Nietzche, Wagner y el Renacimiento italiano

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to redefine Nietzsche’s relationship with the Renaissance, beyond some outstanding and terrible simplifications, and the literary and aesthetic creations of myths focused on the constellation superman, Renaissance-will-of-power, and Antichrist. Richard Wagner strongly conditions Nietzsche’s ideas with his valuations of the Renaissance. There is, in the young author of The Birth of Tragedy, a strong diffidence on the footsteps of the German ideology of the musician and of his rooted aversion to the Renaissance. The Italian Opera seems to be a false revival of the Greek Opera in its paradigmatic model of the artifice, and of the luxury of a selfish aristocracy, far from the feeling of the Volk. As a philologist and a promoter of a revival of the Greek world in Germany, Nietzsche had in the Italian Renaissance a necessary model of comparison. After an initial hostility followed a freer and more open evaluation that can be read in his posthumous documents, regardig the complexity of its experimental movement. The influence of Burckhardt in particular shows a progressive turning point, considerable for bringing a new definition of his relationship with the musician. The essay pauses on Nietzsche’s notes to the lessons dedicated to The Discovery of the Antiquity among the Italians, which turned out to be a mosaic of quotations from The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. It is certainly the most important document, largely ignored throughout history, of the close relationship between Nietzsche and Burckhardt. On the search for complexity and plurality that characterizes the superior culture, Nietzsche discovers and enhances the value of the Latin Renaissance in direct opposition to the German Renaissance impressed by Wagner’s illusion. With Burckhardt, he discovers the individual man and the poet-philologist, a prototype of the free spirit, putting into practice the detachment from the German myth of the Volk and opening the way to the culture of Romanticism.