/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19731507]

>The science of Æsthetics has at all times laid down Unity as a chief requirement from the artwork. In the abstract this Unity is difficult to dialectically define, and its misapprehension has led to many and grave mistakes. It comes out the plainest in the perfect artwork itself, for it is it that moves us to unbroken interest, and keeps the broad impression ever present. Indisputably this result is the most completely attained by the living represented drama; wherefore we have no hesitation in declaring the Drama the most perfect of artworks.
>The modern drama has a twofold origin: the one a natural, and peculiar to our historic evolution, namely, the romance the other an alien, and grafted on our evolution by reflection, namely, the Greek drama as looked at through the misunderstood rules of Aristotle.
>The real kernel of all our poesy may be found in the romance. In their endeavor to make this kernel as tasty as possible, our poets have repeatedly had recourse to a closer or more distant imitation of the Greek drama.
>The topmost flower of that drama which sprang directly from romance we have in the plays of Shakespeare; in the farthest removal from this drama, we find its diametrical opposite in the tragedie of Racine. Between these two extremes our whole remaining dramatic literature sways undecided to and fro.
>As I am writing no history of the modern drama, but, agreeably to my object, have only to point out in its twofold development the chief lines along which the root difference between those two evolutionary paths is plainest visible, I have passed over the Spanish theatre, since in it alone those diverse paths are characteristically crossed with one another. This makes it indeed of the highest significance in itself, but to us it affords no antitheses so marked as the two we find, with determinant influence upon all newer evolution of the drama, in Shakespeare and the French tragedie.

[Anonymous No.19731508]

>>19731507
>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."

[Anonymous No.19731513]

>Thus undoubtedly the essence of Dramatic art, as against the Poet's method, at first seems totally irrational; it is not to be seized, without a complete reversal of the beholder's nature. In what this reversal must consist, however, should not be hard to indicate if we recall the natural process in the beginnings of all Art, as plainly shewn to us in improvisation. The poet, mapping out a plan of action for the improvising mime, would stand in much the same relation to him as the author of an operatic text to the musician; his work can claim as yet no atom of artistic value; but this it will gain in the very fullest measure if the poet makes the improvising spirit of the mime his own, and develops his plan entirely in character with that improvisation, so that the mime now enters with all his individuality into the poet's higher reason. This involves, to be sure, a complete transformation of the poetic artwork itself, of which we might form an idea if we imagined the impromptu of some great musician noted down. We have it on the authority of competent witnesses, that nothing could compare with the effect produced by Beethoven when he improvised at length upon the pianoforte to his friends; nor, even in view of the master's greatest works, need we deem excessive the lament that precisely these inventions were not fixed in writing, if we reflect that far inferior musicians, whose penwork was always stiff and stilted, have quite amazed us in their 'free fantasias' by a wholly unsuspected and often very fertile talent for invention.—At anyrate we believe we shall really expedite the solution of an extremely difficult problem, if we define the Shakespearian Drama as [144] a fixed mimetic improvisation of the highest poetic worth. For this explains at once each wondrous accidental in the bearing and discourse of characters alive to but one purpose, to be at this moment all that they are meant to seem to us to be, and to whom accordingly no word can come that lies outside this conjured nature; so that it would be positively laughable to us, upon closer consideration, if one of these figures were suddenly to pose as poet. This last is silent, and remains for us a riddle, such as Shakespeare. But his work is the only veritable Drama; and what that implies, as work of Art, is shewn by our rating its author the profoundest poet of all time.—

[Anonymous No.19731514]

sneed

[Anonymous No.19731557]

>>19731507
Wagner is always right.

[Anonymous No.19731559]

>>19731557
Wagner is always sneed.

[Anonymous No.19731566]

>>19731557
I think Tolstoy was right.

[Anonymous No.19731570]

>>19731566
I think Tolstoy was sneed.

[Anonymous No.19731601]

>>19731507
Didn't read
>>19731508
Also didn't read
>>19731513
Didn't read that either

[Anonymous No.19731611]

>>19731507
Didn't sneed
>>19731508
Also didn't sneed
>>19731513
Didn't sneed that either

[Anonymous No.19731712]

>>19731507
I kneel Wagner

[Anonymous No.19731730]

I sneed Wagner

[Anonymous No.19731797]

Is this just a bad translation or did Wagner really write like an absolute faggot? Liie holy fuck everything on this wall of autism could be boiled into five sentences if you removed all the "indisputably, namely, plainest in agreeable undoubtedly witnenessed of the topmost lowerdown threefold magnaminorities". Nigga go back to making incel music

[Anonymous No.19731829]

He didn't just write like that, he also spoke like that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN1WLF8T_Oc

[Anonymous No.19731833]

>>19731797
He didn't just write like that, he also spoke like that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN1WLF8T_Oc

[Anonymous No.19731849]

>>19731797
Quite right

[Anonymous No.19731867]

>he's good because he's... anti-Semitic!!!
Woah bravo king of beirut

[Anonymous No.19732670]

>>19731507
This man was refuted in The Will to Power:

834.

