[1]
I relieve myself a little. It is not solely out of sheer wickedness that I praise Bizet at the expense of Wagner in this work. In the midst of much pleasantry, I bring forward a case which is serious enough. It was my fate to turn the back on Wagner; to be fond of aught afterwards was a triumph. No one, perhaps, had been more dangerously entangled in Wagnerism, no one has defended himself harder against it, no one has been more glad to get rid of it. A long history! -- Is there a word wanted for it? -- If I were a moralist, who knows how I should designate it! Perhaps self-overcoming. -- But the philosopher never loves moralists ... neither does he love fancy words ...
What does a philosopher firstly and lastly require of himself? To
overcome his age in himself, to become "timeless." With what, then, has
he to wage the hardest strife ? With the characteristics in which he is
just the child of his age. Well! I am the child of this
[2]
age, just like Wagner, i. e., a décadent; I am, however,
conscious of it; I defended myself against it. My philosophic spirit
defended itself against it.
The problem of décadence is, in fact, that which has occupied me most profoundly; -- I have had reasons for it. "Good and Evil" is only a variety of that problem. When one has learned to discern the symptoms of decline, one also understands morality, -- one understands what conceals itself under its holiest names and valuation-formulæ; namely, impoverished life, desire for the end, great lassitude. Morality negatives life ... For such a task I required some self-discipline: -- I had to engage in combat against whatever was morbid in me, including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including all modern "humanity." -- A profound estrangement, coolness, and sobriety with reference to everything temporary or opportune; and as my highest wish, the eye of Zarathustra, an eye, which, exalted to an immense height, surveys the whole phenomenon of man, -- looks down on it ... To attain such an object -- what sacrifice would not be appropriate? What "self-overcoming!" What "selfdenying!"
My most important experience was a convalescence; Wagner belongs only to my maladies.
Not that I would wish to be ungrateful to this malady. If in this
work I maintain 'the proposition that Wagner is hurtful, I want
none the less to
[3]
maintain to whom, in spite of it all, Wagner is indispensable -- to
the philosopher. In other departments people may perhaps get along without
Wagner; the philosopher, however, is not free to dispense with him. The
philosopher has to be the bad conscience of his time; for that purpose he
must possess its best knowledge. But where would be find a better
initiated guide for the labyrinth of modern soul, a more eloquent
psychological expert than Wagner? Modernism speaks its most
familiar language in Wagner: it conceals neither its good nor its
evil, it has lost all its sense of shame. And reversely: when one has
formed a clear notion about what is good and evil in Wagner, one laas
almost determined the value of modernism. -- I understand
perfectly, when a musician says now, "I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand
any other music." I should however also understand a philosopher who
declared, "Wagner summarises modernism. There is no help for it; we
must first be Wagnerians" ...
[5]
I heard yesterday -- will you believe it? -- the masterpiece of
Bizet for the twentieth time. I again held out with meek devotion,
I again succeeded in not running away. This victory over my impatience
surprises me. How such a work perfects one! One becomes a "masterpiece "
one's self by its influence. -- And really, I have appeared to myself,
every time I have heard Carmen, to be more of a philosopher, a
better philosopher than at other times: I have become so patient, so
happy, so Indian, so sedate ..... Five hours sitting: the first
stage of holiness! May I venture to say that Bizet's orchestra music is
almost the sole orchestration I yet endure? That other orchestra
music which is all the rage at present, the Wagnerian orchestration, at
once brutal, artificial, and "innocent" -- thereby speaking to the three
senses of modern soul at the same time, -- how detrimental to me is that
Wagnerian orchestration! I call it the Sirocco.
[6]
An unpleasant sweat breaks out on me. My good time is at an end.
This music seems to me to be perfect. It approaches lightly, nimbly, and with courtesy. It is amiable, it does not produce sweat. "What is good is easy; everything divine runs with light feet:" -- the first proposition of my Æsthetics. This music is wicked, subtle, and fatalistic; it remains popular at the same time, -- it has the subtlety of a race, not of an individual. It is rich. It is precise. It builds, it organises, it completes; it is thus the antithesis to the polypus in music, "infinite melody." Have more painful, tragic accents ever been heard on the stage? And how are they obtained? Without grimace! Without counterfeit coinage! Without the imposture of the grand style! Finally, this music takes the auditor for an intelligent being, even for a musician; here also Bizet is the contrast to Wagner, who, whatever else he was, was certainly the most uncourteous genius in the world. (Wagner takes us just as if --, he says a thing again and again until one despairs, -- until one believes it.)
And once more, I become a better man when this Bizet exhorts me.
Also a better musician, a better auditor. Is it at all possible to listen
better? -- I bury my ears under this music, I hear the very reason
of it. I seem to assist at its production -- I tremble before dangers
which accompany any hazardous
[7]
enterprise, I am enraptured by strokes of good fortune of which Bizet is
innocent. -- And, curiously enough, I don't think of it after all, or I
don't know how much I think of it. For quite other thoughts run
through my mind at the time ... Has it been noticed that music
makes the spirit
This work saves also; Wagner is not the only "Saviour." With
Bizet's work one takes leave of the humid north, and all the steam
of the Wagnerian ideal. Even the dramatic action saves us therefrom. It
has borrowed from Mérimée the logic in passion, the shortest route,
stern necessity. It possesses, above all, what belongs to the warm
cli-
[8]
mate, the dryness of the air, its limpidezza. Here, in all
respects, the climate is altered. Here a different sensuality expresses
itself, a different sensibility, a different gaiety. This music is gay;
but it has not a French or a German gaiety. Its gaiety is African; destiny
hangs over it, its happiness is short, sudden, and without forgiveness.
