8.

8.—“Very good! But how can thisdécadentspoil one's taste if perchance one is not a musician, if perchance one is not oneself adécadent?”—Conversely! How can onehelpit!Justyou try it!—You know not what Wagner is: quite a great actor! Does a more profound, a moreponderousinfluence exist on the stage? Just look at these youthlets,—all benumbed, pale, breathless! They are Wagnerites: they know nothing about music,—and yet Wagner gets the mastery of them. Wagner's art presses with the weight of a hundred atmospheres: do but submit, there is nothing else to do.… Wagner the actor is a tyrant, his pathos flings all taste, all resistance, to the winds.[pg 023]—Who else has this persuasive power in his attitudes, who else sees attitudes so clearly before anything else! This holding-of-its-breath in Wagnerian pathos, this disinclination to have done with an intense feeling, this terrifying habit of dwelling on a situation in which every instant almost chokes one.——Was Wagner a musician at all? In any case he was something else toa much greater degree—that is to say, an incomparablehistrio, the greatest mime, the most astounding theatrical genius that the Germans have ever had, ourscenic artist par excellence. He belongs to some other sphere than the history of music, with whose really great and genuine figure he must not be confounded. WagnerandBeethoven—this is blasphemy—and above all it does not do justice even to Wagner.… As a musician he was no more than what he was as a man, hebecamea musician, hebecamea poet, because the tyrant in him, his actor's genius, drove him to be both. Nothing is known concerning Wagner, so long as his dominating instinct has not been divined.Wagner wasnotinstinctively a musician. And this he proved by the way in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it,i.e., a rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as an inventor and an innovator of the first order—he increased the powers of speech[pg 024]of music to an incalculable degree—he is the Victor Hugo of music as language, provided always we allow that under certain circumstances music may be something which is not music, but speech—instrument—ancilla dramaturgica. Wagner's music,notin the tender care of theatrical taste, which is very tolerant, is simply bad music, perhaps the worst that has ever been composed. When a musician can no longer count up to three, he becomes“dramatic,”he becomes“Wagnerian”.…Wagner almost discovered the magic which can be wrought even now by means of music which is both incoherent andelementary. His consciousness of this attains to huge proportions, as does also his instinct to dispense entirely with higher law andstyle. The elementary factors—sound, movement, colour, in short, the whole sensuousness of music—suffice. Wagner never calculates as a musician with a musician's conscience, all he strains after is effect, nothing more than effect. And he knows what he has to make an effect upon!—In this he is as unhesitating as Schiller was, as any theatrical man must be; he has also the latter's contempt for the world which he brings to its knees before him. A man is an actor when he is ahead of mankind in his possession of this one view, that everything which has to strike people as true, must not be true. This rule was formulated by Talma: it contains the whole psychology of the actor, it also contains—and this we need not doubt—all his morality. Wagner's music is never true.—But it is supposed to be so: and thus everything is as it should be. As long as we are young, and[pg 025]Wagnerites into the bargain, we regard Wagner as rich, even as the model of a prodigal giver, even as a great landlord in the realm of sound. We admire him in very much the same way as young Frenchmen admire Victor Hugo—that is to say, for his“royal liberality.”Later on we admire the one as well as the other for the opposite reason: as masters and paragons in economy, asprudentamphitryons. Nobody can equal them in the art of providing a princely board with such a modest outlay.—The Wagnerite, with his credulous stomach, is even sated with the fare which his master conjures up before him. But we others who, in books as in music, desire above all to findsubstance, and who are scarcely satisfied with the mere representation of a banquet, are much worse off. In plain English, Wagner does not give us enough to masticate. His recitative—very little meat, more bones, and plenty of broth—I christened“alla genovese”: I had no intention of flattering the Genoese with this remark, but rather theolder recitativo, therecitativo secco. And as to Wagnerianleitmotif, I fear I lack the necessary culinary understanding for it. If hard pressed, I might say that I regard it perhaps as an ideal toothpick, as an opportunity of ridding one's self of what remains of one's meal. Wagner's“arias”are still left over. But now I shall hold my tongue.9.Even in his general sketch of the action, Wagner is above all an actor. The first thing that occurs to him is a scene which is certain to produce a[pg 026]strong effect, a realactio,10with a basso-relievo of attitudes; anoverwhelmingscene, this he now proceeds to elaborate more deeply, and out of it he draws his characters. The whole of what remains to be done follows of itself, fully in keeping with a technical economy which has no reason to be subtle. It is not Corneille's public that Wagner has to consider, it is merely the nineteenth century. Concerning the“actual requirements of the stage”Wagner would have about the same opinion as any other actor of to-day, a series of powerful scenes, each stronger than the one that preceded it,—and, in between, all kinds ofclevernonsense. His first concern is to guarantee the effect of his work; he begins with the third act, heapproveshis work according to the quality of its final effect. Guided by this sort of understanding of the stage, there is not much danger of one's creating a drama unawares. Drama demandsinexorablelogic: but what did Wagner care about logic? Again I say, it was not Corneille's public that he had to consider; but[pg 027]merely Germans! Everybody knows the technical difficulties before which the dramatist often has to summon all his strength and frequently to sweat his blood: the difficulty of making theplotseem necessary and the unravelment as well, so that both are conceivable only in a certain way, and so that each may give the impression of freedom (the principle of the smallest expenditure of energy). Now the very last thing that Wagner does is to sweat blood over the plot; and on this and the unravelment he certainly spends the smallest possible amount of energy. Let anybody put one of Wagner's“plots”under the microscope, and I wager that he will be forced to laugh. Nothing is more enlivening than the dilemma in“Tristan,”unless it be that in the“Mastersingers.”Wagner isnodramatist; let nobody be deceived on this point. All he did was to love the word“drama”—he always loved fine words. Nevertheless, in his writings the word“drama”is merely a misunderstanding (—anda piece of shrewdness: Wagner always affected superiority in regard to the word“opera”—), just as the word“spirit”is a misunderstanding in the New Testament.—He was not enough of a psychologist for drama; he instinctively avoided a psychological plot—but how?—by always putting idiosyncrasy in its place.… Very modern—eh? Very Parisian! very decadent!… Incidentally, theplotsthat Wagner knows how to unravel with the help of dramatic inventions, are of quite another kind. For example, let us suppose that Wagner requires a female voice. A whole act without a woman's voice would be[pg 028]impossible! But in this particular instance not one of the heroines happens to be free. What does Wagner do? He emancipates the oldest woman on earth, Erda.“Step up, aged grandmamma! You have got to sing!”And Erda sings. Wagner's end has been achieved. Thereupon he immediately dismisses the old lady.“Why on earth did you come? Off with you! Kindly go to sleep again!”In short, a scene full of mythological awe, before which the Wagneritewondersall kinds of things.…—“But the substance of Wagner's texts! their mythical substance, their eternal substance”—Question: how is this substance, this eternal substance tested? The chemical analyst replies: Translate Wagner into the real, into the modern,—let us be even more cruel, and say into the bourgeois! And what will then become of him?—Between ourselves, I have tried the experiment. Nothing is more entertaining, nothing more worthy of being recommended to a picnic-party, than to discuss Wagner dressed in a more modern garb: for instance Parsifal, as a candidate in divinity, with a public-school education (—the latter, quite indispensablefor purefoolishness). Whatsurprisesawait one! Would you believe it, that Wagner's heroines one and all, once they have been divested of the heroic husks, are almost indistinguishable from Mdme. Bovary!—just as one can conceive conversely, of Flaubert's beingwell ableto transform all his heroines into Scandinavian or Carthaginian women, and then to offer them to Wagner in this mythologised form as a libretto. Indeed, generally[pg 029]speaking, Wagner does not seem to have become interested in any other problems than those which engross the little Parisian decadents of to-day. Always five paces away from the hospital! All very modern problems, all problems which are at homein big cities!do not doubt it!… Have you noticed (it is in keeping with this association of ideas) that Wagner's heroines never have any children?—Theycannothave them.… The despair with which Wagner tackled the problem of arranging in some way for Siegfried's birth, betrays how modern his feelings on this point actually were.—Siegfried“emancipated woman”—but not with any hope of offspring.—And now here is a fact which leaves us speechless: Parsifal is Lohengrin's father! How ever did he do it?—Ought one at this juncture to remember that“chastity works miracles”?…Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas.10.And now just a worden passantconcerning Wagner's writings: they are among other things a school ofshrewdness. The system of procedures of which Wagner disposes, might be applied to a hundred other cases,—he that hath ears to hear let him hear. Perhaps I may lay claim to some public acknowledgment, if I put three of the most valuable of these procedures into a precise form.Everything that Wagnercannotdo is bad.Wagner could do much more than he does; but his strong principles prevent him.Everything that Wagnercando, no one will[pg 030]ever be able to do after him, no one has ever done before him, and no one must ever do after him. Wagner is godly.These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner's writings;—the rest is merely—“literature”.—Not every kind of music hitherto has been in need of literature; and it were well, to try and discover the actual reason of this. Is it perhaps that Wagner's music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear precisely the reverse—that it was too easy,—that people mightnot understand it with sufficient difficulty?—As a matter of fact, his whole life long, he did nothing but repeat one proposition: that his music did not mean music alone! But something more! Something immeasurably more!…“Not music alone”—nomusician would speak in this way. I repeat, Wagner could not create things as a whole; he had no choice, he was obliged to create things in bits, with“motives,”attitudes, formulæ, duplications, and hundreds of repetitions, he remained a rhetorician in music,—and that is why he was at bottomforcedto press“this means”into the foreground.“Music can never be anything else than a means”: this was his theory, but above all it was the onlypracticethat lay open to him. No musician however thinks in this way.—Wagner was in need of literature, in order to persuade the whole world to take his music seriously, profoundly,“because itmeantan infinity of things”, all his life he was the commentator of the“Idea.”—What does Elsa stand for? But without a doubt, Elsa is“the unconscious[pg 031]mind of the people”(—“when I realised this, I naturally became a thorough revolutionist”—).Do not let us forget that, when Hegel and Schelling were misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is—“the idea,”—that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,—rigorously, but also unjustly, for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more“honest”than his more famous contemporaries. But let us leave morality out of the question, Hegel is amatter of taste.… And not only of German but of European taste!… A taste which Wagner understood!—which he felt equal to! which he has immortalised!—All he did was to apply it to music—he invented a style for himself, which might mean an“infinity of things,”—he wasHegel'sheir.… Music as“Idea.”—And how well Wagner was understood!—The same kind of man who used to gush over Hegel, now gushes over Wagner, in his school they evenwriteHegelian.11But he who understood Wagner best, was the German youthlet. The two words“infinity”and“meaning”were sufficient for this: at their sound the youthlet immediately began to feel exceptionally happy. Wagner didnotconquer these boys with music, but with the“idea”:—it is[pg 032]the enigmatical vagueness of his art, its game of hide-and-seek amid a hundred symbols, its polychromy in ideals, which leads and lures the lads. It is Wagner's genius for forming clouds, his sweeps and swoops through the air, his ubiquity and nullibiety—precisely the same qualities with which Hegel led and lured in his time!—Moreover in the presence of Wagner's multifariousness, plenitude and arbitrariness, they seem to themselves justified—“saved”. Tremulously they listen while thegreat symbolsin his art seem to make themselves heard from out the misty distance, with a gentle roll of thunder, and they are not at all displeased if at times it gets a little grey, gruesome and cold. Are they not one and all, like Wagner himself, onquite intimate termswith bad weather, with German weather! Wotan is their God, but Wotan is the God of bad weather.… They are right, how could these German youths—in their present condition,—miss what we others, wehalcyonians, miss in Wagner?i.e.:la gaya scienza; light feet, wit, fire, grave, grand logic, stellar dancing, wanton intellectuality, the vibrating light of the South, the calm sea—perfection.…11.—I have mentioned the sphere to which Wagner belongs—certainly not to the history of music. What, however, does he mean historically?—The rise of the actor in music: a momentous event which not only leads me to think but also to fear.In a word:“Wagner and Liszt.”Never yet[pg 033]have the“uprightness”and“genuineness”of musicians been put to such a dangerous test. It is glaringly obvious: great success, mob success is no longer the achievement of the genuine,—in order to get it a man must be an actor!—Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner—they both prove one and the same thing: that in declining civilisations, wherever the mob is allowed to decide, genuineness becomes superfluous, prejudicial, unfavourable. The actor, alone, can still kindlegreatenthusiasm.—And thus it is hisgolden agewhich is now dawning,—his and that of all those who are in any way related to him. With drums and fifes, Wagner marches at the head of all artists in declamation, in display and virtuosity. He began by convincing the conductors of orchestras, the scene-shifters and stage-singers, not to forget the orchestra:—he“delivered”them from monotony.… The movement that Wagner created has spread even to the land of knowledge: whole sciences pertaining to music are rising slowly, out of centuries of scholasticism. As an example of what I mean, let me point more particularly toRiemann'sservices to rhythmics; he was the first who called attention to the leading idea in punctuation—even for music (unfortunately he did so with a bad word; he called it“phrasing”).—All these people, and I say it with gratitude, are the best, the most respectable among Wagner's admirers—they have a perfect right to honour Wagner. The same instinct unites them with one another; in him they recognise their highest type, and since he has inflamed them with his own ardour they feel[pg 034]themselves transformed into power, even into great power. In this quarter, if anywhere, Wagner's influence has really beenbeneficent. Never before has there been so much thinking, willing, and industry in this sphere. Wagner endowed all these artists with a new conscience: what they now exact andobtainfrom themselves, they had never exacted before Wagner's time—before then they had been too modest. Another spirit prevails on the stage since Wagner rules there the most difficult things are expected, blame is severe, praise very scarce,—the good and the excellent have become the rule. Taste is no longer necessary, nor even is a good voice. Wagner is sung only with ruined voices: this has a more“dramatic”effect. Even talent is out of the question. Expressiveness at all costs, which is what the Wagnerian ideal—the ideal of decadence—demands, is hardly compatible with talent. All that is required for this is virtue—that is to say, training, automatism,“self-denial”. Neither taste, voices, nor gifts, Wagner's stage requires but one thing:Germans!… The definition of a German: an obedient man with long legs.… There is a deep significance in the fact that the rise of Wagner should have coincided with the rise of the“Empire”: both phenomena are a proof of one and the same thing—obedience and long legs.—Never have people been more obedient, never have they been so well ordered about. The conductors of Wagnerian orchestras, more particularly, are worthy of an age, which posterity will one day call, with timid awe, theclassical age of war.[pg 035]Wagner understood how to command; in this respect, too, he was a great teacher. He commanded as a man who had exercised an inexorable will over himself—as one who had practised lifelong discipline: Wagner was, perhaps, the greatest example of self-violence in the whole of the history of art (—even Alfieri, who in other respects is his next-of-kin, is outdone by him. The note of a Torinese).12.This view, that our actors have become more worthy of respect than heretofore, does not imply that I believe them to have become less dangerous.… But who is in any doubt as to what I want,—as to what thethree requisitionsare concerning which my wrath and my care and love of art, have made me open my mouth on this occasion?That the stage should not become master of the arts.That the actor should not become the corrupter of the genuine.That music should not become an art of lying.Friedrich Nietzsche.[pg 036]PostscriptThe gravity of these last words allows me at this point to introduce a few sentences out of an unprinted essay which will at least leave no doubt as to my earnestness in regard to this question. The title of this essay is:“What Wagner has cost us.”One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Even to-day a vague feeling that this is so, still prevails. Even Wagner's success, his triumph, did not uproot this feeling thoroughly. But formerly it was strong, it was terrible, it was a gloomy hate throughout almost three-quarters of Wagner's life. The resistance which he met with among us Germans cannot be too highly valued or too highly honoured. People guarded themselves against him as against an illness,—not with arguments—it is impossible to refute an illness,—but with obstruction, with mistrust, with repugnance, with loathing, with sombre earnestness, as though he were a great rampant danger. The æsthetes gave themselves away when out of three schools of German philosophy they waged an absurd war against Wagner's principles with“ifs”and“fors”—what did he care about principles, even his own!