Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

· rRichard Wagner in Bayreuthits capacity both to surrender and to receive. By apparently succumbingto Wagner's overflowing nature, he who reflects upon ithas in fact participated in its energy and has thus as it were through himacquired power against him; and whoever examines himself closelyknows that even mere contemplation involves a secret antagonism,the antagonism involved in comparison. If his art allows us toexperience all that a soul encounters when it goes on a journey - participationin other souls and their destiny, acquisition of the abilityto look at the world through many eyes - we are then, throughknowledge of such strange and remote things, also made capable ofseeing him himself after having experienced him himself. Then wefeel certain that in Wagner all that is visible in the world wants tobecome more profound and more intense by becoming audible,that it seeks here its lost soul; and that all that is audible in the worldlikewise wants to emerge into the light and also become aphenomenon fo r the eye; that it wants as it were to acquire corporality.His art always conducts him along this twofold path, from aworld as an audible spectacle into a world as a visible spectacleenigmatically related to it, and the reverse; he is continually compelled- and the beholder is compelled with him - to translate visiblemovement back into soul and primordial life, and conversely to seethe most deeply concealed inner activity as visible phenomenon andto clothe it with the appearance of a body. All this constitutes theessence of the dithyrambic dramatist, this concept extended to em braceat once the actor, poet and composer: as it must be, since it isnecessarily derived from the only perfect exemplar of the dithyrambicdramatist before Wagner, from Aeschylus and his fellow Greekartists. If one has tried to see the evolution of the greatest artists asderiving from inner constraints or lacunae; if, for example, poetrywas for Goethe a kind of substitute for a failed calling as a painter; ifone can speak of Schiller'S plays as being vulgar eloquence redirected;if Wagner himself seeks to interpret the promotion of music by theGermans by supposing among other things that, denied the seductivestimulus of a naturally melodious voice, they were compelledto take the art of music with something of the same degree ofseriousness as their religious reformers took Christianity -: so, if onewanted in a similar way to associate Wagner's evolution with such aninner constraint, one might assume the existence in him of anoriginal histrionic talent which had to deny itself satisfaction by themost obvious and trivial route and which found its expedient anddeliverance in drawing together all the arts into a great histrionic223