With Nietzsche the apparent contradictions of his Wagner-worship and Wagner-hatred may be explained if we closely examine the concepts of his first work of importance, The Birth of Tragedy. It was a misfortune that his bitterest book, The Wagner Case, should have been first translated into English, for Wagner is our music-maker now, and the rude assaults of Nietzsche fall upon deaf ears; while those who had read the earlier essay, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, were both puzzled and outraged. Certainly the man who could thus flout what he once adored must have been mad. This was the popular verdict, a facile and unjust verdict. What Nietzsche first postulated as to the nature of music he returned to at the close of his life; the mighty personality of Richard Wagner had deflected the stream of his thought for a few years. But as early as 1872 doubts began to trouble his sensitive conscience--this was before his pamphlet Richard Wagner in Bayreuth--and his notebooks of that period were sown with question-marks. In the interesting correspondence with Dr. Georg Brandes, who literally revealed to Europe the genius of Nietzsche, we find this significant passage: I was the first to distil a sort of unity out of the two [Schopenhauer and Wagner].... All the Wagnerians are disciples of Schopenhauer. Things were different when I was young. Then it was the last of the Hegelians who clung to Wagner, and "Wagner and Hegel" was still the cry in the '50s. Nietzsche might have added the name of the philosopher Feuerbach. Wagner's English apologist, Ashton Ellis, repudiates the common belief that Wagner refashioned the latter part of the Ring so as to introduce in it his newly acquired Schopenhauerian ideas. Wagner was always a pessimist, declares Mr. Ellis; Schopenhauer but confirmed him in his theories. Wagner, like Nietzsche, was too often a weathercock. A second-rate poet and philosopher, he stands chiefly for his magnificent music. Nietzsche or any other _polemiker_ cannot change the map of music by fulminating against Wagner. Time may prove his true foe--the devouring years that always show such hostility to music of the theatre, music that is not pure music. The spirit of the letter to Brandes quoted above may be found in Nietzsche Contra Wagner (The Case of Wagner, page 72). Nietzsche wrote: I similarly interpreted Wagner's music in my own way as the expression of a Dionysian powerfulness of soul.... It is obvious what I misunderstood, it is obvious in like manner what I bestowed upon Wagner and Schopenhauer--myself. He read his own enthusiasms, his Hellenic ideals, into the least Greek among composers. Wagner himself was at first pleased, also not a little nonplussed by the idolatry of Nietzsche. Remember that this young philologist was a musician as well as a brilliant scholar.