“I am the most German being, I am the German spirit.”
Richard Wagner 

Richard Wagner considered himself to be “the most German of men”. He wrote such great operas as “Tristan und Isolde”, “Parsifal”, “Der fliegende Hollaender”, “Der Ring des Nibelungen”, and others. He actively participated in the revolution of 1849. He had numerous love affairs. He always lacked money and the king Ludwig II was his financial support. “He” – is the great German composer and writer Richard Wagner.

Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813, in Leipzig. He was the ninth child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, a police actuary, and Johanna Rosine Wagner. Soon after Richard’s birth his father died, and his mother married Ludwig Geyer, an actor and playwright, whom Wagner suspected to be his real father. From the early childhood Wagner studied and enjoyed music, piano in particular. In the age of 15 Wagner attended a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony which became the profound experience for the boy. He started writing his own music: piano sonatas, overtures and even a Symphony in C major. These works were written copiously, mostly after Beethoven, Weber and Meyerbeer. In 1833 Wagner wrote his first opera, “Die Feen” (“The Fairies”). It was the first in the series of three operas written by Wagner till 1840 – “Das Liebesverbot” (“The Prohibition of Love”)and “Rienzi”, inspired and derived from the works of the German, Italian and French composers accordingly. At that very time Wagner had his first literary experience with the essay “Die Deutsche Opera”. Thus Wagner began the practice of working out a specific theory in print before trying it out in music.

“Der fliegende Hollaender” (1841) was Wagner’s first opera which set him out into a new world of opera, which he called simply drama. With this opera Wagner formed his mature operatic style of composition.

Along with his musical and literary achievements, Wagner had several important appointments: as choirmaster in Wuerzburg (1833), as music director at a traveling theater in Magdeburg (1834), as music director at a theater in Riga (1836). In 1839 he had to leave Riga and his creditors, heading for Paris which became a bitterly disappointing experience to him. Wagner had neither money nor connections which were so important in Parisian life. In 1842 Wagner left Paris for Dresden, where the premiere of “Rienzi” was a formidable success. Wagner was offered the position of co-music director at the Dresden court. For the first time in his life Wagner was financially free.

Wagner took an active part in the revolution of 1848-49. After the revolt was crushed by the Prussians, the police issued a warrant against Wagner, and he fled to Weimar where Liszt arranged his safe transport to Paris. From there Wagner moved to Zurich. Almost immediately he wrote “Die Kunst und die Revolution” (“Art and Revolution”), and “Die Kunst der Zukunft” (“The Artwork of the Future”). The exile lasted for 11 years, till 1860, when Wagner was given a partial amnesty in Germany (except for Saxony). Only in 1862 Wagner was granted the complete amnesty and could safely get back to Germany.

After the succession of favorable events Wagner finally made up his mind to conquer the city of his humiliation – Paris. However Paris was not going to favor Wagner. The chosen opera was“Tannhaeuser”. At the opening night, and also the second and third performances young aristocrats, wishing to humiliate Wagner, created constant disturbances that ruined the opera. “Tannhaeuser”was withdrawn, and Wagner hurriedly left Paris. This was the beginning of the serious financial troubles for Wagner. His personal life was at stake, his friends turned away from him… Due to the increasing debts, he had to flee from Vienna. The year 1864 came to be a great turning-point in Wagner’s life – the new king, Ludwig II, was crowned in Bavaria. Being a great fan of Wagner’s works, the king paid all his debts, settled him in a luxurious villa in Munich, and promised the financial support in future.

Wagner keeps working on the greatest opera of his life – “Der Ring des Nibelungen” (“The Ring of the Nibelungs”), which he started in 1848. Wagner’s dream was to perform “Der Ring…” in a special place where everything would be to his best satisfaction and nobody would stir things up. So, traveling in 1871 through Bayreuth, he decided to build an opera house there. Wagner’s attempts to raise money for this purpose, including the establishing Wagner societies throughout Germany and the request to Bismarck, failed, and king Ludwig II once again granted Wagner funds to cover all the expenses. In 1874 Wagner finished the text and music of the last part of “Der Ring…”, which consists of four parts:“Das Rheingold” (“The Rhinegold”), “Die Walküre” (“The Valkyries”), “Siegfried”, and“Götterdämmerung” (“The Twilight of the Gods”). The first festival opened in 1876 with the performance of “Der Ring…” The Bayreuth Festival was a unique cultural event in Germany, and there were such celebrities among the numerous guests as Friedrich Nietzsche, Edvard Grieg and Peter Tchaikovsky. Despite its cultural success, the festival was a financial disaster. Wagner realized that the next festivals could be held only with the continuous support of the state or at least the societies. The state didn’t provide any support, and the next Bayreuth festival took place only in 1882. This was the last festival in Wagner’s lifetime, because he unexpectedly died of a heart attack in 1883.