If by artistic genius we understand the most consummate freedom within the law, divine ease, and facility in overcoming the greatest[Pg 271] difficulties, then Offenbach has even more right to the title genius than Wagner has. Wagner is heavy and clumsy: nothing is more foreign to him than the moments of wanton perfection which this clown Offenbach achieves as many as five times, six times, in nearly every one of his buffooneries. But by genius we ought perhaps to understand something else.

835.

Concerning "music."—French, German, and Italian music. (Our most debased periods in a political sense are our most productive. The Slavs?)—The ballet, which is the outcome of excessive study of the history of strange civilisations, has become master of opera.—Stage music and musicians music.—It is an error to suppose that what Wagner composed was a. form: it was rather formlessness. The possibilities of dramatic construction have yet to be discovered.—Rhythm. "Expression" at all costs. Harlotry in instrumentation.—All honour to Heinrich Schütz; all honour to Mendelssohn: in them we find an element of Goethe, but nowhere else! (We also find another element of Goethe coming to blossom in Rahel; a third element in Heinrich Heine.)

[1/4]

[Anonymous No.19732674]

>>19732670
838.

What we lack in music is an æsthetic which would impose laws upon musicians and give them a conscience; and as a result of this we lack a real contest concerning "principles."—For as musicians we laugh at Herbart's velleities in this department just as heartily as we laugh at Schopenhauer's. As a matter of fact, tremendous difficulties present themselves here. We no[Pg 273] longer know on what basis to found our concepts of what is exemplary, masterly, perfect. With the instincts of old loves and old admiration we grope about in a realm of values, and we almost believe, "that is good which pleases us".... I am always suspicious when I hear people everywhere speak innocently of Beethoven as a "classic"; what I would maintain, and with some seventy, is that, in other arts, a classic is the very reverse of Beethoven. But when the complete and glaring dissolution of style, Wagner's so-called dramatic style, is taught and honoured as exemplary, as masterly, as progressive, then my impatience exceeds all bounds. Dramatic style in music, as Wagner understood it, is simply renunciation of all style whatever; it is the assumption that something else, namely, drama, is a hundred times more important than music. Wagner can paint; he does not use music for the sake of music, with it he accentuates attitudes; he is a poet. Finally he made an appeal to beautiful feelings and heaving breasts, just as all other theatrical artists have done, and with it all he converted women and even those whose souls thirst for culture to him. But what do women and the uncultured care about music? All these people have no conscience for art: none of them suffer when the first and fundamental virtues of an art are scorned and trodden upon in favour of that which is merely secondary (as ancilla dramaturgica). What good can come of all extension in the means of expression, when that which is expressed, art itself, has lost all its law and order? The picturesque pomp and power[Pg 274] of tones, the symbolism of sound, rhythm, the colour effects of harmony and discord, the suggestive significance of music, the whole sensuality of this art which Wagner made prevail—it is all this that Wagner derived, developed, and drew out of music. Victor Hugo did something very similar for language: but already people in France are asking themselves, in regard to the case of Victor Hugo, whether language was not corrupted by him, whether reason, intellectuality, and thorough conformity to law in language are not suppressed when the sensuality of expression is elevated to a high place? Is it not a sign of decadence that the poets in France have become plastic artists, and that the musicians of Germany have become actors and culturemongers?

[2/4]

[Anonymous No.19732686]

>>19732674
839.

To-day there exists a sort of musical pessimism even among people who are not musicians. Who has not met and cursed the confounded youthlet who torments his piano until it shrieks with despair, and who single-handed heaves the slime of the most lugubrious and drabby harmonies before him? By so doing a man betrays himself as a pessimist.... It is open to question, though, whether he also proves himself a musician by this means. I for my part could never be made to believe it. Wagnerite pur sang is unmusical, he submits to the elementary forces of music very much as a woman submits to the will of the man who hypnotises her—and in order to be able to[Pg 275] do this he must not be made suspicious in rebus musicis et musicantibus by a too severe or too delicate conscience. I said "very much as"—but in this respect I spoke perhaps more than a parable. Let any one consider the means which Wagner uses by preference, when he wishes to make an effect (means which for the greater part he first had to invent), they are appallingly similar to the means by which a hypnotist exercises his power (the choice of his movements, the general colour of his orchestration; the excruciating evasion of consistency, and fairness and squareness, in rhythm; the creepiness, the soothing touch, the mystery, the hysteria of his "unending melody"). And is the condition to which the overture to Lohengrin, for instance, reduces the men, and still more the women, in the audience, so essentially different from the somnambulistic trance? On one occasion after the overture in question had been played, I heard an Italian lady say, with her eyes half closed, in a way in which female Wagnerites are adepts: "Come si dorme con questa musica!"[10]

[10]"How the music makes one sleep!"—Tr.

840.

