Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsfor generations to come incite them to competition with oneanother, so as at last to achieve a perfect visible and palpable representationof the image of the Wagnerian hero which already liesperfectly realized in the music of the drama. Following this lead, theeye of the plastic artist will at last behold the miracle of a new visibleworld such as only the creator of such works as the Ring des Nibelungenhas seen before him: as a sculptor of the highest kind who, likeAeschylus, points the way to an art of the future. Indeed, must notthe jealousy aroused when the plastic artist compares the effect of hisart with that of such music as Wagner's not in itself inspire greattalents: a music in which there reposes the purest sunlit happiness;so that to him who hears this music it is as though almost all earliermusic had spoken in a superficial and constricted language, asthough it were a game played before those unworthy of seriousnessor a means of instruction and demonstration for those unworthyeven of play. That earlier music inspires in us only for brief hoursthat happiness which we feel in Wagnerian music all the time: raremoments of forgetfulness when it spea;.s to itself alone and, likeRaphael's Cecilia, directs its glance away from its listeners, whodemand of it only distraction, merriment or scholarliness.Of Wagner the musician it can be said in general that he has bestoweda language upon everything in nature which has hitherto notwanted to speak: he does not believe that anything is obliged to bedumb. He plunges into daybreaks, woods, mist, ravines, mountainheights, the dread of night, moonlight, and remarks in them a secretdesire: they want to resound. If the philosopher says it is one willwhich in animate and inanimate nature thirsts fo r existence, themusician adds: and this will wants at every stage an existence insound.Before Wagner, music was as a whole narrowly bounded; itapplied to the steady, permanent states of mankind, to that whichthe Greeks called ethos, and it was only with Beethoven that it beganto discover the language of pathos, of passionate desire, of thedramatic events which take place in the depths of man. Formerly theobjective was to give expression in sound to a mood, a state of determinationor cheerfulness or reverence or penitence; by means of acertain striking uniformity of fo rm, and through protracting thisuniformity fo r some time, one wanted to compel the listener tointerpret the mood of the music and in the end to be transportedinto it himself. Different forms were needed fo r each of these imagesof different moods and states; other forms were determined by con-240