—The Germans themselves had enough instinctive good sense to dispense with every“if”and“for”in this matter. An instinct is weakened when it becomes conscious: for by[pg 037]becoming conscious it makes itself feeble. If there were any signs that in spite of the universal character of European decadence there was still a modicum of health, still an instinctive premonition of what is harmful and dangerous, residing in the German soul, then it would be precisely this blunt resistance to Wagner which I should least like to see underrated. It does us honour, it gives us some reason to hope: France no longer has such an amount of health at her disposal. The Germans, theseloiterers par excellence, as history shows, are to-day the most backward among the civilised nations of Europe; this has its advantages,—for they are thus relatively the youngest.One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. It is only quite recently that the Germans have overcome a sort of dread of him,—the desire to be rid of him occurred to them again and again.12Does anybody remember a very curious occurrence in which, quite unexpectedly towards the end, this[pg 038]old feeling once more manifested itself? It happened at Wagner's funeral. The first Wagner Society, the one in Munich, laid a wreath on his grave with this inscription, which immediately became famous:“Salvation to the Saviour!”Everybody admired the lofty inspiration which had dictated this inscription, as also the taste which seemed to be the privilege of the followers of Wagner. Many also, however (it was singular enough), made this slight alteration in it:“Salvationfromthe Saviour”—People began to breathe again—One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Let us try to estimate the influence of this worship upon culture. Whom did this movement press to the front? What did it make ever more and more pre-eminent?—In the first place the layman's arrogance, the arrogance of the art-maniac. Now these people are organising societies, they wish to make their taste prevail, they even wish to pose as judgesin rebus musicis et musicantibus. Secondly: an ever increasing indifference towards severe, noble and conscientious schooling in the service of art, and in its place the belief in genius, or in plain English, cheeky dilettantism (—the formula for this is to be found in theMastersingers). Thirdly, and this is the worst of all:Theatrocracy—, the craziness of a belief in the pre-eminence of the theatre, in the right of the theatre to rule supreme over the arts, over Art in general.… But this should be shouted into the face of Wagnerites a hundred times over: that the theatre is something lower than art, something secondary, something coarsened,[pg 039]above all something suitably distorted and falsified for the mob. In this respect Wagner altered nothing: Bayreuth is grand Opera—and not even good opera.… The stage is a form of Demolatry in the realm of taste, the stage is an insurrection of the mob, aplébisciteagainst good taste.… The case of Wagner proves this fact: he captivated the masses—he depraved taste, he even perverted our taste for opera!—One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. What has Wagner-worship made out of spirit? Does Wagner liberate the spirit? To him belong that ambiguity and equivocation and all other qualities which can convince the uncertain without making them conscious of why they have been convinced. In this sense Wagner is a seducer on a grand scale. There is nothing exhausted, nothing effete, nothing dangerous to life, nothing that slanders the world in the realm of spirit, which has not secretly found shelter in his art, he conceals the blackest obscurantism in the luminous orbs of the ideal. He flatters every nihilistic (Buddhistic) instinct and togs it out in music; he flatters every form of Christianity, every religious expression of decadence. He that hath ears to hear let him hear: everything that has ever grown out of the soil of impoverished life, the whole counterfeit coinage of the transcendental and of a Beyond found its most sublime advocate in Wagner's art, not in formulæ (Wagner is too clever to use formulæ), but in the persuasion of the senses which in their turn makes the spirit weary and morbid. Music in the form of Circe … in[pg 040]this respect his last work is his greatest masterpiece. In the art of seduction“Parsifal”will for ever maintain its rank as a stroke of genius.… I admire this work. I would fain have composed it myself. Wagner was never better inspired than towards the end. The subtlety with which beauty and disease are united here, reaches such a height, that it casts so to speak a shadow upon all Wagner's earlier achievements: it seems too bright, too healthy. Do ye understand this? Health and brightness acting like a shadow? Almost like an objection?… To this extent are we already pure fools.… Never was there a greater Master in heavy hieratic perfumes—Never on earth has there been such a connoisseur of paltry infinities, of all that thrills, of extravagant excesses, of all the feminism from out the vocabulary of happiness! My friends, do but drink the philtres of this art! Nowhere will ye find a more pleasant method of enervating your spirit, of forgetting your manliness in the shade of a rosebush.… Ah, this old magician, mightiest of Klingsors; how he wages war against us with his art, against us free spirits! How he appeals to every form of cowardice of the modern soul with his charming girlish notes! There never was such amortal hatredof knowledge! One must be a very cynic in order to resist seduction here. One must be able to bite in order to resist worshipping at this shrine. Very well, old seducer! The cynic cautions you—cave canem.…One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. I contemplate the youthlets who have long been exposed to his infection. The first[pg 041]relatively innocuous effect of it is the corruption of their taste. Wagner acts like chronic recourse to the bottle. He stultifies, he befouls the stomach. His specific effect: degeneration of the feeling for rhythm. What the Wagnerite calls rhythmical is what I call, to use a Greek metaphor,“stirring a swamp.”Much more dangerous than all this, however, is the corruption of ideas. The youthlet becomes a moon-calf, an“idealist”. He stands above science, and in this respect he has reached the master's heights. On the other hand, he assumes the airs of a philosopher, he writes for theBayreuth Journal; he solves all problems in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Master. But the most ghastly thing of all is the deterioration of the nerves. Let any one wander through a large city at night, in all directions he will hear people doing violence to instruments with solemn rage and fury, a wild uproar breaks out at intervals. What is happening? It is the disciples of Wagner in the act of worshipping him.… Bayreuth is another word for a Hydro. A typical telegram from Bayreuth would readbereits bereut(I already repent). Wagner is bad for young men; he is fatal for women. What medically speaking is a female Wagnerite? It seems to me that a doctor could not be too serious in putting this alternative of conscience to young women; either one thing or the other. But they have already made their choice. You cannot serve two Masters when one of these is Wagner. Wagner redeemed woman; and in return woman built Bayreuth for him. Every sacrifice, every[pg 042]surrender: there was nothing that they were not prepared to give him. Woman impoverishes herself in favour of the Master, she becomes quite touching, she stands naked before him. The female Wagnerite, the most attractive equivocality that exists to-day: she is the incarnation of Wagner's cause: his cause triumphs with her as its symbol.… Ah, this old robber! He robs our young men: he even robs our women as well, and drags them to his cell.… Ah, this old Minotaur! What has he not already cost us? Every year processions of the finest young men and maidens are led into his labyrinth that he may swallow them up, every year the whole of Europe cries out“Away to Crete! Away to Crete!”.…[pg 043]Second PostscriptIt seems to me that my letter is open to some misunderstanding. On certain faces I see the expression of gratitude; I even hear modest but merry laughter. I prefer to be understood here as in other things. But since a certain animal,the wormof Empire, the famousRhinoxera, has become lodged in the vineyards of the German spirit, nobody any longer understands a word I say. TheKreus-Zeitunghas brought this home to me, not to speak of theLitterarisches Centralblatt. I have given the Germans the deepest books that they have ever possessed—a sufficient reason for their not having understood a word of them.… If in this essay I declare war against Wagner—and incidentally against a certain form of German taste, if I seem to use strong language about the cretinism of Bayreuth, it must not be supposed that I am in the least anxious to glorify any other musician. Other musicians are not to be considered by the side of Wagner. Things are generally bad. Decay is universal. Disease lies at the very root of things. If Wagner's name represents the ruin of music, just as Bernini's stands for the ruin of sculpture, he is not on that account its cause. All he did was to accelerate the fall,—though we are quite prepared to admit that he did it in a way which makes one recoil with horror from this almost instantaneous decline[pg 044]and fall to the depths. He possessed the ingenuousness of decadence: this constituted his superiority. He believed in it. He did not halt before any of its logical consequences. The others hesitated—that is their distinction. They have no other. What is common to both Wagner and“the others”consists in this: the decline of all organising power, the abuse of traditional means, without the capacity or the aim that would justify this. The counterfeit imitation of grand forms, for which nobody nowadays is strong, proud, self-reliant and healthy enough, excessive vitality in small details; passion at all costs; refinement as an expression of impoverished life, ever more nerves in the place of muscle. I know only one musician who to-day would be able to compose an overture as an organic whole: and nobody else knows him.13He who is famous now, does not write better music than Wagner, but only less characteristic, less definite music:—less definite, because half measures, even in decadence, cannot stand by the side of completeness. But Wagner was complete, Wagner represented thorough corruption, Wagner has had the courage, the will, and the conviction for corruption. What does Johannes Brahms matter?… It was his good fortune to be misunderstood by Germany; he was taken to be an antagonist of Wagner—people required an antagonist!—But he did not write necessary music, above all he wrote too much music!—When one is not rich one should[pg 045]at least have enough pride to be poor!… The sympathy which here and there was meted out to Brahms, apart from party interests and party misunderstandings, was for a long time a riddle to me, until one day through an accident, almost, I discovered that he affected a particular type of man. He has the melancholy of impotence. His creations are not the result of plenitude, he thirsts after abundance. Apart from what he plagiarises, from what he borrows from ancient or exotically modern styles—he is a master in the art of copying,—there remains as his most individual quality alonging.… And this is what the dissatisfied of all kinds, and all those who yearn, divine in him. He is much too little of a personality, too little of a central figure.… The“impersonal,”those who are not self-centred, love him for this. He is especially the musician of a species of dissatisfied women. Fifty steps further on, and we find the female Wagnerite—just as we find Wagner himself fifty paces ahead of Brahms.—The female Wagnerite is a more definite, a more interesting, and above all, a more attractive type. Brahms is touching so long as he dreams or mourns over himself in private—in this respect he is modern;—he becomes cold, we no longer feel at one with him when he poses as the child of the classics.… People like to call Brahms Beethoven's heir: I know of no more cautious euphemism—All that which to-day makes a claim to being the grand style in music is on precisely that account either false to us or false to itself. This alternative is suspicious enough: in itself it contains a[pg 046]casuistic question concerning the value of the two cases. The instinct of the majority protests against the alternative;“false to us”—they do not wish to be cheated;—and I myself would certainly always prefer this type to the other (“False to itself”). This ismytaste.—Expressed more clearly for the sake of the“poor in spirit”it amounts to this: BrahmsorWagner.… Brahms isnotan actor.—A very great part of other musicians may be summed up in the concept Brahms—I do not wish to say anything about the clever apes of Wagner, as for instance Goldmark: when one has“The Queen of Sheba”to one's name, one belongs to a menagerie,—one ought to put oneself on show.—Nowadays all things that can be done well and even with a master hand are small. In this department alone is honesty still possible. Nothing, however, can cure music as a whole of its chief fault, of its fate, which is to be the expression of general physiological contradiction,—which is, in fact, to be modern.The best instruction, the most conscientious schooling, the most thorough familiarity, yea, and even isolation, with the Old Masters,—all this only acts as a palliative, or, more strictly speaking, has but an illusory effect, because the first condition of the right thing is no longer in our bodies; whether this first condition be the strong race of a Handel or the overflowing animal spirits of a Rossini. Not everyone has the right to every teacher: and this holds good of whole epochs.—In itself it is not impossible that there are still remains of stronger natures, typical unadapted men, somewhere[pg 047]in Europe: from this quarter the advent of a somewhat belated form of beauty and perfection, even in music, might still be hoped for. But the most that we can expect to see are exceptional cases. From the rule, that corruption is paramount, that corruption is a fatality,—not even a God can save music.[pg 048]EpilogueAnd now let us take breath and withdraw a moment from this narrow world which necessarily must be narrow, because we have to make enquiries relative to the value ofpersons. A philosopher feels that he wants to wash his hands after he has concerned himself so long with the“Case of Wagner”. I shall now give my notion of what ismodern. According to the measure of energy of every age, there is also a standard that determines which virtues shall be allowed and which forbidden. The age either has the virtues ofascendinglife, in which case it resists the virtues of degeneration with all its deepest instincts. Or it is in itself an age of degeneration, in which case it requires the virtues of declining life,—in which case it hates everything that justifies itself, solely as being the outcome of a plenitude, or a superabundance of strength. Æsthetic is inextricably bound up with these biological principles: there is decadent æsthetic, andclassicalæsthetic,—“beauty in itself”is just as much a chimera as any other kind of idealism.—Within the narrow sphere of the so-called moral values, no greater antithesis could be found than that ofmaster-moralityand the morality ofChristianvaluations: the latter having grown out of a thoroughly morbid soil. (—The gospels present us with the same physiological types, as do the novels of Dostoiewsky),[pg 049]the master-morality (“Roman,”“pagan,”“classical,”“Renaissance”), on the other hand, being the symbolic speech of well-constitutedness, ofascendinglife, and of the Will to Power as a vital principle. Master-moralityaffirmsjust as instinctively as Christian moralitydenies(“God,”“Beyond,”“self-denial,”—all of them negations). The first reflects its plenitude upon things,—it transfigures, it embellishes, itrationalisesthe world,—the latter impoverishes, bleaches, mars the value of things; itsuppressesthe world.“World”is a Christian term of abuse. These antithetical forms in the optics of values, arebothnecessary: they are different points of view which cannot be circumvented either with arguments or counter-arguments. One cannot refute Christianity: it is impossible to refute a diseased eyesight. That people should have combated pessimism as if it had been a philosophy, was the very acme of learned stupidity. The concepts“true”and“untrue”do not seem to me to have any sense in optics.—That, alone, which has to be guarded against is the falsity, the instinctive duplicity whichwould fainregard this antithesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,—and his mastery in this kind of falseness was of no mean order. To cast side-long glances at master-morality, atnoblemorality (—Icelandic saga is perhaps the greatest documentary evidence of these values), and at the same time to have the opposite teaching, the“gospel of the lowly,”the doctrine of theneedof salvation, on one's lips!… Incidentally, I admire the modesty of Christians who go to Bayreuth. As for myself, I couldnot[pg 050]endure to hear the sound of certain words on Wagner's lips. There are some concepts which are too good for Bayreuth … What? Christianity adjusted for female Wagnerites, perhapsbyfemale Wagnerites—for, in his latter days Wagner was thoroughlyfeminini generis—? Again I say, the Christians of to-day are too modest for me.… If Wagner were a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a Father of the Church!—The need ofsalvation, the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing in common with such clowns; it is the most straightforward expression of decadence, it is the most convincing and most painful affirmation of decadence, in sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wishesto be ridof himself.Le moi est toujours haissable.Noble morality, master-morality, on the other hand, is rooted in a triumphant saying of yea toone's self,—it is the self-affirmation and self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime symbols and practices; but only“because its heart is too full.”The whole of beautiful art and of great art belongs here; their common essence is gratitude. But we must allow it a certain instinctive repugnanceto décadents, and a scorn and horror of the latter's symbolism: such things almost prove it. The noble Romans considered Christianity as afœda superstitio: let me call to your minds the feelings which the last German of noble taste—Goethe—had in regard to the cross. It is idle to look for more valuable, morenecessarycontrasts.14[pg 051]But the kind of falsity which is characteristic of the Bayreuthians is not exceptional to-day. We all know the hybrid concept of the Christian gentleman. Thisinnocencein contradiction, this“clean conscience”in falsehood, is rather modernpar excellence, with it modernity is almost defined. Biologically, modern man represents acontradiction of values, he sits between two stools, he says yea and nay in one breath. No wonder that it is precisely in our age that falseness itself became flesh and blood, and even genius! No wonderWagnerdwelt amongst us! It was not without reason that I called Wagner the Cagliostro of modernity.… But all of us, though we do not know it, involuntarily have values, words, formulæ, and morals in our bodies, which are quiteantagonisticin their origin—regarded from a physiological standpoint, we arefalse.… How would adiagnosis of the modern soulbegin? With a determined incision into this agglomeration of contradictory instincts, with the total suppression of its antagonistic values, with vivisection applied to its mostinstructivecase. To philosophers the“Case of Wagner”is awindfall—this essay, as you observe, was inspired by gratitude.

