The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
840.
_Religion in music._--What a large amount of satisfaction all religious needs get out of Wagnerian music, though this is never acknowledged or even understood! How much prayer, virtue, unction, virginity, salvation, speaks through this music!... Oh what capital this cunning saint, who leads and seduces us back to everything that was once believed in, makes out of the fact that he may dispense with words and concepts! ... Our intellectual conscience has no need to feel ashamed--it stands apart--if any old instinct puts its trembling lips to the rim of forbidden philtres.... This is shrewd and healthy, and, in so far as it betrays a certain shame in regard to the satisfaction of the religious instinct, it is even a good sign.... Cunning Christianity: the type of the music which came from the "last Wagner."
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.