The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
838.
What we lack in music is an æsthetic which would impose laws upon musicians and give them a conscience; and as a result of this we lack a real contest concerning "principles."--For as musicians we laugh at Herbart's velleities in this department just as heartily as we laugh at Schopenhauer's. As a matter of fact, tremendous difficulties present themselves here. We no longer know on what basis to found our concepts of what is exemplary, masterly, perfect. With the instincts of old loves and old admiration we grope about in a realm of values, and we almost believe, "that is good which pleases us".... I am always suspicious when I hear people everywhere speak innocently of Beethoven as a "classic"; what I would maintain, and with some seventy, is that, in other arts, a classic is the very reverse of Beethoven. But when the complete and glaring dissolution of style, Wagner's so-called dramatic style, is taught and honoured as exemplary, as masterly, as progressive, then my impatience exceeds all bounds. Dramatic style in music, as Wagner understood it, is simply renunciation of all style whatever; it is the assumption that something else, namely, drama, is a hundred times more important than music.
Wagner can paint; he does not use music for the sake of music, with it he accentuates attitudes; he is a poet. Finally he made an appeal to beautiful feelings and heaving breasts, just as all other theatrical artists have done, and with it all he converted women and even those whose souls thirst for culture to him. But what do women and the uncultured care about music? All these people have no conscience for art: none of them suffer when the first and fundamental virtues of an art are scorned and trodden upon in favour of that which is merely secondary (as _ancilla dramaturgica_). What good can come of all extension in the means of expression, when that which is expressed, art itself, has lost all its law and order? The picturesque pomp and power of tones, the symbolism of sound, rhythm, the colour effects of harmony and discord, the suggestive significance of music, the whole sensuality of this art which Wagner made prevail--it is all this that Wagner derived, developed, and drew out of music. Victor Hugo did something very similar for language: but already people in France are asking themselves, in regard to the case of Victor Hugo, whether language was not corrupted by him, whether reason, intellectuality, and thorough conformity to law in language are not suppressed when the sensuality of expression is elevated to a high place? Is it not a sign of decadence that the poets in France have become plastic artists, and that the musicians of Germany have become actors and culturemongers?
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.