8.—“Very good! But how can thisdécadentspoil one's taste if perchance one is not a musician, if perchance one is not oneself adécadent?”—Conversely! How can onehelpit!Justyou try it!—You know not what Wagner is: quite a great actor! Does a more profound, a moreponderousinfluence exist on the stage? Just look at these youthlets,—all benumbed, pale, breathless! They are Wagnerites: they know nothing about music,—and yet Wagner gets the mastery of them. Wagner's art presses with the weight of a hundred atmospheres: do but submit, there is nothing else to do.… Wagner the actor is a tyrant, his pathos flings all taste, all resistance, to the winds.[pg 023]—Who else has this persuasive power in his attitudes, who else sees attitudes so clearly before anything else! This holding-of-its-breath in Wagnerian pathos, this disinclination to have done with an intense feeling, this terrifying habit of dwelling on a situation in which every instant almost chokes one.——Was Wagner a musician at all? In any case he was something else toa much greater degree—that is to say, an incomparablehistrio, the greatest mime, the most astounding theatrical genius that the Germans have ever had, ourscenic artist par excellence. He belongs to some other sphere than the history of music, with whose really great and genuine figure he must not be confounded. WagnerandBeethoven—this is blasphemy—and above all it does not do justice even to Wagner.… As a musician he was no more than what he was as a man, hebecamea musician, hebecamea poet, because the tyrant in him, his actor's genius, drove him to be both. Nothing is known concerning Wagner, so long as his dominating instinct has not been divined.Wagner wasnotinstinctively a musician. And this he proved by the way in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it,i.e., a rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as an inventor and an innovator of the first order—he increased the powers of speech[pg 024]of music to an incalculable degree—he is the Victor Hugo of music as language, provided always we allow that under certain circumstances music may be something which is not music, but speech—instrument—ancilla dramaturgica. Wagner's music,notin the tender care of theatrical taste, which is very tolerant, is simply bad music, perhaps the worst that has ever been composed. When a musician can no longer count up to three, he becomes“dramatic,”he becomes“Wagnerian”.…Wagner almost discovered the magic which can be wrought even now by means of music which is both incoherent andelementary. His consciousness of this attains to huge proportions, as does also his instinct to dispense entirely with higher law andstyle. The elementary factors—sound, movement, colour, in short, the whole sensuousness of music—suffice. Wagner never calculates as a musician with a musician's conscience, all he strains after is effect, nothing more than effect. And he knows what he has to make an effect upon!—In this he is as unhesitating as Schiller was, as any theatrical man must be; he has also the latter's contempt for the world which he brings to its knees before him. A man is an actor when he is ahead of mankind in his possession of this one view, that everything which has to strike people as true, must not be true. This rule was formulated by Talma: it contains the whole psychology of the actor, it also contains—and this we need not doubt—all his morality. Wagner's music is never true.—But it is supposed to be so: and thus everything is as it should be. As long as we are young, and[pg 025]Wagnerites into the bargain, we regard Wagner as rich, even as the model of a prodigal giver, even as a great landlord in the realm of sound. We admire him in very much the same way as young Frenchmen admire Victor Hugo—that is to say, for his“royal liberality.”Later on we admire the one as well as the other for the opposite reason: as masters and paragons in economy, asprudentamphitryons. Nobody can equal them in the art of providing a princely board with such a modest outlay.—The Wagnerite, with his credulous stomach, is even sated with the fare which his master conjures up before him. But we others who, in books as in music, desire above all to findsubstance, and who are scarcely satisfied with the mere representation of a banquet, are much worse off. In plain English, Wagner does not give us enough to masticate. His recitative—very little meat, more bones, and plenty of broth—I christened“alla genovese”: I had no intention of flattering the Genoese with this remark, but rather theolder recitativo, therecitativo secco. And as to Wagnerianleitmotif, I fear I lack the necessary culinary understanding for it. If hard pressed, I might say that I regard it perhaps as an ideal toothpick, as an opportunity of ridding one's self of what remains of one's meal. Wagner's“arias”are still left over. But now I shall hold my tongue.9.Even in his general sketch of the action, Wagner is above all an actor. The first thing that occurs to him is a scene which is certain to produce a[pg 026]strong effect, a realactio,10with a basso-relievo of attitudes; anoverwhelmingscene, this he now proceeds to elaborate more deeply, and out of it he draws his characters. The whole of what remains to be done follows of itself, fully in keeping with a technical economy which has no reason to be subtle. It is not Corneille's public that Wagner has to consider, it is merely the nineteenth century. Concerning the“actual requirements of the stage”Wagner would have about the same opinion as any other actor of to-day, a series of powerful scenes, each stronger than the one that preceded it,—and, in between, all kinds ofclevernonsense. His first concern is to guarantee the effect of his work; he begins with the third act, heapproveshis work according to the quality of its final effect. Guided by this sort of understanding of the stage, there is not much danger of one's creating a drama unawares. Drama demandsinexorablelogic: but what did Wagner care about logic? Again I say, it was not Corneille's public that he had to consider; but[pg 027]merely Germans! Everybody knows the technical difficulties before which the dramatist often has to summon all his strength and frequently to sweat his blood: the difficulty of making theplotseem necessary and the unravelment as well, so that both are conceivable only in a certain way, and so that each may give the impression of freedom (the principle of the smallest expenditure of energy). Now the very last thing that Wagner does is to sweat blood over the plot; and on this and the unravelment he certainly spends the smallest possible amount of energy. Let anybody put one of Wagner's“plots”under the microscope, and I wager that he will be forced to laugh. Nothing is more enlivening than the dilemma in“Tristan,”unless it be that in the“Mastersingers.”Wagner isnodramatist; let nobody be deceived on this point. All he did was to love the word“drama”—he always loved fine words. Nevertheless, in his writings the word“drama”is merely a misunderstanding (—anda piece of shrewdness: Wagner always affected superiority in regard to the word“opera”—), just as the word“spirit”is a misunderstanding in the New Testament.—He was not enough of a psychologist for drama; he instinctively avoided a psychological plot—but how?—by always putting idiosyncrasy in its place.… Very modern—eh? Very Parisian! very decadent!… Incidentally, theplotsthat Wagner knows how to unravel with the help of dramatic inventions, are of quite another kind. For example, let us suppose that Wagner requires a female voice. A whole act without a woman's voice would be[pg 028]impossible! But in this particular instance not one of the heroines happens to be free. What does Wagner do? He emancipates the oldest woman on earth, Erda.“Step up, aged grandmamma! You have got to sing!”And Erda sings. Wagner's end has been achieved. Thereupon he immediately dismisses the old lady.“Why on earth did you come? Off with you! Kindly go to sleep again!”In short, a scene full of mythological awe, before which the Wagneritewondersall kinds of things.…—“But the substance of Wagner's texts! their mythical substance, their eternal substance”—Question: how is this substance, this eternal substance tested? The chemical analyst replies: Translate Wagner into the real, into the modern,—let us be even more cruel, and say into the bourgeois! And what will then become of him?—Between ourselves, I have tried the experiment. Nothing is more entertaining, nothing more worthy of being recommended to a picnic-party, than to discuss Wagner dressed in a more modern garb: for instance Parsifal, as a candidate in divinity, with a public-school education (—the latter, quite indispensablefor purefoolishness). Whatsurprisesawait one! Would you believe it, that Wagner's heroines one and all, once they have been divested of the heroic husks, are almost indistinguishable from Mdme. Bovary!—just as one can conceive conversely, of Flaubert's beingwell ableto transform all his heroines into Scandinavian or Carthaginian women, and then to offer them to Wagner in this mythologised form as a libretto. Indeed, generally[pg 029]speaking, Wagner does not seem to have become interested in any other problems than those which engross the little Parisian decadents of to-day. Always five paces away from the hospital! All very modern problems, all problems which are at homein big cities!do not doubt it!… Have you noticed (it is in keeping with this association of ideas) that Wagner's heroines never have any children?—Theycannothave them.… The despair with which Wagner tackled the problem of arranging in some way for Siegfried's birth, betrays how modern his feelings on this point actually were.—Siegfried“emancipated woman”—but not with any hope of offspring.—And now here is a fact which leaves us speechless: Parsifal is Lohengrin's father! How ever did he do it?—Ought one at this juncture to remember that“chastity works miracles”?…Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas.10.And now just a worden passantconcerning Wagner's writings: they are among other things a school ofshrewdness. The system of procedures of which Wagner disposes, might be applied to a hundred other cases,—he that hath ears to hear let him hear. Perhaps I may lay claim to some public acknowledgment, if I put three of the most valuable of these procedures into a precise form.Everything that Wagnercannotdo is bad.Wagner could do much more than he does; but his strong principles prevent him.Everything that Wagnercando, no one will[pg 030]ever be able to do after him, no one has ever done before him, and no one must ever do after him. Wagner is godly.These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner's writings;—the rest is merely—“literature”.—Not every kind of music hitherto has been in need of literature; and it were well, to try and discover the actual reason of this. Is it perhaps that Wagner's music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear precisely the reverse—that it was too easy,—that people mightnot understand it with sufficient difficulty?—As a matter of fact, his whole life long, he did nothing but repeat one proposition: that his music did not mean music alone! But something more! Something immeasurably more!…“Not music alone”—nomusician would speak in this way. I repeat, Wagner could not create things as a whole; he had no choice, he was obliged to create things in bits, with“motives,”attitudes, formulæ, duplications, and hundreds of repetitions, he remained a rhetorician in music,—and that is why he was at bottomforcedto press“this means”into the foreground.“Music can never be anything else than a means”: this was his theory, but above all it was the onlypracticethat lay open to him. No musician however thinks in this way.—Wagner was in need of literature, in order to persuade the whole world to take his music seriously, profoundly,“because itmeantan infinity of things”, all his life he was the commentator of the“Idea.”—What does Elsa stand for? But without a doubt, Elsa is“the unconscious[pg 031]mind of the people”(—“when I realised this, I naturally became a thorough revolutionist”—).Do not let us forget that, when Hegel and Schelling were misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is—“the idea,”—that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,—rigorously, but also unjustly, for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more“honest”than his more famous contemporaries. But let us leave morality out of the question, Hegel is amatter of taste.… And not only of German but of European taste!… A taste which Wagner understood!—which he felt equal to! which he has immortalised!—All he did was to apply it to music—he invented a style for himself, which might mean an“infinity of things,”—he wasHegel'sheir.… Music as“Idea.”—And how well Wagner was understood!—The same kind of man who used to gush over Hegel, now gushes over Wagner, in his school they evenwriteHegelian.11But he who understood Wagner best, was the German youthlet. The two words“infinity”and“meaning”were sufficient for this: at their sound the youthlet immediately began to feel exceptionally happy. Wagner didnotconquer these boys with music, but with the“idea”:—it is[pg 032]the enigmatical vagueness of his art, its game of hide-and-seek amid a hundred symbols, its polychromy in ideals, which leads and lures the lads. It is Wagner's genius for forming clouds, his sweeps and swoops through the air, his ubiquity and nullibiety—precisely the same qualities with which Hegel led and lured in his time!—Moreover in the presence of Wagner's multifariousness, plenitude and arbitrariness, they seem to themselves justified—“saved”. Tremulously they listen while thegreat symbolsin his art seem to make themselves heard from out the misty distance, with a gentle roll of thunder, and they are not at all displeased if at times it gets a little grey, gruesome and cold. Are they not one and all, like Wagner himself, onquite intimate termswith bad weather, with German weather! Wotan is their God, but Wotan is the God of bad weather.… They are right, how could these German youths—in their present condition,—miss what we others, wehalcyonians, miss in Wagner?i.e.:la gaya scienza; light feet, wit, fire, grave, grand logic, stellar dancing, wanton intellectuality, the vibrating light of the South, the calm sea—perfection.…11.—I have mentioned the sphere to which Wagner belongs—certainly not to the history of music. What, however, does he mean historically?—The rise of the actor in music: a momentous event which not only leads me to think but also to fear.In a word:“Wagner and Liszt.”Never yet[pg 033]have the“uprightness”and“genuineness”of musicians been put to such a dangerous test. It is glaringly obvious: great success, mob success is no longer the achievement of the genuine,—in order to get it a man must be an actor!—Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner—they both prove one and the same thing: that in declining civilisations, wherever the mob is allowed to decide, genuineness becomes superfluous, prejudicial, unfavourable. The actor, alone, can still kindlegreatenthusiasm.—And thus it is hisgolden agewhich is now dawning,—his and that of all those who are in any way related to him. With drums and fifes, Wagner marches at the head of all artists in declamation, in display and virtuosity. He began by convincing the conductors of orchestras, the scene-shifters and stage-singers, not to forget the orchestra:—he“delivered”them from monotony.… The movement that Wagner created has spread even to the land of knowledge: whole sciences pertaining to music are rising slowly, out of centuries of scholasticism. As an example of what I mean, let me point more particularly toRiemann'sservices to rhythmics; he was the first who called attention to the leading idea in punctuation—even for music (unfortunately he did so with a bad word; he called it“phrasing”).—All these people, and I say it with gratitude, are the best, the most respectable among Wagner's admirers—they have a perfect right to honour Wagner. The same instinct unites them with one another; in him they recognise their highest type, and since he has inflamed them with his own ardour they feel[pg 034]themselves transformed into power, even into great power. In this quarter, if anywhere, Wagner's influence has really beenbeneficent. Never before has there been so much thinking, willing, and industry in this sphere. Wagner endowed all these artists with a new conscience: what they now exact andobtainfrom themselves, they had never exacted before Wagner's time—before then they had been too modest. Another spirit prevails on the stage since Wagner rules there the most difficult things are expected, blame is severe, praise very scarce,—the good and the excellent have become the rule. Taste is no longer necessary, nor even is a good voice. Wagner is sung only with ruined voices: this has a more“dramatic”effect. Even talent is out of the question. Expressiveness at all costs, which is what the Wagnerian ideal—the ideal of decadence—demands, is hardly compatible with talent. All that is required for this is virtue—that is to say, training, automatism,“self-denial”. Neither taste, voices, nor gifts, Wagner's stage requires but one thing:Germans!… The definition of a German: an obedient man with long legs.… There is a deep significance in the fact that the rise of Wagner should have coincided with the rise of the“Empire”: both phenomena are a proof of one and the same thing—obedience and long legs.—Never have people been more obedient, never have they been so well ordered about. The conductors of Wagnerian orchestras, more particularly, are worthy of an age, which posterity will one day call, with timid awe, theclassical age of war.[pg 035]Wagner understood how to command; in this respect, too, he was a great teacher. He commanded as a man who had exercised an inexorable will over himself—as one who had practised lifelong discipline: Wagner was, perhaps, the greatest example of self-violence in the whole of the history of art (—even Alfieri, who in other respects is his next-of-kin, is outdone by him. The note of a Torinese).12.This view, that our actors have become more worthy of respect than heretofore, does not imply that I believe them to have become less dangerous.… But who is in any doubt as to what I want,—as to what thethree requisitionsare concerning which my wrath and my care and love of art, have made me open my mouth on this occasion?That the stage should not become master of the arts.That the actor should not become the corrupter of the genuine.That music should not become an art of lying.Friedrich Nietzsche.[pg 036]PostscriptThe gravity of these last words allows me at this point to introduce a few sentences out of an unprinted essay which will at least leave no doubt as to my earnestness in regard to this question. The title of this essay is:“What Wagner has cost us.”One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Even to-day a vague feeling that this is so, still prevails. Even Wagner's success, his triumph, did not uproot this feeling thoroughly. But formerly it was strong, it was terrible, it was a gloomy hate throughout almost three-quarters of Wagner's life. The resistance which he met with among us Germans cannot be too highly valued or too highly honoured. People guarded themselves against him as against an illness,—not with arguments—it is impossible to refute an illness,—but with obstruction, with mistrust, with repugnance, with loathing, with sombre earnestness, as though he were a great rampant danger. The æsthetes gave themselves away when out of three schools of German philosophy they waged an absurd war against Wagner's principles with“ifs”and“fors”—what did he care about principles, even his own!—The Germans themselves had enough instinctive good sense to dispense with every“if”and“for”in this matter. An instinct is weakened when it becomes conscious: for by[pg 037]becoming conscious it makes itself feeble. If there were any signs that in spite of the universal character of European decadence there was still a modicum of health, still an instinctive premonition of what is harmful and dangerous, residing in the German soul, then it would be precisely this blunt resistance to Wagner which I should least like to see underrated. It does us honour, it gives us some reason to hope: France no longer has such an amount of health at her disposal. The Germans, theseloiterers par excellence, as history shows, are to-day the most backward among the civilised nations of Europe; this has its advantages,—for they are thus relatively the youngest.One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. It is only quite recently that the Germans have overcome a sort of dread of him,—the desire to be rid of him occurred to them again and again.12Does anybody remember a very curious occurrence in which, quite unexpectedly towards the end, this[pg 038]old feeling once more manifested itself? It happened at Wagner's funeral. The first Wagner Society, the one in Munich, laid a wreath on his grave with this inscription, which immediately became famous:“Salvation to the Saviour!”Everybody admired the lofty inspiration which had dictated this inscription, as also the taste which seemed to be the privilege of the followers of Wagner. Many also, however (it was singular enough), made this slight alteration in it:“Salvationfromthe Saviour”—People began to breathe again—One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Let us try to estimate the influence of this worship upon culture. Whom did this movement press to the front? What did it make ever more and more pre-eminent?—In the first place the layman's arrogance, the arrogance of the art-maniac. Now these people are organising societies, they wish to make their taste prevail, they even wish to pose as judgesin rebus musicis et musicantibus. Secondly: an ever increasing indifference towards severe, noble and conscientious schooling in the service of art, and in its place the belief in genius, or in plain English, cheeky dilettantism (—the formula for this is to be found in theMastersingers). Thirdly, and this is the worst of all:Theatrocracy—, the craziness of a belief in the pre-eminence of the theatre, in the right of the theatre to rule supreme over the arts, over Art in general.… But this should be shouted into the face of Wagnerites a hundred times over: that the theatre is something lower than art, something secondary, something coarsened,[pg 039]above all something suitably distorted and falsified for the mob. In this respect Wagner altered nothing: Bayreuth is grand Opera—and not even good opera.… The stage is a form of Demolatry in the realm of taste, the stage is an insurrection of the mob, aplébisciteagainst good taste.… The case of Wagner proves this fact: he captivated the masses—he depraved taste, he even perverted our taste for opera!—One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. What has Wagner-worship made out of spirit? Does Wagner liberate the spirit? To him belong that ambiguity and equivocation and all other qualities which can convince the uncertain without making them conscious of why they have been convinced. In this sense Wagner is a seducer on a grand scale. There is nothing exhausted, nothing effete, nothing dangerous to life, nothing that slanders the world in the realm of spirit, which has not secretly found shelter in his art, he conceals the blackest obscurantism in the luminous orbs of the ideal. He flatters every nihilistic (Buddhistic) instinct and togs it out in music; he flatters every form of Christianity, every religious expression of decadence. He that hath ears to hear let him hear: everything that has ever grown out of the soil of impoverished life, the whole counterfeit coinage of the transcendental and of a Beyond found its most sublime advocate in Wagner's art, not in formulæ (Wagner is too clever to use formulæ), but in the persuasion of the senses which in their turn makes the spirit weary and morbid. Music in the form of Circe … in[pg 040]this respect his last work is his greatest masterpiece. In the art of seduction“Parsifal”will for ever maintain its rank as a stroke of genius.… I admire this work. I would fain have composed it myself. Wagner was never better inspired than towards the end. The subtlety with which beauty and disease are united here, reaches such a height, that it casts so to speak a shadow upon all Wagner's earlier achievements: it seems too bright, too healthy. Do ye understand this? Health and brightness acting like a shadow? Almost like an objection?… To this extent are we already pure fools.… Never was there a greater Master in heavy hieratic perfumes—Never on earth has there been such a connoisseur of paltry infinities, of all that thrills, of extravagant excesses, of all the feminism from out the vocabulary of happiness! My friends, do but drink the philtres of this art! Nowhere will ye find a more pleasant method of enervating your spirit, of forgetting your manliness in the shade of a rosebush.… Ah, this old magician, mightiest of Klingsors; how he wages war against us with his art, against us free spirits! How he appeals to every form of cowardice of the modern soul with his charming girlish notes! There never was such amortal hatredof knowledge! One must be a very cynic in order to resist seduction here. One must be able to bite in order to resist worshipping at this shrine. Very well, old seducer! The cynic cautions you—cave canem.…One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. I contemplate the youthlets who have long been exposed to his infection. The first[pg 041]relatively innocuous effect of it is the corruption of their taste. Wagner acts like chronic recourse to the bottle. He stultifies, he befouls the stomach. His specific effect: degeneration of the feeling for rhythm. What the Wagnerite calls rhythmical is what I call, to use a Greek metaphor,“stirring a swamp.”Much more dangerous than all this, however, is the corruption of ideas. The youthlet becomes a moon-calf, an“idealist”. He stands above science, and in this respect he has reached the master's heights. On the other hand, he assumes the airs of a philosopher, he writes for theBayreuth Journal; he solves all problems in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Master. But the most ghastly thing of all is the deterioration of the nerves. Let any one wander through a large city at night, in all directions he will hear people doing violence to instruments with solemn rage and fury, a wild uproar breaks out at intervals. What is happening? It is the disciples of Wagner in the act of worshipping him.… Bayreuth is another word for a Hydro. A typical telegram from Bayreuth would readbereits bereut(I already repent). Wagner is bad for young men; he is fatal for women. What medically speaking is a female Wagnerite? It seems to me that a doctor could not be too serious in putting this alternative of conscience to young women; either one thing or the other. But they have already made their choice. You cannot serve two Masters when one of these is Wagner. Wagner redeemed woman; and in return woman built Bayreuth for him. Every sacrifice, every[pg 042]surrender: there was nothing that they were not prepared to give him. Woman impoverishes herself in favour of the Master, she becomes quite touching, she stands naked before him. The female Wagnerite, the most attractive equivocality that exists to-day: she is the incarnation of Wagner's cause: his cause triumphs with her as its symbol.… Ah, this old robber! He robs our young men: he even robs our women as well, and drags them to his cell.… Ah, this old Minotaur! What has he not already cost us? Every year processions of the finest young men and maidens are led into his labyrinth that he may swallow them up, every year the whole of Europe cries out“Away to Crete! Away to Crete!”.…[pg 043]Second PostscriptIt seems to me that my letter is open to some misunderstanding. On certain faces I see the expression of gratitude; I even hear modest but merry laughter. I prefer to be understood here as in other things. But since a certain animal,the wormof Empire, the famousRhinoxera, has become lodged in the vineyards of the German spirit, nobody any longer understands a word I say. TheKreus-Zeitunghas brought this home to me, not to speak of theLitterarisches Centralblatt. I have given the Germans the deepest books that they have ever possessed—a sufficient reason for their not having understood a word of them.… If in this essay I declare war against Wagner—and incidentally against a certain form of German taste, if I seem to use strong language about the cretinism of Bayreuth, it must not be supposed that I am in the least anxious to glorify any other musician. Other musicians are not to be considered by the side of Wagner. Things are generally bad. Decay is universal. Disease lies at the very root of things. If Wagner's name represents the ruin of music, just as Bernini's stands for the ruin of sculpture, he is not on that account its cause. All he did was to accelerate the fall,—though we are quite prepared to admit that he did it in a way which makes one recoil with horror from this almost instantaneous decline[pg 044]and fall to the depths. He possessed the ingenuousness of decadence: this constituted his superiority. He believed in it. He did not halt before any of its logical consequences. The others hesitated—that is their distinction. They have no other. What is common to both Wagner and“the others”consists in this: the decline of all organising power, the abuse of traditional means, without the capacity or the aim that would justify this. The counterfeit imitation of grand forms, for which nobody nowadays is strong, proud, self-reliant and healthy enough, excessive vitality in small details; passion at all costs; refinement as an expression of impoverished life, ever more nerves in the place of muscle. I know only one musician who to-day would be able to compose an overture as an organic whole: and nobody else knows him.13He who is famous now, does not write better music than Wagner, but only less characteristic, less definite music:—less definite, because half measures, even in decadence, cannot stand by the side of completeness. But Wagner was complete, Wagner represented thorough corruption, Wagner has had the courage, the will, and the conviction for corruption. What does Johannes Brahms matter?… It was his good fortune to be misunderstood by Germany; he was taken to be an antagonist of Wagner—people required an antagonist!—But he did not write necessary music, above all he wrote too much music!—When one is not rich one should[pg 045]at least have enough pride to be poor!… The sympathy which here and there was meted out to Brahms, apart from party interests and party misunderstandings, was for a long time a riddle to me, until one day through an accident, almost, I discovered that he affected a particular type of man. He has the melancholy of impotence. His creations are not the result of plenitude, he thirsts after abundance. Apart from what he plagiarises, from what he borrows from ancient or exotically modern styles—he is a master in the art of copying,—there remains as his most individual quality alonging.… And this is what the dissatisfied of all kinds, and all those who yearn, divine in him. He is much too little of a personality, too little of a central figure.… The“impersonal,”those who are not self-centred, love him for this. He is especially the musician of a species of dissatisfied women. Fifty steps further on, and we find the female Wagnerite—just as we find Wagner himself fifty paces ahead of Brahms.—The female Wagnerite is a more definite, a more interesting, and above all, a more attractive type. Brahms is touching so long as he dreams or mourns over himself in private—in this respect he is modern;—he becomes cold, we no longer feel at one with him when he poses as the child of the classics.… People like to call Brahms Beethoven's heir: I know of no more cautious euphemism—All that which to-day makes a claim to being the grand style in music is on precisely that account either false to us or false to itself. This alternative is suspicious enough: in itself it contains a[pg 046]casuistic question concerning the value of the two cases. The instinct of the majority protests against the alternative;“false to us”—they do not wish to be cheated;—and I myself would certainly always prefer this type to the other (“False to itself”). This ismytaste.—Expressed more clearly for the sake of the“poor in spirit”it amounts to this: BrahmsorWagner.… Brahms isnotan actor.—A very great part of other musicians may be summed up in the concept Brahms—I do not wish to say anything about the clever apes of Wagner, as for instance Goldmark: when one has“The Queen of Sheba”to one's name, one belongs to a menagerie,—one ought to put oneself on show.—Nowadays all things that can be done well and even with a master hand are small. In this department alone is honesty still possible. Nothing, however, can cure music as a whole of its chief fault, of its fate, which is to be the expression of general physiological contradiction,—which is, in fact, to be modern.The best instruction, the most conscientious schooling, the most thorough familiarity, yea, and even isolation, with the Old Masters,—all this only acts as a palliative, or, more strictly speaking, has but an illusory effect, because the first condition of the right thing is no longer in our bodies; whether this first condition be the strong race of a Handel or the overflowing animal spirits of a Rossini. Not everyone has the right to every teacher: and this holds good of whole epochs.—In itself it is not impossible that there are still remains of stronger natures, typical unadapted men, somewhere[pg 047]in Europe: from this quarter the advent of a somewhat belated form of beauty and perfection, even in music, might still be hoped for. But the most that we can expect to see are exceptional cases. From the rule, that corruption is paramount, that corruption is a fatality,—not even a God can save music.[pg 048]EpilogueAnd now let us take breath and withdraw a moment from this narrow world which necessarily must be narrow, because we have to make enquiries relative to the value ofpersons. A philosopher feels that he wants to wash his hands after he has concerned himself so long with the“Case of Wagner”. I shall now give my notion of what ismodern. According to the measure of energy of every age, there is also a standard that determines which virtues shall be allowed and which forbidden. The age either has the virtues ofascendinglife, in which case it resists the virtues of degeneration with all its deepest instincts. Or it is in itself an age of degeneration, in which case it requires the virtues of declining life,—in which case it hates everything that justifies itself, solely as being the outcome of a plenitude, or a superabundance of strength. Æsthetic is inextricably bound up with these biological principles: there is decadent æsthetic, andclassicalæsthetic,—“beauty in itself”is just as much a chimera as any other kind of idealism.—Within the narrow sphere of the so-called moral values, no greater antithesis could be found than that ofmaster-moralityand the morality ofChristianvaluations: the latter having grown out of a thoroughly morbid soil. (—The gospels present us with the same physiological types, as do the novels of Dostoiewsky),[pg 049]the master-morality (“Roman,”“pagan,”“classical,”“Renaissance”), on the other hand, being the symbolic speech of well-constitutedness, ofascendinglife, and of the Will to Power as a vital principle. Master-moralityaffirmsjust as instinctively as Christian moralitydenies(“God,”“Beyond,”“self-denial,”—all of them negations). The first reflects its plenitude upon things,—it transfigures, it embellishes, itrationalisesthe world,—the latter impoverishes, bleaches, mars the value of things; itsuppressesthe world.“World”is a Christian term of abuse. These antithetical forms in the optics of values, arebothnecessary: they are different points of view which cannot be circumvented either with arguments or counter-arguments. One cannot refute Christianity: it is impossible to refute a diseased eyesight. That people should have combated pessimism as if it had been a philosophy, was the very acme of learned stupidity. The concepts“true”and“untrue”do not seem to me to have any sense in optics.—That, alone, which has to be guarded against is the falsity, the instinctive duplicity whichwould fainregard this antithesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,—and his mastery in this kind of falseness was of no mean order. To cast side-long glances at master-morality, atnoblemorality (—Icelandic saga is perhaps the greatest documentary evidence of these values), and at the same time to have the opposite teaching, the“gospel of the lowly,”the doctrine of theneedof salvation, on one's lips!… Incidentally, I admire the modesty of Christians who go to Bayreuth. As for myself, I couldnot[pg 050]endure to hear the sound of certain words on Wagner's lips. There are some concepts which are too good for Bayreuth … What? Christianity adjusted for female Wagnerites, perhapsbyfemale Wagnerites—for, in his latter days Wagner was thoroughlyfeminini generis—? Again I say, the Christians of to-day are too modest for me.… If Wagner were a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a Father of the Church!—The need ofsalvation, the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing in common with such clowns; it is the most straightforward expression of decadence, it is the most convincing and most painful affirmation of decadence, in sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wishesto be ridof himself.Le moi est toujours haissable.Noble morality, master-morality, on the other hand, is rooted in a triumphant saying of yea toone's self,—it is the self-affirmation and self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime symbols and practices; but only“because its heart is too full.”The whole of beautiful art and of great art belongs here; their common essence is gratitude. But we must allow it a certain instinctive repugnanceto décadents, and a scorn and horror of the latter's symbolism: such things almost prove it. The noble Romans considered Christianity as afœda superstitio: let me call to your minds the feelings which the last German of noble taste—Goethe—had in regard to the cross. It is idle to look for more valuable, morenecessarycontrasts.14[pg 051]But the kind of falsity which is characteristic of the Bayreuthians is not exceptional to-day. We all know the hybrid concept of the Christian gentleman. Thisinnocencein contradiction, this“clean conscience”in falsehood, is rather modernpar excellence, with it modernity is almost defined. Biologically, modern man represents acontradiction of values, he sits between two stools, he says yea and nay in one breath. No wonder that it is precisely in our age that falseness itself became flesh and blood, and even genius! No wonderWagnerdwelt amongst us! It was not without reason that I called Wagner the Cagliostro of modernity.… But all of us, though we do not know it, involuntarily have values, words, formulæ, and morals in our bodies, which are quiteantagonisticin their origin—regarded from a physiological standpoint, we arefalse.… How would adiagnosis of the modern soulbegin? With a determined incision into this agglomeration of contradictory instincts, with the total suppression of its antagonistic values, with vivisection applied to its mostinstructivecase. To philosophers the“Case of Wagner”is awindfall—this essay, as you observe, was inspired by gratitude.

