Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Richard Wagner in Bayreuthwhich he had enclosed all he knew of power, effectiveness and joy,with the great, painfully incisive question: 'Where are you who sufferand desire as I do? Where are the many which I long to see become afolk? The sign by which I shall know you is that you shall have thesame happiness and the same comfort in common with me: yoursuffering shall be revealed to me through your joy!' Thus he ques-"tioned in Tannhiiuser and Lohengrin, thus he looked about him for hisown kind; the solitary thirsted for the many.Yet what happened? No one answered, no one understood thequestion. Not that there was utter silence; on the contrary, therewere answers to a thousand questions he had never asked at all, therewere twitterings about the new art-works as though they had beencreated for the express purpose of being talked to pieces. The wholelust for aesthetic chattering and scribbling erupted among the Germanslike a fever, the art-works and the person of the artist were assessedand fingered with that shamelessness which characterizes Germanscholars no less than it does German journalists. Wagner tried toassist an understanding of his question through prose writings: freshconfusion, fresh buzzing - a musician who writes and thinks was toall the world in those days a monstrosity; then they cried: he is atheorist who wants to transform art according to intellectual concepts,stone him! - Wagner was as though stunned; his question hadnot been understood, his need not comprehended, his art-workswere like communications to the deaf and blind, his folk was like aphantom; he reeled and faltered. The possibility of a total upheavalof all things rose before his eyes, and he no longer shrank from thispossibility: perhaps a new hope could be erected on the other side ofrevolution and destruction, perhaps not - and in any event nothingnessis better than something repulsive. Before long he was a politicalrefugee and penniless.Yet it was only now, when his outward and inner destiny had takenso fearful a turn, that the great man entered upon the period of hislife over which the light of supreme mastery lies like the glitter ofliquid gold! Only now did the genius of the dithyrambic dramathrow off his last concealment! He is utterly alone, time seems nothingto him, he has abandoned hope: thus his universal glanceagain descends into the depths, and this time to the very bottom:there he sees that suffering pertains to the essence of things and fromthen on, grown as it were more impersonal, he accepts his own shareof suffering more calmly. The desire for supreme power, theinheritance of earlier years, is wholly translated into artistic23 1