/lit/ - Literature

>>20339067
>Wagner put his own critical work on a par with Lessing’s Laocoön, claiming on November 26, 1882, that his article, “The Destiny of Opera,” gave a perspective on music that was “completely new” and “probably as worthy of being considered a landmark for a new way of seeing things as Laocoön in another territory.” For Wagner, improvisation meant getting closer to nature as art and his greatest examples of this are Aeschylus and Shakespeare. In his 1871 essay Wagner contends that the essence of dramatic art consists in the poet’s making “the improvising spirit of the mime his own." 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. With Schiller, one can imagine how things came into his mind and how he considered manipulating them; but not in Shakespeare or Aeschylus."

>>20064181
>Wagner put his own critical work on a par with Lessing’s Laocoön, claiming on November 26, 1882, that his article, “The Destiny of Opera,” gave a perspective on music that was “completely new” and “probably as worthy of being considered a landmark for a new way of seeing things as Laocoön in another territory.” For Wagner, improvisation meant getting closer to nature as art and his greatest examples of this are Aeschylus and Shakespeare. In his 1871 essay Wagner contends that the essence of dramatic art consists in the poet’s making “the improvising spirit of the mime his own." 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."

>>20064182
>Wagner put his own critical work on a par with Lessing’s Laocoön, claiming on November 26, 1882, that his article, “The Destiny of Opera,” gave a perspective on music that was “completely new” and “probably as worthy of being considered a landmark for a new way of seeing things as Laocoön in another territory.” For Wagner, improvisation meant getting closer to nature as art and his greatest examples of this are Aeschylus and Shakespeare. In his 1871 essay Wagner contends that the essence of dramatic art consists in the poet’s making “the improvising spirit of the mime his own." 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."

>>20011514
>Wagner put his own critical work on a par with Lessing’s Laocoön, claiming on November 26, 1882, that his article, “The Destiny of Opera,” gave a perspective on music that was “completely new” and “probably as worthy of being considered a landmark for a new way of seeing things as Laocoön in another territory.”

>Wagner put his own critical work on a par with Lessing’s Laocoön, claiming on November 26, 1882, that his article, “The Destiny of Opera,” gave a perspective on music that was “completely new” and “probably as worthy of being considered a landmark for a new way of seeing things as Laocoön in another territory.”

>>19674477
>To the French, as representatives of modern civilisation, Shakespeare, considered seriously, to this day is a monstrosity; and even to the Germans he has remained a subject of constantly renewed investigation, with so little [142] positive result that the most conflicting views and statements are forever cropping up again. Thus has this most bewildering of dramatists—already set down by some as an utterly irresponsible and untamed genius, without one trace of artistic culture—quite recently been credited again with the most systematic tendence of the didactic poet. Goethe, after introducing him in "Wilhelm Meister" as an "admirable writer," kept returning to the problem with increasing caution, and finally decided that here the higher tendence was to be sought, not in the poet, but in the embodied characters he brought before us in immediate action. Yet the closer these figures were inspected, the greater riddle became the artist's method: though the main plan of a piece was easy to perceive, and it was impossible to mistake the consequent development of its plot, for the most part pre-existing in the source selected, yet the marvellous "accidentiæ" in its working out, as also in the bearing of its dramatis personae, were inexplicable on any hypothesis of deliberate artistic scheming. Here we found such drastic individuality, that it often seemed like unaccountable caprice, whose sense we never really fathomed till we closed the book and saw the living drama move before our eyes; then stood before us life's own image, mirrored with resistless truth to nature, and filled us with the lofty terror of a ghostly vision. But how decipher in this magic spell the tokens of an "artwork"? Was the author of these plays a poet?

>What little we know of his life makes answer with outspoken naïvety: he was a play-actor and manager, who wrote for himself and his troop these pieces that in after days amazed and poignantly perplexed our greatest poets; pieces that for the most part would not so much as have come down to us, had the unpretending prompt-books of the Globe Theatre not been rescued from oblivion in the nick of time by the printing-press. Lope de Vega, scarcely less a wonder, wrote his pieces from one day to the next in immediate contact with his actors and the [143] stage; beside Corneille and Racine, the poets of façon, there stands the actor Molière, in whom alone production was alive; and midst his tragedy sublime stood Æschylus, the leader of its chorus.—Not to the Poet, but to the Dramatist must we look, for light upon the Drama's nature; and he stands no nearer to the poet proper than to the mime himself, from whose heart of hearts he must issue if as poet he means to "hold the mirror up to Nature."

>>19638577

>>19585606

>Wagner put his own critical work on a par with Lessing’s Laocoön, claiming on November 26, 1882, that his article, “The Destiny of Opera,” gave a perspective on music that was “completely new” and “probably as worthy of being considered a landmark for a new way of seeing things as Laocoön in another territory.”

>>18688113

This is the final word on Shakespeare.