8.—“Very good! But how can thisdécadentspoil one's taste if perchance one is not a musician, if perchance one is not oneself adécadent?”—Conversely! How can onehelpit!Justyou try it!—You know not what Wagner is: quite a great actor! Does a more profound, a moreponderousinfluence exist on the stage? Just look at these youthlets,—all benumbed, pale, breathless! They are Wagnerites: they know nothing about music,—and yet Wagner gets the mastery of them. Wagner's art presses with the weight of a hundred atmospheres: do but submit, there is nothing else to do.… Wagner the actor is a tyrant, his pathos flings all taste, all resistance, to the winds.[pg 023]—Who else has this persuasive power in his attitudes, who else sees attitudes so clearly before anything else! This holding-of-its-breath in Wagnerian pathos, this disinclination to have done with an intense feeling, this terrifying habit of dwelling on a situation in which every instant almost chokes one.——Was Wagner a musician at all? In any case he was something else toa much greater degree—that is to say, an incomparablehistrio, the greatest mime, the most astounding theatrical genius that the Germans have ever had, ourscenic artist par excellence. He belongs to some other sphere than the history of music, with whose really great and genuine figure he must not be confounded. WagnerandBeethoven—this is blasphemy—and above all it does not do justice even to Wagner.… As a musician he was no more than what he was as a man, hebecamea musician, hebecamea poet, because the tyrant in him, his actor's genius, drove him to be both. Nothing is known concerning Wagner, so long as his dominating instinct has not been divined.Wagner wasnotinstinctively a musician. And this he proved by the way in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it,i.e., a rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as an inventor and an innovator of the first order—he increased the powers of speech[pg 024]of music to an incalculable degree—he is the Victor Hugo of music as language, provided always we allow that under certain circumstances music may be something which is not music, but speech—instrument—ancilla dramaturgica. Wagner's music,notin the tender care of theatrical taste, which is very tolerant, is simply bad music, perhaps the worst that has ever been composed. When a musician can no longer count up to three, he becomes“dramatic,”he becomes“Wagnerian”.…Wagner almost discovered the magic which can be wrought even now by means of music which is both incoherent andelementary. His consciousness of this attains to huge proportions, as does also his instinct to dispense entirely with higher law andstyle. The elementary factors—sound, movement, colour, in short, the whole sensuousness of music—suffice. Wagner never calculates as a musician with a musician's conscience, all he strains after is effect, nothing more than effect. And he knows what he has to make an effect upon!—In this he is as unhesitating as Schiller was, as any theatrical man must be; he has also the latter's contempt for the world which he brings to its knees before him. A man is an actor when he is ahead of mankind in his possession of this one view, that everything which has to strike people as true, must not be true. This rule was formulated by Talma: it contains the whole psychology of the actor, it also contains—and this we need not doubt—all his morality. Wagner's music is never true.—But it is supposed to be so: and thus everything is as it should be. As long as we are young, and[pg 025]Wagnerites into the bargain, we regard Wagner as rich, even as the model of a prodigal giver, even as a great landlord in the realm of sound. We admire him in very much the same way as young Frenchmen admire Victor Hugo—that is to say, for his“royal liberality.”Later on we admire the one as well as the other for the opposite reason: as masters and paragons in economy, asprudentamphitryons. Nobody can equal them in the art of providing a princely board with such a modest outlay.—The Wagnerite, with his credulous stomach, is even sated with the fare which his master conjures up before him. But we others who, in books as in music, desire above all to findsubstance, and who are scarcely satisfied with the mere representation of a banquet, are much worse off. In plain English, Wagner does not give us enough to masticate. His recitative—very little meat, more bones, and plenty of broth—I christened“alla genovese”: I had no intention of flattering the Genoese with this remark, but rather theolder recitativo, therecitativo secco. And as to Wagnerianleitmotif, I fear I lack the necessary culinary understanding for it. If hard pressed, I might say that I regard it perhaps as an ideal toothpick, as an opportunity of ridding one's self of what remains of one's meal. Wagner's“arias”are still left over. But now I shall hold my tongue.9.Even in his general sketch of the action, Wagner is above all an actor. The first thing that occurs to him is a scene which is certain to produce a[pg 026]strong effect, a realactio,10with a basso-relievo of attitudes; anoverwhelmingscene, this he now proceeds to elaborate more deeply, and out of it he draws his characters. The whole of what remains to be done follows of itself, fully in keeping with a technical economy which has no reason to be subtle. It is not Corneille's public that Wagner has to consider, it is merely the nineteenth century. Concerning the“actual requirements of the stage”Wagner would have about the same opinion as any other actor of to-day, a series of powerful scenes, each stronger than the one that preceded it,—and, in between, all kinds ofclevernonsense. His first concern is to guarantee the effect of his work; he begins with the third act, heapproveshis work according to the quality of its final effect. Guided by this sort of understanding of the stage, there is not much danger of one's creating a drama unawares. Drama demandsinexorablelogic: but what did Wagner care about logic? Again I say, it was not Corneille's public that he had to consider; but[pg 027]merely Germans! Everybody knows the technical difficulties before which the dramatist often has to summon all his strength and frequently to sweat his blood: the difficulty of making theplotseem necessary and the unravelment as well, so that both are conceivable only in a certain way, and so that each may give the impression of freedom (the principle of the smallest expenditure of energy). Now the very last thing that Wagner does is to sweat blood over the plot; and on this and the unravelment he certainly spends the smallest possible amount of energy. Let anybody put one of Wagner's“plots”under the microscope, and I wager that he will be forced to laugh. Nothing is more enlivening than the dilemma in“Tristan,”unless it be that in the“Mastersingers.”Wagner isnodramatist; let nobody be deceived on this point. All he did was to love the word“drama”—he always loved fine words. Nevertheless, in his writings the word“drama”is merely a misunderstanding (—anda piece of shrewdness: Wagner always affected superiority in regard to the word“opera”—), just as the word“spirit”is a misunderstanding in the New Testament.—He was not enough of a psychologist for drama; he instinctively avoided a psychological plot—but how?—by always putting idiosyncrasy in its place.… Very modern—eh? Very Parisian! very decadent!… Incidentally, theplotsthat Wagner knows how to unravel with the help of dramatic inventions, are of quite another kind. For example, let us suppose that Wagner requires a female voice. A whole act without a woman's voice would be[pg 028]impossible! But in this particular instance not one of the heroines happens to be free. What does Wagner do? He emancipates the oldest woman on earth, Erda.“Step up, aged grandmamma! You have got to sing!”And Erda sings. Wagner's end has been achieved. Thereupon he immediately dismisses the old lady.“Why on earth did you come? Off with you! Kindly go to sleep again!”In short, a scene full of mythological awe, before which the Wagneritewondersall kinds of things.…—“But the substance of Wagner's texts! their mythical substance, their eternal substance”—Question: how is this substance, this eternal substance tested? The chemical analyst replies: Translate Wagner into the real, into the modern,—let us be even more cruel, and say into the bourgeois! And what will then become of him?—Between ourselves, I have tried the experiment. Nothing is more entertaining, nothing more worthy of being recommended to a picnic-party, than to discuss Wagner dressed in a more modern garb: for instance Parsifal, as a candidate in divinity, with a public-school education (—the latter, quite indispensablefor purefoolishness). Whatsurprisesawait one! Would you believe it, that Wagner's heroines one and all, once they have been divested of the heroic husks, are almost indistinguishable from Mdme. Bovary!—just as one can conceive conversely, of Flaubert's beingwell ableto transform all his heroines into Scandinavian or Carthaginian women, and then to offer them to Wagner in this mythologised form as a libretto. Indeed, generally[pg 029]speaking, Wagner does not seem to have become interested in any other problems than those which engross the little Parisian decadents of to-day. Always five paces away from the hospital! All very modern problems, all problems which are at homein big cities!do not doubt it!… Have you noticed (it is in keeping with this association of ideas) that Wagner's heroines never have any children?—Theycannothave them.… The despair with which Wagner tackled the problem of arranging in some way for Siegfried's birth, betrays how modern his feelings on this point actually were.—Siegfried“emancipated woman”—but not with any hope of offspring.—And now here is a fact which leaves us speechless: Parsifal is Lohengrin's father! How ever did he do it?—Ought one at this juncture to remember that“chastity works miracles”?…Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas.10.And now just a worden passantconcerning Wagner's writings: they are among other things a school ofshrewdness. The system of procedures of which Wagner disposes, might be applied to a hundred other cases,—he that hath ears to hear let him hear. Perhaps I may lay claim to some public acknowledgment, if I put three of the most valuable of these procedures into a precise form.Everything that Wagnercannotdo is bad.Wagner could do much more than he does; but his strong principles prevent him.Everything that Wagnercando, no one will[pg 030]ever be able to do after him, no one has ever done before him, and no one must ever do after him. Wagner is godly.These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner's writings;—the rest is merely—“literature”.—Not every kind of music hitherto has been in need of literature; and it were well, to try and discover the actual reason of this. Is it perhaps that Wagner's music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear precisely the reverse—that it was too easy,—that people mightnot understand it with sufficient difficulty?—As a matter of fact, his whole life long, he did nothing but repeat one proposition: that his music did not mean music alone! But something more! Something immeasurably more!…“Not music alone”—nomusician would speak in this way. I repeat, Wagner could not create things as a whole; he had no choice, he was obliged to create things in bits, with“motives,”attitudes, formulæ, duplications, and hundreds of repetitions, he remained a rhetorician in music,—and that is why he was at bottomforcedto press“this means”into the foreground.“Music can never be anything else than a means”: this was his theory, but above all it was the onlypracticethat lay open to him. No musician however thinks in this way.—Wagner was in need of literature, in order to persuade the whole world to take his music seriously, profoundly,“because itmeantan infinity of things”, all his life he was the commentator of the“Idea.”—What does Elsa stand for? But without a doubt, Elsa is“the unconscious[pg 031]mind of the people”(—“when I realised this, I naturally became a thorough revolutionist”—).Do not let us forget that, when Hegel and Schelling were misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is—“the idea,”—that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,—rigorously, but also unjustly, for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more“honest”than his more famous contemporaries. But let us leave morality out of the question, Hegel is amatter of taste.… And not only of German but of European taste!… A taste which Wagner understood!—which he felt equal to! which he has immortalised!—All he did was to apply it to music—he invented a style for himself, which might mean an“infinity of things,”—he wasHegel'sheir.… Music as“Idea.”—And how well Wagner was understood!—The same kind of man who used to gush over Hegel, now gushes over Wagner, in his school they evenwriteHegelian.11But he who understood Wagner best, was the German youthlet. The two words“infinity”and“meaning”were sufficient for this: at their sound the youthlet immediately began to feel exceptionally happy. Wagner didnotconquer these boys with music, but with the“idea”:—it is[pg 032]the enigmatical vagueness of his art, its game of hide-and-seek amid a hundred symbols, its polychromy in ideals, which leads and lures the lads. It is Wagner's genius for forming clouds, his sweeps and swoops through the air, his ubiquity and nullibiety—precisely the same qualities with which Hegel led and lured in his time!—Moreover in the presence of Wagner's multifariousness, plenitude and arbitrariness, they seem to themselves justified—“saved”. Tremulously they listen while thegreat symbolsin his art seem to make themselves heard from out the misty distance, with a gentle roll of thunder, and they are not at all displeased if at times it gets a little grey, gruesome and cold. Are they not one and all, like Wagner himself, onquite intimate termswith bad weather, with German weather! Wotan is their God, but Wotan is the God of bad weather.… They are right, how could these German youths—in their present condition,—miss what we others, wehalcyonians, miss in Wagner?i.e.:la gaya scienza; light feet, wit, fire, grave, grand logic, stellar dancing, wanton intellectuality, the vibrating light of the South, the calm sea—perfection.…11.—I have mentioned the sphere to which Wagner belongs—certainly not to the history of music. What, however, does he mean historically?—The rise of the actor in music: a momentous event which not only leads me to think but also to fear.In a word:“Wagner and Liszt.”Never yet[pg 033]have the“uprightness”and“genuineness”of musicians been put to such a dangerous test. It is glaringly obvious: great success, mob success is no longer the achievement of the genuine,—in order to get it a man must be an actor!—Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner—they both prove one and the same thing: that in declining civilisations, wherever the mob is allowed to decide, genuineness becomes superfluous, prejudicial, unfavourable. The actor, alone, can still kindlegreatenthusiasm.—And thus it is hisgolden agewhich is now dawning,—his and that of all those who are in any way related to him. With drums and fifes, Wagner marches at the head of all artists in declamation, in display and virtuosity. He began by convincing the conductors of orchestras, the scene-shifters and stage-singers, not to forget the orchestra:—he“delivered”them from monotony.… The movement that Wagner created has spread even to the land of knowledge: whole sciences pertaining to music are rising slowly, out of centuries of scholasticism. As an example of what I mean, let me point more particularly toRiemann'sservices to rhythmics; he was the first who called attention to the leading idea in punctuation—even for music (unfortunately he did so with a bad word; he called it“phrasing”).—All these people, and I say it with gratitude, are the best, the most respectable among Wagner's admirers—they have a perfect right to honour Wagner. The same instinct unites them with one another; in him they recognise their highest type, and since he has inflamed them with his own ardour they feel[pg 034]themselves transformed into power, even into great power. In this quarter, if anywhere, Wagner's influence has really beenbeneficent. Never before has there been so much thinking, willing, and industry in this sphere. Wagner endowed all these artists with a new conscience: what they now exact andobtainfrom themselves, they had never exacted before Wagner's time—before then they had been too modest. Another spirit prevails on the stage since Wagner rules there the most difficult things are expected, blame is severe, praise very scarce,—the good and the excellent have become the rule. Taste is no longer necessary, nor even is a good voice. Wagner is sung only with ruined voices: this has a more“dramatic”effect. Even talent is out of the question. Expressiveness at all costs, which is what the Wagnerian ideal—the ideal of decadence—demands, is hardly compatible with talent. All that is required for this is virtue—that is to say, training, automatism,“self-denial”. Neither taste, voices, nor gifts, Wagner's stage requires but one thing:Germans!… The definition of a German: an obedient man with long legs.… There is a deep significance in the fact that the rise of Wagner should have coincided with the rise of the“Empire”: both phenomena are a proof of one and the same thing—obedience and long legs.—Never have people been more obedient, never have they been so well ordered about. The conductors of Wagnerian orchestras, more particularly, are worthy of an age, which posterity will one day call, with timid awe, theclassical age of war.[pg 035]Wagner understood how to command; in this respect, too, he was a great teacher. He commanded as a man who had exercised an inexorable will over himself—as one who had practised lifelong discipline: Wagner was, perhaps, the greatest example of self-violence in the whole of the history of art (—even Alfieri, who in other respects is his next-of-kin, is outdone by him. The note of a Torinese).12.This view, that our actors have become more worthy of respect than heretofore, does not imply that I believe them to have become less dangerous.… But who is in any doubt as to what I want,—as to what thethree requisitionsare concerning which my wrath and my care and love of art, have made me open my mouth on this occasion?That the stage should not become master of the arts.That the actor should not become the corrupter of the genuine.That music should not become an art of lying.Friedrich Nietzsche.[pg 036]PostscriptThe gravity of these last words allows me at this point to introduce a few sentences out of an unprinted essay which will at least leave no doubt as to my earnestness in regard to this question. The title of this essay is:“What Wagner has cost us.”One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Even to-day a vague feeling that this is so, still prevails. Even Wagner's success, his triumph, did not uproot this feeling thoroughly. But formerly it was strong, it was terrible, it was a gloomy hate throughout almost three-quarters of Wagner's life. The resistance which he met with among us Germans cannot be too highly valued or too highly honoured. People guarded themselves against him as against an illness,—not with arguments—it is impossible to refute an illness,—but with obstruction, with mistrust, with repugnance, with loathing, with sombre earnestness, as though he were a great rampant danger. The æsthetes gave themselves away when out of three schools of German philosophy they waged an absurd war against Wagner's principles with“ifs”and“fors”—what did he care about principles, even his own!—The Germans themselves had enough instinctive good sense to dispense with every“if”and“for”in this matter. An instinct is weakened when it becomes conscious: for by[pg 037]becoming conscious it makes itself feeble. If there were any signs that in spite of the universal character of European decadence there was still a modicum of health, still an instinctive premonition of what is harmful and dangerous, residing in the German soul, then it would be precisely this blunt resistance to Wagner which I should least like to see underrated. It does us honour, it gives us some reason to hope: France no longer has such an amount of health at her disposal. The Germans, theseloiterers par excellence, as history shows, are to-day the most backward among the civilised nations of Europe; this has its advantages,—for they are thus relatively the youngest.One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. It is only quite recently that the Germans have overcome a sort of dread of him,—the desire to be rid of him occurred to them again and again.12Does anybody remember a very curious occurrence in which, quite unexpectedly towards the end, this[pg 038]old feeling once more manifested itself? It happened at Wagner's funeral. The first Wagner Society, the one in Munich, laid a wreath on his grave with this inscription, which immediately became famous:“Salvation to the Saviour!”Everybody admired the lofty inspiration which had dictated this inscription, as also the taste which seemed to be the privilege of the followers of Wagner. Many also, however (it was singular enough), made this slight alteration in it:“Salvationfromthe Saviour”—People began to breathe again—One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Let us try to estimate the influence of this worship upon culture. Whom did this movement press to the front? What did it make ever more and more pre-eminent?—In the first place the layman's arrogance, the arrogance of the art-maniac. Now these people are organising societies, they wish to make their taste prevail, they even wish to pose as judgesin rebus musicis et musicantibus. Secondly: an ever increasing indifference towards severe, noble and conscientious schooling in the service of art, and in its place the belief in genius, or in plain English, cheeky dilettantism (—the formula for this is to be found in theMastersingers). Thirdly, and this is the worst of all:Theatrocracy—, the craziness of a belief in the pre-eminence of the theatre, in the right of the theatre to rule supreme over the arts, over Art in general.… But this should be shouted into the face of Wagnerites a hundred times over: that the theatre is something lower than art, something secondary, something coarsened,[pg 039]above all something suitably distorted and falsified for the mob. In this respect Wagner altered nothing: Bayreuth is grand Opera—and not even good opera.… The stage is a form of Demolatry in the realm of taste, the stage is an insurrection of the mob, aplébisciteagainst good taste.… The case of Wagner proves this fact: he captivated the masses—he depraved taste, he even perverted our taste for opera!—One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. What has Wagner-worship made out of spirit? Does Wagner liberate the spirit? To him belong that ambiguity and equivocation and all other qualities which can convince the uncertain without making them conscious of why they have been convinced. In this sense Wagner is a seducer on a grand scale. There is nothing exhausted, nothing effete, nothing dangerous to life, nothing that slanders the world in the realm of spirit, which has not secretly found shelter in his art, he conceals the blackest obscurantism in the luminous orbs of the ideal. He flatters every nihilistic (Buddhistic) instinct and togs it out in music; he flatters every form of Christianity, every religious expression of decadence. He that hath ears to hear let him hear: everything that has ever grown out of the soil of impoverished life, the whole counterfeit coinage of the transcendental and of a Beyond found its most sublime advocate in Wagner's art, not in formulæ (Wagner is too clever to use formulæ), but in the persuasion of the senses which in their turn makes the spirit weary and morbid. Music in the form of Circe … in[pg 040]this respect his last work is his greatest masterpiece. In the art of seduction“Parsifal”will for ever maintain its rank as a stroke of genius.… I admire this work. I would fain have composed it myself. Wagner was never better inspired than towards the end. The subtlety with which beauty and disease are united here, reaches such a height, that it casts so to speak a shadow upon all Wagner's earlier achievements: it seems too bright, too healthy. Do ye understand this? Health and brightness acting like a shadow? Almost like an objection?… To this extent are we already pure fools.… Never was there a greater Master in heavy hieratic perfumes—Never on earth has there been such a connoisseur of paltry infinities, of all that thrills, of extravagant excesses, of all the feminism from out the vocabulary of happiness! My friends, do but drink the philtres of this art! Nowhere will ye find a more pleasant method of enervating your spirit, of forgetting your manliness in the shade of a rosebush.… Ah, this old magician, mightiest of Klingsors; how he wages war against us with his art, against us free spirits! How he appeals to every form of cowardice of the modern soul with his charming girlish notes! There never was such amortal hatredof knowledge! One must be a very cynic in order to resist seduction here. One must be able to bite in order to resist worshipping at this shrine. Very well, old seducer! The cynic cautions you—cave canem.…One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. I contemplate the youthlets who have long been exposed to his infection. The first[pg 041]relatively innocuous effect of it is the corruption of their taste. Wagner acts like chronic recourse to the bottle. He stultifies, he befouls the stomach. His specific effect: degeneration of the feeling for rhythm. What the Wagnerite calls rhythmical is what I call, to use a Greek metaphor,“stirring a swamp.”Much more dangerous than all this, however, is the corruption of ideas. The youthlet becomes a moon-calf, an“idealist”. He stands above science, and in this respect he has reached the master's heights. On the other hand, he assumes the airs of a philosopher, he writes for theBayreuth Journal; he solves all problems in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Master. But the most ghastly thing of all is the deterioration of the nerves. Let any one wander through a large city at night, in all directions he will hear people doing violence to instruments with solemn rage and fury, a wild uproar breaks out at intervals. What is happening? It is the disciples of Wagner in the act of worshipping him.… Bayreuth is another word for a Hydro. A typical telegram from Bayreuth would readbereits bereut(I already repent). Wagner is bad for young men; he is fatal for women. What medically speaking is a female Wagnerite? It seems to me that a doctor could not be too serious in putting this alternative of conscience to young women; either one thing or the other. But they have already made their choice. You cannot serve two Masters when one of these is Wagner. Wagner redeemed woman; and in return woman built Bayreuth for him. Every sacrifice, every[pg 042]surrender: there was nothing that they were not prepared to give him. Woman impoverishes herself in favour of the Master, she becomes quite touching, she stands naked before him. The female Wagnerite, the most attractive equivocality that exists to-day: she is the incarnation of Wagner's cause: his cause triumphs with her as its symbol.… Ah, this old robber! He robs our young men: he even robs our women as well, and drags them to his cell.… Ah, this old Minotaur! What has he not already cost us? Every year processions of the finest young men and maidens are led into his labyrinth that he may swallow them up, every year the whole of Europe cries out“Away to Crete! Away to Crete!”.…[pg 043]Second PostscriptIt seems to me that my letter is open to some misunderstanding. On certain faces I see the expression of gratitude; I even hear modest but merry laughter. I prefer to be understood here as in other things. But since a certain animal,the wormof Empire, the famousRhinoxera, has become lodged in the vineyards of the German spirit, nobody any longer understands a word I say. TheKreus-Zeitunghas brought this home to me, not to speak of theLitterarisches Centralblatt. I have given the Germans the deepest books that they have ever possessed—a sufficient reason for their not having understood a word of them.… If in this essay I declare war against Wagner—and incidentally against a certain form of German taste, if I seem to use strong language about the cretinism of Bayreuth, it must not be supposed that I am in the least anxious to glorify any other musician. Other musicians are not to be considered by the side of Wagner. Things are generally bad. Decay is universal. Disease lies at the very root of things. If Wagner's name represents the ruin of music, just as Bernini's stands for the ruin of sculpture, he is not on that account its cause. All he did was to accelerate the fall,—though we are quite prepared to admit that he did it in a way which makes one recoil with horror from this almost instantaneous decline[pg 044]and fall to the depths. He possessed the ingenuousness of decadence: this constituted his superiority. He believed in it. He did not halt before any of its logical consequences. The others hesitated—that is their distinction. They have no other. What is common to both Wagner and“the others”consists in this: the decline of all organising power, the abuse of traditional means, without the capacity or the aim that would justify this. The counterfeit imitation of grand forms, for which nobody nowadays is strong, proud, self-reliant and healthy enough, excessive vitality in small details; passion at all costs; refinement as an expression of impoverished life, ever more nerves in the place of muscle. I know only one musician who to-day would be able to compose an overture as an organic whole: and nobody else knows him.13He who is famous now, does not write better music than Wagner, but only less characteristic, less definite music:—less definite, because half measures, even in decadence, cannot stand by the side of completeness. But Wagner was complete, Wagner represented thorough corruption, Wagner has had the courage, the will, and the conviction for corruption. What does Johannes Brahms matter?… It was his good fortune to be misunderstood by Germany; he was taken to be an antagonist of Wagner—people required an antagonist!—But he did not write necessary music, above all he wrote too much music!—When one is not rich one should[pg 045]at least have enough pride to be poor!… The sympathy which here and there was meted out to Brahms, apart from party interests and party misunderstandings, was for a long time a riddle to me, until one day through an accident, almost, I discovered that he affected a particular type of man. He has the melancholy of impotence. His creations are not the result of plenitude, he thirsts after abundance. Apart from what he plagiarises, from what he borrows from ancient or exotically modern styles—he is a master in the art of copying,—there remains as his most individual quality alonging.… And this is what the dissatisfied of all kinds, and all those who yearn, divine in him. He is much too little of a personality, too little of a central figure.… The“impersonal,”those who are not self-centred, love him for this. He is especially the musician of a species of dissatisfied women. Fifty steps further on, and we find the female Wagnerite—just as we find Wagner himself fifty paces ahead of Brahms.—The female Wagnerite is a more definite, a more interesting, and above all, a more attractive type. Brahms is touching so long as he dreams or mourns over himself in private—in this respect he is modern;—he becomes cold, we no longer feel at one with him when he poses as the child of the classics.… People like to call Brahms Beethoven's heir: I know of no more cautious euphemism—All that which to-day makes a claim to being the grand style in music is on precisely that account either false to us or false to itself. This alternative is suspicious enough: in itself it contains a[pg 046]casuistic question concerning the value of the two cases. The instinct of the majority protests against the alternative;“false to us”—they do not wish to be cheated;—and I myself would certainly always prefer this type to the other (“False to itself”). This ismytaste.—Expressed more clearly for the sake of the“poor in spirit”it amounts to this: BrahmsorWagner.… Brahms isnotan actor.—A very great part of other musicians may be summed up in the concept Brahms—I do not wish to say anything about the clever apes of Wagner, as for instance Goldmark: when one has“The Queen of Sheba”to one's name, one belongs to a menagerie,—one ought to put oneself on show.—Nowadays all things that can be done well and even with a master hand are small. In this department alone is honesty still possible. Nothing, however, can cure music as a whole of its chief fault, of its fate, which is to be the expression of general physiological contradiction,—which is, in fact, to be modern.The best instruction, the most conscientious schooling, the most thorough familiarity, yea, and even isolation, with the Old Masters,—all this only acts as a palliative, or, more strictly speaking, has but an illusory effect, because the first condition of the right thing is no longer in our bodies; whether this first condition be the strong race of a Handel or the overflowing animal spirits of a Rossini. Not everyone has the right to every teacher: and this holds good of whole epochs.—In itself it is not impossible that there are still remains of stronger natures, typical unadapted men, somewhere[pg 047]in Europe: from this quarter the advent of a somewhat belated form of beauty and perfection, even in music, might still be hoped for. But the most that we can expect to see are exceptional cases. From the rule, that corruption is paramount, that corruption is a fatality,—not even a God can save music.[pg 048]EpilogueAnd now let us take breath and withdraw a moment from this narrow world which necessarily must be narrow, because we have to make enquiries relative to the value ofpersons. A philosopher feels that he wants to wash his hands after he has concerned himself so long with the“Case of Wagner”. I shall now give my notion of what ismodern. According to the measure of energy of every age, there is also a standard that determines which virtues shall be allowed and which forbidden. The age either has the virtues ofascendinglife, in which case it resists the virtues of degeneration with all its deepest instincts. Or it is in itself an age of degeneration, in which case it requires the virtues of declining life,—in which case it hates everything that justifies itself, solely as being the outcome of a plenitude, or a superabundance of strength. Æsthetic is inextricably bound up with these biological principles: there is decadent æsthetic, andclassicalæsthetic,—“beauty in itself”is just as much a chimera as any other kind of idealism.—Within the narrow sphere of the so-called moral values, no greater antithesis could be found than that ofmaster-moralityand the morality ofChristianvaluations: the latter having grown out of a thoroughly morbid soil. (—The gospels present us with the same physiological types, as do the novels of Dostoiewsky),[pg 049]the master-morality (“Roman,”“pagan,”“classical,”“Renaissance”), on the other hand, being the symbolic speech of well-constitutedness, ofascendinglife, and of the Will to Power as a vital principle. Master-moralityaffirmsjust as instinctively as Christian moralitydenies(“God,”“Beyond,”“self-denial,”—all of them negations). The first reflects its plenitude upon things,—it transfigures, it embellishes, itrationalisesthe world,—the latter impoverishes, bleaches, mars the value of things; itsuppressesthe world.“World”is a Christian term of abuse. These antithetical forms in the optics of values, arebothnecessary: they are different points of view which cannot be circumvented either with arguments or counter-arguments. One cannot refute Christianity: it is impossible to refute a diseased eyesight. That people should have combated pessimism as if it had been a philosophy, was the very acme of learned stupidity. The concepts“true”and“untrue”do not seem to me to have any sense in optics.—That, alone, which has to be guarded against is the falsity, the instinctive duplicity whichwould fainregard this antithesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,—and his mastery in this kind of falseness was of no mean order. To cast side-long glances at master-morality, atnoblemorality (—Icelandic saga is perhaps the greatest documentary evidence of these values), and at the same time to have the opposite teaching, the“gospel of the lowly,”the doctrine of theneedof salvation, on one's lips!… Incidentally, I admire the modesty of Christians who go to Bayreuth. As for myself, I couldnot[pg 050]endure to hear the sound of certain words on Wagner's lips. There are some concepts which are too good for Bayreuth … What? Christianity adjusted for female Wagnerites, perhapsbyfemale Wagnerites—for, in his latter days Wagner was thoroughlyfeminini generis—? Again I say, the Christians of to-day are too modest for me.… If Wagner were a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a Father of the Church!—The need ofsalvation, the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing in common with such clowns; it is the most straightforward expression of decadence, it is the most convincing and most painful affirmation of decadence, in sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wishesto be ridof himself.Le moi est toujours haissable.Noble morality, master-morality, on the other hand, is rooted in a triumphant saying of yea toone's self,—it is the self-affirmation and self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime symbols and practices; but only“because its heart is too full.”The whole of beautiful art and of great art belongs here; their common essence is gratitude. But we must allow it a certain instinctive repugnanceto décadents, and a scorn and horror of the latter's symbolism: such things almost prove it. The noble Romans considered Christianity as afœda superstitio: let me call to your minds the feelings which the last German of noble taste—Goethe—had in regard to the cross. It is idle to look for more valuable, morenecessarycontrasts.14[pg 051]But the kind of falsity which is characteristic of the Bayreuthians is not exceptional to-day. We all know the hybrid concept of the Christian gentleman. Thisinnocencein contradiction, this“clean conscience”in falsehood, is rather modernpar excellence, with it modernity is almost defined. Biologically, modern man represents acontradiction of values, he sits between two stools, he says yea and nay in one breath. No wonder that it is precisely in our age that falseness itself became flesh and blood, and even genius! No wonderWagnerdwelt amongst us! It was not without reason that I called Wagner the Cagliostro of modernity.… But all of us, though we do not know it, involuntarily have values, words, formulæ, and morals in our bodies, which are quiteantagonisticin their origin—regarded from a physiological standpoint, we arefalse.… How would adiagnosis of the modern soulbegin? With a determined incision into this agglomeration of contradictory instincts, with the total suppression of its antagonistic values, with vivisection applied to its mostinstructivecase. To philosophers the“Case of Wagner”is awindfall—this essay, as you observe, was inspired by gratitude.

