Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
7
To the most exceptional of my readers I should like to say just one word about what I really exact from music. It must be cheerful and yet profound, like an October afternoon. It must be original, exuberant, and tender, and like a dainty, soft woman in roguishness and grace ... I shall never admit that a German _can_ understand what music is. Those musicians who are called German, the greatest and most famous foremost, are all foreigners, either Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen--or Jews; or else, like Heinrich Schütz, Bach, and Händel, they are Germans of a strong race which is now extinct. For my own part, I have still enough of the Pole left in me to let all other music go, if only I can keep Chopin. For three reasons I would except Wagner's _Siegfried Idyll,_ and perhaps also one or two things of Liszt, who excelled all other musicians in the noble tone of his orchestration; and finally everything that has been produced beyond the Alps_--this side_ of the Alps.[3] I could not possibly dispense with Rossini, and still less with my Southern soul in music, the work of my Venetian maestro, Pietro Gasti. And when I say beyond the Alps, all I really mean is Venice. If I try to find a new word for music, I can never find any other than Venice. I know not how to draw any distinction between tears and music. I do not know how to think either of joy, or of the south, without a shudder of fear. On the bridge I stood Lately, in gloomy night. Came a distant song: In golden drops it rolled Over the glittering rim away. Music, gondolas, lights-- Drunk, swam far forth in the gloom.... A stringed instrument, my soul, Sang, imperceptibly moved, A gondola song by stealth, Gleaming for gaudy blessedness. --Hearkened any thereto?
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