An excerpt from the beginning of the Translator's Preface

In spite of the adverse criticism with which the above preface has met at the hands of many reviewers since the summer of last year, I cannot say that I should feel justified, even after mature consideration, in altering a single word or sentence it contains. If I felt inclined to make any changes at all, these would take the form of extensive additions, tending to confirm rather than to modify the general argument it advances; but, any omissions of which I may have been guilty in the first place, have been so fully rectified since, thanks to the publication of the English translations of Daniel Halévy's and Henri Lichtenberger's works, “The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche,”2 and “The Gospel of Superman,”3 respectively, that, were it not for the fact that the truth about this matter cannot be repeated too often, I should have refrained altogether from including any fresh remarks of my own in this Third Edition.

1.
It should be noted that the first and second editions of these essays on Wagner appeared in pamphlet form, for which the above first preface was written.
2.
Fisher Unwin, 1911.
3.
T. N. Foulis, 1910.

In the works just referred to (pp. 129 et seq. in Halévy's book, and pp. 78 et seq. in Lichtenberger's book), the statement I made in my preface to “Thoughts out of Season,” vol. i., and which I did not think it necessary to repeat in my first preface to these pamphlets, will be found to receive the fullest confirmation.
The statement in question was to the effect that many long years before these pamphlets were even projected, Nietzsche's apparent volte-face in regard to his hero Wagner had been not only foreshadowed but actually stated in plain words, in two works written during his friendship with Wagner,—the works referred to being “The Birth of Tragedy” (1872), and “Wagner in Bayreuth” (1875) of which Houston Stuart Chamberlain declares not only that it possesses “undying classical worth” but that “a perusal of it is indispensable to all who wish to follow the question (of Wagner) to its roots.”4

4.
See Richard Wagner, by Houston Stuart Chamberlain (translated by G. A. Hight), pp. 15, 16.

The idea that runs through the present work like a leitmotif—the idea that Wagner was at bottom more of a mime than a musician—was so far an ever present thought with Nietzsche that it is ever impossible to ascertain the period when it was first formulated.
In Nietzsche's wonderful autobiography (Ecce Homo, p. 88), in the section dealing with the early works just mentioned, we find the following passage—“In the second of the two essays (Wagner in Bayreuth) with a profound certainty of instinct, I already characterised the elementary factor in Wagner's nature as a theatrical talent which, in all his means and aspirations, draws its final conclusions.” And as early as 1874, Nietzsche wrote in his diary—“Wagner is a born actor. Just as Goethe was an abortive painter, and Schiller an abortive orator, so Wagner was an abortive theatrical genius. His attitude to music is that of the actor; for he knows how to sing and speak, as it were out of different souls and from absolutely different worlds (Tristan and the Meistersinger).”
There is, however, no need to multiply examples, seeing, as I have said, that in the translations of Halévy's and Lichtenberger's books the reader will find all the independent evidence he could possibly desire, disproving the popular, and even the learned belief that, in the two pamphlets before us we have a complete, apparently unaccountable, and therefore “demented” volte-face on Nietzsche's part. Nevertheless, for fear lest some doubt should still linger in certain minds concerning this point, and with the view of adding interest to these essays, the Editor considered it advisable, in the Second Edition, to add a number of extracts from Nietzsche's diary of the year 1878 (ten years before “The Case of Wagner,” and “Nietzsche contra Wagner” were written) in order to show to what extent those learned critics who complain of Nietzsche's “morbid and uncontrollable recantations and revulsions of feeling,” have overlooked even the plain facts of the case when forming their all-too-hasty conclusions. These extracts will be found at the end of “Nietzsche contra Wagner.” While reading them, however, it should not be forgotten that they were never intended for publication by Nietzsche himself—a fact which accounts for their unpolished and sketchy form—and that they were first published in vol. xi. of the first German Library Edition (pp. 99-129) only when he was a helpless invalid, in 1897....