8.—“Very good! But how can thisdécadentspoil one's taste if perchance one is not a musician, if perchance one is not oneself adécadent?”—Conversely! How can onehelpit!Justyou try it!—You know not what Wagner is: quite a great actor! Does a more profound, a moreponderousinfluence exist on the stage? Just look at these youthlets,—all benumbed, pale, breathless! They are Wagnerites: they know nothing about music,—and yet Wagner gets the mastery of them. Wagner's art presses with the weight of a hundred atmospheres: do but submit, there is nothing else to do.… Wagner the actor is a tyrant, his pathos flings all taste, all resistance, to the winds.[pg 023]—Who else has this persuasive power in his attitudes, who else sees attitudes so clearly before anything else! This holding-of-its-breath in Wagnerian pathos, this disinclination to have done with an intense feeling, this terrifying habit of dwelling on a situation in which every instant almost chokes one.——Was Wagner a musician at all? In any case he was something else toa much greater degree—that is to say, an incomparablehistrio, the greatest mime, the most astounding theatrical genius that the Germans have ever had, ourscenic artist par excellence. He belongs to some other sphere than the history of music, with whose really great and genuine figure he must not be confounded. WagnerandBeethoven—this is blasphemy—and above all it does not do justice even to Wagner.… As a musician he was no more than what he was as a man, hebecamea musician, hebecamea poet, because the tyrant in him, his actor's genius, drove him to be both. Nothing is known concerning Wagner, so long as his dominating instinct has not been divined.Wagner wasnotinstinctively a musician. And this he proved by the way in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it,i.e., a rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as an inventor and an innovator of the first order—he increased the powers of speech[pg 024]of music to an incalculable degree—he is the Victor Hugo of music as language, provided always we allow that under certain circumstances music may be something which is not music, but speech—instrument—ancilla dramaturgica. Wagner's music,notin the tender care of theatrical taste, which is very tolerant, is simply bad music, perhaps the worst that has ever been composed. When a musician can no longer count up to three, he becomes“dramatic,”he becomes“Wagnerian”.…Wagner almost discovered the magic which can be wrought even now by means of music which is both incoherent andelementary. His consciousness of this attains to huge proportions, as does also his instinct to dispense entirely with higher law andstyle. The elementary factors—sound, movement, colour, in short, the whole sensuousness of music—suffice. Wagner never calculates as a musician with a musician's conscience, all he strains after is effect, nothing more than effect. And he knows what he has to make an effect upon!—In this he is as unhesitating as Schiller was, as any theatrical man must be; he has also the latter's contempt for the world which he brings to its knees before him. A man is an actor when he is ahead of mankind in his possession of this one view, that everything which has to strike people as true, must not be true. This rule was formulated by Talma: it contains the whole psychology of the actor, it also contains—and this we need not doubt—all his morality. Wagner's music is never true.—But it is supposed to be so: and thus everything is as it should be. As long as we are young, and[pg 025]Wagnerites into the bargain, we regard Wagner as rich, even as the model of a prodigal giver, even as a great landlord in the realm of sound. We admire him in very much the same way as young Frenchmen admire Victor Hugo—that is to say, for his“royal liberality.”Later on we admire the one as well as the other for the opposite reason: as masters and paragons in economy, asprudentamphitryons. Nobody can equal them in the art of providing a princely board with such a modest outlay.—The Wagnerite, with his credulous stomach, is even sated with the fare which his master conjures up before him. But we others who, in books as in music, desire above all to findsubstance, and who are scarcely satisfied with the mere representation of a banquet, are much worse off. In plain English, Wagner does not give us enough to masticate. His recitative—very little meat, more bones, and plenty of broth—I christened“alla genovese”: I had no intention of flattering the Genoese with this remark, but rather theolder recitativo, therecitativo secco. And as to Wagnerianleitmotif, I fear I lack the necessary culinary understanding for it. If hard pressed, I might say that I regard it perhaps as an ideal toothpick, as an opportunity of ridding one's self of what remains of one's meal. Wagner's“arias”are still left over. But now I shall hold my tongue.

