The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
2.
What? would it really be the first virtue of a performance (as performing musical artists now seem to believe), under all circumstances to attain to a _haut-relief_ which cannot be surpassed? If this were applied to Mozart, for instance, would it not be a real sin against Mozart’s spirit,—Mozart’s cheerful, enthusiastic, delightful and loving spirit? He who fortunately was no German, and whose seriousness is a charming and golden seriousness and not by any means that of a German clodhopper.… Not to speak of the earnestness of the “marble statue”.… But you seem to think that all music is the music of the “marble statue”?—that all music should, so to speak, spring out of the wall and shake the listener to his very bowels?… Only thus could music have any effect! But on whom would the effect be made? Upon something on which a noble artist ought never to deign to act,—upon the mob, upon the immature! upon the blasés! upon the diseased! upon idiots! upon _Wagnerites_!… A Music Without A Future.
Of all the arts which succeed in growing on the soil of a particular culture, music is the last plant to appear; maybe because it is the one most dependent upon our innermost feelings, and therefore the last to come to the surface—at a time when the culture to which it belongs is in its autumn season and beginning to fade. It was only in the art of the Dutch masters that the spirit of mediæval Christianity found its expression—, its architecture of sound is the youngest, but genuine and legitimate, sister of the Gothic. It was only in Handel’s music that the best in Luther and in those like him found its voice, the Judeo-heroic trait which gave the Reformation a touch of greatness-the Old Testament, _not_ the New, become music. It was left to Mozart, to pour out the epoch of Louis XIV., and of the art of Racine and Claude Lorrain, in _ringing_ gold; only in Beethoven’s and Rossini’s music did the Eighteenth Century sing itself out—the century of enthusiasm, broken ideals, and _fleeting joy_.
We Antipodes. Perhaps a few people, or at least my friends, will remember that I made my first plunge into life armed with some errors and some exaggerations, but that, in any case, I began with _hope_ in my heart. In the philosophical pessimism of the nineteenth century, I recognised—who knows by what by-paths of personal experience—the symptom of a higher power of thought, a more triumphant plenitude of life, than had manifested itself hitherto in the philosophies of Hume, Kant and Hegel!—I regarded _tragic_ knowledge as the most beautiful luxury of our culture, as its most precious, most noble, most dangerous kind of prodigality; but, nevertheless, in view of its overflowing wealth, as a justifiable _luxury_. In the same way, I began by interpreting Wagner’s music as the expression of a Dionysian powerfulness of soul. In it I thought I heard the earthquake by means of which a primeval life-force, which had been constrained for ages, was seeking at last to burst its bonds, quite indifferent to how much of that which nowadays calls itself culture, would thereby be shaken to ruins. You see how I misinterpreted, you see also, what I _bestowed_ upon Wagner and Schopenhauer—myself.… Every art and every philosophy may be regarded either as a cure or as a stimulant to ascending or declining life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers:—those that suffer from _overflowing vitality_, who need Dionysian art and require a tragic insight into, and a tragic outlook upon, the phenomenon life,—and there are those who suffer from _reduced_ vitality, and who crave for repose, quietness, calm seas, or else the intoxication, the spasm, the bewilderment which art and philosophy provide.
Revenge upon life itself—this is the most voluptuous form of intoxication for such indigent souls!… Now Wagner responds quite as well as Schopenhauer to the twofold cravings of these people,—they both deny life, they both slander it but precisely on this account they are my antipodes.—The richest creature, brimming over with vitality,—the Dionysian God and man, may not only allow himself to gaze upon the horrible and the questionable; but he can also lend his hand to the terrible deed, and can indulge in all the luxury of destruction, disaggregation, and negation,—in him evil, purposelessness and ugliness, seem just as allowable as they are in nature—because of his bursting plenitude of creative and rejuvenating powers, which are able to convert every desert into a luxurious land of plenty.