I envy Bizet for having had the courage for this sensibility, which did
not hitherto find expression in the cultured music of Europe -- this more
southern, more tawny, more scorched sensibility ... How the yellow
afternoons of its happiness benefit us! We contemplate the outlook: did
we ever see the sea smoother? And how tranquilisingly the Moorish
dance appeals to us! How even our insatiability learns for once to be
satiated with its lascivious melancholy! Finally, love, -- love
retranslated again into nature! Not the love of a "cultured
maiden!" No Senta-sentimentality! But love as fate, as fatality,
cynical, innocent, cruel, -- and thus true to nature! Love, which
in its expedients is the war of the sexes, and in its basis their
mortal hatred. -- I know of no case where tragic humour, which
forms the essence of love, has expressed itself so strenuously, has
formulated itself so terribly, as in the last cry of Don Jose, with which
the work concludes:
"Yes! I myself have killed her;
Oh my Carmen! my Carmen adored!"
[9]
-- Such a conception of love (the only one which is worthy of a
philosopher) is rare; it distinguishes a work of art among thousands of
others. For, on an average, artists do like all the world, or worse even
-- they misunderstand love. Wagner also has misunderstood it.
People imagine they are unselfish in love because they seek the advantage
of another being, often in opposition to their own advantage. But for so
doing they want to possess the other being ... Even God himself is
no exception to this rule. He is far ftom thinking, "What need you trouble
about it, if I love you?" -- he becomes a terror, if he is not loved in
return. L'Amour -- with this word one gains one's case with gods
and men -- est de tous les sentiments le plus égoïste, et par
conséquent, lorsqu'il est blessé, le moins généreux (B. Constant).
You already see how much this music improves me? -- Il
faut méditerraniser la musique: I have reasons for using this formula
(Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 255). The return to nature, to health,
to gaiety, to youth, and to virtue! -- And yet I was one of the
most corrupt of the Wagnerians ... I was capable of taking Wagner
seriously ... Ah, this old magician! to what extent has he imposed upon
us! The first thing his art furnishes is a magnifying-glass. We
[10]
look into it, we don't trust our eyes -- everything becomes great, even
Wagner becomes great ... What a wise rattlesnake! All his life he has
rattled before us about "devotion," about "loyalty," about "purity;" with
a panegyric on chastity, he withdrew from the corrupt world! -- And
we have believed him ...
But you do not listen to me? You prefer even the problem of
Wagner to that of Bizet? I don't undervalue it myself, it has its charm.
The problem of salvation is even a venerable problem. There is nothing
which Wagner has meditated on more profoundly than salvation; his opera is
the opera of salvation. Someone always wants to be saved in Wagner's
works; at one time it is some little man, at another time it is some
little woman -- that is his problem. -- And with what opulence he
varies his leading motive! What rare, what profound sallies! Who was it
but Wagner taught us that innocence has a preference for saving
interesting sinners (the case in Tannhäuser)? Or that even the
Wandering Jew will be saved, will become settled, if he marries
(the case in the Flying Dutchman)? Or that corrupt old women prefer
to be saved by chaste youths (the case of Kundry in
Parsifal)? Or that young hysterics like best to be saved by their
doctor (the case in Lohengrin) ? Or that handsome girls like best
to be saved by a cavalier who is a Wagnerian (the case in the
Master-singers) ? Or that even married women
[11]
are willingly saved by a cavalier (the case of Isolde) ? Or that
"the old God," after he has compromised himself morally in every respect,
is finally saved by a freethinker and immoralist (the case in the
Nibelung's Ring)? Admire especially this last profundity! Do you
understand it? I take good care not to understand it ... That other
lessons also may be derived from these works, I would rather prove than
deny. That one can be brought to despair by a Wagnerian ballet --
and to virtue (once more the case of Tannhäuser)! That the
worst consequences may result if one does not go to bed at the right time
(once more the case of Lohengrin). That one should never know too
exactly whom one marries (for the third time the case of
Lohengrin). -- Tristan and Isolde extols the perfect
husband, who on a certain occasion has only one question in his mouth:
"But why have you not told me that sooner? Nothing was simpler than that!"
Answer:
In truth I cannot tell it,
What thou dost ask
Remains for aye unanswered.
Lohengrin contains a solemn proscription of investigation and
questioning. Wagner, accordingly, advocates the Christian doctrine, "Thou
shalt believe, and must believe." It is an offence against
the highest and holiest to be scientific ... The Flying Dutchman
preaches the sublime doctrine that woman makes even the most vagabond
person settle down, or, in Wagnerian
[12]
language, "saves" him. Here we take the liberty to ask a question.
Granted that it is true, would it at the same time be desirable? What
becomes of the "Wandering Jew," adored and settled down by a woman?
He simply ceases to be the eternal wanderer, he marries, and is of no more
interest to us. Translated into actuality: the danger of artists, of
geniuses -- for these are the " Wandering Jews " -- lies in woman:
adoring women are their ruin. Hardly anyone has sufficient
character to resist being corrupted -- being "saved " -- when he finds
himself treated as a god: he forthwith condescends to woman. -- Man
is cowardly before all that is eternally feminine: women know it. -- In
many cases of feminine love (perhaps precisely in the most celebrated
cases), love is only a more refined parasitism, a nestling in a
strange soul, sometimes even in a strange body -- Ah! at what expense
always to "the host" -- !