—“Very good! But how can thisdécadentspoil one's taste if perchance one is not a musician, if perchance one is not oneself adécadent?”—Conversely! How can onehelpit!Justyou try it!—You know not what Wagner is: quite a great actor! Does a more profound, a moreponderousinfluence exist on the stage? Just look at these youthlets,—all benumbed, pale, breathless! They are Wagnerites: they know nothing about music,—and yet Wagner gets the mastery of them. Wagner's art presses with the weight of a hundred atmospheres: do but submit, there is nothing else to do.… Wagner the actor is a tyrant, his pathos flings all taste, all resistance, to the winds.

—Who else has this persuasive power in his attitudes, who else sees attitudes so clearly before anything else! This holding-of-its-breath in Wagnerian pathos, this disinclination to have done with an intense feeling, this terrifying habit of dwelling on a situation in which every instant almost chokes one.——

Was Wagner a musician at all? In any case he was something else toa much greater degree—that is to say, an incomparablehistrio, the greatest mime, the most astounding theatrical genius that the Germans have ever had, ourscenic artist par excellence. He belongs to some other sphere than the history of music, with whose really great and genuine figure he must not be confounded. WagnerandBeethoven—this is blasphemy—and above all it does not do justice even to Wagner.… As a musician he was no more than what he was as a man, hebecamea musician, hebecamea poet, because the tyrant in him, his actor's genius, drove him to be both. Nothing is known concerning Wagner, so long as his dominating instinct has not been divined.

Wagner wasnotinstinctively a musician. And this he proved by the way in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it,i.e., a rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as an inventor and an innovator of the first order—he increased the powers of speech[pg 024]of music to an incalculable degree—he is the Victor Hugo of music as language, provided always we allow that under certain circumstances music may be something which is not music, but speech—instrument—ancilla dramaturgica. Wagner's music,notin the tender care of theatrical taste, which is very tolerant, is simply bad music, perhaps the worst that has ever been composed. When a musician can no longer count up to three, he becomes“dramatic,”he becomes“Wagnerian”.…

Wagner almost discovered the magic which can be wrought even now by means of music which is both incoherent andelementary. His consciousness of this attains to huge proportions, as does also his instinct to dispense entirely with higher law andstyle. The elementary factors—sound, movement, colour, in short, the whole sensuousness of music—suffice. Wagner never calculates as a musician with a musician's conscience, all he strains after is effect, nothing more than effect. And he knows what he has to make an effect upon!—In this he is as unhesitating as Schiller was, as any theatrical man must be; he has also the latter's contempt for the world which he brings to its knees before him. A man is an actor when he is ahead of mankind in his possession of this one view, that everything which has to strike people as true, must not be true. This rule was formulated by Talma: it contains the whole psychology of the actor, it also contains—and this we need not doubt—all his morality. Wagner's music is never true.

—But it is supposed to be so: and thus everything is as it should be. As long as we are young, and[pg 025]Wagnerites into the bargain, we regard Wagner as rich, even as the model of a prodigal giver, even as a great landlord in the realm of sound. We admire him in very much the same way as young Frenchmen admire Victor Hugo—that is to say, for his“royal liberality.”Later on we admire the one as well as the other for the opposite reason: as masters and paragons in economy, asprudentamphitryons. Nobody can equal them in the art of providing a princely board with such a modest outlay.—The Wagnerite, with his credulous stomach, is even sated with the fare which his master conjures up before him. But we others who, in books as in music, desire above all to findsubstance, and who are scarcely satisfied with the mere representation of a banquet, are much worse off. In plain English, Wagner does not give us enough to masticate. His recitative—very little meat, more bones, and plenty of broth—I christened“alla genovese”: I had no intention of flattering the Genoese with this remark, but rather theolder recitativo, therecitativo secco. And as to Wagnerianleitmotif, I fear I lack the necessary culinary understanding for it. If hard pressed, I might say that I regard it perhaps as an ideal toothpick, as an opportunity of ridding one's self of what remains of one's meal. Wagner's“arias”are still left over. But now I shall hold my tongue.

9.Even in his general sketch of the action, Wagner is above all an actor. The first thing that occurs to him is a scene which is certain to produce a[pg 026]strong effect, a realactio,10with a basso-relievo of attitudes; anoverwhelmingscene, this he now proceeds to elaborate more deeply, and out of it he draws his characters. The whole of what remains to be done follows of itself, fully in keeping with a technical economy which has no reason to be subtle. It is not Corneille's public that Wagner has to consider, it is merely the nineteenth century. Concerning the“actual requirements of the stage”Wagner would have about the same opinion as any other actor of to-day, a series of powerful scenes, each stronger than the one that preceded it,—and, in between, all kinds ofclevernonsense. His first concern is to guarantee the effect of his work; he begins with the third act, heapproveshis work according to the quality of its final effect. Guided by this sort of understanding of the stage, there is not much danger of one's creating a drama unawares. Drama demandsinexorablelogic: but what did Wagner care about logic? Again I say, it was not Corneille's public that he had to consider; but[pg 027]merely Germans! Everybody knows the technical difficulties before which the dramatist often has to summon all his strength and frequently to sweat his blood: the difficulty of making theplotseem necessary and the unravelment as well, so that both are conceivable only in a certain way, and so that each may give the impression of freedom (the principle of the smallest expenditure of energy). Now the very last thing that Wagner does is to sweat blood over the plot; and on this and the unravelment he certainly spends the smallest possible amount of energy. Let anybody put one of Wagner's“plots”under the microscope, and I wager that he will be forced to laugh. Nothing is more enlivening than the dilemma in“Tristan,”unless it be that in the“Mastersingers.”Wagner isnodramatist; let nobody be deceived on this point. All he did was to love the word“drama”—he always loved fine words. Nevertheless, in his writings the word“drama”is merely a misunderstanding (—anda piece of shrewdness: Wagner always affected superiority in regard to the word“opera”—), just as the word“spirit”is a misunderstanding in the New Testament.—He was not enough of a psychologist for drama; he instinctively avoided a psychological plot—but how?—by always putting idiosyncrasy in its place.… Very modern—eh? Very Parisian! very decadent!… Incidentally, theplotsthat Wagner knows how to unravel with the help of dramatic inventions, are of quite another kind. For example, let us suppose that Wagner requires a female voice. A whole act without a woman's voice would be[pg 028]impossible! But in this particular instance not one of the heroines happens to be free. What does Wagner do? He emancipates the oldest woman on earth, Erda.“Step up, aged grandmamma! You have got to sing!”And Erda sings. Wagner's end has been achieved. Thereupon he immediately dismisses the old lady.“Why on earth did you come? Off with you! Kindly go to sleep again!”In short, a scene full of mythological awe, before which the Wagneritewondersall kinds of things.…—“But the substance of Wagner's texts! their mythical substance, their eternal substance”—Question: how is this substance, this eternal substance tested? The chemical analyst replies: Translate Wagner into the real, into the modern,—let us be even more cruel, and say into the bourgeois! And what will then become of him?—Between ourselves, I have tried the experiment. Nothing is more entertaining, nothing more worthy of being recommended to a picnic-party, than to discuss Wagner dressed in a more modern garb: for instance Parsifal, as a candidate in divinity, with a public-school education (—the latter, quite indispensablefor purefoolishness). Whatsurprisesawait one! Would you believe it, that Wagner's heroines one and all, once they have been divested of the heroic husks, are almost indistinguishable from Mdme. Bovary!—just as one can conceive conversely, of Flaubert's beingwell ableto transform all his heroines into Scandinavian or Carthaginian women, and then to offer them to Wagner in this mythologised form as a libretto. Indeed, generally[pg 029]speaking, Wagner does not seem to have become interested in any other problems than those which engross the little Parisian decadents of to-day. Always five paces away from the hospital! All very modern problems, all problems which are at homein big cities!do not doubt it!… Have you noticed (it is in keeping with this association of ideas) that Wagner's heroines never have any children?—Theycannothave them.… The despair with which Wagner tackled the problem of arranging in some way for Siegfried's birth, betrays how modern his feelings on this point actually were.—Siegfried“emancipated woman”—but not with any hope of offspring.—And now here is a fact which leaves us speechless: Parsifal is Lohengrin's father! How ever did he do it?—Ought one at this juncture to remember that“chastity works miracles”?…Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas.

Even in his general sketch of the action, Wagner is above all an actor. The first thing that occurs to him is a scene which is certain to produce a[pg 026]strong effect, a realactio,10with a basso-relievo of attitudes; anoverwhelmingscene, this he now proceeds to elaborate more deeply, and out of it he draws his characters. The whole of what remains to be done follows of itself, fully in keeping with a technical economy which has no reason to be subtle. It is not Corneille's public that Wagner has to consider, it is merely the nineteenth century. Concerning the“actual requirements of the stage”Wagner would have about the same opinion as any other actor of to-day, a series of powerful scenes, each stronger than the one that preceded it,—and, in between, all kinds ofclevernonsense. His first concern is to guarantee the effect of his work; he begins with the third act, heapproveshis work according to the quality of its final effect. Guided by this sort of understanding of the stage, there is not much danger of one's creating a drama unawares. Drama demandsinexorablelogic: but what did Wagner care about logic? Again I say, it was not Corneille's public that he had to consider; but[pg 027]merely Germans! Everybody knows the technical difficulties before which the dramatist often has to summon all his strength and frequently to sweat his blood: the difficulty of making theplotseem necessary and the unravelment as well, so that both are conceivable only in a certain way, and so that each may give the impression of freedom (the principle of the smallest expenditure of energy). Now the very last thing that Wagner does is to sweat blood over the plot; and on this and the unravelment he certainly spends the smallest possible amount of energy. Let anybody put one of Wagner's“plots”under the microscope, and I wager that he will be forced to laugh. Nothing is more enlivening than the dilemma in“Tristan,”unless it be that in the“Mastersingers.”Wagner isnodramatist; let nobody be deceived on this point. All he did was to love the word“drama”—he always loved fine words. Nevertheless, in his writings the word“drama”is merely a misunderstanding (—anda piece of shrewdness: Wagner always affected superiority in regard to the word“opera”—), just as the word“spirit”is a misunderstanding in the New Testament.—He was not enough of a psychologist for drama; he instinctively avoided a psychological plot—but how?—by always putting idiosyncrasy in its place.… Very modern—eh? Very Parisian! very decadent!… Incidentally, theplotsthat Wagner knows how to unravel with the help of dramatic inventions, are of quite another kind. For example, let us suppose that Wagner requires a female voice. A whole act without a woman's voice would be[pg 028]impossible! But in this particular instance not one of the heroines happens to be free. What does Wagner do? He emancipates the oldest woman on earth, Erda.“Step up, aged grandmamma! You have got to sing!”And Erda sings. Wagner's end has been achieved. Thereupon he immediately dismisses the old lady.“Why on earth did you come? Off with you! Kindly go to sleep again!”In short, a scene full of mythological awe, before which the Wagneritewondersall kinds of things.…

—“But the substance of Wagner's texts! their mythical substance, their eternal substance”—Question: how is this substance, this eternal substance tested? The chemical analyst replies: Translate Wagner into the real, into the modern,—let us be even more cruel, and say into the bourgeois! And what will then become of him?—Between ourselves, I have tried the experiment. Nothing is more entertaining, nothing more worthy of being recommended to a picnic-party, than to discuss Wagner dressed in a more modern garb: for instance Parsifal, as a candidate in divinity, with a public-school education (—the latter, quite indispensablefor purefoolishness). Whatsurprisesawait one! Would you believe it, that Wagner's heroines one and all, once they have been divested of the heroic husks, are almost indistinguishable from Mdme. Bovary!—just as one can conceive conversely, of Flaubert's beingwell ableto transform all his heroines into Scandinavian or Carthaginian women, and then to offer them to Wagner in this mythologised form as a libretto. Indeed, generally[pg 029]speaking, Wagner does not seem to have become interested in any other problems than those which engross the little Parisian decadents of to-day. Always five paces away from the hospital! All very modern problems, all problems which are at homein big cities!do not doubt it!… Have you noticed (it is in keeping with this association of ideas) that Wagner's heroines never have any children?—Theycannothave them.… The despair with which Wagner tackled the problem of arranging in some way for Siegfried's birth, betrays how modern his feelings on this point actually were.—Siegfried“emancipated woman”—but not with any hope of offspring.—And now here is a fact which leaves us speechless: Parsifal is Lohengrin's father! How ever did he do it?—Ought one at this juncture to remember that“chastity works miracles”?…

Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas.

10.And now just a worden passantconcerning Wagner's writings: they are among other things a school ofshrewdness. The system of procedures of which Wagner disposes, might be applied to a hundred other cases,—he that hath ears to hear let him hear. Perhaps I may lay claim to some public acknowledgment, if I put three of the most valuable of these procedures into a precise form.Everything that Wagnercannotdo is bad.Wagner could do much more than he does; but his strong principles prevent him.Everything that Wagnercando, no one will[pg 030]ever be able to do after him, no one has ever done before him, and no one must ever do after him. Wagner is godly.These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner's writings;—the rest is merely—“literature”.—Not every kind of music hitherto has been in need of literature; and it were well, to try and discover the actual reason of this. Is it perhaps that Wagner's music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear precisely the reverse—that it was too easy,—that people mightnot understand it with sufficient difficulty?—As a matter of fact, his whole life long, he did nothing but repeat one proposition: that his music did not mean music alone! But something more! Something immeasurably more!…“Not music alone”—nomusician would speak in this way. I repeat, Wagner could not create things as a whole; he had no choice, he was obliged to create things in bits, with“motives,”attitudes, formulæ, duplications, and hundreds of repetitions, he remained a rhetorician in music,—and that is why he was at bottomforcedto press“this means”into the foreground.“Music can never be anything else than a means”: this was his theory, but above all it was the onlypracticethat lay open to him. No musician however thinks in this way.—Wagner was in need of literature, in order to persuade the whole world to take his music seriously, profoundly,“because itmeantan infinity of things”, all his life he was the commentator of the“Idea.”—What does Elsa stand for? But without a doubt, Elsa is“the unconscious[pg 031]mind of the people”(—“when I realised this, I naturally became a thorough revolutionist”—).Do not let us forget that, when Hegel and Schelling were misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is—“the idea,”—that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,—rigorously, but also unjustly, for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more“honest”than his more famous contemporaries. But let us leave morality out of the question, Hegel is amatter of taste.… And not only of German but of European taste!… A taste which Wagner understood!—which he felt equal to! which he has immortalised!—All he did was to apply it to music—he invented a style for himself, which might mean an“infinity of things,”—he wasHegel'sheir.… Music as“Idea.”—And how well Wagner was understood!—The same kind of man who used to gush over Hegel, now gushes over Wagner, in his school they evenwriteHegelian.11But he who understood Wagner best, was the German youthlet. The two words“infinity”and“meaning”were sufficient for this: at their sound the youthlet immediately began to feel exceptionally happy. Wagner didnotconquer these boys with music, but with the“idea”:—it is[pg 032]the enigmatical vagueness of his art, its game of hide-and-seek amid a hundred symbols, its polychromy in ideals, which leads and lures the lads. It is Wagner's genius for forming clouds, his sweeps and swoops through the air, his ubiquity and nullibiety—precisely the same qualities with which Hegel led and lured in his time!—Moreover in the presence of Wagner's multifariousness, plenitude and arbitrariness, they seem to themselves justified—“saved”. Tremulously they listen while thegreat symbolsin his art seem to make themselves heard from out the misty distance, with a gentle roll of thunder, and they are not at all displeased if at times it gets a little grey, gruesome and cold. Are they not one and all, like Wagner himself, onquite intimate termswith bad weather, with German weather! Wotan is their God, but Wotan is the God of bad weather.… They are right, how could these German youths—in their present condition,—miss what we others, wehalcyonians, miss in Wagner?i.e.:la gaya scienza; light feet, wit, fire, grave, grand logic, stellar dancing, wanton intellectuality, the vibrating light of the South, the calm sea—perfection.…

And now just a worden passantconcerning Wagner's writings: they are among other things a school ofshrewdness. The system of procedures of which Wagner disposes, might be applied to a hundred other cases,—he that hath ears to hear let him hear. Perhaps I may lay claim to some public acknowledgment, if I put three of the most valuable of these procedures into a precise form.

Everything that Wagnercannotdo is bad.

Wagner could do much more than he does; but his strong principles prevent him.

Everything that Wagnercando, no one will[pg 030]ever be able to do after him, no one has ever done before him, and no one must ever do after him. Wagner is godly.

These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner's writings;—the rest is merely—“literature”.

—Not every kind of music hitherto has been in need of literature; and it were well, to try and discover the actual reason of this. Is it perhaps that Wagner's music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear precisely the reverse—that it was too easy,—that people mightnot understand it with sufficient difficulty?—As a matter of fact, his whole life long, he did nothing but repeat one proposition: that his music did not mean music alone! But something more! Something immeasurably more!…“Not music alone”—nomusician would speak in this way. I repeat, Wagner could not create things as a whole; he had no choice, he was obliged to create things in bits, with“motives,”attitudes, formulæ, duplications, and hundreds of repetitions, he remained a rhetorician in music,—and that is why he was at bottomforcedto press“this means”into the foreground.“Music can never be anything else than a means”: this was his theory, but above all it was the onlypracticethat lay open to him. No musician however thinks in this way.—Wagner was in need of literature, in order to persuade the whole world to take his music seriously, profoundly,“because itmeantan infinity of things”, all his life he was the commentator of the“Idea.”—What does Elsa stand for? But without a doubt, Elsa is“the unconscious[pg 031]mind of the people”(—“when I realised this, I naturally became a thorough revolutionist”—).

