Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationstension between different parts of a work ceased altogether. That iswhy the symphony after Beethoven is such a strangely confusedstructure, especially when in its individual parts it still stammers thelanguage of Beethoven ian pathos. The means are not appropriate tothe objective, and the objective as a whole is not at all clear to thelistener because it was never clear to the composer either. But thedemand that one should have something quite definite to say, andthat one should say it as clearly as possible, is the more indispensablethe higher, more difficult and more ambitious a species of workis.That is why Wagner's whole struggle was to find every means ofprocuring clarity; to this end he needed above all to liberate himselffrom every prejudice and claim of the older music of static states andto put into the mouth of his music, which may be called the operationsof feeling and passion become sound, a speech free of allambiguity. If we look at what he achieved, it must seem to us asthough he has done in the realm of music what the inventor of freestandingsculpture did in that of the plaic arts. Measured againstWagner's, all earlier music seems stiff or timid, as though it wereashamed to be seen from all sides. Wagner seizes every degree andevery shade of feeling with the greatest sureness and definiteness: hetakes the tenderest, most remote and wildest emotions in handwithout fear oflosing his grip on them and holds them as somethinghard and firm, even though to anyone else they may be as elusive as abutterfly. His music is never indefinite, indicating only a generalmood; everything that speaks through it, man or nature, has a strictly. individualized passion; storm and fire take on the compelling forceof a personal will. Over all the individuals realized in sound and thestruggles their passions undergo, over the whole vortex of opposingforces, there soars in the supremest self-possession an oveIWhelmingsymphonic intelligence which out of all this conflict brings forthconcord: Wagner's music as a whole is an image of the world as it wasunderstood by the great Ephesian philosopher: * a harmony producedby conflict, the unity of justice and enmity. I wonder at thefact that it is possible to calculate the grand course of a total passionout of a multiplicity of individual passions each heading in a differentdirection: that such a thing is possible I see demonstrated byeach individual act of a Wagnerian drama, which narrates the personalhistory of various individuals together with a general history of*Heraclitus (sixth cemury BC).242