However Richard Wagner left a wonderful cultural heritage after him, and the theater in Bayreuth is considered to be his monument.




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Author – Tatyana Gordeeva

The Irrational Genius, or Why Am I so Wise?

Turbulent life of Friedrich Nietzsche 

The cure for love is still in most cases that ancient radical medicine: love in return.
— Friedrich Nietzsche 

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844 in a small Prussian town of Roecken. The date of his birth coincided with the 49th birthday of the Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, after whom Nietzsche was named, and who had been responsible for Nietzsche’s father’s appointment as Roecken’s town minister. When Nietzsche was 4 years old, his father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche died from a brain ailment in the age of 36, and the death of Nietzsche’s two-year-old brother, Joseph, followed half a year later. After the father’s death the whole family moved to Naumburg, where the little Fritzchen lived and was brought up by his five female relatives – his mother, his grandmother, his two aunts and the younger sister Elizabeth who would later take care of Nietzsche and his archive.

As a schoolboy, Fritzchen already revealed his intellectual gift. He found it boring to play with his neighbors’ children and despised them. In turn, they never played with him either, and called him “the little minister”.

When Nietzsche was 14, he went to the boarding school Schulpforta, where he prepared for the university. This was his chance to get away from the excessive care of his family where he was adored for being the only male. It was at this time that the young philosopher first suffered from the migraine headaches that were to be with him for most of his adult life. During his summer holidays spent in Naumburg, Nietzsche led a music and literature club “Germania” where he first got acquainted with Richard Wagner’s music. After graduating from Schulpforta, Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn in 1864 as a theology and philology student.

Nietzsche loved playing piano, composed many sonatas and liked Chopin.

There he enjoyed the free, college students’ privileged adolescent life more than anything else with beer, wine, sex and tobacco, etc. It is said that at this time he contracted syphilis which affected him in his second half of life. His spending exceeded the money sent from his family and he started getting tired of such life anyway and transferred himself to University of Leipzig where he came under the influence of Schopenhauer’s non-rational philosophy of will expressed in The World as Will and Idea. Nietzsche was deeply influenced by him and his thought. However, by nature Nietzsche was not rational, but was, from the beginning of philosophical study, deeply attracted to non-rational elements of reality, which in Schopenhauer’s philosophy was the concept of will.

In 1867, as he approached the age of 23, Nietzsche entered his required military service and was assigned to an equestrian field artillery regiment close to Naumburg. There he had the first accident connected with the horse. While attempting to leap-mount into the saddle upon a particularly unruly horse, he suffered a serious chest injury and was dismissed after his chest wound was too slow to heal. The second horse accident 22 years later will be the last event in his sane life.

Shortly thereafter he returned to the University of Leipzig. Late in 1868, Nietzsche met the composer Richard Wagner. Wagner and Nietzsche shared an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, who had been composing piano, choral and orchestral music since he was a teenager, admired Wagner for his musical genius and magnetic personality. Wagner was exactly the age Nietzsche’s father would have been, and had also attended the University of Leipzig many years before. The Nietzsche-Wagner relationship was very friendly, almost familial, sometimes stormy, and it affected Nietzsche deeply: twenty years later, he would still appreciate Wagner’s cultural significance.

As he was thought to be a brilliant student, the University of Basel called him to the chair of classical philology at the age of 24, even though he had not received his doctorate. Arrangements were hastily made for the doctorate to be awarded after his appointment, and Nietzsche taught at Basel from 1869 to 1879 when he was forced to retire due to ill-health… In the fall of 1870, as Bismarck‘s war against France was in full swing, Nietzsche tried to join the army again. However, he was not qualified as a soldier, but as he enlisted himself for the German ambulance service, he took close care of wounded soldiers, contracted diphtheria and dysentery, and subsequently experienced a painful variety of health difficulties for the rest of his life.

As he stopped teaching at Basel University in 1879, Nietzsche traveled a lot, circling between French, Swiss, German and Italian cities. On a visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, now at age thirty-seven, met Lou Salomé, a twenty-one-year-old Russian-Jewish woman who was studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. He soon fell in love with her, and twice proposed to her. Both offers were rejected, and the relationship was also spoiled by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth who was absolutely anti-Semitic, and hated the Jewish blood in Lou. Thus Nietzsche has lost his love, and remained alone.