Goethe's fate in moralic-acid, old-maidenish Germany is known. He
was always a scandal to the Germans; he has had honest admirers only among
Jewesses. Schiller, "noble" Schiller, who blustered round their ears with
high-flown phrases, he was according to their taste. Why did they
reproach Goethe? For the "Mountain of Venus," and because he had composed
Venetian epigrams. Klopstock had already preached to him on morals; there
was a time when Herder had a preference for the word "Priapus,"
[13]
when speaking of Goethe. Even Wilhelm Meister was only regarded as
a symptom of décadence, of "going to the dogs" in morals. The
"menagerie of tame cattle " which it exhibits, and the "meanness" of the
hero, exasperated Niebuhr, for example, who finally breaks out into a
lamentation which Biterolf might have chanted: "Hardly anything can
produce a more painful impression than a great mind despoiling itself of
its wings, and seeking its virtuosity in something far lower, while it
renounces the higher" ... The cultured maiden was however especially
roused: all the little courts -- every sort of "Wartburg" in Germany --
crossed themselves before Goethe, before the "unclean spirit" in Goethe.
-- Wagner has set this history to music. He saves Goethe,
that goes without saying, but he does it in such a way that he adroitly
takes the part of the cultured maiden at the same time. Goethe is saved; a
prayer saves him, a cultured maiden draws him upward ...
What Goethe would have thought of Wagner? Goethe once proposed to
himself the question, "What is the danger which hovers over all
romanticists: the fate of the romanticist?" His answer was, "Suffocation
by chewing moral and religious absurdities over again." In fewer words:
Parsifal -- The philosopher adds an epilogue to that answer.
Holiness -- the last of the higher values perhaps still seen by the
[14]
populace and woman, the horizon of the ideal for all who are naturally
myopic. For philosophers, however, it is like every other horizon, a mere
misapprehension, a sort of door-closing of the region where their world
only commences -- their danger, their ideal, their
desirability ... Expressed more politely: la philosophie ne suffit
pas au grand nombre. Il lui faut la sainteté. --
I further recount the story of the Nibelung's Ring. It
belongs to this place. It is also a story of salvation, only, this time,
it is Wagner himself who is saved. For the half of his life, Wagner has
believed in revolution, as none but a Frenchman has ever believed
in it. He sought for it in the Runic characters of myths, he believed
that he found in Siegfried the typical revolutionist. -- "Whence comes all
the evil in the world?" Wagner asked himself. From "old conventions" he
answered, like every revolutionary ideologist. That means from customs,
laws, morals, and institutions, from all that the old world, old society
rest on. "How does one get rid of the evil in the world? How does one do
away with old society?" Only by declaring war against "conventions"
(traditional usage and morality). That is what Siegfried does.
He commences early with it, very early: his procreation already is a
declaration of war against
[15]
morality -- he comes into the world through adultery and incest ... It is
not the legend, but Wagner who is the inventor of this radical
trait; on this point he has corrected the legend ... Siegfried
continues as he commenced: he follows only the first impulse, he casts
aside all tradition, all reverence, all fear. Whatever displeases
him, he stabs down. He runs irreverently to the attack on the old
Deities. His principal undertaking, however, is for the purpose of
emancipating woman -- "saving Brunnhilde" ... Siegfried and
Brunnhilde; the sacrament of free love: the dawn of the golden age; the
twilight of the Gods of old morality! -- evil is done away with ...
Wagner's vessel ran merrily on this course for a long time. Here,
undoubtedly, Wagner sought his highest goal. -- What happened? A
misfortune. The vessel went on a reef; Wagner was run aground. The reef
was Schopenhauer's philosophy; Wagner was run aground on a
contrary view of things. What had he set to music? Optimism. Wagner
was ashamed. In addition, it was an optimism for which Schopenhauer had
formed a malicious epithet -- infamous optimism. He was once more
ashamed. He thought long over it; his situation seemed desperate ... A
way out of the difficulty finally dawned on his mind. The reef on which he
was wrecked -- how would it be if he interpreted it as the goal,
the ultimate purpose, the real meaning of his voyage? To be
[16]
wrecked here -- that was a goal also. Bene navigavi cum
naufragium feci ... And he translated the Nibelung's Ring into
Schopenhauerism. Everything goes wrong, everything goes to ruin, the new
world is as bad as the old. -- Nothingness, the Indian Circe, makes a sign
... Brunnhilde, who according to the earlier design had to take leave with
a song in honour of free love, solacing the world in anticipation of a
Socialistic Utopia in which "all will be well," has now something else to
do. She has first to study Schopenhauer; she has to put into verse the
fourth book of the "World as Will and Representation." Wagner was
saved ... In all seriousness, that was a salvation. The service
for which Wagner is indebted to Schopenhauer is immense. It was only the
philosopher of décadence who enabled the artist of décadence
to discover himself.
The artist of décadence -- that is the word. And it is here that my seriousness commences. I am not at all inclined to be a quiet spectator, when this décadent ruins our health -- and music along with it. Is Wagner a man at all? Is he not rather a disease? Everything he touches he makes morbid -- he has made music morbid. --
A typical décadent, who feels himself necessary with his corrupt
taste, who claims that it is a higher
[17]
taste, who knows how to make his depravity be regarded as a law, as a
progress, as fulfilment.
And nobody defends himself. Wagner's power of seduction becomes prodigious, the smoke of incense steams around him, the misunderstanding about him calls itself "Gospel" -- it is by no means the poor in spirit exclusively whom he has convinced.
I should like to open the windows a little. Air! More air! --
It does not surprise me that people deceive themselves about Wagner in
Germany. The contrary would surprise me. The Germans have created for
themselves a Wagner whom they can worship; they were never psychologists,
they are grateful by misunderstanding. But that people also deceive
themselves about Wagner in Paris! where people are almost nothing else but
psychologists. And in St. Petersburg! where things are still divined which
are not divined even in Paris. How intimately related to the entire
European décadence must Wagner be, when he is not recognised by it
as a décadent. He belongs to it: he is its Protagonist, its
greatest name ... People honour themselves by exalting him to the skies.
