/lit/ - Literature

>>23175902
It's true.

>>22717516
5th century Greece. 17th century England. !9th century Germany.

>>22713566
By Wagner.

>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.

>>21548704
Wagner, obviously. He completes Western drama by returning to the highly stylized drama of the Greeks-- which is only possible under a fusion of the arts; through the heightened advancements, and Germanic character, of Shakespeare and Beethoven. It is a necessity for the subject of this stylized art to be myth, and furthermore the native myths of our culture.

>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.

>>21393207
Yes, the greatest dramatists are all comparable with Dante. Even Nietzsche says of Parsifal:

>The supreme psychological perception and precision as regards what can be said, expressed, communicated here, the extreme of concision and directness of form, every nuance of feeling conveyed epigrammatically; a clarity of musical description that reminds us of a shield of consummate workmanship; and finally an extraordinary sublimity of feeling, something experienced in the very depths of music, that does Wagner the highest honour; a synthesis of conditions which to many people — even "higher minds" — will seem incompatible, of strict coherence, of "loftiness" in the most startling sense of the word, of a cognisance and a penetration of vision that cuts through the soul as with a knife, of sympathy with what is seen and shown forth. We get something comparable to it in Dante, but nowhere else.

Baudelaire:
>I found in those of his works which are translated, particularly in Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and the Flying Dutchman, an excellent method of construction, a spirit of order and division which recalls the architecture of ancient tragedies.

Whitman:
>I am again consumed with regret for knowing I have never had a chance to hear the wonderful operas. I say 'wonderful' because I feel that they are constructed on my lines—attach themselves to the same theories of art that have been responsible for Leaves of Grass.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam:
>He is the very man of whom we have dreamed; he is a genius such as appears upon the earth once every thousand years.

Nietzsche:
>Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan – I have sought in vain, in every art. Everything strange and alien about Leonardo da Vinci is demystified with the first tones of Tristan.

Mallarme:
>Oh strange defiance hurled at poets by him who has usurped their duty with the most open and splendid audacity: Richard Wagner!

Weininger:
>the greatest man since Christ’s time

D'Annunzio:
>In articulating our need for metaphysics, [Wagner] has revealed to us a hidden part of our interior life.

Yeats:
>Wagner's dramas are becoming to Germany what the Greek Tragedies were to Greece.

Strauss:
>Tristan does not, as you believe, represent the "dazzling resurrection" of romanticism, but the end of all romanticism, as it brings into focus the longing of the entire 19th century, longing which is finally released in the Tag- und Nachtsgeprach and in Isolde's Liebestod. . . Tristan is the ultimate conclusion of Schiller and Goethe and the highest fulfilment of a development of the theatre stretching over 2,000 years.

Joyce:
>There are indeed hardly more than a dozen original themes in world LITERATURE ... Tristan und Isolde is an example of an original theme.

Auden:
>perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived

Lévi-Strauss:
>the undeniable father of the structural analysis of myth

Junger:
>Thoughts about the mighty mind of the dramatist who breathes artificial breath into past ages and dead cultures so that they move like corpses we can quote. A sorcerer of the highest order who conjures with real blood at the gates of the underworld.

Scruton:
>Modern high culture is as much a set of footnotes to Wagner as Western philosophy is, in Whitehead’s judgement, footnotes to Plato.

>>20867705
>So be a Cecil Rhodes and not a William Shakespeare.
>NOOO DUDE YOU CANNOT CREATE A MASTERPIECE OTHERWISE I WILL GET DISCREDITED

watch me do it, and i will piss in the grave of spengler

1. Der Ring des Nibelungen
2. Oresteia
3. Henriad
4. The Sea of Fertility

>>20294667
>>20294669
i kneel

>In Music of the Future (1860), Wagner described his conception of opera in terms of the dominance of “inner psychic motives” over external events, the circumvention of ordinary dramatic causality, symbolized in the question “Why,” and the resultant transporting of the listener into a “dreamlike state which soon becomes a clairvoyant vision.” As he relates, in Tristan, having undergone a period of “questioning” in Opera and Drama and his other theoretical writings, he immersed himself in the “depths of the psyche and from this inmost center of the world boldly constructed an external form” in which the “detailed exposition” was of “inner motives” only: “the whole affecting story is the outcome of a soul’s inmost need, and it comes to light as reflected from within.”

>>19506647

>>19487332
No, he was.

Why isn't Wagner respected as a poet?

>Greek drama has the chorus to explain what's happening
>Shakespeare has the moral reflection of the characters
>Wagner has, umm.. le Musik!
Literary Wagnerism was a mistake. His dramas don't mean anything concrete.

>Herr v. Stein reads to us the translation he has made of Aeschylus’s chorus (the female hare and the eagle), and it seems to us very good. “That is religion,” R. exclaims.
>R. then speaks again about this wonderful poem, which contains everything that one can call religion.
>“Nature in its life instinct is so good.” From there we pass on to Aeschylus, Calderon, Goethe, Shakespeare: “Since in your presence one must always discuss such nonsense.” — “Goethe, Cervantes saw and created characters, D. Q., Sancho, Faust, Mephisto; Dante, Vergil were wanderers who looked around them, whereas Aeschylus spoke like a priest in the midst of a community. Shakespeare neither the one nor the other, the most enigmatic of them all.”

...

>>18125190
How can the Spanish even compare?

Is the drama or poem the highest form of literary art?

>>16930514
Wagner is the greatest artist to ever live.

Was Wagner's narcissism warranted?

Who is the greatest playwright, Aeschylus, Shakespeare or Wagner?