Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

i\! -, I, I,I!-lnUntimely Meditationsthis forced service - all this Wagner pursued through the ages, onlyto spring up in rage and disgust when he had finished: he hadbecome a revolutionary out of pity for the folk. From then on heloved the folk and yearned for them as he yearned after his art, forah! it was only in them, only in the folk, though it was now artificiallysuppressed so that it could hardly any longer be imagined, that henow saw the only spectator and listener who might be worthy of andequal to the power of his art-work as he dreamed of it. Thus hisreflections collected around the question: how does the folk comeinto being? how can it be resurrected?He found only one answer: - if a multiplicity of people sufferedthe same need as he suffered, that would be the folk, he said to himself.And where the same need led to the same impulse and desire,the same kind of satisfaction must necessarily be sought and thesame happiness discovered in this satisfaction. When he then castaround for that which cheered and consoled him the most in hisneed, which came to meet it most warmly and profoundly, he wasaware with inspiriting certainty that it coqJd only be the myth andmusic - the myth which he recognized as the product and languageof the folk's need, music having a similar though even moreenigmatic origin. In these two elements he bathed and healed hissoul, they were what he desired most ardently: - from this conditionhe could infer how closely related his need was to that experiencedby the folk when it came into being, and in what manner the folkwould have to be resurrected if there were to be many Wagners. How,then, did myth and music fare in our modern society, insofar as theyhad not fallen victim to it? They had both suffered a similar fate, awitness to their mysterious affinity: myth had been deeply debasedand disfigured, transformed into the 'fairy tale', the plaything of thewomen and children of the degenerate folk and quite divested of itsmiraculous and serious manly nature; music had maintained itselfamong the poor and simple, among the solitary, the German musicianhad failed to establish himself in the luxury trade in the artsand had himself become a fairy tale full of monsters and touchingsounds and signs, an asker of the wrong questions, something quiteenchanted and in need of redemption. Here the artist heard clearlythe command directed at him alone - to restore to the myth itsmanliness, and to take the spell from music and bring it to speech: allat once he felt his strength fo r drama unfettered, his right to rule overan as yet undiscovered middle realm between myth and music,established. He now set before mankind his new art-work, within230