/lit/ - Literature

At breakfast R. tells me he is thinking of depicting the German character once again in great depth. “Gaiety—that is what characterizes us Germans and so distinguishes us from the Latin races. This feature is expressed most pregnantly in Goethe’s Faust, which one has only to compare with Dante’s epic to see the difference in spirit. This benevolent gaiety is our aristocratic feature, which we have preserved as we have preserved our various aristocratic families. It makes us akin to the Greeks (though they did not possess it to the same degree), while the Latin nations have inherited from the Romans the inability to appreciate a joke. Only in Cervantes can I recognize something of the German spirit.”

R. goes on to say that he had been thinking previously about the F Major Symphony; one cannot really say that such a work touches one’s heart, so what is it that gives one such satisfaction? It is this joyfulness, like Brahma making sport with himself. This, he says, is a very German quality. Making joyful sport with oneself in this way does not lead to laughter, for there is nothing in the least ironic about it (like the humor of Cervantes, for example)—it is entirely positive. And it is this same spirit which prevails in Faust.

>>23498298
No stage-piece in the world has such a scenic force and directness (Anschaulichkeit) to shew, as precisely this maligned and un-understood second half of the tragedy. And this work, which roots in the plastic spirit of the German Theatre as ne'er another, had to be written by the poet in the air: the only signs by which he could fix its type, or the "example" as I have called it, were rhyming metres taken chiefly from the rugged art of our old folk-poet, Hans Sachs. Yet if we want a witness to the supreme ideality whose germ lay lurking in the homeliest element of the German Folk, awaiting its development by a faithful chosen spirit, we have only to regard this wonder-building raised by Goethe on that so-called knittel-verse [doggerel]: he seems to never quit this basis of the most completely Popular, and yet he soars above it to the highest art of antique Metrics, filling link upon link with fresh inventions of a freedom unknown to the Greeks themselves, from smiles to grief, the wildest bluntness to the tenderest sublimity.
- Richard Wagner's Actors and Singers

>We take up Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, the Walpurgisnacht, to our utter delight, all of it divine and so eloquent, reflecting so completely our own outlook on the world. At table R. had already—in connection with a collection of Franconian folk songs—touched on the theme of what it behooved us to do: to listen to Nature from the viewpoint of a culture which has lost its naivete. The Homunculus, demanding birth, R. sees as the German spirit, which must turn from the scholar’s study to Nature.
- Cosima Wagner's Diaries

>>21776871
>Is this a sign that I should get into Wagner and Cervantes?
Yes.

>Gaiety-—that is what characterizes us Germans and so distinguishes us from the Latin races. This feature is expressed most pregnantly in Goethe’s Faust, which one has only to compare with Dante’s epic to see the difference in spirit. This benevolent gaiety is our aristocratic feature, which we have preserved as we have preserved our various aristocratic families. It makes us akin to the Greeks (though they did not possess it to the same degree), while the Latin nations have inherited from the Romans the inability to appreciate a joke. Only in Cervantes can I recognize something of the German spirit.

>>21647297
Wagner's estimation of Faust did not deter him from from asserting - at a crucial moment in the genesis of Tristan und Isolde - that Goethe's ultimate concern with the totality of Faust's striving obviated the even more significant potential of the original love tragedy. The letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of 3 April 1858 attempts to clarify a heated argument the previous evening about the 'versäumte Gelegenheit' ('missed opportunity') of Faust. Instead of remaining 'bei der ersten, so schönen Gelegenheit, der Liebe Gretchens' ('at the first, so beautiful opportunity, the love of Gretchen'), Goethe extricated Faust from this love,

>damit er nun die eigentliche große Welt, die antike Kunstwelt, die praktisch-industrielle Welt, mit möglichst Behagen vor seiner recht objektiven Betrachtung abspielen lassen könne. So heißt dieser Faust für mich eigentlich nur die versaümte Gelegenheit; und diese Gelegenheit war keine geringere als die einzige des Heiles und der Erlösung. Das fühlt auch der graue Sünder schließlich, und sucht das Versaümte durch ein Schlußtableau nachzuholen, - so außerhalbliegend, nach dem Tode, wo's ihn nicht mehr geniert. (so that he can now let the actual great world, the antique art world, the practical industrial world, be played out with as much comfort as possible before his really objective observation. So for me this Faust is actually just the missed opportunity; and that opportunity was none other than the only one of salvation and redemption. Even the gray sinner finally feels this, and tries to make up for what he has missed with a final tableau - lying so outside, after death, where he is no longer embarrassed.)

Inherent in this criticism is a fundamental antithesis between the objective 'große Welt' ('great world') and the subjective 'Seelentiefe der Liebe' ('soul depth of love'): by objectifying Faust's striving, Goethe neglected - according to Wagner - the true realm of salvation, the subjective consciousness, since in Faust's episodic progress through the world, 'das Subject nie dazu kommt, das Object, die Welt in sich aufzunehmen' ('the subject never gets to absorb the object, the world').

Why did Wagner hate Renaissance Humanism?

>At lunch he becomes heated about the Renaissance, which he maintains had an enormously damaging effect on German development; this period had understood and respected antiquity just as little as it did Christianity, and men of tremendous genius had worked in the service of a power which corrupted everything. As always, the naive Germans had let themselves be so awed by foreign culture that their own aesthetic sense had been almost ruined. But strangely enough, though everything had been directed toward destroying the German identity, they had not succeeded entirely.

