/lit/ - Literature

>>23378740
Wagner's On State and Religion. Nietzsche referred to it as brilliant and beautifully written.

>The embodied voucher for this fundamental law is the Monarch. In no State is there a weightier law than that which centres its stability in the supreme hereditary power of one particular family, unconnected and un-commingling with any other lineage in that State. Never yet has there been a Constitution in which, after the downfall of such families and abrogation of the Kingly power, some substitution or periphrasis has not necessarily, and for the most part necessitously, reconstructed a power of similar kind. It therefore is established as the most essential principle of the State; and as in it resides the warrant of stability, so in the person of the King the State attains its true ideal.

http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/91/27.pdf

>>23284249
Read Wagner's essays on Shakespeare. Begin with German Art and German Politics, then Beethoven, The Destiny of Opera and finally Actors and Singers. If you simply want a quick read then start with The Destiny of Opera. Wagner understood Shakespeare better than any other author. It is only from grasping the fundamental principles which metaphysical foreordain Shakespeare's art that you can understand what makes any individual play so great.

>In the antique Orchestra, almost completely surrounded by the amphitheatre, the tragic Chorus stood as in the public's heart: its songs and dances, instrumentally accompanied, rapt the nation of spectators to a state of clairvoyance in which the hero, now appearing in his mask upon the stage, had all the import of a ghostly vision. Now, if we think of Shakespeare's stage as pitched within the Orchestra itself, we at once perceive what an uncommon power of illusion must have been expected of the mime, if he was to bring the drama to convincing life under the spectator's very eyes. To this stage transplanted to the orchestra our modern proscenium bears the relation of that theatrum in theatro of which Shakespeare makes repeated use, presenting the performers of his actual drama with a second piece performed upon that doubly fictive stage by players playing at being players. I fancy this feature proves an almost concious knowledge, on the poet's part, of the original ideality of those scenic conventions which he here employs according to their traditional misunderstanding and abuse. His Chorus had become the drama itself, and moved in the Orchestra with so realistic a naturalism that it well might end by feeling itself the audience, and expressing in that capacity its approval or disapproval of, or even but its interest in, a second stage-play acted to it. Highly characteristic, too, is the light in which this poet sets this second play: the "Murder of Gonzago" in Hamlet shews us the whole rhetorical-pathos of Academic Tragedy, to whose actors the poet gets sent from the orchestral main-stage itself the cry to "leave their damnable faces."

His writings have had an enormous influence on Western art and thought, from Baudelaire to Nietzsche, Mallarme, Weininger, Joyce, Schmitt, Heidegger, Adorno, Lévi-Strauss etc.

>I know of no writing on the arts that sheds so much light on the subject as Wagner’s. Whatever can be learned about the genesis of a work of art is to be found here. It is one of the very greatest of minds that we encounter in these pages, and over the years he has been constantly refining his theories, stating his views with ever greater freedom and clarity.
- Nietzsche

Recommended reading order is to start with The Music of the Future, written by Wagner as an introduction to his ideas for the French public, then the three 'big' writings from his late period, German Art and German Politics, Beethoven and Actors and Singers. With a small lecture entitled The Destiny of Opera as an essential preliminary reading before Actors and Singers. These are the ultimate maturation of his ideas and do much to clarify and build upon the most important writings of his life, as named by himself, Art and Revolution, The Artwork of the Future and Opera and Drama. In these latter, and for the first time, he unhesitatingly stepped into his own direction as artist and thinker. Everything he had written prior on art had only been leading up to them, very gradually. Now suddenly, through a mixture of a renewed study of Greek culture and German philosophy, his ideas exploded onto paper. Though rash and confusing at points, they are the centre of his thought and should be read in exegesis with the named later works. Their revolutionary import for our civilization, from a highly reactionary perspective, has never been lost. Other writings, of a secondary importance, include Judaism in Music, Some Explanations Concerning "Judaism in Music", A Communication to my Friends, What is German?, On Conducting, On Poetry and Composition, On Operatic Poetry and Composition, On the Application of Music to the Drama, Against Vivisection, Religion and Art and Know Thyself.

His writings have had an enormous influence on Western art and thought, from Baudelaire to Nietzsche, Mallarme, Weininger, Joyce, Schmitt, Heidegger, Adorno, Lévi-Strauss etc.

