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Richard Wagner |
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Preface
The author of the presented work felt compelled to
also contribute to the celebration of the one hundredth birthday of our great Beethoven
and chose, since there did not occur to him
another occasion dignified enough for this celebration, this elaboration
in writing on the importance of Beethoven’s
music as it opened itself up to his understanding. The form of the resulting written
presentation occurred to him due to the idea that he might be called upon to
hold a festive speech on the occasion of an ideal celebration of the great
musician, whereby to him, since this speech was not to be held in reality,
there arose the advantage of more in-depth elaboration than would have been
allowed for a speech in front of a real live audience. Due to this it was possible to him to guide
the reader through a more in-depth investigation of the essence of music and to
deliver to the seriously educated reader a contribution with respect to the
philosophy of music, as which the presented work may be considered, on the one
hand, while, on the other hand, the assumption that it, should it actually be
held as a speech on a certain day of this so extraordinarily meaningful year in
front of a German audience, it would suggest a close and warm connection in
such spoken presentation to the elevating events of this time. Inasmuch as it was possible for the writer to
draft and carry out his work under the immediate impressions of these events,
may it therefore also benefit from this advantage in order to have made
possible an inner connection to the depth of the German mind during the greater excitement of German sentiment(s)
than during ordinary times in the life of our nation.
While it must already appear difficult to provide a
satisfactory insight into the true relationship of a great artist to his nation, then this difficulty is increased
for the sober mind to the highest degree, as soon as this does not concern a
poet or a fine artist, but a musician.
That the poet and the fine artist, in the manner in which both of these
perceive the phenomenon or forms of the world, are, at first, guided by the
particulars of the nation that they belong to, has certainly always been
considered in their evaluation. If for
a poet, the language in which he writes, immediately stands out as determining
for
the views that he will put forth, then the nature of his country and of his
people do not appear as any less decisive factors for the choice of form and
colour to the fine artist. Neither
through language nor through any form of the shape of his country perceptible
to his eyes is the musician connected to these. Therefore, one assumes that the tone language equally belongs to
all of mankind and that the melody is the absolute language through which the
musician speaks to every heart. At
closer examination, we recognize very well that there could be made mention of
a German music as opposed to an Italian music, and for this difference, there
may still be considered a
physiological national trait, namely the great facility o the Italian for song
which would have predestined him as much for his musical training as the
German, due to his lack of that facility, would have been directed to his
special musical area of his very own.
However, since this difference does not touch the essence of tonal language
but rather, since every melody, be it of Italian or German origin, can be
equally understood, this can, at first, only be considered a quite superficial
momentum, as much as language for the poet or the physical properties of his
country for the fine artist: for, also
in these, these outer differences can be recognized as advantages or
disadvantages without our attributing to them any importance with respect to
the intellectual content of the artistic organism.
The particular traits by which a musician is recognized as belonging to
his nation must, in any event, be deeper seated than that by which we recognize
Goethe and Schiller as Germans, Rubens and Rembrandt as Netherlanders, even if
we must consider that one or the other of them might be inspired for the same
reason. To investigate this deeper
reason might be as enticing as to thoroughly investigate the essence of music
itself. What might have been hitherto
considered as unattainable by means of dialectic treatment might, contrarily,
open itself up all the easier to our judgment if we put to ourselves the more
distinct task of investigating the connection of the great musician whose 100th
birthday we are about to celebrate, with the German nation which now has
entered such a serious text of its worth.
If we raise this question in this connection at first superficially,
then it might already not be easy to escape an illusion due to this superficial
approach. If it is already that
difficult for a poet to make himself
understood that we have to endure the most idiotic statements of a famous
German literary historian with respect to the development of Shakespeare’s
genius, then we should not be surprised that we will stumble upon even greater
errors if, in a similar manner, a musician like Beethoven is taken as the
subject. With greater certainty is it
possible for us to look at the development of Schiller and Goethe, since, from
their own conscious communications to us there remain precise indications for
us: these, too, however, only cover the
aesthetic progress of their education and development , which more accompanied
than guided their creative activities; with respect to the real background of
the latter, particularly with respect to the selection of the material to their
writings, we actually only learn that here, coincidence ruled over intention to
a great extent; an actual tendency that is connected with outer world or
national history can be discerned, in the least. Also with respect to the impact of quite personal life
impressions (and experiences) on the selection and development of their topics,
one can only draw the most cautious conclusions in the case of the two
poets in order not to let disregard
that this never found expression in an immediate, but rather always only in an
indirect sense, which makes all certain proof of their influence on their
actual creative processes impermissible.
