/lit/ - Literature

>has sufficient content in every act to make a single play
>decides to make it five hours long instead

>>19808483
literature + music

>The very difficulty of thus applying Beethovenian Music to the Shakespearian Drama might lead, when conquered, to the utmost perfecting of musical Form, through its final liberation from each remaining fetter. What still distressed our great German poets in regard of Opera, and what still left its manifest traces on Beethoven's instrumental music, that scaffolding which in nowise rested on the essence of Music, but rather on that selfsame tendence which planned the operatic aria and the ballet−tune, this conventional four−square structure, so wondrously wreathed already with the luxuriant life of Beethovenian melody, would vanish quite away before an ideal ordering of highest freedom; so that Music now would take the ineffably vital shape of a Shakespearian drama, and its sublime irregularity, compared with the antique drama, would wellnigh give it the appearance of a nature−scene as against a work of architecture, a scene whose skilful measurement would be evinced by nothing but the unfailing sureness of the artwork's effect. And in this would lie withal the untold newness of this artwork as form: a form ideal alike and natural, and thus conceivable in no modern, racial language save the German, the most developed of them all; a form, on the other hand, which could be misconstrued only for so long as the artwork was measured by a standard it had thoroughly outgrown, whereas the new and fitting standard might haply be sought in the impression received by the fortunate hearers of one of those unwritten impromptus of the most peerless of musicians. Then would the greatest dramatist have taught us to fix that impromptu too; for in the highest conceivable Artwork the sublimest inspirations of them both should live with an undying life, as the essence of the world displayed with clearness past all measure in the mirror of the world itself.

>For Wagner, improvisation meant getting closer to nature as art and his greatest examples of this are Aeschylus and Shakespeare. In his 1871 essay, “The Destiny of Opera,” Wagner contends that the essence of dramatic art consists in the poet’s making “the improvising spirit of the mime his own” (143). In following this course of action the dramatic poet merely follows the natural origins of all art, which Wagner claims is improvisation. Dilating further upon the notion of improvisation and its relationship to nature, in a conversation about Aeschylus in 1872 he observes to Cosima, “The remarkable thing about this truly great being is that one hardly notices the way it is done! It does not appear to be art at all, because it is in fact something much higher: improvisation”.

>>19471534
It's GESAMTKUNSTWERK.

>The arts of Dance, of Tone, and Poetry: thus call themselves the three primeval sisters whom we see at once entwine their measures wherever the conditions necessary for artistic manifestment have arisen. By their nature they are inseparable without disbanding the stately minuet of Art; for in this dance, which is the very cadence of Art itself; they are so wondrous closely interlaced with one another, of fairest love and inclination, so mutually bound up in each other's life, of body and of spirit: that each of the three partners, unlinked from the united chain and bereft thus of her own life and motion, can only carry on an artificially inbreathed and borrowed life; not giving forth her sacred ordinances, as in their trinity, but now receiving despotic rules for mechanical movement.

>>19423255
>Meyerbeer saves him from poverty and catapults him to fame by staging Rienzi
>later writes a tract about how evil Meyerbeer is because he's Jewish
>has affairs with his patrons' wives (they continue to financially support him)
>leaves his sick wife to die alone
>indefinitely funded by literal King of Bavaria
>builds largest free standing timber structure ever erected exclusively for his own works
>spreads gossip that Nietzsche has a small penis and is a masturbation addict
>glorifies Christian asceticism in Parsifal while having an affair and draping himself in silk and perfume
>claimed to be the ultimate result of all Western art

There is no work of philosophy that delves so deeply into the paradoxes of erotic love as Tristan and Isolde, no work of Christian theology that matches Wagner's exploration of the Eucharist in Parsifal, and no work of political theory that uncovers the place of power and law in the human psyche with the perceptiveness of The Ring.

>The very difficulty of thus applying Beethovenian Music to the Shakespearian Drama might lead, when conquered, to the utmost perfecting of musical Form, through its final liberation from each remaining fetter. What still distressed our great German poets in regard of Opera, and what still left its manifest traces on Beethoven's instrumental music, that scaffolding which in nowise rested on the essence of Music, but rather on that selfsame tendence which planned the operatic aria and the ballet−tune, this conventional four−square structure, so wondrously wreathed already with the luxuriant life of Beethovenian melody, would vanish quite away before an ideal ordering of highest freedom; so that Music now would take the ineffably vital shape of a Shakespearian drama, and its sublime irregularity, compared with the antique drama, would wellnigh give it the appearance of a nature−scene as against a work of architecture, a scene whose skilful measurement would be evinced by nothing but the unfailing sureness of the artwork's effect. And in this would lie withal the untold newness of this artwork as form: a form ideal alike and natural, and thus conceivable in no modern, racial language save the German, the most developed of them all; a form, on the other hand, which could be misconstrued only for so long as the artwork was measured by a standard it had thoroughly outgrown, whereas the new and fitting standard might haply be sought in the impression received by the fortunate hearers of one of those unwritten impromptus of the most peerless of musicians. Then would the greatest dramatist have taught us to fix that impromptu too; for in the highest conceivable Artwork the sublimest inspirations of them both should live with an undying life, as the essence of the world displayed with clearness past all measure in the mirror of the world itself.

>>19219189
Wagner was a better and more influential dramatist.

https://youtu.be/ZiqkO2upJKI?t=3994

>I am being used as the instrument for something higher than my own being warrants. I am in the hands of the immortal genius that I serve for the span of my life.

>>18999621
This >>19003623

>Just to liberate himself from me, he succumbs to all available platitudes!
t. Wagner