictated. On the other, a brilliant but austere pedant who procured experiences and exaggerated what life had not granted him—a capacity for fun and enjoyment.