 The Case of Wagner, A Musician’s Problem (Der Fall Wagner, Ein Musikanten-Problem, May-August 1888), contrasts sharply with Nietzsche’s laudatory portrayal of Wagner in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and compares well with his 1873 meditation on David Strauss in its unbridled attack on a popular cultural figure. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche “declares war” upon Richard Wagner, whose music is characterized as the epitome of modern cultural achievement, but also crucially as sick and decadent. The work is a brilliant display of Nietzsche’s talents as a music critic, and includes memorable ridicule of Wagner’s theatrical style, reflections on redemption via art, a “physiology of art,” and discussion of the virtues associated, respectively, with ascending and descending life energies. As the therapeutic inversion and antithesis of Wagner’s debilitatingly serious music, Nietzsche refers us to Georges Bizet (1838–1875) whose music he finds cheerful, revitalizing, redeeming and light-hearted. Wagner himself had some years earlier (1850) condemned Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) for having confounded the public’s taste in music. Nietzsche, writing almost thirty years later, here accuses Wagner of having done the same.