>The "plait"-church Domenico with the pillar of the saint disgusted him, "that's where the renaissance lead to"; I [Cosima] say, that the renaissance is as little to blame for it as Palestrina's music is to blame for the origin of the operatic aria, but he sticks to his opinion, Greek art had influenced the world long after its fall, but with this eagerness to do it beautifully, to avoid the harsh, one arrived at the rococo. There was something spoiled in the seed. People like Nietzsche, through the renaissance-man Burckhardt, even say it openly what they want: Erasmus, Petrarca, they are abhorrent to me.

>>21268794
>The "plait"-church Domenico with the pillar of the saint disgusted him, "that's where the renaissance lead to"; I [Cosima] say, that the renaissance is as little to blame for it as Palestrina's music is to blame for the origin of the operatic aria, but he sticks to his opinion, Greek art had influenced the world long after its fall, but with this eagerness to do it beautifully, to avoid the harsh, one arrived at the rococo. There was something spoiled in the seed. People like Nietzsche, through the renaissance-man Burckhardt, even say it openly what they want: Erasmus, Petrarca, they are abhorrent to me.

>>20730506
>The German will always keep his idealism as a hiding place.

>Wagner's estimation of Faust did not deter him from from asserting - at a crucial moment in the genesis of Tristan und Isolde - that Goethe's ultimate concern with the totality of Faust's striving obviated the even more significant potential of the original love tragedy. The letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of 3 April 1858 attempts to clarify a heated argument the previous evening about the 'versäumte Gelegenheit' ('missed opportunity') of Faust. Instead of remaining 'bei der ersten, so schönen Gelegenheit, der Liebe Gretchens' ('at the first, so beautiful opportunity, the love of Gretchen'), Goethe extricated Faust from this love,

>damit er nun die eigentliche große Welt, die antike Kunstwelt, die praktisch-industrielle Welt, mit möglichst Behagen vor seiner recht objektiven Betrachtung abspielen lassen könne. So heißt dieser Faust für mich eigentlich nur die versaümte Gelegenheit; und diese Gelegenheit war keine geringere als die einzige des Heiles und der Erlösung. Das fühlt auch der graue Sünder schließlich, und sucht das Versaümte durch ein Schlußtableau nachzuholen, - so außerhalbliegend, nach dem Tode, wo's ihn nicht mehr geniert. (so that he can now let the actual great world, the antique art world, the practical industrial world, be played out with as much comfort as possible before his really objective observation. So for me this Faust is actually just the missed opportunity; and that opportunity was none other than the only one of salvation and redemption. Even the gray sinner finally feels this, and tries to make up for what he has missed with a final tableau - lying so outside, after death, where he is no longer embarrassed.)

>Inherent in this criticism is a fundamental antithesis between the objective 'große Welt' ('great world') and the subjective 'Seelentiefe der Liebe' ('soul depth of love'): by objectifying Faust's striving, Goethe neglected - according to Wagner - the true realm of salvation, the subjective consciousness, since in Faust's episodic progress through the world, 'das Subject nie dazu kommt, das Object, die Welt in sich aufzunehmen' ('the subject never gets to absorb the object, the world').

>>20238211
Der Ring des Nibelungen.

>The development of the whole poem sets forth the necessity of recognising and yielding to the change, the many-sidedness, the multiplicity, the eternal renewing of reality and of life. Wotan rises to the tragic height of willing his own destruction. This is the lesson that we have to learn from the history of mankind: to will what necessity imposes, and ourselves to bring it about.
>What you want in drama — as indeed in all works of Art — is to achieve your end, not by statement of the artist's intentions, but by the presentment of life as the resultant, not of arbitrary forces, but of eternal laws. It is just this that distinguishes my poetical material from all the poetical material which alone absorbs poets' minds at the present day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUMdhTJ6zfk

>>20123895
Der Ring des Nibelungen.

>The development of the whole poem sets forth the necessity of recognising and yielding to the change, the many-sidedness, the multiplicity, the eternal renewing of reality and of life. Wotan rises to the tragic height of willing his own destruction. This is the lesson that we have to learn from the history of mankind: to will what necessity imposes, and ourselves to bring it about.
>What you want in drama — as indeed in all works of Art — is to achieve your end, not by statement of the artist's intentions, but by the presentment of life as the resultant, not of arbitrary forces, but of eternal laws. It is just this that distinguishes my poetical material from all the poetical material which alone absorbs poets' minds at the present day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUMdhTJ6zfk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXh5JprKqiU

>>19905529
There was Wagner.

>What you want in drama — as indeed n all works of Art — is to achieve your end, not by statement of the artist's intentions, but by the presentment of life as the resultant, not of arbitrary forces, but of eternal laws. It is just this that distinguishes my poetical material from all the poetical material which alone absorbs poets' minds at the present day.

>He reads two acts of Macbeth, with indescribable effect. R. is also of my opinion that in Macbeth the English language is particularly true to itself, that the word “Hail,” for instance, sounds completely different from “Heil,” hoarse and daemonic.

>He reads two acts of Macbeth, with indescribable effect. R. is also of my opinion that in Macbeth the English language is particularly true to itself, that the word “Hail,” for instance, sounds completely different from “Heil,” hoarse and daemonic.

>At lunch R. declares: “I have been thinking again about Don Quixote and, considering it from the angle of its ironic outlook on the world, I was reminded of a dialogue by Plato; it is in him, too, this irony, but there it appears free, confident, nothing is pressing on it. Whereas one senses the horrible pressure of Catholicism on Cervantes’s noble spirit; the way he finds it necessary to make the poor Moresco praise the Inquisition! In the Greek one sees the Olympic wreath, in the Spaniard the starving poet, treated by the nobility, just as D.Q. was treated, like a plaything, in a world hostile to things of the spirit. Oh, the misery of having been born in this millennium!”