THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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satanic angel is the imposing radiance of the Baroque in the midst of the bourgeoisie, in its German alliance with stale, refurbished, romanticized feudalism; thus the
stated danger of false pre­appearance of radiant outflow, outflowing radiance became in Wagner just as clear as genuine preappearance certainly also emerges again
and again in the operatic wishful landscape, by virtue of music and by virtue of a work of genius in music. And it is not for example as if the spectacle as such, with
fortissimo, which is so powerfully familiar from the Baroque, were incompetent from the start at the climax, and possibly even at the low point; the incompetent aspect
of it remains essentially only the cliché, which is always so easily combined with emptiness in what is pompously wonderful. The fact that the pompously wonderful as
well, even that which is particularly heightened, can be effect with cause, a powerfully fulfilled tonic even in opera, as soon as the contrived zest is absent: this is shown
in the last act of the ‘Meistersinger’ by the chorus of the ‘Awake’, this unexpectedly mighty reddening dawn, after every intensification of day already seemed to have
come. And even the fine, more mysterious reddening dawn becomes free wherever a climax, a pause without the cliché of pretending to be a climax, shows its
landscape: as even in the drumbeats surrounding Senta's first encounter with the Dutchman; as in the quintet of the ‘Meistersinger’; even as in the violin strains of the
Good Friday meadow. This is the legitimate thing about significant opera in general: the fact that, out of the tonic radiance native to it as also out of tragedy and
especially out of happiness, it can cause a solution to arise in the action which the spoken word lacks in this expansive oceanic element. With what grand­arched
jubilation the bliss­making melody ends and also does not end in the final bars of the ‘Götterdämmerung’, the opposite land to the bombastic entry into Valhalla which
is here also musically purified. There is high time in the opera, resoundingly represented wishful land which it well befits if by virtue of the still hovering sound, as in the
most powerful of all operas: in ‘Fidelio’, it rises above a nameless ocean with nameless joy.
All this presupposes a taut sound of course, which surprisingly slackens. The raging then dies down in such a way that it flows out into the entering song of rest. But this
outflow is still itself filled with the preceding unrest, and thus the song which reproduces it is characteristically hot. And the danger here always remains a sensational
entry of the tonic (in a further sense than the fundamental harmonic one). But there is still an often smaller, always cool melodic region where a kind of silvery released
element itself emerges from the action in opera. As an Arcadian melody, without previous