role of the music in art and into the realm of politics and society bearing directly on the problem of German culture:
In his art all that the modern world requires most urgently is mixed in the most seductive manner: the three great stimulantia of the exhausted--the brutal, the artificial, and the innocent (idiotic).
Nietzsche was once a very close friend to Wagner. When he was a student, Nietzsche was an admirer of Tristan und Isolde, and he loved a great deal of Wagner's music. He then considered Wagner to be Germany's greatest living composer and the nation's greatest living creative genius. Kaufmann states,
Nietzsche's discernment in such matters was generally good, and he believed that Schopenhauer, Heine, and Wagner were the most important men in German arts and letters since Goethe's death. (Later he included himself in this group.)
Of the three, Wagner was the only one still living, and Nietzsche sought him out. Wagner convinced Nietzsche that greatness and genuine creation were still possible. Wagner also instilled within him the will first to equal and then to outdo his friend. Kaufmann notes that this would continue even after their break as "Nietzsche frankly admitted how much he owed to the early inspiration of this friendship."
In addition to his love for the greatness of Wagner as a personality and an artistic leader, Nietzsche also had a great love of music. In particular, he admired the revolutionary nature of Wagner's music, and the two also shared a passion for Schopenhauer:
Tristan, moreover, celebrated not only Schopenhauer's ceaseless, blind, and passionately striving will but also a drunken frenzy which suggested to Nietzsche's mind the ecstatic abandonment of the ancient Dionysian cults.
Nietzsche makes this clear in The Birth of Tragedy when he discusses how he managed to get through the difficult times of his youth by listening to Wagner, particularly Tristan. Wagner ...