-- For it is already a sign of décadence that no one defends
himself against Wagner. Instinct is weakened. What should be shunned
attracts people. What drives still faster into the abyss is put to the
lips. -- You want an example? One need only
[18]
observe the régime which the anæmic, the gouty, and the diabetic
prescribe for themselves. Definition of the vegetarian: a being who needs
a strengthening diet. To recognise what is hurtful, as hurtful, to be
able to deny one's self what is hurtful, is a sign of youth and
vitality. The exhausted is allured by what is hurtful; the
vegetarian by his pot-herbs. Disease itself may be a stimulus to life:
only, a person must be sound enough for such a stimulus! Wagner increases
exhaustion; it is on that account that he allures the weak and
exhausted. Oh, the rattlesnake joy of the old master, when he always saw
just "the little children" come to him!
I give prominence to this point of view: Wagner's art is morbid.
The problems which he brings upon the stage -- nothing but problems of
hysterics --, the convulsiveness of his emotion, his over-excited
sensibility, his taste, which always asked for stronger stimulants, his
instability, which he disguised as principles, and, not least, the choice
of his heroes and heroines, regarded as physiological types (a gallery of
morbid individuals!): altogether these symptoms represent a picture of
disease about which there can be no mistake. Wagner est une
névrose. Nothing is perhaps better known at present, at any rate
nothing is studied more than the Protean character of degeneracy, which
here crystallises as art and artist. Our physicians and physiologists have
in Wagner
[19]
their most interesting case, at least a very complete case. Just because
nothing is more modern than this entire morbidness, this decrepitude and
over-excitability of the nervous mechanism, Wagner is the modern artist
par excellence, the Cagliostro of modernism. In his art there is
mixed, in the most seductive manner, the things at present most necessary
for everybody -- the three great stimulants of the exhausted,
brutality, artifice, and innocence (idiocy).
Wagner is a great ruin for music. He has divined in music the expedient for exciting fatigued nerves -- he has thus made music morbid. He possesses no small inventive abilitv in the art of pricking up once more the most exhausted, and calling back to life those who are half-dead. He is the master of hypnotic passes, he upsets, like the bulls, the very strongest. The success of Wagner -- his success on the nerves, and consequently on women -- has made all the ambitious musical world disciples of his magical art. And not the ambitious only, the shrewd also ... At present money is only made by morbid music, our great theatres live by Wagner.
I again allow myself a little gaiety. I suppose the case that the
Success of Wagner became embodied, took form, and that, disguised
as a philanthropic
[20]
musical savant, it mixed among young artists. How do you think it would
express itself under the circumstances?
My friends, it would say, let us have five words among ourselves. It is easier to make bad music than good music. What, if, apart from that, it were also more advantageous? more effective, more persuasive, more inspiriting, more sure? more Wagnerian? Pulchrum est paucorum hominum. Bad enough! We understand Latin, we perhaps also understand our advantage. The beautiful has its thorns; we are aware of that. What is the good, then, of beauty? Why not rather the grand, the sublime, the gigantic, that which moves the masses? -- And once more: it is easier to be gigantic than to be beautiful: we are aware of that ...
We know the masses, we know the theatre. The best that sit in it,
German youths, horned Siegfrieds and other Wagnerians, require the
sublime, the profound, the overpowering. Thus much we can accomplish.
And the others that sit in the theatre -- the culture-cretins, the little
blasés, the eternally feminine, the good digesters, in short the
people -- similarly require the sublime, the profound, and the
overpowering. Those have all one kind of logic. "He who upsets us is
strong; he who raises us is divine; he who makes us imaginative is
profound." Let us decide, Messrs. the musicians: let us upset
[21]
them, let us raise them, let us make them imaginative. Thus much we can
accomplish.
As regards the making imaginative, it is here that our conception of "style" has its starting point. Above all, there must be no thought! Nothing is more compromising than a thought! Put the state of mind which precedes thought, the travail of yet unborn thoughts, the promise of future thoughts, the world as it was before God created it -- a recrudescence of chaos ... chaos makes imaginative ...
In the language of the master: infinity, but without melody.
In the second place, as concerns the upsetting, it already belongs in part to physiology. Let us study first of all the instruments. Some of them persuade even the bowels (they open the doors, as Handel says), others charm the spinal marrow. The colour of sound is decisive here; what resounds is almost indifferent. Let us refine on this point! What is the use of wasting ourselves on other matters? Let us be characteristic in sound, even to foolishness! It is attributed to our genius when we give much to conjecture in our sounds! Let us irritate the nerves, let us strike them dead, let us make use of lightning and thunder, -- that upsets ...
Above all, however, passion upsets. -- Let there be no
misunderstanding among us with regard to passion. Nothing is less
expensive than passion. One
[22]
can dispense with all the virtues of counterpoint, one need not have
learned anything, -- one can always use passion. Beauty is difficult: let
us guard ourselves against beauty! ... And melody still more!
Let us disparage, my friends, let us disparage, if we are serious about
the ideal, let us disparage melody! Nothing is more dangerous than a fine
melody! Nothing more certainly ruins the taste. We are lost, my friends,
if fine melodies are again loved!
Principle: Melody is immoral. Proof: Palestrina. Application: Parsifal. The want of melody even sanctifies ...
And this is the definition of passion. Passion -- or the gymnastics of the loathsome on the rope of enharmonics. -- Let us dare, my friends, to be loathsome! Wagner has dared it! Let us splash before us, undismayed, the mire of the most odious harmonies! Let us not spare our hands! It is thus only that we become natural ...