Conversely, it is the greatest sufferer and pauper in vitality, who is most in need of mildness, peace and goodness—that which to-day is called humaneness—in thought as well as in action, and possibly of a God whose speciality is to be a God of the sick, a Saviour, and also of logic or the abstract intelligibility of existence even for idiots (—the typical “free-spirits,” like the idealists, and “beautiful souls,” are _décadents_—); in short, of a warm, danger-tight, and narrow confinement, between optimistic horizons which would allow of stultification.… And thus very gradually, I began to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian Greek, and also the Christian who in fact is only a kind of Epicurean, and who, with his belief that “faith saves,” carries the principle of Hedonism _as far as possible_—far beyond all intellectual honesty.… If I am ahead of all other psychologists in anything, it is in this fact that my eyes are more keen for tracing those most difficult and most captious of all deductions, in which the largest number of mistakes have been made,—the deduction which makes one infer something concerning the author from his work, something concerning the doer from his deed, something concerning the idealist from the need which produced this ideal, and something concerning the imperious _craving_ which stands at the back of all thinking and valuing—In regard to all artists of what kind soever, I shall now avail myself of this radical distinction: does the creative power in this case arise from a loathing of life, or from an excessive _plenitude_ of life?
In Goethe, for instance, an overflow of vitality was creative, in Flaubert—hate: Flaubert, a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with this instinctive belief at heart: “_Flaubert est toujours haissable, l’homme n’est rien, l’œuvre est tout_”.… He tortured himself when he wrote, just as Pascal tortured himself when he thought—the feelings of both were inclined to be “non-egoistic.” … “Disinterestedness”—principle of decadence, the will to nonentity in art as well as in morality. Where Wagner Is At Home. Even at the present day, France is still the refuge of the most intellectual and refined culture in Europe, it remains the high school of taste: but one must know where to find this France of taste. The _North-German Gazette_, for instance, or whoever expresses his sentiments in that paper, thinks that the French are “barbarians,”—as for me, if I had to find the _blackest_ spot on earth, where slaves still required to be liberated, I should turn in the direction of Northern Germany.… But those who form part of _that select_ France take very good care to _conceal themselves_; they are a small body of men, and there may be some among them who do not stand on very firm legs—a few may be fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids; others may be enervated, and artificial,—such are those who would fain be artistic,—but all the loftiness and delicacy which still remains to this world, is in their possession.
In this France of intellect, which is also the France of pessimism, Schopenhauer is already much more at home than he ever was in Germany, his principal work has already been translated twice, and the second time so excellently that now I prefer to read Schopenhauer in French (—he was an _accident_ among Germans, just as I am—the Germans have no fingers wherewith to grasp us; they haven’t any fingers at all,—but only claws). And I do not mention Heine—_l’adorable Heine_, as they say in Paris—who long since has passed into the flesh and blood of the more profound and more soulful of French lyricists. How could the horned cattle of Germany know how to deal with the _délicatesses_ of such a nature!—And as to Richard Wagner, it is obvious, it is even glaringly obvious, that Paris is the very _soil_ for him, the more French music adapts itself to the needs of _l’âme moderne_, the more Wagnerian it will become,—it is far enough advanced in this direction already.—In this respect one should not allow one’s self to be misled by Wagner himself—it was simply disgraceful on Wagner’s part to scoff at Paris, as he did, in its agony in 1871.… In spite of it all, in Germany Wagner is only a misapprehension.—who could be more incapable of understanding anything about Wagner than the Kaiser, for instance?—To everybody familiar with the movement of European culture, this fact, however, is certain, that French romanticism and Richard Wagner are most intimately related.
All dominated by literature, up to their very eyes and ears—the first European artists with a _universal literary_ culture,—most of them writers, poets, mediators and minglers of the senses and the arts, all fanatics in _expression_, great discoverers in the realm of the sublime as also of the ugly and the gruesome, and still greater discoverers in passion, in working for effect, in the art of dressing their windows,—all possessing talent far above their genius,—virtuosos to their backbone, knowing of secret passages to all that seduces, lures, constrains or overthrows; born enemies of logic and of straight lines, thirsting after the exotic, the strange and the monstrous, and all opiates for the senses and the understanding. On the whole, a daring dare-devil, magnificently violent, soaring and high-springing crew of artists, who first had to teach their own century—it is the century of the mob—what the concept “artist” meant. But they were _ill_.… Wagner As The Apostle Of Chastity. Is this the German way? Comes this low bleating forth from German hearts? Should Teutons, sin repenting, lash themselves, Or spread their palms with priestly unctuousness, Exalt their feelings with the censer’s fumes, And cower and quake and bend the trembling knee, And with a sickly sweetness plead a prayer? Then ogle nuns, and ring the Ave-bell, And thus with morbid fervour out-do heaven? Is this the German way? Beware, yet are you free, yet your own Lords. What yonder lures is Rome, Rome’s faith sung without words.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.