The Case of Wagner Complete Works, Volume 8 · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
8.
Wagner was _not_ instinctively a musician. And this he proved by the way in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it, _i.e.,_ a rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as an inventor and an innovator of the first order--he _increased the powers of speech of music to an incalculable degree_--: he is the Victor Hugo of music as language, provided always we allow that under certain circumstances music may be something which is not music, but speech--instrument--_ancilla dramaturgica._ Wagner's music, _not_ in the tender care of theatrical taste, which is very tolerant, is simply bad music, perhaps the worst that has ever been composed. When a musician can no longer count up to three, he becomes "dramatic," he becomes "Wagnerian." ...
Wagner almost discovered the magic which can be wrought even now by means of music which is both incoherent and _elementary._ His consciousness of this attains to huge proportions, as does also his instinct to dispense entirely with higher law and _style._ The elementary factors--sound, movement, colour, in short, the whole sensuousness of music--suffice. Wagner never calculates as a musician with a musician's conscience: all he strains after is effect, nothing more than effect. And he knows what he has to make an effect upon!--In this he is as unhesitating as Schiller was, as any theatrical man must be; he has also the latter's contempt for the world which he brings to its knees before him. A man is an actor when he is ahead of mankind in his possession of this one view, that everything which has to strike people as true, must not be true. This rule was formulated by Talma: it contains the whole psychology of the actor, it also contains--and this we need not doubt--all his morality. Wagner's music is never true.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.