In the morning of January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche had a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest of his life. Upon witnessing a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse’s neck and collapsed, never to return to full sanity. Some argue that Nietzsche was afflicted with a syphilitic infection (this was the original diagnosis of the doctors in Basel and Jena) contracted either while he was a student or while he was serving as a hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War; some claim that Nietzsche’s use of chloral hydrate, a drug which he had been using as a sedative, deteriorated his already weakened nervous system; some speculate that Nietzsche’s collapse was due to a brain disease he inherited from his father. Anyway, his creative life stopped, and until his death on August 25, 1900 Nietzsche was completely insane.

“Why am I so wise?”, “Why am I so clever?”, “Why am I a destiny?” — with these words Nietzsche finished one of his last works on 1888 – his autobiography Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is. In this work Nietzsche examined all his works and described himself as “a follower of the philosopher Dionysus, the god of life’s exuberance” who, he hoped, would replace Jesus, the god of the heavenly other world, as the primary cultural standard for future millennia.




Author – Tatyana Gordeeva

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Sometimes it feels so good to get into high antiquity and have a look at the great masters whose works are still alive and admired. The art of 15th century in Germany is marked with the period of Renaissance. The revival of fine arts of that time was intensive and full of different schools and trends. The brightest star on the Renaissance sky of Germany was Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), a German painter, engraver, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His high-quality woodcuts (nowadays often called Meisterstiche or “master prints”) established his reputation and influence across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since.

Praying Hands by Albrecht Dürer. Prints available at http://bit.ly/2S47IrW.

The most famous and outstanding artist of Germany of that time, Albrecht Dürer greatly contributed to the development of art and science. Dürer had an absolutely unique style of work, and he mostly polished it during his two visits to Italy, where he got acquainted with the great Bellini, who had a particular influence on his works. Dürer was exceptionally smart, and this caused his own treatise on proportion in 1528. There are more facts about Dürer than about any other artist of that time, and these data state that Dürer was a very reserved person, and never let his emotions out in front of the others. So they had to find their way in his fabulously beautiful works; that is probably why they look so touching.

The Great Piece of Turf

As a young man, Albrecht Dürer  was apprenticed to Michael Wolgemut, chief illustrator of the Nuremberg Chronicle. He traveled widely and his work as a painter was only exceeded by his ability to engrave on metal. During the first decade of the sixteenth century he was depicting plants in all his artworks with a new note of botanical accuracy. This was at a time when the plant world was introduced to exotic oriental bulbs and the science of botany broke away from medicine, to which it had long been subordinate. His work The Great Piece of Turf depicts the plants exactly as he saw them growing in the field, and his observations would have a lasting influence on the rendering of flowers in art well into the seventeenth century.

Dürer is often said to be Renaissance himself. It makes sense: his interest in geometry and mathematical proportions, his curiosity in exploring the world, his observations of nature, and his awareness of his own individual potential demonstrate the spirit of German Renaissance.

When we hear the name of Albert Einstein, we mostly just think of two things:
a) Genius of physics,
b) E=mc2.

But there is more to know about Albert Einstein than just that. Einstein was a theoretical physicist who developed the general theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed “the world’s most famous equation”), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”. The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory.

Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor’s degree.

During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he produced much of his remarkable work and in 1908 he was appointed Privatdozent in Berne. In 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in 1911 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin. He became a German citizen in 1914 and remained in Berlin until 1933 when he renounced his citizenship for political reasons and emigrated to America to take the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton. He became a United States citizen in 1940 and retired from his post in 1945.

After World War II, Einstein was a leading figure in the World Government Movement, he was offered the Presidency of the State of Israel, which he declined, and he collaborated with Dr. Chaim Weizmann in establishing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Einstein always appeared to have a clear view of the problems of physics and the determination to solve them. He had a strategy of his own and was able to visualize the main stages on the way to his goal. He regarded his major achievements as mere stepping-stones for the next advance.

At the start of his scientific work, Einstein realized the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics and his special theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. He dealt with classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory: this led to an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules. He investigated the thermal properties of light with a low radiation density and his observations laid the foundation of the photon theory of light.

Albert Einstein received honorary doctorate degrees in science, medicine and philosophy from many European and American universities. During the 1920’s he lectured in Europe, America and the Far East and he was awarded Fellowships or Memberships of all the leading scientific academies throughout the world. He gained numerous awards in recognition of his work, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1925, and the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1935.

Einstein’s gifts inevitably resulted in his dwelling much in intellectual solitude and, for relaxation, music played an important part in his life. He married Mileva Maric in 1903 and they had a daughter and two sons; their marriage was dissolved in 1919 and in the same year he married his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who died in 1936. He died on April 18, 1955 at Princeton, New Jersey.

Author – Tatyana Gordeeva

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