Book excerpt: "The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms" is a novel by the famed German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote the rough draft of "The Case of Wagner" in Turin, during the month of May 1888 and it was published in the following autumn. "Nietzsche contra Wagner" was also written about the middle of December 1888 but it was not published until long afterwards owing to Nietzsche's complete breakdown in the first days of 1889. Being a disciple at first of Richard Wagner, Nietsche found himself drifting farther and farther away intellectually from Wagner resulting in this book. In Wagner's music, in his doctrine, in his whole concept of art, Nietzsche saw the confirmation, the promotion—aye, even the encouragement, of that decadence and degeneration then rampant in Europe; and it is for this reason, although to the end of his life he still loved Wagner, the man and the friend, that we find him, on the very eve of his spiritual death, exhorting his readers to abjure Wagner the musician and the artist.