Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

iIIUntimely Meditationscreativity; now he speaks through his art only to himself and no longerto a 'public' or folk, and struggles to bestow upon it the greatestclarity and capacity to conduct such a mighty colloquy. His workstoo had been different during the preceding period: in them too hehad, if nobly and tenderly, sought to produce an immediate effect:for these works were meant as a question designed to evoke an instantanswer; and how often Wagner desired to make himself moreeasily understood by those to whom he put it - so that he went out tomeet them and their inexperience in being questioned and conformedto older forms and means of expression; where he had tofear that he would fail to convince and be understood in his ownlanguage, he had tried to put his question in a tongue half foreign tohim, though familiar to his listeners. Now there was no longer anythingto constrain him to such consideration; now he wanted onlyone thing: to come to terms with himself, to think of the nature of theworld in the form of actions, to philosophize in sound; what was leftin him of intentionality was bent upon the expression of his finalinsights. He who is worthy to know what teo k place in him then, whathe was accustomed to discuss with himself in the darkest sanctuaryof his soul - not many are worthy of it - let him hear, behold andexperience Tristan und Isolde, the actual opus metaphysicum of all art, awork upon which there lies the broken glance of a dying man withhis insatiable sweet longing for the mysteries of night and death, fardistant from life, which, as evil, deception and separation, shineswith an uncanny ghostly morning brightness and distinctness: andwith this a drama of the most austere strictness of form, ovelWhelmingin its simple grandeur, and only thus adequate to the mystery ofwhich it speaks, the mystery of death in life, of unity in duality. Andyet there is something even more miraculous than this work: theartist himself, who after producing it could soon afterwards create aworld of a completely different colouring, the Meistersinger vonNiirnberg, and who was indeed, in these two works, only as it wereresting and refreshing himself so as then to complete with measuredpace the four-part giant structure he had already sketched out andbegun, the object of his reflection and invention over twenty years,his Bayreuth art-work, the Ring des Nibelungen! Whoever can feel perplexedat the proximity of Tristan and the Meistersinger has failed tounderstand the life and nature of all truly great Germans on animportant point: he does not know upon what basis alone that uniquelyGerman cheerfulness exhibited by Luther, Beethoven and Wagner cangrow, a kind of cheerfulness which other nations completely fail to232