Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Richard Wagner in Bayreuthsister, gymnastics: in its search for this it becomes judge over the wholevisible world of the present. This is Wagner's second answer to thequestion as to what significance music can have in this age. Help me,he cries to all who can hear, help me to discove:r that culture whoseexistence my music, as the rediscovered language of true feeling,prophesies; reflect that the soul of music now wants to create foritself a body, that it seeks its path through all of you to visibility inmovement, deed, structure and morality! There are men who comprehendthis call, and there will be more and more of them; and theyhave also for the first time grasped anew what it means to found thestate upon music, something the ancient Hellenes not only graspedbut also demanded of themselves: whereas they would condemn thecontemporary state as unconditionally as most men now condemnthe church. The path to so new yet not wholly unheard-of a goal leads toan admission to ourselves that the m,ost shameful shortcoming ofour education and the actual ground of its inability to emerge frombarbarism is its lack of the enlivening and formative soul of music,and that its demands and institutions are products of a time whenthe music from which we expect so much had not yet been born.Our education is the most backward structure of the present day,and it is backward precisely in regard to the only new educative forcewhich contemporary mankind has that previous centuries did nothave - or which they could have if they would cease their mindlessscurrying forward under the lash of the moment! Because they haveup to now not let the soul of music lodge within them, they have asyet no inkling of gymnastics in the Greek and Wagnerian sense of theword; and this is again the reason their plastic artists are condemnedto hopelessness so long as they continue to desire to dispense withmusic to conduct them into a new visible world: it does not matterhow much talent they have, it will come either too late or too soonand in any case at the wrong time, for it is superfluous and ineffective,since the perfect and highest products of former ages, the patternfor our contemporary artists, are themselves superfluous andalmost ineffective and hardly capable now of setting one stone uponanother. If they behold within themselves no new figures beforethem but only the old figures behind them, then they may serve historybut they cannot serve life, and they are dead while they are stillbreathing: . he who feels true, fruitful life within him, however - andat present that means music - could he be misled for a moment intoexpecting anything further from something that exhausts itself infigures, forms and styles? He has gone beyond all vanities of this217