Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Richard Wagner in Bayreuthof the folk, the theoretical man. Thus Wagner does not address himselfto the latter; for the theoretical man understands of the poetical,of the myth, precisely as much as a deaf man does of music, that is tosay both behold a movement which seems to them meaningless.From within one of these disparate spheres one cannot see into theother: so long as one is under the spell of the poet one thinks withhim, as though one were a being who only fe els, sees and hears; theconclusions one draws are the linking together of the events onesees, that is to say factual causalities, not logical ones.N ow, if the gods and heroes of such mythological dramas asWagner writes are to communicate also in words, there is no greaterdanger than that this spoken language will awaken the theoretical manin us and thereby heave us over into the other, non-mythical sphere:so that in the end we should not through the employment of wordshave understood more clearly what is taking place before us but, onthe contrary, have failed to understand it at all. That is why Wagnerhas forced language back to a primordial state in which it hardly yetthinks in concepts and in which it is itself still poetry, image and feeling;the fearlessness with which Wagner set about this quite frightful tas kshows how fo rcibly he was led by the spirit of poetry, as one who hasto follow wherever his ghostly guide may lead him. Every word ofthese dramas had to be able to be sung, and it had to be appropriateto gods and heroes: that was the tremendous demand Wagner presentedto his linguistic imagination. Anyone else would surely havedespaired of succeeding; for our language seems almost too old andtoo devastated fo r one to be able to demand of it what Wagnerdemanded: and yet the blow he struck against the rock called forthan abundant spring. Because he had loved this language more anddemanded more ofit than other Germans, Wagner had also sufferedmore from its degeneration and enfeeblement, from the manifoldlosses and mutilation it had sustained, from its clumsy sentencestructure, from its unsingable auxiliary verbs - all things which haveentered into the language through sin and depravity. On the otherhand, he sensed with profound pride the natural originality andinexhaustibility still existing in this language, the resonant strengthof its roots in which he suspected, in contrast to the highly derivativeand artificially rhetorical languages of the Roman family, a wonderfulinclination to and preparation for music, for true music. A joy inGerman permeates Wagner's poetry, a cordiality and ingenuousnessin dealing with it that is to be encountered in no other Germanexcept Goethe. Individuality of expression, bold compression,237