It is one of those famous meetings in history, and it starts on a note of farce. It all began on November 9, 1868. Returning to his digs after having delivered a lecture for Leipzig University’s Classical Society, the twenty-four-year-old student Friedrich Nietzsche finds a note waiting for him: “If you want to meet Richard Wagner, come at 3:45 p.m. to the Café Théâtre,” signed Windisch, a fellow student.
Locating his friend to ask him what this was all about, Nietzsche learns that Wagner has slipped secretly into town and has been told that Nietzsche already knows Walther’s prize-winning song from Wagner’s brand-new opera Die Meistersinger, the score for which was just out. Nietzsche relays: “Joy and amazement on Wagner’s part! Announces his supreme will, to meet me incognito; I am to be invited for Sunday evening.”
Wagner was the toast of Europe: in London he met Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, in Paris Princess Pauline Metternich, and to King Ludwig of Bavaria he was “my adored and angelic friend.” In his youth, however, Wagner had been a radical, manning the barricades in Dresden in 1849 and so was living in exile in Switzerland at this point.
The occasion obviously calls for the proper duds, and Nietzsche’s smart new evening suit arrives just in time. But then comes the delicate question of payment: the little old messenger insists on cash on delivery. Nietzsche details the chaotic scene:
I am amazed and explain that I
