/lit/ - Literature

>>23505582
>It is difficult to imagine how music has always expressed its special power on the world of appearances. We must suppose that the music of the Hellenes deeply penetrated the world of appearances and merged with the laws of its perceptibility. Pythagoras’s numbers surely come to life only when understood through music: the architect built in accordance with the laws of eurhythmics and the artist conceived of human form in accordance with those of harmony; the rules of melody made the poet into a singer, and from choral song drama was projected onto the stage. Everywhere we see the inner law which can be understood only from the spirit of music, determining the outer law which orders the world of appearances: the laws of music governed the genuinely ancient Dorian state which Plato tried to define philosophically, and for that matter governed the rules of war and battle with the same confidence as dance. But paradise was lost: the original source of movement of a world sickened. This world moved like a ball being pushed and swung around in a whirl, but its movement no longer had a driving soul; and thus it had eventually to tire until the soul of the world was once more awakened. It was the spirit of Christianity that brought new life to the soul of music. The soul of music transfigured the eye of the Italian painter and it stimulated his vision, passing through the appearance of things to reach its soul, to reach the spirit of Christianity already apparent in the Church. These great painters were almost all musicians and it is the spirit of music that allows us, as we absorb ourselves in their saints and martyrs, to forget that we are seeing. But fashion took command: just as the spirit of the church fell prey to the artificial discipline of the Jesuits, so – along with art – did music fall prey to soulless affectation.

>>23499851
>forgot pic
Pic related being his 1870 essay on Beethoven.

>>23467356
The indigenous Austrian, after the removal of every trace of German Protestantism, had been brought up in the school of Roman Jesuits and had even lost the correct pronunciation for his language; he now heard it, like the classical names of the ancient world, only mangled in an un-German, Romanised way. German spirit, German style and custom, were taught from textbooks of Italian and Spanish provenance. Thus a people, by nature cheerful and jolly, had been educated on the basis of bogus history, science and religion into a scepticism calculated to suppress the true, genuine and free; a scepticism which manifested itself as real frivolity.
This was the same spirit which had given to the art of music, the only art cultivated in Austria, the lowly status of which we have already considered. We saw how Beethoven used his powerful natural disposition to protect himself against this tendency, and we can now see the same strength in him powerfully serving as guard against any inclination towards frivolity in his life or his spirit. Although he was baptised and brought up as a Catholic, the whole spirit of German Protestantism lived in him through these beliefs. This spirit led him as an artist in turn on a path where he was to meet the only soulmate to whom he could bow in awe and whom he could absorb as the revelation of the deepest secret of his own nature. If Haydn was considered as the leader of the youth, the great Sebastian Bach guided the unfolding artistic life of the man.

>>23411179
If we see an art emerging from this direct consciousness of the unity of our inner nature with the nature of the outside world, it is above all else apparent that this art must be subjected to quite other aesthetic laws than every other art. Yet it still seemed repugnant to all aestheticians to have to derive a real art from – as it seemed to them – a purely pathological element; and they were willing to recognise the validity of this art only from the point where its products showed themselves in the detached appearance peculiar to the formations of visual art. From Schopenhauer we successfully learned that its pure element is no longer perceived but deeply and consciously felt in our consciousness as an idea of the world. We understand this idea as a direct revelation of the unity of the Will that is irrefutably represented to our consciousness (starting from the unity of human nature), as unity also with nature itself which we in the same way hear as sound.

Beethoven was never drawn to anything except to that which exclusively engaged him: the play of a magician with the shapes of his inner world. For the outer world was now totally extinguished for him not because blindness robbed him of seeing it but because deafness finally kept it away from him. Hearing was the only sense through which the outer world still disturbed him: to his eyes the world had long since died. What did the enchanted dreamer see when he roamed through the colourful and crowded streets of Vienna staring ahead with his eyes open but animated only by the wakefulness of his inner world of sound? The origin and growth of his hearing difficulties pained him greatly and inclined him towards deep melancholy. He never, however, seriously complained about the onset of his total deafness, nor in particular about the loss of his ability to listen to musical performances; only the business of living became difficult which in itself held no attraction for him and he more and more deliberately distanced himself from it.
A deaf musician! Can we imagine a blind painter?
But we know a blind visionary. The deaf musician is now like Tiresias, for whom the world of appearances is closed and who is therefore aware of the basis of all appearance through his inner eye; undisturbed by the noises of life he listens only to the harmonies in his mind and from his depths still speaks only to a world – a world which has no more to say to him. Thus the genius is freed from everything external to himself and remains entirely with and in him. What a miracle it must have seemed to anyone then seeing Beethoven with the look of Tiresias: a world wandering among men, the ‘in itself ’ of the world as a wandering man!
And now the musician’s eye lit up from within. He now cast his glance on the appearance which, illuminated by his inner light, communicated back to his inner self in a wonderful reflex. Now only the essence of things is speaking to him again, showing them to him in the tranquil light of beauty. Now he understands the forest, the brook, the meadow, the blue ether, the cheerful crowd, the loving couple, the song of the bird, the passing of the clouds, the roar of the storm, the magic of the blissfully moving quiet. All his vision and creativity is there permeated by this wonderful joy which only he has bestowed on music. Even a lament, so deeply peculiar to all music, is softened to a smile: the world regains the innocence of a child. ‘This day ye shall be with me in paradise’ – who has not heard this word of our Saviour calling him when he listened to the Pastoral Symphony?