>I know of no writing on the arts that sheds so much light on the subject as Wagner’s. Whatever can be learned about the genesis of a work of art is to be found here. It is one of the very greatest of minds that we encounter in these pages, and over the years he has been constantly refining his theories, stating his views with ever greater freedom and clarity.
- Nietzsche

Recommended reading order is to start with The Music of the Future, written by Wagner as an introduction to his ideas, then the three 'big' writings from his late period, German Art and German Politics, Beethoven and Actors and Singers. And before Actors and Singers a small but essential lecture entitled The Destiny of Opera. These are the ultimate expression of his ideas and do much to clarify and build upon what are his three most important writings, as named by himself, Art and Revolution, The Artwork of the Future and Opera and Drama. They were the first time Wagner unhesitatingly stepped into his own direction. Though Rash and confusing at points, they are the centre of his thought and should be read in exegesis with the named later works. Other writings, of a secondary importance, include Judaism in Music, Some Explanations Concerning "Judaism in Music", A Communication to my Friends, What is German?, On Conducting, On Poetry and Composition, On Operatic Poetry and Composition, On the Application of Music to the Drama, Against Vivisection, Religion and Art and Know Thyself.

>>22510994
Wagner writes about it quite often, and with a far more acute eye than Spengler. Kultur as the immediate instantiation of nature. Modern civilisation (with Paris as the chief representation in the 19th century) is a construction of arbitrary fashion, technological relations and capitalist production. This is what the Ring is about, the death of Western civilisation over a snuffed out kultur.

>French Civilisation arose without the people, German Art without the princes; the first could arrive at no depth of spirit because it merely laid a garment on the nation, but never thrust into its heart; the second has fallen short of power and patrician finish because it could not reach as yet the courts of princes, not open yet the hearts of rulers to the German Spirit.
- German Art and German Politics

>When I remark that it seems to me that the Germans were never made to form a state, which always contains an element of sterility, he says, “Yes, it is an Assyrian-Semitic idea; we Germans were made to form small, industrious communities like the Boers; the French, on the other hand, for monarchy.”
- Cosima's diaries

>>22505952
>>22506044
>>22506096
All just watered-down Wagner.

>>22505717
>Our public spirit is prey to a heartless weighing of For and Against; we lack all inner Must. And quite in opposition to Lessing's most humane, but not over "wise" Nathan, the veritable sage perceives the only truth in Man must must
>What phases of development are appointed for the German nation, it is difficult to say; under the alleged dominion of Free-will much appears to be spoilt in it. For instance, whoever attends our present free discussions of Protective Duties will find it hard of comprehension how anything inherently essential to the nation can be the upshot: one free-willed man [Bismarck], at the head of a Chamber of Deputies elected by a free-willed people, will do what he thinks fit, just as a few years back he did the seeming profitable opposite. On the other hand what must be will shew itself when everybody must-s for once; though, to be sure, it then will appear as an outward obligation, whereas the inner Must can only dawn on a very great mind and sympathetically productive heart, such as our world brings forth no longer. Under the spur of this fully conscious inner Must, a man so equipped would gain a power no so-called Free-will—no choice of Free-trade or Protection, let us say—could possibly withstand. This, however, is the wondrous plight into which the German Folk has fallen: whilst the Frenchman and the Englishman know quite by instinct what they will, the German doesn't, and lets himself be managed as "one" wills.

>Beside the polish of these latinised nations of Europe, and suffering under the un-German-ness of all his higher social system (Lebensverfassung), is the German already tottering to his fall; or dwells there in him still a faculty of infinite importance for the redemption of Nature, but therefore only cultivable by endless patience, and ripening toward full consciousness amid most wearisome delays—a faculty whose full development might recompense a new and broader world for the fall of this old world that overshadows us to-day?

>>22500342
Opera and Drama (only the political section)
On State and Religion
German Art and German Politics
Know Thyself

Opera and Drama is Wagner's major work in aesthetics and on that path is led to a discussion of politics and political destiny, though written during Wagner's revolutionary years it contains the essence of all his future thought, to be interpreted and reinterpreted throughout his life. In spirit the artwork that corresponds to it is his Ring tetralogy. In On State and Religion Wagner turns conservative under the influence of Schopenhauer and defends the principle of the monarch as the most ideal embodiment of the executive authority necessary in every state and that stands as a 'warrant of stability'. It is tangentially related to his revolutionary ideas in its pessimistic survey of political history, and Carl Schmitt wrote two essays on its concept of 'wahn' for the Bayreuther Blatter. Another conservative work, German Art and German Politics is more extensive and optimistic, seeking the solution to modern politics, as well as the beneficent to artistic culture, in the traditions of German history. Wagner gave artistic expression to this conservatism in Meistersinger. Know Thyself belongs to Wagner's late period of intense religiosity and, apparently too old to now sugar-coat his ideas, openly revives his earlier critique of property and the state but in an idealist and racialist context. Its analysis of politics will offer something interesting to anyone, if not its metaphysical solution. Parsifal is the artwork of this period.

