/lit/ - Literature

>"My book, which is now to be called 'Oper und Drama,' is not yet ready: it will be at least twice as big as the Art-work of the Future. I still shall require at least the whole of December before I come to the end, and then the whole of January, for certain, for the copying and revising. I can tell you nothing about it in advance, except the general outline: I. Exposition of the essence of Opera, down to our own day; with the conclusion, 'Music is a bearing organism (Beethoven, as it were, practised it in the bearing of Melody)—therefore a womanly.'—II. Exposition of the essence of Drama, from Shakespeare down to our own day; conclusion, 'the poetic Understanding is a begetting organism, the poetic Aim the fertilising seed which takes its rise in nothing but the emotion of Love, and is the impulse to the fecundation of a female organism, which must bear the seed—received in Love.' III. (Here, first, do I really begin) 'Exposition of the act of bearing the poetic Aim, achieved through perfected Tone-speech.'—Alas! I would I had told you nothing—for I see that I have told you nothing really.—Only this, as well: I have spared no pains, to be exact and circumstantial; therefore I resolved, from the start, not to let myself be pressed for time, so as not to scamp any part."
>He then adds the diagram which I have reproduced on page 2, and about which I ought to remark that the arrow-heads are somewhat misleading, as it is evident, from page 224, that the evolutionary line is meant to proceed from the left base-angle to the apex of the triangle, and thence to the right base-angle.

>>15644521
Look at this diagram, if you can make it out. It was drawn by Wagner in the early 1850's I think before coming across Schopenhauer, as an early conception on the arts and its historic origins and ends. The three major works on art he wrote during the turn of the century include some of these ideas, such as on the ancient greek chorus. I will now post an extensive quote from Thomas Carlyle which I think would say much about this topic, someone whom Wagner read and admired, relating to the pic but also to the question of the origin of things in music or even perhaps why Wagner never seriously took on the Dionysian/Apollonian split.

cont

>>15552610
Mate, do you even know what "ideology" is? You're just using it as a buzzword as part of your support for your ideology. I agree ideology is a bad use of term to designate reality; but don't act like it isn't what it is. You have no feeling young man!--; You are meaningless! And as result your people fade of in the fog-boat of the night.

>>15426548
Shut up faggot.

>>15420713
Plato and then Aquinas and then mysticism and then Kant and then Goethe and then Hegel and then Schopenhauer and then Heidegger all talk about this.

>>15375553
A diagram drawn by Richard Wagner for a friend in a letter.

Though it may be misleading in what it is suggesting, he is not saying artistic-word ends with the rational, but the reorganisation and concretization of it is rational--; and in Wagner's eyes ends in a unification of what one can in this context, descriptively call feeling and reason in the human, "the noblest truths of our own inner being, yet lifted high above conceivable experience." The direction of the arrows, chief above all a representation of history in his own Operatic theories. One example of this, would be "In the oldest Lyric [...] the words and verse proceeded from the tones and melody." Or his belief in the substitution and redirecting of the choral energies into, or by way of music the acting of the whole: "whilst Antique Tragedy had to confine its dramatic dialogue to separate sections strewn between the choruses delivered in the Orchestra--those chants in which Music gave to the drama its higher meaning--in the Modern Orchestra, the greatest artistic achievement of our age, this archetypal element goes hand in hand with the action itself, unsevered from the dialogue, and in a profounder sense may be said to embrace all the action's motives in its mother-womb." A question of arrogance could be asked if we were to assume Wagner is simply ignoring the unique cultural-artistic value of the chorus, but it is not this simple, after all he says himself that a whole book could be written on the properties of the chorus; a thing of constant intrigue. And although his theories in this particular, though casual, diagram and furthermore of his entire life, are not completely right, it nonetheless presents a truth relevant to the development of Wagner's Operas and the nature of art on a whole, even if much of the terming behind it is wrong.