Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

pUntimely Meditationssank down too soon, their work unfinished, broken or d eadened bythe struggle. And are you now to be permitted, tamquam re bene gesta, *to praise such men! and to do so in words which reveal unmistakablywhom it is you have in mind when you utter such praise, which then'gushes so warmly from the heart' that one would have to be blindnot to see towards whom your obeisances are really directed. Even inhis day, Goethe felt impelled to exclaim: 'Truly, we are in need of aLessing!' and woe to all vain teachers and to the whole aestheticheavenly kingdom if the young tiger, his restless energy visible inswelling muscles and the glance of his eye, should ever set out insearch of prey!5How wise my friend was that, enlightened by this chimerical figureas to the nature of the Straussian Lessing and of Strauss himself, heforbore to read further. We read further, however, and went on tobeg entry into the musical sanctum of new faith. The Masteropened the door, attended at our side, explained, named names - atlast we stopped mistrustfully and looked at him: were we notexperiencing the .same thing as happened to our poor friend in hisdream? So long as he was speaking of them, the composers of whomStrauss spoke seemed to us to be wrongly named, and we felt hemust be referring to someone else, if not to mere teasing phantoms.When, for example, he takes, with the same warmth as had made ussuspicious when he praised Lessing, the name of Haydn into hismouth and gives himself out for an epopt and priest of a Haydnesquemystery cult, while at the same time (p. 362) comparing Haydn with'honest soup' and Beethoven with 'confectionary' (in reference to thequartets, of all things), we are certain of only one thing: hisco nfectio nary-Beethoven is not our Beethoven, and his soup-Haydnis not our Haydn. The Master finds, moreover, that our orchestrasare too good to perform his Haydn and believes that this music issuited only to the most modestly competent dilettanti - again a proofthat he is referring to a different artist and to different works of art(perhaps to Riehl's music for the home).Butwho could this Straussian confectio nary-Beethoven be? He issupposed to have written nine symphonies, of which the 'Pastoral' is'the least inspired'; we discover that at every third of them he is*tamquam re bene gesta: as if things had turned out well22