Nietzsche and Wagner's Greatest Hits, and Naughty Bits MONTCLAIR, N.J. - When Nietzsche and Wagner first met in 1868, the philosopher, more than 30 years Wagner's junior, found a father figure. Wagner got an acolyte and mouthpiece. But their bromance cooled hard. Nietzsche thought Wagner's art was growing complacent. He also had a crush on Wagner's wife. Wagner thought excessive masturbation was causing Nietzsche's health troubles. Years after Wagner died in 1883, Nietzsche wrote, "Wagner belongs only to my diseases." Their sad falling out was indeed the "Tragedy of a Friendship," as the Belgian artist and director Jan Fabre calls his sometimes arresting, often obvious and tiresome new work, which opened in Antwerp in May and arrived here on Friday as part of the Peak Performances series at Montclair State University. The short run ended Sunday. Wagner and Nietzsche are characters in the piece, as much as anyone can be in one of Mr. Fabre's stylized landscapes. The unerringly committed, daringly athletic performers - about a dozen members of Mr. Fabre's company, Troubleyn - occasionally stumble around struggling with vices clamped on their heads, an allusion to Nietzsche's unbearable headaches. But Mr. Fabre, working from a text by Stefan Hertmans, is interested less in biographical particulars than in fleshing out the Nietzschean side of Wagner's work: the dark, Dionysian intensity, violence and sex. Those qualities permeate "Tragedy of a Friendship," which over three hours goes chronologically through Wagner's 13 operas, each of which gets an episode that is part theater, part dance, part kinky art installation. "Lohengrin" is rendered as a slow-motion swordfight through which a naked woman walks toward a taxidermied swan. For "Götterdämmerung," the performers act as though they were being burned alive. Mr. Fabre's gloss on "Das Liebesverbot," an early rarity, ends with a brutal simulated rape, after which the two perpetrators appear to feed the victim a slice of her own skin. Seen on Saturday, "Tragedy of a Friendship" had in common with Mr. Fabre's previous works (several of which have come to Peak Performances) a style both pared down and amped up, with a lot of preternaturally attractive people copulating in their underwear. Once the immolating denizens of "Götterdämmerung" have stripped to almost nothing, they spend a long time violently thrusting into the air. Those many minutes of thrusting capture both the stirring and lethargic sides of Mr. Fabre's vision. Death and sex intertwined: duly noted. The piece's musical interest is just as slight. Moritz Eggert has created a droning overlay to Wagner that seeps into the gaps between fragments of the operas. Occasionally the soprano Lies Vandewege and the tenor Hans Peter Janssens sing, excellently, a cappella Wagner excerpts. "Tannhäuser," which Mr. Fabre directed in Brussels in 2004, elicits his most haunting imagery. Two women in dunce caps appear to masturbate a standing Ms. Vandewege until she emits glorious phrases that the women rush to "capture" in clear plastic bags. This sequence was almost alone in a long evening in bringing to Wagner something truly fresh, the paradoxes of an adult fairy tale: erotic and funny, medieval and modern, forbidding and warm.