A last counsel! Perhaps it embraces all in one: -- Let us be
idealists! If this is not the most expedient thing we can do, it is at
least the wisest. In order to raise men, we ourselves must be exalted.
Let us walk above the clouds, let us harangue the infinite, let us
surround ourselves with grand symbols! Sursum! Bumbum! -- there is
no better counsel. Let "fulness of heart" be our argument; let "fine
feeling" be our advocate. Virtue still wins the case against
[23]
counterpoint. "He who makes us better -- how could it be that he was not
good himself?" such has always been the conclusion of mankind. Let us
therefore make mankind better -- one thereby becomes good (one thereby
becomes "classic" even : Schiller became a "classic"). Seeking after
ignoble sense-excitement, after so-called beauty, has enervated the
Italians: let us remain German! Even Mozart's relation to music -- Wagner
has told us by way of consolation! -- was frivolous after all ...
Let us never admit that music "serves for recreation," that it "cheers
up," that it "furnishes enjoyment." Let us never furnish enjoyment!
-- we are lost, if people again think of art as hedonistic ... That
belongs to the bad eighteenth century ... On the other hand, nothing might
be more advisable (we say it apart) than a dose of -- hypocrisy, sit
venia verbo. That gives dignity. -- And let us choose the hour when it
is suitable to look black, to sigh publicly, to sigh in a Christian
manner, to exhibit large Christian sympathy. "Man is depraved: who will
save him? What will save him?" Let us not answer. Let us be
careful. Let us struggle against our ambition, which would like to found
religions. But nobody must venture to doubt that we save him, that
our music alone brings salvation ... (Wagner's Essay, "Religion and
Art").
[24]
Enough! Enough! I fear sinister reality will have been too
plainly recognised under my cheerful lines -- the picture of a decline in
art, of a decline also in the artists. The latter, a decline of character,
would perhaps receive a provisory expression with this formula: the
musician is now becoming a stage player, his art is developing more and
more into a talent for lying. I shall have an opportunity (in a
chapter of my principal work, which bears the title, "A Physiology of
Art") of showing in detail how this total transformation of art into
stage-playing is just as definite an expression of physiological
degeneration (more exactly, a form of hysterics) as any of the corruptions
and weaknesses of the art inaugurated by Wagner; for example, the
restlessness of its optics, which necessitates continual changing of
posture before it. One understands nothing of Wagner so long as one only
sees in him a sport of nature, a caprice, a whim, or an accident. He was
no "defective," "abortive," or "contradictory," genius as has occasionally
been said. Wagner was something complete, a typical
décadent, in whom all "free will" was lacking, all whose
characteristics were determined by necessity. If anything is interesting
in Wagner, it is the logic with which a physiological trouble, as practice
and procedure, as innovation in principles and crisis in
[25]
taste, advances step by step, from conclusion to conclusion.
I confine myself this time solely to the question of style. -- What is the characteristic of all literary décadence? It is that the life no longer resides in the whole. The word gets the upper hand and jumps out of the sentence, the sentence stretches too far and obscures the meaning of the page, the page acquires life at the expense of the whole -- the whole is no longer a whole. But that is the simile for every style of décadence: always anarchy of the atoms, disgregation of will, in the language of morality, "liberty of the individual," -- widened to a political theory, "equal rights for all." Life, equal vitality, vibration and exuberance of life pushed back into the most minute structures, the others poor in life. Everywhere paralysis, distress, and torpor, or hostility and chaos, always becoming more striking, as one ascends to ever higher forms of organisation. The whole has ceased to live altogether; it is composite, summed up, artificial, an unnatural product.
There is hallucination at the commencement in Wagner -- not of
tones, but of gestures; for these he seeks the appropriate semeiotic
tones. If vou want to admire him, see him at work here: how he separates,
how he arrives at little unities, how he animates them, inflates them, and
renders them visible. But by so doing his power exhausts itself: the rest
[26]
is worth nothing. How pitiable, how confused, how laic is his mode of
"developing," his attempt to pierce at least into one another, things
which have not grown out of one another! His manner here reminds one of
the Frères de Goncourt, whose style approaches Wagner's in other
respects also. A sort of pity is aroused for so much trouble. That
Wagner has masked under the guise of a principle his incapacity for
creating organically, that he asserts a "dramatic style" where we assert
merely his incapacity for any style, corresponds to an audacious habit
which has accompanied Wagner all his life: he posits a principle where he
lacks a faculty (very different in this respect, let us say in passing,
from old Kant, who loved another kind of audacity: whenever he
lacked a principle, he posited a "faculty" in human beings ...). Once more
let it be said that Wagner is only worthy of admiration and love in the
invention of minutiæ, in the elaboration of details; -- here we
have every right to proclaim him as a master of the first rank, as our
greatest miniaturist in music, who compresses into the smallest
space an infinitude of meaning and sweetness. His wealth of colours, of
demi-tints, of the mysteries of vanishing light, spoils us to such a
degree that almost all other musicians seem too robust afterwards. -- If
you will believe me, the highest conception of Wagner is not to be got
from what at present pleases in his works. That has been in-
[27]
vented to persuade the masses; one of our class bounds back in presence of
it, as before an all too impudent fresco. What do we care for the
agaçante brutality of the Overture of Tannhäuser? or for
the Circus of the Walkyrie? Whatever has become popular in
Wagner's music apart from the theatre is of a doubtful flavour and spoils
the taste. The Tannhäuser March seems to me to raise a suspicion of
Philistinism; the Overture of the Flying Dutchman is much ado about
nothing; the Prelude to Lohengrin gave the first cxample, only too
insidious, only too successful, of how one may hypnotise with music (I
dislike all music that has no higher ambition than to persuade the
nerves). Apart, however, from Wagner the magnetiser and fresco-painter,
there is yet a Wagner who deposits little jewels in his works, our
greatest melancholist in music, full of flashes, delicacies, and words of
comfort in which no one has anticipated him, the master of the tones of a
melancholy and comatose happiness ... A lexicon of the most familiar
language of Wagner, nothing but short phrases of from five to fifteen
measures, nothing but music which nobody knows ... Wagner had the
virtue of the décadents, pity ...
