The selections are assembled in this essay in order to focus on Nietzsche's thoughts about the composer Richard Wagner.

[2] Nietzsche describes in this short work why he parted ways with his one-time idol and friend, Richard Wagner.

[4] According to Roger Hollinrake, it is reasonable to question Nietzsche’s qualifications to criticize a great musician on very specific musical topics.

Nietzsche had the broad combined perspective of a scholar, philosopher, historian and poet, abetted by his penetrating insight and an objectivity with a lack of musical bias.

The Gay Science, 368) Nietzsche's objections to Wagner's music are physiological—as he listens to Wagner’s music his whole body feels discomfort: He does not breathe easily, his feet begin to rebel, as they do not find a desire to dance or march being satisfied.

Ecce Homo, Why I Am So Clever, 7) Nietzsche wants music to be cheerful, profound, unique, wanton, tender, roguish, and graceful.

These qualities are lacking in German music, except for the works of Bach, Handel, and also in Wagner's Siegfried Idyll.

Nietzsche's concern is that an opera that is all one "endless melody" has the effect similar to a person walking into the ocean, losing one’s footing, then surrendering to the elements, and being forced to tread water.

The danger to music is "degeneration of rhythmic feeling" which would be unaccommodating to the element of dance in performance, and the supplanting of rhythm with chaos, which would result in an emphasis on mere "effect" — on posing.

He suggests that the music of his time, "has but a short life span ahead of it", for it arose from a culture that will soon sink and disappear.

He speaks specifically of Wagner's music, which may find support and sudden glory, in that the current age was suffering much European warfare and turbulence.

Nietzsche, who was fast becoming a notable academic lecturer, was in some danger of being completely eclipsed by the celebrated greatness of Wagner.

Northern Germany, on the other hand, according to Nietzsche, is a place of darkness, where some Germans consider the French to be "barbarians".

That second possibility is further developed as the section continues, and Nietzsche asks, "Who could be more incapable of understanding Wagner than, for example, the young Kaiser?

The story of Parsifal is partly based on medieval Germanic legends and Christian ideals, and it dramatizes a conflict between sensuality versus chastity.

Part one of "Wagner as Apostle of Chastity" is a verse by Nietzsche, written in the style of a poem by Goethe.

Nietzsche critiques the theme of "sensuality versus chastity" in Wagner’s opera Parsifal.

The opera presents those two aspects in such dire opposition, that when a naive young man encounters an alluring siren in the woods, a "long kiss on the lips" threatens to destroy his hopes of salvation by robbing him of his chastity: The young man responds to the kiss in "utmost terror", he then "flings himself in despair on his knees" and cries out: "Redeemer!

Nietzsche suggests that there are some "mortals", who find balancing their existence between two extremes, angel and animal, to be an attraction to life itself.

Circe is a sorceress in the legends of ancient Greece who had the power to turn humans into lions, wolves and swine.

[35][36] Finally, Nietzsche asks why Wagner "at the end of his life" wanted to set this "embarrassing and perfectly superfluous opposition to music and produce it on the stage.

If Parsifal is taken seriously, it would be seen as a "curse on the senses and the spirit", a regression to "sickly Christian and obscurantist ideals", and a "self-abnegation".

Ludwig Feuerbach, an influential German philosopher, advocated atheism, considering "God" to be the "idealization of human aspirations".

Nietzsche concludes, "The preaching of chastity remains an incitement to anti-nature: I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics.

Nietzsche then became a solitary, courageous pessimist and he completely dedicated himself to his life's arduous task.

Great artists and other higher humans create works in order to forget their own decadent flaws.

Noble, profound sufferers feign cheerfulness in order to ward off unwanted pity.

Like the ancient Dionysian Greeks, we have known the terrible truth about life and now appreciate the effects of an artist's false, wonderful tones, fictional words, and fascinating forms.

Dionysus-Dithyrambs) "On the Poverty of the Richest" is one of the poems of the Dionysus-Dithrambs, which use poetic imagery taken from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.