Do not let us forget that, when Hegel and Schelling were misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is—“the idea,”—that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,—rigorously, but also unjustly, for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more“honest”than his more famous contemporaries. But let us leave morality out of the question, Hegel is amatter of taste.… And not only of German but of European taste!… A taste which Wagner understood!—which he felt equal to! which he has immortalised!—All he did was to apply it to music—he invented a style for himself, which might mean an“infinity of things,”—he wasHegel'sheir.… Music as“Idea.”—

And how well Wagner was understood!—The same kind of man who used to gush over Hegel, now gushes over Wagner, in his school they evenwriteHegelian.11But he who understood Wagner best, was the German youthlet. The two words“infinity”and“meaning”were sufficient for this: at their sound the youthlet immediately began to feel exceptionally happy. Wagner didnotconquer these boys with music, but with the“idea”:—it is[pg 032]the enigmatical vagueness of his art, its game of hide-and-seek amid a hundred symbols, its polychromy in ideals, which leads and lures the lads. It is Wagner's genius for forming clouds, his sweeps and swoops through the air, his ubiquity and nullibiety—precisely the same qualities with which Hegel led and lured in his time!—Moreover in the presence of Wagner's multifariousness, plenitude and arbitrariness, they seem to themselves justified—“saved”. Tremulously they listen while thegreat symbolsin his art seem to make themselves heard from out the misty distance, with a gentle roll of thunder, and they are not at all displeased if at times it gets a little grey, gruesome and cold. Are they not one and all, like Wagner himself, onquite intimate termswith bad weather, with German weather! Wotan is their God, but Wotan is the God of bad weather.… They are right, how could these German youths—in their present condition,—miss what we others, wehalcyonians, miss in Wagner?i.e.:la gaya scienza; light feet, wit, fire, grave, grand logic, stellar dancing, wanton intellectuality, the vibrating light of the South, the calm sea—perfection.…

11.—I have mentioned the sphere to which Wagner belongs—certainly not to the history of music. What, however, does he mean historically?—The rise of the actor in music: a momentous event which not only leads me to think but also to fear.In a word:“Wagner and Liszt.”Never yet[pg 033]have the“uprightness”and“genuineness”of musicians been put to such a dangerous test. It is glaringly obvious: great success, mob success is no longer the achievement of the genuine,—in order to get it a man must be an actor!—Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner—they both prove one and the same thing: that in declining civilisations, wherever the mob is allowed to decide, genuineness becomes superfluous, prejudicial, unfavourable. The actor, alone, can still kindlegreatenthusiasm.—And thus it is hisgolden agewhich is now dawning,—his and that of all those who are in any way related to him. With drums and fifes, Wagner marches at the head of all artists in declamation, in display and virtuosity. He began by convincing the conductors of orchestras, the scene-shifters and stage-singers, not to forget the orchestra:—he“delivered”them from monotony.… The movement that Wagner created has spread even to the land of knowledge: whole sciences pertaining to music are rising slowly, out of centuries of scholasticism. As an example of what I mean, let me point more particularly toRiemann'sservices to rhythmics; he was the first who called attention to the leading idea in punctuation—even for music (unfortunately he did so with a bad word; he called it“phrasing”).—All these people, and I say it with gratitude, are the best, the most respectable among Wagner's admirers—they have a perfect right to honour Wagner. The same instinct unites them with one another; in him they recognise their highest type, and since he has inflamed them with his own ardour they feel[pg 034]themselves transformed into power, even into great power. In this quarter, if anywhere, Wagner's influence has really beenbeneficent. Never before has there been so much thinking, willing, and industry in this sphere. Wagner endowed all these artists with a new conscience: what they now exact andobtainfrom themselves, they had never exacted before Wagner's time—before then they had been too modest. Another spirit prevails on the stage since Wagner rules there the most difficult things are expected, blame is severe, praise very scarce,—the good and the excellent have become the rule. Taste is no longer necessary, nor even is a good voice. Wagner is sung only with ruined voices: this has a more“dramatic”effect. Even talent is out of the question. Expressiveness at all costs, which is what the Wagnerian ideal—the ideal of decadence—demands, is hardly compatible with talent. All that is required for this is virtue—that is to say, training, automatism,“self-denial”. Neither taste, voices, nor gifts, Wagner's stage requires but one thing:Germans!… The definition of a German: an obedient man with long legs.… There is a deep significance in the fact that the rise of Wagner should have coincided with the rise of the“Empire”: both phenomena are a proof of one and the same thing—obedience and long legs.—Never have people been more obedient, never have they been so well ordered about. The conductors of Wagnerian orchestras, more particularly, are worthy of an age, which posterity will one day call, with timid awe, theclassical age of war.[pg 035]Wagner understood how to command; in this respect, too, he was a great teacher. He commanded as a man who had exercised an inexorable will over himself—as one who had practised lifelong discipline: Wagner was, perhaps, the greatest example of self-violence in the whole of the history of art (—even Alfieri, who in other respects is his next-of-kin, is outdone by him. The note of a Torinese).

—I have mentioned the sphere to which Wagner belongs—certainly not to the history of music. What, however, does he mean historically?—The rise of the actor in music: a momentous event which not only leads me to think but also to fear.

In a word:“Wagner and Liszt.”Never yet[pg 033]have the“uprightness”and“genuineness”of musicians been put to such a dangerous test. It is glaringly obvious: great success, mob success is no longer the achievement of the genuine,—in order to get it a man must be an actor!—Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner—they both prove one and the same thing: that in declining civilisations, wherever the mob is allowed to decide, genuineness becomes superfluous, prejudicial, unfavourable. The actor, alone, can still kindlegreatenthusiasm.—And thus it is hisgolden agewhich is now dawning,—his and that of all those who are in any way related to him. With drums and fifes, Wagner marches at the head of all artists in declamation, in display and virtuosity. He began by convincing the conductors of orchestras, the scene-shifters and stage-singers, not to forget the orchestra:—he“delivered”them from monotony.… The movement that Wagner created has spread even to the land of knowledge: whole sciences pertaining to music are rising slowly, out of centuries of scholasticism. As an example of what I mean, let me point more particularly toRiemann'sservices to rhythmics; he was the first who called attention to the leading idea in punctuation—even for music (unfortunately he did so with a bad word; he called it“phrasing”).—All these people, and I say it with gratitude, are the best, the most respectable among Wagner's admirers—they have a perfect right to honour Wagner. The same instinct unites them with one another; in him they recognise their highest type, and since he has inflamed them with his own ardour they feel[pg 034]themselves transformed into power, even into great power. In this quarter, if anywhere, Wagner's influence has really beenbeneficent. Never before has there been so much thinking, willing, and industry in this sphere. Wagner endowed all these artists with a new conscience: what they now exact andobtainfrom themselves, they had never exacted before Wagner's time—before then they had been too modest. Another spirit prevails on the stage since Wagner rules there the most difficult things are expected, blame is severe, praise very scarce,—the good and the excellent have become the rule. Taste is no longer necessary, nor even is a good voice. Wagner is sung only with ruined voices: this has a more“dramatic”effect. Even talent is out of the question. Expressiveness at all costs, which is what the Wagnerian ideal—the ideal of decadence—demands, is hardly compatible with talent. All that is required for this is virtue—that is to say, training, automatism,“self-denial”. Neither taste, voices, nor gifts, Wagner's stage requires but one thing:Germans!… The definition of a German: an obedient man with long legs.… There is a deep significance in the fact that the rise of Wagner should have coincided with the rise of the“Empire”: both phenomena are a proof of one and the same thing—obedience and long legs.—Never have people been more obedient, never have they been so well ordered about. The conductors of Wagnerian orchestras, more particularly, are worthy of an age, which posterity will one day call, with timid awe, theclassical age of war.

Wagner understood how to command; in this respect, too, he was a great teacher. He commanded as a man who had exercised an inexorable will over himself—as one who had practised lifelong discipline: Wagner was, perhaps, the greatest example of self-violence in the whole of the history of art (—even Alfieri, who in other respects is his next-of-kin, is outdone by him. The note of a Torinese).

12.This view, that our actors have become more worthy of respect than heretofore, does not imply that I believe them to have become less dangerous.… But who is in any doubt as to what I want,—as to what thethree requisitionsare concerning which my wrath and my care and love of art, have made me open my mouth on this occasion?That the stage should not become master of the arts.That the actor should not become the corrupter of the genuine.That music should not become an art of lying.Friedrich Nietzsche.

This view, that our actors have become more worthy of respect than heretofore, does not imply that I believe them to have become less dangerous.… But who is in any doubt as to what I want,—as to what thethree requisitionsare concerning which my wrath and my care and love of art, have made me open my mouth on this occasion?

That the stage should not become master of the arts.

That the actor should not become the corrupter of the genuine.

That music should not become an art of lying.

PostscriptThe gravity of these last words allows me at this point to introduce a few sentences out of an unprinted essay which will at least leave no doubt as to my earnestness in regard to this question. The title of this essay is:“What Wagner has cost us.”One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Even to-day a vague feeling that this is so, still prevails. Even Wagner's success, his triumph, did not uproot this feeling thoroughly. But formerly it was strong, it was terrible, it was a gloomy hate throughout almost three-quarters of Wagner's life. The resistance which he met with among us Germans cannot be too highly valued or too highly honoured. People guarded themselves against him as against an illness,—not with arguments—it is impossible to refute an illness,—but with obstruction, with mistrust, with repugnance, with loathing, with sombre earnestness, as though he were a great rampant danger. The æsthetes gave themselves away when out of three schools of German philosophy they waged an absurd war against Wagner's principles with“ifs”and“fors”—what did he care about principles, even his own!—The Germans themselves had enough instinctive good sense to dispense with every“if”and“for”in this matter. An instinct is weakened when it becomes conscious: for by[pg 037]becoming conscious it makes itself feeble. If there were any signs that in spite of the universal character of European decadence there was still a modicum of health, still an instinctive premonition of what is harmful and dangerous, residing in the German soul, then it would be precisely this blunt resistance to Wagner which I should least like to see underrated. It does us honour, it gives us some reason to hope: France no longer has such an amount of health at her disposal. The Germans, theseloiterers par excellence, as history shows, are to-day the most backward among the civilised nations of Europe; this has its advantages,—for they are thus relatively the youngest.One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. It is only quite recently that the Germans have overcome a sort of dread of him,—the desire to be rid of him occurred to them again and again.12Does anybody remember a very curious occurrence in which, quite unexpectedly towards the end, this[pg 038]old feeling once more manifested itself? It happened at Wagner's funeral. The first Wagner Society, the one in Munich, laid a wreath on his grave with this inscription, which immediately became famous:“Salvation to the Saviour!”Everybody admired the lofty inspiration which had dictated this inscription, as also the taste which seemed to be the privilege of the followers of Wagner. Many also, however (it was singular enough), made this slight alteration in it:“Salvationfromthe Saviour”—People began to breathe again—One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Let us try to estimate the influence of this worship upon culture. Whom did this movement press to the front? What did it make ever more and more pre-eminent?—In the first place the layman's arrogance, the arrogance of the art-maniac. Now these people are organising societies, they wish to make their taste prevail, they even wish to pose as judgesin rebus musicis et musicantibus. Secondly: an ever increasing indifference towards severe, noble and conscientious schooling in the service of art, and in its place the belief in genius, or in plain English, cheeky dilettantism (—the formula for this is to be found in theMastersingers). Thirdly, and this is the worst of all:Theatrocracy—, the craziness of a belief in the pre-eminence of the theatre, in the right of the theatre to rule supreme over the arts, over Art in general.… But this should be shouted into the face of Wagnerites a hundred times over: that the theatre is something lower than art, something secondary, something coarsened,[pg 039]above all something suitably distorted and falsified for the mob. In this respect Wagner altered nothing: Bayreuth is grand Opera—and not even good opera.… The stage is a form of Demolatry in the realm of taste, the stage is an insurrection of the mob, aplébisciteagainst good taste.… The case of Wagner proves this fact: he captivated the masses—he depraved taste, he even perverted our taste for opera!—One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. What has Wagner-worship made out of spirit? Does Wagner liberate the spirit? To him belong that ambiguity and equivocation and all other qualities which can convince the uncertain without making them conscious of why they have been convinced. In this sense Wagner is a seducer on a grand scale. There is nothing exhausted, nothing effete, nothing dangerous to life, nothing that slanders the world in the realm of spirit, which has not secretly found shelter in his art, he conceals the blackest obscurantism in the luminous orbs of the ideal. He flatters every nihilistic (Buddhistic) instinct and togs it out in music; he flatters every form of Christianity, every religious expression of decadence. He that hath ears to hear let him hear: everything that has ever grown out of the soil of impoverished life, the whole counterfeit coinage of the transcendental and of a Beyond found its most sublime advocate in Wagner's art, not in formulæ (Wagner is too clever to use formulæ), but in the persuasion of the senses which in their turn makes the spirit weary and morbid. Music in the form of Circe … in[pg 040]this respect his last work is his greatest masterpiece. In the art of seduction“Parsifal”will for ever maintain its rank as a stroke of genius.… I admire this work. I would fain have composed it myself. Wagner was never better inspired than towards the end. The subtlety with which beauty and disease are united here, reaches such a height, that it casts so to speak a shadow upon all Wagner's earlier achievements: it seems too bright, too healthy. Do ye understand this? Health and brightness acting like a shadow? Almost like an objection?… To this extent are we already pure fools.… Never was there a greater Master in heavy hieratic perfumes—Never on earth has there been such a connoisseur of paltry infinities, of all that thrills, of extravagant excesses, of all the feminism from out the vocabulary of happiness! My friends, do but drink the philtres of this art! Nowhere will ye find a more pleasant method of enervating your spirit, of forgetting your manliness in the shade of a rosebush.… Ah, this old magician, mightiest of Klingsors; how he wages war against us with his art, against us free spirits! How he appeals to every form of cowardice of the modern soul with his charming girlish notes! There never was such amortal hatredof knowledge! One must be a very cynic in order to resist seduction here. One must be able to bite in order to resist worshipping at this shrine. Very well, old seducer! The cynic cautions you—cave canem.…One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. I contemplate the youthlets who have long been exposed to his infection. The first[pg 041]relatively innocuous effect of it is the corruption of their taste. Wagner acts like chronic recourse to the bottle. He stultifies, he befouls the stomach. His specific effect: degeneration of the feeling for rhythm. What the Wagnerite calls rhythmical is what I call, to use a Greek metaphor,“stirring a swamp.”Much more dangerous than all this, however, is the corruption of ideas. The youthlet becomes a moon-calf, an“idealist”. He stands above science, and in this respect he has reached the master's heights. On the other hand, he assumes the airs of a philosopher, he writes for theBayreuth Journal; he solves all problems in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Master. But the most ghastly thing of all is the deterioration of the nerves. Let any one wander through a large city at night, in all directions he will hear people doing violence to instruments with solemn rage and fury, a wild uproar breaks out at intervals. What is happening? It is the disciples of Wagner in the act of worshipping him.… Bayreuth is another word for a Hydro. A typical telegram from Bayreuth would readbereits bereut(I already repent). Wagner is bad for young men; he is fatal for women. What medically speaking is a female Wagnerite? It seems to me that a doctor could not be too serious in putting this alternative of conscience to young women; either one thing or the other. But they have already made their choice. You cannot serve two Masters when one of these is Wagner. Wagner redeemed woman; and in return woman built Bayreuth for him. Every sacrifice, every[pg 042]surrender: there was nothing that they were not prepared to give him. Woman impoverishes herself in favour of the Master, she becomes quite touching, she stands naked before him. The female Wagnerite, the most attractive equivocality that exists to-day: she is the incarnation of Wagner's cause: his cause triumphs with her as its symbol.… Ah, this old robber! He robs our young men: he even robs our women as well, and drags them to his cell.… Ah, this old Minotaur! What has he not already cost us? Every year processions of the finest young men and maidens are led into his labyrinth that he may swallow them up, every year the whole of Europe cries out“Away to Crete! Away to Crete!”.…

The gravity of these last words allows me at this point to introduce a few sentences out of an unprinted essay which will at least leave no doubt as to my earnestness in regard to this question. The title of this essay is:“What Wagner has cost us.”

One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Even to-day a vague feeling that this is so, still prevails. Even Wagner's success, his triumph, did not uproot this feeling thoroughly. But formerly it was strong, it was terrible, it was a gloomy hate throughout almost three-quarters of Wagner's life. The resistance which he met with among us Germans cannot be too highly valued or too highly honoured. People guarded themselves against him as against an illness,—not with arguments—it is impossible to refute an illness,—but with obstruction, with mistrust, with repugnance, with loathing, with sombre earnestness, as though he were a great rampant danger. The æsthetes gave themselves away when out of three schools of German philosophy they waged an absurd war against Wagner's principles with“ifs”and“fors”—what did he care about principles, even his own!—The Germans themselves had enough instinctive good sense to dispense with every“if”and“for”in this matter. An instinct is weakened when it becomes conscious: for by[pg 037]becoming conscious it makes itself feeble. If there were any signs that in spite of the universal character of European decadence there was still a modicum of health, still an instinctive premonition of what is harmful and dangerous, residing in the German soul, then it would be precisely this blunt resistance to Wagner which I should least like to see underrated. It does us honour, it gives us some reason to hope: France no longer has such an amount of health at her disposal. The Germans, theseloiterers par excellence, as history shows, are to-day the most backward among the civilised nations of Europe; this has its advantages,—for they are thus relatively the youngest.

One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. It is only quite recently that the Germans have overcome a sort of dread of him,—the desire to be rid of him occurred to them again and again.12Does anybody remember a very curious occurrence in which, quite unexpectedly towards the end, this[pg 038]old feeling once more manifested itself? It happened at Wagner's funeral. The first Wagner Society, the one in Munich, laid a wreath on his grave with this inscription, which immediately became famous:“Salvation to the Saviour!”Everybody admired the lofty inspiration which had dictated this inscription, as also the taste which seemed to be the privilege of the followers of Wagner. Many also, however (it was singular enough), made this slight alteration in it:“Salvationfromthe Saviour”—People began to breathe again—

One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Let us try to estimate the influence of this worship upon culture. Whom did this movement press to the front? What did it make ever more and more pre-eminent?—In the first place the layman's arrogance, the arrogance of the art-maniac. Now these people are organising societies, they wish to make their taste prevail, they even wish to pose as judgesin rebus musicis et musicantibus. Secondly: an ever increasing indifference towards severe, noble and conscientious schooling in the service of art, and in its place the belief in genius, or in plain English, cheeky dilettantism (—the formula for this is to be found in theMastersingers). Thirdly, and this is the worst of all:Theatrocracy—, the craziness of a belief in the pre-eminence of the theatre, in the right of the theatre to rule supreme over the arts, over Art in general.… But this should be shouted into the face of Wagnerites a hundred times over: that the theatre is something lower than art, something secondary, something coarsened,[pg 039]above all something suitably distorted and falsified for the mob. In this respect Wagner altered nothing: Bayreuth is grand Opera—and not even good opera.… The stage is a form of Demolatry in the realm of taste, the stage is an insurrection of the mob, aplébisciteagainst good taste.… The case of Wagner proves this fact: he captivated the masses—he depraved taste, he even perverted our taste for opera!—

One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. What has Wagner-worship made out of spirit? Does Wagner liberate the spirit? To him belong that ambiguity and equivocation and all other qualities which can convince the uncertain without making them conscious of why they have been convinced. In this sense Wagner is a seducer on a grand scale. There is nothing exhausted, nothing effete, nothing dangerous to life, nothing that slanders the world in the realm of spirit, which has not secretly found shelter in his art, he conceals the blackest obscurantism in the luminous orbs of the ideal. He flatters every nihilistic (Buddhistic) instinct and togs it out in music; he flatters every form of Christianity, every religious expression of decadence. He that hath ears to hear let him hear: everything that has ever grown out of the soil of impoverished life, the whole counterfeit coinage of the transcendental and of a Beyond found its most sublime advocate in Wagner's art, not in formulæ (Wagner is too clever to use formulæ), but in the persuasion of the senses which in their turn makes the spirit weary and morbid. Music in the form of Circe … in[pg 040]this respect his last work is his greatest masterpiece. In the art of seduction“Parsifal”will for ever maintain its rank as a stroke of genius.… I admire this work. I would fain have composed it myself. Wagner was never better inspired than towards the end. The subtlety with which beauty and disease are united here, reaches such a height, that it casts so to speak a shadow upon all Wagner's earlier achievements: it seems too bright, too healthy. Do ye understand this? Health and brightness acting like a shadow? Almost like an objection?… To this extent are we already pure fools.… Never was there a greater Master in heavy hieratic perfumes—Never on earth has there been such a connoisseur of paltry infinities, of all that thrills, of extravagant excesses, of all the feminism from out the vocabulary of happiness! My friends, do but drink the philtres of this art! Nowhere will ye find a more pleasant method of enervating your spirit, of forgetting your manliness in the shade of a rosebush.… Ah, this old magician, mightiest of Klingsors; how he wages war against us with his art, against us free spirits! How he appeals to every form of cowardice of the modern soul with his charming girlish notes! There never was such amortal hatredof knowledge! One must be a very cynic in order to resist seduction here. One must be able to bite in order to resist worshipping at this shrine. Very well, old seducer! The cynic cautions you—cave canem.…