-- "Very good! But how can one lose one's taste for this
décadent, if one is not perchance a musician,
[28]
if one is not perchance a décadent one's self?" -- Reversely! How
is it we can't do it? Just attempt it! You are not aware who Wagner
is; he is quite a great stage-player! Does there at all exist a more
profound, a more oppressive effect in the theatre? Do look at these
youths -- benumbed, pale, and breathless! They are Wagnerians, they
understand nothing of music -- and nevertheless Wagner becomes master over
them ... Wagner's art presses with the weight of a hundred atmospheres:
bow yourselves just, it is unavoidable ... Wagner the stage-player is a
tyrant, his pathos overthrows every kind of taste, every kind of
resistance. -- Who has such convincing power of attitude, who sees the
attitude so definitely before everything else? This holding the breath of
Wagnerian pathos, this unwillingness to let an extreme feeling escape,
this dread-inspiring duration of conditions where momentary
suspense is enough to choke one! --
Was Wagner a musician at all? At least he was something else in a
higher degree, namely, an incomparable histrio, the greatest
mime, the most astonishing theatrical genius that the Germans have had,
our scenic artist par excellence. His place is elsewhere than in
the history of music, with the grand true geniuses of which he must not be
confounded. Wagner and Beethoven -- that is a blasphemy -- and in
the end an injustice even to Wagner ... He was
[29]
also as a musician only that which he was in other respects: he
became a musician, he became a poet, because the tyrant in
him, his stage-player genius compelled him to it. One finds out nothing
about Wagner as long as one has not found out his dominating instinct.
Wagner was not a musician by instinct. He proved this himself by abandoning all lawfulness, and -- to speak more definitely -- all style in music, in order to make out of it what he required, a theatrical rhetoric, a means for expression, for strengthening attitudes, for suggestion, for the psychologically picturesque. Wagner might here pass for an inventor and an innovator of the first rank -- he has immeasurably increased the speaking power of music; he is the Victor Hugo of music as language. Provided always one grants that music may, under certain conditions, not be music, but speech, tool, or ancilla dramaturgica. Wagner's music, not taken under protection by theatrical taste, a very tolerant taste, is simply bad music, perhaps the worst that has ever been made. When a musician can no longer count three, he becomes "dramatic," he becomes "Wagnerian" ...
Wagner has almost discovered what magic can be wrought with a
music decomposed and reduced, as it were, to the elementary. His
consciousness of it goes so far as to be disquieting, like his instinct
for finding
[30]
a higher lawfulness and a style unnecessary. The elementary
suffices -- sound, movement, colour, in short, the sensuality of
music. Wagner never calculates as a musician from any kind of musical
conscience; he wants effect, he wants nothing but effect. And he knows
that on which he has to operate! He has, in this respect, the
unscrupulousness which Schiller possessed, which every one possesses who
is connected with the stage; he has also Schiller's contempt for the
world, which has to sit at his feet. A person is a stage-player in virtue
of having a certain discernment in advance of other men, viz., that what
has to operate as true must not be true at all. The proposition has been
formulated by Talma: it contains the entire psychology of the
stage-player, it contains -- let us not doubt it -- his morality also.
Wagner's music is never true.
-- But it is taken as true, and so it is all right. --
As long as people continue childish, and Wagnerian in addition,
they think of Wagner even as rich, as a paragon of lavishness, as a great
landed proprietor in the empire of sound. They admire in him what young
French people admire in Victor Hugo, the "royal generosity." Later on
people admire both of them for the very reverse reasons: as masters and
models of economy, as prudent amphitryons. Nobody equals them in
the ability to present an apparently princely table at a modest cost. --
The Wagnerian, with his
[31]
devout stomach, becomes satiated even with the fare which his master
conjures up for him. We others, however, who, alike in books and in
music, want substance more than anything else, and for whom merely
"represented" feasts hardly suffice, we are much worse off. Speaking
plainly, Wagner does not give us enough to chew. His recitativo --
little meat, somewhat more bone, and very much sauce -- has been
christened by me "Alla genovese;" wherewith I certainly do not mean
to flatter the Genoese, but rather the older recitativo, the
recitativo secco. As for the Wagnerian "leading motive," I lack
all culinary intelligence for it. If I were pressed, I would perhaps
assign to it the value of an ideal toothpick, as an occasion for
dispensing with the rest of the food. The "arias" of Wagner are
still left. -- And now I do not say a word more.
