The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
829.
At bottom, even Wagner's music, in so far as it stands for the whole of French romanticism, is literature: the charm of exoticism (strange times, customs, passions), exercised upon sensitive cosy-corner people. The delight of entering into extremely distant and prehistoric lands to which books lead one, and by which means the whole horizon is painted with new colours and new possibilities.... Dreams of still more distant and unexploited worlds; disdain of the boulevards. ... For Nationalism, let us not deceive ourselves, is also only a form of exoticism.... Romantic musicians merely relate what exotic books have made of them: people would fain experience exotic sensations and passions according to Florentine and Venetian taste; finally they are satisfied to look for them in an image.... The essential factor is the kind of novel desire, the desire to imitate, the desire to live as people have lived once before in the past, and the disguise and dissimulation of the soul.... Romantic art is only an emergency exit from defective "reality." The attempt to perform new things: revolution, Napoleon. Napoleon represents the passion of new spiritual possibilities, of an extension of the soul's domain. The greater the debility of the will, the greater the extravagances in the desire to feel, to represent, and to dream new things.--The result of the excesses which have been indulged in: an insatiable thirst for unrestrained feelings.... Foreign literatures afford the strongest spices.
Winckelmann's and Goethe's Greeks, Victor Hugo's Orientals, Wagner's Edda characters, Walter Scott's Englishmen of the thirteenth century--some day the whole comedy will be exposed! All of it was disproportionately historical and false, _but_--modern. Concerning the characteristics of national genius in regard to the strange and to the borrowed-- English genius vulgarises and makes realistic everything it sees; The French whittles down, simplifies, rationalises, embellishes; The German muddles, compromises, involves, and infects everything with morality; The Italian has made by far the freest and most subtle use of borrowed material, and has enriched it with a hundred times more beauty than it ever drew out of it: it is the richest genius, it had the most to bestow. The Jews, with Heinrich Heine and Offenbach, approached genius in the sphere of art. The latter was the most intellectual and most high-spirited satyr, who as a musician abided by great tradition, and who, for him who has something more than ears, is a real relief after the sentimental and, at bottom, degenerate musicians of German romanticism. _Offenbach;_ trench music imbued with Voltaire's intellect, free, wanton, with a slight sardonic grin, but clear and intellectual almost to the point of banality (Offenbach never titivates), and free from the _mignardise_ of morbid or blond-Viennese sensuality. If by artistic genius we understand the most consummate freedom within the law, divine ease, and facility in overcoming the greatest difficulties, then Offenbach has even more right to the title genius than Wagner has. Wagner is heavy and clumsy: nothing is more foreign to him than the moments of wanton perfection which this clown Offenbach achieves as many as five times, six times, in nearly every one of his buffooneries. But by genius we ought perhaps to understand something else.
_Concerning "music."_--French, German, and Italian music. (Our most debased periods in a political sense are our most productive. The Slavs?)--The ballet, which is the outcome of excessive study of the history of strange civilisations, has become master of opera.--Stage music and musicians music.--It is an error to suppose that what Wagner composed was _a. form_: it was rather formlessness. The possibilities of dramatic construction have yet to be discovered.--Rhythm. "Expression" at all costs. Harlotry in instrumentation.--All honour to Heinrich Schütz; all honour to Mendelssohn: in them we find an element of Goethe, but nowhere else! (We also find another element of Goethe coming to blossom in Rahel; a third element in Heinrich Heine.) Descriptive music leaves reality to work its effects alone.... All these kinds of art are easier, and more easy to imitate; poorly gifted people have recourse to them. The appeal to the instincts; suggestive art.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.