>>22148907
>Just as in Hugo there is a blatant misunderstanding of Shakespeare, so in Berlioz there is a misunderstanding of Beethoven; here and there the main object is a garish highlighting of detail. French poetry is blown-up prose.

>When we were talking about Hebbel’s Nibelungen yesterday, R. said: “V[ictor] Hugo is the father of all these German plays; even in the most horrible situations people still indulge in polished speech. And how dull are all the gruesome happenings! Shakespeare summons everything to his aid, storm winds, the song of a fool, the sight of a dagger, etc., but here it is all set in front of one so flat and naked.”

>I do not know what led us to purely human factors; R. said Goethe had also tried—in Tasso, for example—to dissociate his characters from historical costume, whereas a similar sort of Venetian play by Hugo is stuffed full of historical local color.

>Never for an instant does the [German] poet cease to strut as world sage and get himself displayed as such by his comedians, into whose mouth he drops the deepest-going comments on the action in its very thick. But the resulting compound is further planned to create the utmost theatrical Effect, and for this one loses sight of nothing the latest French school, with Victor Hugo in particular, has introduced upon the stage. There was some sense in the revolutionary Frenchman, in full revolt against the maxims of the Académie and classic Tragédie, deliberately dragging into vivid daylight everything they had tabooed; and though it led to a baleful eccentricity in both the construction and the wording of pieces, it was at once an act of vengeance most instructive for the history of our culture and a not uninteresting spectacle, since the Frenchman's indisputable talent for the theatre came out in even this. But what figure do Victor Hugo's "Burgraves" cut, for instance, when transposed into the German Nibelungenlied? So fatuous a one, that we may readily excuse the poet's and the actor's inclination to self-ridicule.

>>21315194
>In joy and gladness to bear the thing conceived, this is the deed of Woman,—and to work deeds the woman only needs to be entirely what she is, but in no way to will something: for she can will but one thing—to be a woman! To man, therefore, woman is the ever clear and cognisable measure of natural infallibility, (Untrüglichkeit), for she is at her perfectest when she never quits the sphere of beautiful Instinctiveness (Unwillkürlichkeit).

>>21033896
Yes.

>Clever though be the many thoughts expressed by mouth or pen about the invention of money and its enormous value as a civiliser, against such praises should be set the curse to which it has always been doomed in song and legend. If gold here figures as the demon strangling manhood's innocence, our greatest poet shews at last the goblin's game of paper money. The Nibelung's fateful ring become a pocket-book, might well complete the eerie picture of the spectral world-controller. By the advocates of our Progressive Civilisation this rulership is indeed regarded as a spiritual, nay, a moral power; for vanished Faith is now replaced by "Credit," that fiction of our mutual honesty kept upright by the most elaborate safeguards against loss and trickery. What comes to pass beneath the benedictions of this Credit, we now are witnessing, and seem inclined to lay all blame upon the Jews.

>>20851634
I'll go first.

>>20839868
Richard Wagner, the og antisemite.

>>20814779
>Whilst Goethe and Schiller had shed the German spirit on the world, without so much as talking of the "German" spirit, these Democratic speculators fill every book- and print-shop, every so-called "Volks-," i.e. joint-stock theatre, with vulgar, utterly vapid dummies, forever plastered with the puff of "deutsch," and "deutsch" again, to decoy the easygoing crowd. And really we have got so far, that we presently shall see the German Folk quite turned to gabies by it: the national propensity to sloth and phlegma is being lured into fantastic satisfaction with itself; already the German people is taking a large part, itself, in the playing of the shameful comedy; and not without a shudder can the thoughtful German spirit look upon those foolish festive gatherings, with their theatrical processions, their silly speeches, and the cheerless empty songs wherewith one tries to make the German Folk imagine it is something special and does not need to first endeavour to become it.