The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
842.
"Music" and the grand style. The greatness of an artist is not to be measured by the beautiful feelings which he evokes: let this belief be left to the girls. It should be measured according to the extent to which he approaches the grand style, according to the extent to which he is capable of the grand style. This style and great passion have this in common--that they scorn to please; that they forget to persuade; that they command: that they will.... To become master of the chaos which is in one; to compel one's inner chaos to assume form; to become consistent, simple, unequivocal, mathematical, law this is the great ambition here. By means of it one repels; nothing so much endears people to such powerful men as this,--a desert seems to lie around them, they impose silence upon all, and awe every one with the greatness Of their sacrilege.... All arts know this kind of aspirant to the grand style: why are they absent in music? Never yet has a musician built as that architect did who erected the Palazzo Pitti.... This is a problem. Does music perhaps belong to that culture in which the reign of powerful men of various types is already at an end? Is the concept "grand style" in fact a contradiction of the soul of music,--of "the Woman" in our music? ...
With this I touch upon the cardinal question: how should all our music be classified? The age of classical taste knows nothing that can be compared with it: it bloomed when the world of the Renaissance reached its evening, when "freedom" had already bidden farewell to both men and their customs--is it characteristic of music to be Counter-Renaissance? Is music, perchance, the sister of the baroque style, seeing that in any case they were contemporaries? Is not music, modern music, already decadence? ... I have put my finger before on this question: whether music is not an example of Counter-Renaissance art? whether it is not the next of kin to the baroque style? whether it has not grown in Opposition to all classic taste, so that any aspiration to classicism is forbidden by the very nature of music? The answer to this most important of all questions of values would not be a very doubtful one, if people thoroughly understood the fact that music attains to its highest maturity and plenitude as romanticism--likewise as a reactionary movement against classicism. Mozart, a delicate and lovable soul, but quite eighteenth century, even in his serious lapses ... Beethoven, the first great romanticist according to the French conception of romanticism, just as Wagner is the last great romanticist ... both of them are instinctive opponents of classical taste, of severe style--not to speak of "grand" in this regard. Romanticism: an ambiguous question, like all modern questions. The æsthetic conditions are twofold:-- The abundant and generous, as opposed to the seeking and the desiring. A romanticist is an artist whose great dissatisfaction with himself makes him productive--; who looks away from himself and his fellows, and sometimes, therefore, looks backwards.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.