Friedrich Nietzsche has published four long essays…

Friedrich Nietzsche has published four long essays separately between 1873 and 1876: David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.

These will later appear in a collected edition under the title Untimely Meditations.

The four essays share the orientation of a cultural critique, challenging the developing German culture along lines suggested by Schopenhauer and Wagner.

Nietzsche had also begun in 1873 to accumulate notes that will be posthumously published as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.

Nietzsche had met Malwida von Meysenbug and Hans von Bülow in the circle of the Wagners during this time, and had also begun a friendship with Paul Rée, who in 1876 influences him in dismissing the pessimism in his early writings.

He is deeply disappointed however, by the Bayreuth Festival of 1876, where the banality of the shows and the baseness of the public repel him.

He is also alienated by Wagner's championing of 'German culture', which Nietzsche thinks a contradiction in terms, as well as by Wagner's celebration of his fame among the German public.

All this contribute to Nietzsche's subsequent decision to distance himself from Wagner.