Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The Case of Wagner Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: There was reason for adding further ? "Be but a little more honest with yourself! for we are not in Bayreuth. In Bayreuth people are only honest in the mass, as individuals they lie, they deceive themselves. They leave themselves at home when they go to Bayreuth, they renounce the right to their own tongue and choice, to their taste, even to their courage, as they have it and use it within their own four walls with respect to God and the world. Nobody takes-j the most refined sentiments of his art into the theatre with him, least of all the artist who works for the theatre, ? solitude is wanting, the perfect does not tolerate witnesses. In the theatre one becomes mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, voting animal, patron, idiot ? Wagnerian: there even the most personal con- -, science succumbs to the levelling charm of the great multitude, there the neighbour rules, there one becomes neighbour ..." WAGNER AS A DANGER The object which recent music pursues in what is at present called ? by a strong though obscure name ? " infinite melody " one can explain to one's self by going into the sea, gradually losing secure footing on the bottom, and finally submitting one's self to the element at discretion: one has to swim. In older music, in an elegant, or solemn, or passionate to-and- fro, faster and slower, one had to do something quite different, namely, to dance. The proportion necessary thereto, the observance of definite balance in measures of time and intensity, extorted from the soul of the hearer a continuous consideration, ? on the contrast between this cooler breeze, which originated from consideration, and the breath of enthusiasm warmed through, the charm of all good music rested. ? Richard Wagner wanted another kind of movement j ?he overthrew the physiological pre-requisite...