In sketching dramatic action, likewise, Wagner is above all a
stage-player. That which first suggests itself to him is a scene with an
absolutely sure effect, a veritable actio(1), with a
haut-relief of gesture, a scene
[32]
which upsets; -- he thinks this out thoroughly, it is only out of
this that he derives his characters. All the rest follows therefrom in
accordance with a technical economy which has no reasons to be subtle. It
is not the public of Corneille Wagner has to indulge; it is merely the
nineteenth century. Wagner would decide with regard to the "one thing
needful" in much the same manner as every other stage-player decides
now-a-days: a series of strong scenes, each stronger than the other, --
and much sage stupidity in between. He seeks first of all to
guarantee to himself the effect of his work; he begins with the third act,
he tests for himself his work by its finai effect. With such a
theatrical talent for guide, one is in no danger of creating a drama
unawares. A drama requires hard logic: but what did Wagner ever
care about logic! Let us repeat: it was not the public of
Corneille he had to indulge, it was mere Germans! One knows the technical
problem in solving which the dramatist applies all his power and often
sweats blood: to give necessity to the plot, and likewise to the
dénouement, so that both are possible only in one way, so that both
give the impression of freedom (principle of the least expenditure of
force). Now
[33]
Wagner sweats the least blood here; it is certain that he makes the least
expenditure of force on plot and dénouement. You may put any one
of Wagner's "plots" under the microscope ; -- I promise you will have to
laugh at what you see. Nothing more enlivening than the plot of
Tristan, unless it be that of the Master-singers. Wagner is
not a dramatist; let us not be imposed upon! He loved the word
"drama;" that was all -- he always loved fancy words. The word "drama,"
in his writings, is nevertheless purely a misunderstanding (and
shrewd policy: Wagner always affected superiority toward the word
"opera"), much in the same manner as the word "spirit" in the New
Testament is purely a misunderstanding. -- From the first, he was not
enough of a psychologist for the drama; be avoided instinctively
psychological motivation. By what means? By always putting idiosyncrasy
in its place ... Very modern, is it not? very Parisian! very
décadent! ... The plots, let us say in passing, which Wagner
really knows how to work out by means of dramatic invention, are of quite
another kind. I give an example. Let us take the case of Wagner requiring
a woman's voice. An entire act without a woman's voice -- that does
not do! But for the moment none of the "heroines" are free. What does
Wagner do! He emancipates the oldest woman in the world, Erda. "Up! old
grandmother! You have got to sing!" Erda sings. Wagner's purpose is
served.
[34]
He immediately discharges the old dame again. "Why really did you come?
Retire! Please go to sleep again!" -- In summa: a scene full of
mythological horrors, which makes the Wagnerians imaginative ...
-- "But the contents of the Wagnerian texts! their mythical
contents, their eternal contents!" -- Question: How does one test these
contents, these eternal contents! The chemist gives the reply: one
translates Wagner into the real, into the modern -- let us be still more
cruel, -- into civil life! What then becomes of Wagner! To speak in
confidence, I have attempted it. Nothing more entertaining, nothing more
recommendable for pleasure walks, than to recount Wagner to one's self in
more modern proportions: for example, Parsifal as a
candidate in divinity, with a public school education (the latter
indispensable for pure folly(2)). What surprises one then
experiences! Would you believe it that the Wagnerian heroines, each and
all, when one has only stripped them of their heroic trappings, are like
counterparts of Madame Bovary! -- And how one comprehends,
inversely, that Flaubert was at liberty to translate his heroine
into Scandinavian, or Carthaginian, and then to offer her, mythologised,
to Wagner as a libretto. Yes, taken as a whole, Wagner appears to have
had no interest in any other problems than those which at present interest
[35]
petty Parisian décadents. Always just five steps from the hospital!
Nothing hut quite modern problems, nothing but problems of a great
city! don't you doubt it! ... Have you remarked (it belongs to this
association of ideas) that the Wagnerian heroines have no children? They
cannot have children ... The despair with which Wagner has dealt
with the problem of permitting Siegfried to be born at all, reveals
how modern his sentiments were on this point. -- Siegfried
"emancipates woman" -- but without hope of posterity. -- Finally, a fact
which perplexes us: Parsifal is the father of Lohengrin! How has he done
that? -- Have we here to recollect that "chastity works miracles?"
...
Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas.
A word yet, in passing, concerning Wagner's writings: they are among other things, a school of expediency. The system of procedure which Wagner uses, is to be employed in a hundred other cases, -- he that hath an ear, let him hear. Perhaps I shall have a claim to public gratitude, if I give precise expression to his three most valuable principles of procedure: --
Whatever Wagner cannot accomplish is objectionable.
Wagner might accomplish much more, but he is unwilling -- owing to strictness of principle.
[36]
Whatever Wagner can accomplish, no one will imitate, no one has anticipated, no one ought to imitate ... Wagner is divine ...
These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner's writings: the rest is -- "literature."
-- Not all the music up till now has had need of literature: one
does well here to seek for a satisfactory reason. Is it that Wagner's
music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear the contrary, that
it would he understood too easily, that it would not be difficult
enough to understand? -- In fact, he has all his life repeated one
phrase: that his music does not simply mean music! But more! Infinitely
more! ... "Not simply music" -- no musician speaks in such a
manner! Let it be said once more, Wagner was unable to cut out of the
block; he had no choice at all, he was obliged to make patch-work --
"motives," attitudes, formulæ, reduplications, centuplications; as a
musician he remained a rhetorician: -- on that account he was
compelled as a matter of principle to bring the device, "It implies,"
into the foreground. "Music is always just a means;" that was his theory,
that was the only praxis at all possible for him. But no musician
thinks in such a way. -- Wagner had need of literature in order to
persuade all the world to take his music seriously, to take it as
profound, "because it meant Infinity;" all his life he was the
commentator of the "Idea." -- What does Elsa signify? There is
[37]
no doubt however: Elsa is "the unconscious spirit of the people"
("with this idea I necessarily developed into a complete
revolutionist"(3)).
