TWO RICHARD WAGNER PORTRAITS: NIETZCHE’S IDEAL TYPE OF TIME OF DECADENCE AND BARZUN’S REVOLUTIONIST IN ART

The purpose of this article is to present the interpretations of different perspectives of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Barzun about Richard Wagner, who has a radical influence on many of the arts, especially Western music. Nietzsche referred to Wagner in his early works as praise, but in his later works he defined it as the ideal type of the modern age or time of decadence. For Richard Barzan, on the other hand, Wagner is a revolutionary in his own discipline, just as Darwin and Marx are revolutionary in their own disciplines. During research period, one of the major difficulties encountered in this article is the inadequacy of the resources in Turkish and the lack of foreign resources on the subject in the libraries despite the tens of thousands of resources written about Wagner in the world.