Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Richard Wagner in Bayreuthsought relief, strove for power and intoxication, often flew back indisgust, how he wanted to throw off his burden, longed to forget, todeny, to renounce - the entire stream plunged now into this valley,now into that, and bored its way into the darkest ravines: - in thenight of this half-subterranean turmoil a star appeared high abovehim shining with a sad light, and he named it for what he recognizedit to be: loyalty, selfless loyalty! Why did it seem to him to shine morebrightly and purely than any other? what secret does the wordloyalty hold for his whole being? For the image and problem ofloyalty is impressed upon everything he thought and created; thereexists in his works a virtually complete series of all possible kinds ofloyalty, the most glorious and rarest among them: loyalty of brotherto sister, of friend to friend, of servant to master, Elizabeth toTannhauser, Senta to the Dutchman, Elsa to Lohengrin, Isolde,Kurwenal and Marke to Tristan, Briinnhilde to Wotan's innermostdesire - to make only a start on the series. It is the most personalprimal event that Wagner experiences within himself and revereslike a religious mystery: he expresses it in the word loyalty and henever wearies of displaying it in a hundred shapes and, in the abundanceof his gratitude, of bestowing upon it the finest things hepossesses and the finest he can do - that marvellous experience andrecognition that one sphere of his being remains loyal to the other,shows loyalty out of free and most selfless love, the creative, innocent,more illuminated sphere to the dark, intractable andtyrannical.3It was in the relationship of these two profound forces with oneanother, in the surrender of the one to the other, that there lay thegreat necessity which had to be fu lfilled if he was to be whole andwholly himself: at the same time it was the only act that did not lie inhis own power, which he could only watch and endure, while thepossibility of seduction to disloyalty, and the frightfu l danger it representedto him, was always present. In the uncertainty that thusarose there lay an abundant source of suffering. Each of his drivesstrove without limit, each of his talents, joyful in its existence, wantedto tear itself free from the others and satisfy itself individually; thegreater their abundance, the greater was the tumult and the greaterthe hostility when they crossed one another. In addition there wasthe impulse, deriving from chance and from life itself, to acquire203