One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. I contemplate the youthlets who have long been exposed to his infection. The first[pg 041]relatively innocuous effect of it is the corruption of their taste. Wagner acts like chronic recourse to the bottle. He stultifies, he befouls the stomach. His specific effect: degeneration of the feeling for rhythm. What the Wagnerite calls rhythmical is what I call, to use a Greek metaphor,“stirring a swamp.”Much more dangerous than all this, however, is the corruption of ideas. The youthlet becomes a moon-calf, an“idealist”. He stands above science, and in this respect he has reached the master's heights. On the other hand, he assumes the airs of a philosopher, he writes for theBayreuth Journal; he solves all problems in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Master. But the most ghastly thing of all is the deterioration of the nerves. Let any one wander through a large city at night, in all directions he will hear people doing violence to instruments with solemn rage and fury, a wild uproar breaks out at intervals. What is happening? It is the disciples of Wagner in the act of worshipping him.… Bayreuth is another word for a Hydro. A typical telegram from Bayreuth would readbereits bereut(I already repent). Wagner is bad for young men; he is fatal for women. What medically speaking is a female Wagnerite? It seems to me that a doctor could not be too serious in putting this alternative of conscience to young women; either one thing or the other. But they have already made their choice. You cannot serve two Masters when one of these is Wagner. Wagner redeemed woman; and in return woman built Bayreuth for him. Every sacrifice, every[pg 042]surrender: there was nothing that they were not prepared to give him. Woman impoverishes herself in favour of the Master, she becomes quite touching, she stands naked before him. The female Wagnerite, the most attractive equivocality that exists to-day: she is the incarnation of Wagner's cause: his cause triumphs with her as its symbol.… Ah, this old robber! He robs our young men: he even robs our women as well, and drags them to his cell.… Ah, this old Minotaur! What has he not already cost us? Every year processions of the finest young men and maidens are led into his labyrinth that he may swallow them up, every year the whole of Europe cries out“Away to Crete! Away to Crete!”.…

Second PostscriptIt seems to me that my letter is open to some misunderstanding. On certain faces I see the expression of gratitude; I even hear modest but merry laughter. I prefer to be understood here as in other things. But since a certain animal,the wormof Empire, the famousRhinoxera, has become lodged in the vineyards of the German spirit, nobody any longer understands a word I say. TheKreus-Zeitunghas brought this home to me, not to speak of theLitterarisches Centralblatt. I have given the Germans the deepest books that they have ever possessed—a sufficient reason for their not having understood a word of them.… If in this essay I declare war against Wagner—and incidentally against a certain form of German taste, if I seem to use strong language about the cretinism of Bayreuth, it must not be supposed that I am in the least anxious to glorify any other musician. Other musicians are not to be considered by the side of Wagner. Things are generally bad. Decay is universal. Disease lies at the very root of things. If Wagner's name represents the ruin of music, just as Bernini's stands for the ruin of sculpture, he is not on that account its cause. All he did was to accelerate the fall,—though we are quite prepared to admit that he did it in a way which makes one recoil with horror from this almost instantaneous decline[pg 044]and fall to the depths. He possessed the ingenuousness of decadence: this constituted his superiority. He believed in it. He did not halt before any of its logical consequences. The others hesitated—that is their distinction. They have no other. What is common to both Wagner and“the others”consists in this: the decline of all organising power, the abuse of traditional means, without the capacity or the aim that would justify this. The counterfeit imitation of grand forms, for which nobody nowadays is strong, proud, self-reliant and healthy enough, excessive vitality in small details; passion at all costs; refinement as an expression of impoverished life, ever more nerves in the place of muscle. I know only one musician who to-day would be able to compose an overture as an organic whole: and nobody else knows him.13He who is famous now, does not write better music than Wagner, but only less characteristic, less definite music:—less definite, because half measures, even in decadence, cannot stand by the side of completeness. But Wagner was complete, Wagner represented thorough corruption, Wagner has had the courage, the will, and the conviction for corruption. What does Johannes Brahms matter?… It was his good fortune to be misunderstood by Germany; he was taken to be an antagonist of Wagner—people required an antagonist!—But he did not write necessary music, above all he wrote too much music!—When one is not rich one should[pg 045]at least have enough pride to be poor!… The sympathy which here and there was meted out to Brahms, apart from party interests and party misunderstandings, was for a long time a riddle to me, until one day through an accident, almost, I discovered that he affected a particular type of man. He has the melancholy of impotence. His creations are not the result of plenitude, he thirsts after abundance. Apart from what he plagiarises, from what he borrows from ancient or exotically modern styles—he is a master in the art of copying,—there remains as his most individual quality alonging.… And this is what the dissatisfied of all kinds, and all those who yearn, divine in him. He is much too little of a personality, too little of a central figure.… The“impersonal,”those who are not self-centred, love him for this. He is especially the musician of a species of dissatisfied women. Fifty steps further on, and we find the female Wagnerite—just as we find Wagner himself fifty paces ahead of Brahms.—The female Wagnerite is a more definite, a more interesting, and above all, a more attractive type. Brahms is touching so long as he dreams or mourns over himself in private—in this respect he is modern;—he becomes cold, we no longer feel at one with him when he poses as the child of the classics.… People like to call Brahms Beethoven's heir: I know of no more cautious euphemism—All that which to-day makes a claim to being the grand style in music is on precisely that account either false to us or false to itself. This alternative is suspicious enough: in itself it contains a[pg 046]casuistic question concerning the value of the two cases. The instinct of the majority protests against the alternative;“false to us”—they do not wish to be cheated;—and I myself would certainly always prefer this type to the other (“False to itself”). This ismytaste.—Expressed more clearly for the sake of the“poor in spirit”it amounts to this: BrahmsorWagner.… Brahms isnotan actor.—A very great part of other musicians may be summed up in the concept Brahms—I do not wish to say anything about the clever apes of Wagner, as for instance Goldmark: when one has“The Queen of Sheba”to one's name, one belongs to a menagerie,—one ought to put oneself on show.—Nowadays all things that can be done well and even with a master hand are small. In this department alone is honesty still possible. Nothing, however, can cure music as a whole of its chief fault, of its fate, which is to be the expression of general physiological contradiction,—which is, in fact, to be modern.The best instruction, the most conscientious schooling, the most thorough familiarity, yea, and even isolation, with the Old Masters,—all this only acts as a palliative, or, more strictly speaking, has but an illusory effect, because the first condition of the right thing is no longer in our bodies; whether this first condition be the strong race of a Handel or the overflowing animal spirits of a Rossini. Not everyone has the right to every teacher: and this holds good of whole epochs.—In itself it is not impossible that there are still remains of stronger natures, typical unadapted men, somewhere[pg 047]in Europe: from this quarter the advent of a somewhat belated form of beauty and perfection, even in music, might still be hoped for. But the most that we can expect to see are exceptional cases. From the rule, that corruption is paramount, that corruption is a fatality,—not even a God can save music.

It seems to me that my letter is open to some misunderstanding. On certain faces I see the expression of gratitude; I even hear modest but merry laughter. I prefer to be understood here as in other things. But since a certain animal,the wormof Empire, the famousRhinoxera, has become lodged in the vineyards of the German spirit, nobody any longer understands a word I say. TheKreus-Zeitunghas brought this home to me, not to speak of theLitterarisches Centralblatt. I have given the Germans the deepest books that they have ever possessed—a sufficient reason for their not having understood a word of them.… If in this essay I declare war against Wagner—and incidentally against a certain form of German taste, if I seem to use strong language about the cretinism of Bayreuth, it must not be supposed that I am in the least anxious to glorify any other musician. Other musicians are not to be considered by the side of Wagner. Things are generally bad. Decay is universal. Disease lies at the very root of things. If Wagner's name represents the ruin of music, just as Bernini's stands for the ruin of sculpture, he is not on that account its cause. All he did was to accelerate the fall,—though we are quite prepared to admit that he did it in a way which makes one recoil with horror from this almost instantaneous decline[pg 044]and fall to the depths. He possessed the ingenuousness of decadence: this constituted his superiority. He believed in it. He did not halt before any of its logical consequences. The others hesitated—that is their distinction. They have no other. What is common to both Wagner and“the others”consists in this: the decline of all organising power, the abuse of traditional means, without the capacity or the aim that would justify this. The counterfeit imitation of grand forms, for which nobody nowadays is strong, proud, self-reliant and healthy enough, excessive vitality in small details; passion at all costs; refinement as an expression of impoverished life, ever more nerves in the place of muscle. I know only one musician who to-day would be able to compose an overture as an organic whole: and nobody else knows him.13He who is famous now, does not write better music than Wagner, but only less characteristic, less definite music:—less definite, because half measures, even in decadence, cannot stand by the side of completeness. But Wagner was complete, Wagner represented thorough corruption, Wagner has had the courage, the will, and the conviction for corruption. What does Johannes Brahms matter?… It was his good fortune to be misunderstood by Germany; he was taken to be an antagonist of Wagner—people required an antagonist!—But he did not write necessary music, above all he wrote too much music!—When one is not rich one should[pg 045]at least have enough pride to be poor!… The sympathy which here and there was meted out to Brahms, apart from party interests and party misunderstandings, was for a long time a riddle to me, until one day through an accident, almost, I discovered that he affected a particular type of man. He has the melancholy of impotence. His creations are not the result of plenitude, he thirsts after abundance. Apart from what he plagiarises, from what he borrows from ancient or exotically modern styles—he is a master in the art of copying,—there remains as his most individual quality alonging.… And this is what the dissatisfied of all kinds, and all those who yearn, divine in him. He is much too little of a personality, too little of a central figure.… The“impersonal,”those who are not self-centred, love him for this. He is especially the musician of a species of dissatisfied women. Fifty steps further on, and we find the female Wagnerite—just as we find Wagner himself fifty paces ahead of Brahms.—The female Wagnerite is a more definite, a more interesting, and above all, a more attractive type. Brahms is touching so long as he dreams or mourns over himself in private—in this respect he is modern;—he becomes cold, we no longer feel at one with him when he poses as the child of the classics.… People like to call Brahms Beethoven's heir: I know of no more cautious euphemism—All that which to-day makes a claim to being the grand style in music is on precisely that account either false to us or false to itself. This alternative is suspicious enough: in itself it contains a[pg 046]casuistic question concerning the value of the two cases. The instinct of the majority protests against the alternative;“false to us”—they do not wish to be cheated;—and I myself would certainly always prefer this type to the other (“False to itself”). This ismytaste.—Expressed more clearly for the sake of the“poor in spirit”it amounts to this: BrahmsorWagner.… Brahms isnotan actor.—A very great part of other musicians may be summed up in the concept Brahms—I do not wish to say anything about the clever apes of Wagner, as for instance Goldmark: when one has“The Queen of Sheba”to one's name, one belongs to a menagerie,—one ought to put oneself on show.—Nowadays all things that can be done well and even with a master hand are small. In this department alone is honesty still possible. Nothing, however, can cure music as a whole of its chief fault, of its fate, which is to be the expression of general physiological contradiction,—which is, in fact, to be modern.

The best instruction, the most conscientious schooling, the most thorough familiarity, yea, and even isolation, with the Old Masters,—all this only acts as a palliative, or, more strictly speaking, has but an illusory effect, because the first condition of the right thing is no longer in our bodies; whether this first condition be the strong race of a Handel or the overflowing animal spirits of a Rossini. Not everyone has the right to every teacher: and this holds good of whole epochs.—In itself it is not impossible that there are still remains of stronger natures, typical unadapted men, somewhere[pg 047]in Europe: from this quarter the advent of a somewhat belated form of beauty and perfection, even in music, might still be hoped for. But the most that we can expect to see are exceptional cases. From the rule, that corruption is paramount, that corruption is a fatality,—not even a God can save music.

EpilogueAnd now let us take breath and withdraw a moment from this narrow world which necessarily must be narrow, because we have to make enquiries relative to the value ofpersons. A philosopher feels that he wants to wash his hands after he has concerned himself so long with the“Case of Wagner”. I shall now give my notion of what ismodern. According to the measure of energy of every age, there is also a standard that determines which virtues shall be allowed and which forbidden. The age either has the virtues ofascendinglife, in which case it resists the virtues of degeneration with all its deepest instincts. Or it is in itself an age of degeneration, in which case it requires the virtues of declining life,—in which case it hates everything that justifies itself, solely as being the outcome of a plenitude, or a superabundance of strength. Æsthetic is inextricably bound up with these biological principles: there is decadent æsthetic, andclassicalæsthetic,—“beauty in itself”is just as much a chimera as any other kind of idealism.—Within the narrow sphere of the so-called moral values, no greater antithesis could be found than that ofmaster-moralityand the morality ofChristianvaluations: the latter having grown out of a thoroughly morbid soil. (—The gospels present us with the same physiological types, as do the novels of Dostoiewsky),[pg 049]the master-morality (“Roman,”“pagan,”“classical,”“Renaissance”), on the other hand, being the symbolic speech of well-constitutedness, ofascendinglife, and of the Will to Power as a vital principle. Master-moralityaffirmsjust as instinctively as Christian moralitydenies(“God,”“Beyond,”“self-denial,”—all of them negations). The first reflects its plenitude upon things,—it transfigures, it embellishes, itrationalisesthe world,—the latter impoverishes, bleaches, mars the value of things; itsuppressesthe world.“World”is a Christian term of abuse. These antithetical forms in the optics of values, arebothnecessary: they are different points of view which cannot be circumvented either with arguments or counter-arguments. One cannot refute Christianity: it is impossible to refute a diseased eyesight. That people should have combated pessimism as if it had been a philosophy, was the very acme of learned stupidity. The concepts“true”and“untrue”do not seem to me to have any sense in optics.—That, alone, which has to be guarded against is the falsity, the instinctive duplicity whichwould fainregard this antithesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,—and his mastery in this kind of falseness was of no mean order. To cast side-long glances at master-morality, atnoblemorality (—Icelandic saga is perhaps the greatest documentary evidence of these values), and at the same time to have the opposite teaching, the“gospel of the lowly,”the doctrine of theneedof salvation, on one's lips!… Incidentally, I admire the modesty of Christians who go to Bayreuth. As for myself, I couldnot[pg 050]endure to hear the sound of certain words on Wagner's lips. There are some concepts which are too good for Bayreuth … What? Christianity adjusted for female Wagnerites, perhapsbyfemale Wagnerites—for, in his latter days Wagner was thoroughlyfeminini generis—? Again I say, the Christians of to-day are too modest for me.… If Wagner were a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a Father of the Church!—The need ofsalvation, the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing in common with such clowns; it is the most straightforward expression of decadence, it is the most convincing and most painful affirmation of decadence, in sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wishesto be ridof himself.Le moi est toujours haissable.Noble morality, master-morality, on the other hand, is rooted in a triumphant saying of yea toone's self,—it is the self-affirmation and self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime symbols and practices; but only“because its heart is too full.”The whole of beautiful art and of great art belongs here; their common essence is gratitude. But we must allow it a certain instinctive repugnanceto décadents, and a scorn and horror of the latter's symbolism: such things almost prove it. The noble Romans considered Christianity as afœda superstitio: let me call to your minds the feelings which the last German of noble taste—Goethe—had in regard to the cross. It is idle to look for more valuable, morenecessarycontrasts.14[pg 051]But the kind of falsity which is characteristic of the Bayreuthians is not exceptional to-day. We all know the hybrid concept of the Christian gentleman. Thisinnocencein contradiction, this“clean conscience”in falsehood, is rather modernpar excellence, with it modernity is almost defined. Biologically, modern man represents acontradiction of values, he sits between two stools, he says yea and nay in one breath. No wonder that it is precisely in our age that falseness itself became flesh and blood, and even genius! No wonderWagnerdwelt amongst us! It was not without reason that I called Wagner the Cagliostro of modernity.… But all of us, though we do not know it, involuntarily have values, words, formulæ, and morals in our bodies, which are quiteantagonisticin their origin—regarded from a physiological standpoint, we arefalse.… How would adiagnosis of the modern soulbegin? With a determined incision into this agglomeration of contradictory instincts, with the total suppression of its antagonistic values, with vivisection applied to its mostinstructivecase. To philosophers the“Case of Wagner”is awindfall—this essay, as you observe, was inspired by gratitude.

And now let us take breath and withdraw a moment from this narrow world which necessarily must be narrow, because we have to make enquiries relative to the value ofpersons. A philosopher feels that he wants to wash his hands after he has concerned himself so long with the“Case of Wagner”. I shall now give my notion of what ismodern. According to the measure of energy of every age, there is also a standard that determines which virtues shall be allowed and which forbidden. The age either has the virtues ofascendinglife, in which case it resists the virtues of degeneration with all its deepest instincts. Or it is in itself an age of degeneration, in which case it requires the virtues of declining life,—in which case it hates everything that justifies itself, solely as being the outcome of a plenitude, or a superabundance of strength. Æsthetic is inextricably bound up with these biological principles: there is decadent æsthetic, andclassicalæsthetic,—“beauty in itself”is just as much a chimera as any other kind of idealism.—Within the narrow sphere of the so-called moral values, no greater antithesis could be found than that ofmaster-moralityand the morality ofChristianvaluations: the latter having grown out of a thoroughly morbid soil. (—The gospels present us with the same physiological types, as do the novels of Dostoiewsky),[pg 049]the master-morality (“Roman,”“pagan,”“classical,”“Renaissance”), on the other hand, being the symbolic speech of well-constitutedness, ofascendinglife, and of the Will to Power as a vital principle. Master-moralityaffirmsjust as instinctively as Christian moralitydenies(“God,”“Beyond,”“self-denial,”—all of them negations). The first reflects its plenitude upon things,—it transfigures, it embellishes, itrationalisesthe world,—the latter impoverishes, bleaches, mars the value of things; itsuppressesthe world.“World”is a Christian term of abuse. These antithetical forms in the optics of values, arebothnecessary: they are different points of view which cannot be circumvented either with arguments or counter-arguments. One cannot refute Christianity: it is impossible to refute a diseased eyesight. That people should have combated pessimism as if it had been a philosophy, was the very acme of learned stupidity. The concepts“true”and“untrue”do not seem to me to have any sense in optics.—That, alone, which has to be guarded against is the falsity, the instinctive duplicity whichwould fainregard this antithesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,—and his mastery in this kind of falseness was of no mean order. To cast side-long glances at master-morality, atnoblemorality (—Icelandic saga is perhaps the greatest documentary evidence of these values), and at the same time to have the opposite teaching, the“gospel of the lowly,”the doctrine of theneedof salvation, on one's lips!… Incidentally, I admire the modesty of Christians who go to Bayreuth. As for myself, I couldnot[pg 050]endure to hear the sound of certain words on Wagner's lips. There are some concepts which are too good for Bayreuth … What? Christianity adjusted for female Wagnerites, perhapsbyfemale Wagnerites—for, in his latter days Wagner was thoroughlyfeminini generis—? Again I say, the Christians of to-day are too modest for me.… If Wagner were a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a Father of the Church!—The need ofsalvation, the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing in common with such clowns; it is the most straightforward expression of decadence, it is the most convincing and most painful affirmation of decadence, in sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wishesto be ridof himself.Le moi est toujours haissable.Noble morality, master-morality, on the other hand, is rooted in a triumphant saying of yea toone's self,—it is the self-affirmation and self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime symbols and practices; but only“because its heart is too full.”The whole of beautiful art and of great art belongs here; their common essence is gratitude. But we must allow it a certain instinctive repugnanceto décadents, and a scorn and horror of the latter's symbolism: such things almost prove it. The noble Romans considered Christianity as afœda superstitio: let me call to your minds the feelings which the last German of noble taste—Goethe—had in regard to the cross. It is idle to look for more valuable, morenecessarycontrasts.14

But the kind of falsity which is characteristic of the Bayreuthians is not exceptional to-day. We all know the hybrid concept of the Christian gentleman. Thisinnocencein contradiction, this“clean conscience”in falsehood, is rather modernpar excellence, with it modernity is almost defined. Biologically, modern man represents acontradiction of values, he sits between two stools, he says yea and nay in one breath. No wonder that it is precisely in our age that falseness itself became flesh and blood, and even genius! No wonderWagnerdwelt amongst us! It was not without reason that I called Wagner the Cagliostro of modernity.… But all of us, though we do not know it, involuntarily have values, words, formulæ, and morals in our bodies, which are quiteantagonisticin their origin—regarded from a physiological standpoint, we arefalse.… How would adiagnosis of the modern soulbegin? With a determined incision into this agglomeration of contradictory instincts, with the total suppression of its antagonistic values, with vivisection applied to its mostinstructivecase. To philosophers the“Case of Wagner”is awindfall—this essay, as you observe, was inspired by gratitude.

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