Religion in music.—What a large amount of satisfaction all religious needs get out of Wagnerian music, though this is never acknowledged or even understood! How much prayer, virtue, unction, virginity, salvation, speaks through this music!... Oh what capital this cunning[Pg 276] saint, who leads and seduces us back to everything that was once believed in, makes out of the fact that he may dispense with words and concepts! ... Our intellectual conscience has no need to feel ashamed—it stands apart—if any old instinct puts its trembling lips to the rim of forbidden philtres.... This is shrewd and healthy, and, in so far as it betrays a certain shame in regard to the satisfaction of the religious instinct, it is even a good sign.... Cunning Christianity: the type of the music which came from the "last Wagner."

[3/4]

[Anonymous No.19732691]

>>19732686
841.

I distinguish between courage before persons, courage before things, and courage on paper. The latter was the courage of David Strauss, for instance. I distinguish again between the courage before witnesses and the courage without witnesses: the courage of a Christian, or of believers in God in general, can never be the courage without witnesses—but on this score alone Christian courage stands condemned. Finally, I distinguish between the courage which is temperamental and the courage which is the fear of fear; a single instance of the latter kind is moral courage. To this list the courage of despair should be added.

This is the courage which Wagner possessed. His attitude in regard to music was at bottom a desperate one. He lacked two things which go to make up a good musician: nature and nurture, the predisposition for music and the discipline and schooling which music requires. He had courage: out of this deficiency he established a principle;[Pg 277] he invented a kind of music for himself. The dramatic music which he invented was the music which he was able to compose,—its limitations are Wagner's limitations.

And he was misunderstood!—Was he really misunderstood?... Such is the case with five-sixths of the artists of to-day. Wagner is their Saviour: five-sixths, moreover, is the "lowest proportion." In any case where Nature has shown herself without reserve, and wherever culture is an accident, a mere attempt, a piece of dilettantism, the artist turns instinctively—what do I say?—I mean enthusiastically, to Wagner; as the poet says: "Half drew he him, and half sank he."[11]

[4/4]

[Anonymous No.19732702]

BONUS ROUND:

92.

In regard to German culture, I have always had a feeling as of decline. The fact that I learned to know a declining form of culture has often made me unfair towards the whole phenomenon of European culture. The Germans always follow at some distance behind: they always go to the root of things, for instance:—

Dependance upon foreigners; Kant—Rousseau, the sensualists, Hume, Swedenborg.

Schopenhauer—the Indians and Romanticism, Voltaire.

Wagner—the French cult of the ugly and of grand opera, Paris, and the flight into primitive barbarism (the marriage of brother and sister).

The law of the laggard (the provinces go to Paris, Germany goes to France).

How is it that precisely Germans discovered the Greek (the more an instinct is developed, the more it is tempted to run for once into its opposite).

Music is the last breath of every culture.

>inb4 redditors come to seethe about my posts

[Anonymous No.19732747]

>>19732670
>>19732674
>>19732686
>>19732691
>>19732702
>I suppose I know better than any one the prodigious feats of which Wagner was capable, the fifty worlds of strange ecstasies to which no one else had wings to soar; and as I am alive to-day and strong enough to turn even the most suspicious and most dangerous things to my own advantage, and thus to grow stronger, I declare Wagner to have been the greatest benefactor of my life. The bond which unites us is the fact that we have suffered greater agony, even at each other's hands, than most men are able to bear nowadays, and this will always keep our names associated in the minds of men. For, just as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, so, in truth, am I, and ever will be. Ye lack two centuries of psychological and artistic discipline, my dear countrymen!... But ye can never recover the time lost.
- Ecce Homo

>Wagner himself, as man, as animal, as God and artist, surpasses a thousand times the understanding and the incomprehension of our Germans. Whether it is the same with the French I do not know.
- Letter to Peter Gast 26 February 1888

[Anonymous No.19732771]

>>19732674
>it is the assumption that something else, namely, drama, is a hundred times more important than music. Wagner can paint; he does not use music for the sake of music, with it he accentuates attitudes; he is a poet.
But this was his intention from the start. Read Opera and Drama.

[Anonymous No.19732800]

>>19732747
Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Der Fall Wagner (1888)

[Anonymous No.19732908]

>>19732800
Der Fall Wagner is the Ego, Ecce Homo is the Id.

[Anonymous No.19732942]

>>19732908
Your argument, is that Der Fall Wagner is the rational aspect, while Ecce Homo is just his animalistic instinct? What are you trying to say?

[Anonymous No.19733012]

>>19731507
Truly a genius among geniuses

[Anonymous No.19733075]

>>19732942
Der Fall Wagner is what Nietzsche wants the world to see, Ecce Homo is his personal record.

[Anonymous No.19733176]

>>19731797
He made chad music.

[Anonymous No.19733333]

>>19731507
Barbaric Germ hates civilisation.

>All nations begin to regard as barbarous those times when even the greatest geniuses, such as Lopez de Vega and Shakespeare, were ignorant of this system, and they even confess the obligation they are under to us for having rescued them from this barbarism. . . . The fact that Corneille, Racine, Molière, Addison, Congreve, and Maffei have all observed the laws of the stage, that ought to be enough to restrain any one who should entertain the idea of violating them.

[Anonymous No.19733342]

>>19731797
Nigga Wagner was a womanizer in his life. He is the opposite of incel and his music too.