Let us recollect that Wagner was young when Hegel and Schelling led men's minds astray; that he found out, that he grasped firmly what only a German takes seriously -- "the Idea," that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, mysterious; that among Germans clearness is an objection, and logic is disproof. Schopenhauer has, with severity, accused the epoch of Hegel and Schelling of dishonesty -- with severity, and also with injustice: he himself, the old pessimistic false-coiner, has in no way acted "more honestly" than his more celebrated contemporaries. Let us leave morality out of the game: Hegel is a flavour ... And not only a German, but a European flavour! -- A flavour which Wagner understood! -- which he felt himself equal to! -- which he has immortalised! -- He merely made application of it to music -- he invented for himself a style which "meant Infinity" -- he hecame the heir of Hegel ... Music as "Idea" --
And how Wagner was understood! The same sort of men who were enthusiastic
for Hegel, are at present enthusiastic for Wagner: in his school Hegelian
is even written! -- Above all, the German youth understood him. The
two words, "infinite" and "signi-
[38]
ficance" quite sufficed: he enjoyed an incomparable pleasure in hearing
them. It is not with music that Wagner has won the youth over to
himself, it is with the "Idea" -- it is the mysteriousness of his art, its
game of hide-and-seek among a hundred symbols, its polychromy of the
ideal, which has led and allured these youths to Wagner! it is Wagner's
genius for forming clouds, his gripping, sweeping and roving through the
air, his ubiquity and nullibiety -- precisely the same proceedings with
which once Hegel misled and seduced the youths! In the midst of Wagner's
multiplicity, fulness, and arbitrariness, they are justified, as it were,
in their own eyes -- they are "saved." -- They hear with trembling how in
his art the sublime symbols become audible with gentle thunder out
of the cloudy distance; they are not out of temper if the atmosphere here
sometimes becomes grey, frightful, and cold. For they are each and all
related to bad weather, German weather, like Wagner himself! Woden is
their God: Woden, however, is the God of bad weather ... They are right,
these German youths, such as they are: how could they miss in Wagner what
we others, we Halcyonians, miss in him: -- la gaya scienza;
light feet; wit, fire, grace, lofty logic; the dance of the stars, haughty
intellectuality; the tremor of southern light; the smooth sea --
perfection ...
[39]
-- I have explained where Wagner belongs to -- not to the
history of music. Nevertheless, what is his import for the history of
music? The advent of the stage-player in music: a momentous event,
which gives occasion to reflect, perhaps also to fear. In a formula,
"Wagner and Liszt." -- Never has the uprightness of musicians, their
"genuineness," been put to such a dangerous test. It is easily enough
understood: great success, the success with the masses, is no longer on
the side of genuineness, -- one has to be a stage-player in order to
obtain it! -- Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner -- they imply one and the
same truth, that in declining civilisations, wherever the arbitrating
power falls into the hands of the masses, genuineness becomes superfluous,
disadvantageous, and a drawback. It is only the stage-player that still
awakens great enthusiasm. -- Thus dawns the golden age for
the stage-player -- for him and all that is related to his species. Wagner
marches with drums and fifes at the head of all the artists of elocution,
of display, of virtuosity; he has first convinced the leaders of the
orchestras, the machinists, and theatrical singers. Not to forget the
musicians of the orchestra -- he "saved" them from tedium ... The
movement which Wagner created encroaches even on the domain of knowledge;
entire sciences belonging thereto emerge slowly out of a scholasticism
which
[40]
is centuries old. To give an example, I call special attention to the
service which Riemann has rendered to rhythmics; he is the first
who has made current the essential idea of punctuation in music (it is a
pity that by means of an ugly word he calls it "phrasing"). All these, I
say it with gratitude, are the best, the most worthy of regard, among the
worshippers of Wagner -- they are simply right to worship Wagner. The
same instinct unites them with one another, they see in him their highest
type, they feel themselves transformed and elevated to power, even to
great power, ever since he inflamed them with his peculiar ardour. Here
indeed, if anywhere, the influence of Wagner has really been
beneficent. In this sphere, there has never been so much thought,
so much purpose, so much work. Wagner has inspired all these artists with
a new conscience : what they at present require of themselves, what they
obtain from themselves, they have never required before Wagner's
time -- formerly they were too modest for that. A different spirit rules
in the theatre since the spirit of Wagner began to rule there: the most
difficult is demanded, there is severe blaming, there is rarely praising,
-- the good, the excellent, is regarded as the rule. Taste is no longer
necessary; not even voice. Wagner is only sung with a ruined voice: that
has a "dramatic" effect. Even talent is exduded. The espressivo at
any price, such as is demanded by the
[41]
Wagnerian ideal, the décadence ideal, gets along badly with talent.
Virtue only is the proper thing here -- that is to say, drilling,
automatism, "self-denial." Neither taste, nor voice, nor talent: there is
only one thing needful for Wagner's stage -- Germanics! ...
Definition of Germanics: obedience and long legs ... It is full of deep
significance that the advent of Wagner coincides with the advent of the
"Empire;" both facts furnish proof of one and the same thing -- obedience
and long legs. -- There has never been better obedience; there has never
been better commanding. The Wagnerian musical directors, in particular,
are worthy of an age which posterity will one day designate with timorous
reverence, the classica1 age of war. Wagner understood how to
command; by that means he was the great teacher also. He commanded as the
inexorable will to himself, as the life-long discipline of himself:
Wagner, who perhaps furnishes the most striking example of self-tyranny
which the history of art supplies (even Alfieri, otherwise most nearly
related to him, has been surpassed. -- Remark of a Turinese).
That the theatre may not become the master of art.
That the stage-player may not become the corrupter of the genuine ones.
That music may not become an art of lying.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
(2) Nietzscbe here refers to the etymology of Parsifal (pure fool) which Wagner adopted.
(3) Quotations from Wagner.