Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Richard Wagner in Bayreuthfrom this reality. Wagner, on the other hand, as the first to recognizethe inner deficiencies of the spoken drama, presents every dramaticevent in a threefold rendering, through words, gestures and music:the music transmits the fundamental impulses in the depths of thepersons represented in the drama directly to the soul of the listeners,who now perceive in these same persons' gestures the first visiblefo rm of those inner events, and in the words a second, paler manifestationof them translated into a more conscious act of will. All theseeffects take place simultaneously without in the least interfering withone another, and compel him before whom such a drama is presentedto a quite novel understanding and empathy, just as though his senseshad all at once grown more spiritual and his spirit more sensual, andas though everything that longs to know is now in a free and blissfultransport of knowing. Because every event in a Wagnerian drama,illumined from within as it is by music, communicates itself to thespectator with the utmost clarity., its author was able to dispense withall those means of which the poet of the spoken drama has need ifheis to give the events of his play warmth and luminosity. The wholeeconomy of the drama could be made simpler, the architect'srhythmic sense could again venture to reveal itself in the greatoverall proportions of the building; for there was now no motivewhatever for that deliberate complexity and confusing multiplicitythrough which the poet of the spoken drama seeks to arouse interestand tension and then enhance them to a feeling of happy astonishment.The impression of idealized remoteness and nobility couldnow be achieved without artifice. Language retreated from rhetoricalexpansiveness to the economy and fo rce of a speech of feeling: andalthough the performer talked about his deeds and feelings far lessthan before, the inward events which the poet of the spoken dramahad hitherto kept off the stage on account of their supposedlyundramatic nature now compelled the listener to a passionateempathy with them, while the gestures which attended them neededto be only of the gentlest. Now, passion sung takes somewhat longerthan passion spoken; music stretches feeling, as it were: from whichit follows that in general the performer who is also a singer has toovercome that agitation of movement from which the spoken dramasuffers. He finds himself drawn towards an ennoblement of his gestures,and he does so all the more in that the music has plunged hisfeelings into the bath of a purer aether and has thus involuntarilymade them more beautiful.The extraordinary tasks Wagner has set his actors and singers will239