Contrary to this, from our investigations, we recognize this with
certainty, that a course of development that can be discerned in this way, could
only be specific to the great German poets of this noble period of German
re-birth.
What conclusions could, however, be drawn from the letters of Beethoven
that have been left behind, with respect to the outer processes, or even with
respect to the inner relationships of the life of our great musician to his
great compositions and to the process of development that can be discerned in
them? Even if we had at our disposal
all possible data on the conscious processes in this respect in microscopic
detail, these could not provide us with anything more certain, than what (for
example) lies before us in the information that the master initially drafted
the “Sinfonia eroica” in homage to the young General Napoleon and that he wrote
the name of the title page but later crossed it out when he learned that
Bonaparte had made himself Emperor.
Never has one of our poets described one of his most important works
with such certainty with respect to the tendency connected with it; and what do
we derive from this with respect to the evaluation of one of the most wonderful
compositions ? Must it not appear as
pure insanity to us if we were to even attempt such an explanation?
I believe that the most certain information that we can learn about the human
being Beethoven would, in the best of cases, stand in the same relationship to
the musician Beethoven as, for example, General Bonaparte to the “Sinfonia
eroica”. Seen from this vantage point
of awareness, the great musician must
remain a complete mystery to us. In
order to solve this in its appropriate manner, there has to, at least, be taken
quite a different path than that along which it is possible to follow at least
to a certain degree the creative lives of Goethe and Schiller: also this point will be blurred at precisely
that place at which these creative lives move from their conscious sides to
their unconscious ones, that means where the poet no longer determines the
aesthetic form of his work but where it is determined by the inner vision of
its idea. However, precisely in this
vision of the idea there lies the entire difference between the work of a poet
and that of a musician, and in order to arrive at some clarity with respect to
this, we have to, above all, turn to a more in-depth investigation of the
problem at hand.--
Quite recognizably, the diversity referred to here, stands out in the
work of the fine artist when we hold the musician closely next to him, in the
middle of which stands the poet in his conscious creation’s tending towards the
work of the fine artist, while he, on the bark basis of his unconsciousness
touches the musician. With Goethe, his
conscious tendency towards fine art was so strong that he, in an important
phase of his life, felt quite predestined to it while he, in a certain sense,
for all of his life, wanted to see his poetic activity as a kind of striving
for information as a substitute for his declined fine arts career; with his
consciousness, he was a mind that was explicitly tending towards the visible
world. Contrary to this, Schiller was
attracted to a quite stronger degree by the investigation of the unconscious
basis of the inner consciousness that lies far from the contemplation and
viewing of the outer world, in the “thing as such” of Kantian philosophy, the
study of which he was very involved in during the main period of his higher
development. The point of constant
attraction between both great minds lay precisely there, where, from both
extremes, the poet meets his self-awareness.
Both also met in their respective abilities of discernment of the essence
of music: and this ability was accompanied by greater insight in Schiller
than in Goethe who, according to his entire tendency, grasped more of the
pleasing, plastically-symmetrical element of art music in which music,
analogously shows some similarity to architecture. Here, Schiller grasped the touched problem with his evaluative
capabilities at a deeper level which Goethe agreed with and by which it was
decided that the epos tends towards the plastic, while drama tends toward
music. With our above-outlined view on
both poets now also agrees that Schiller was more fortunate in actual drama
than Goethe while the latter was undoubtedly more inclined towards epic
writing.
However, it was only Schopenhauer who has recognized and described with
philosophical clarity the position of music to the other forms of art in his
ascribing to it an essence quite different from fine art and poetry. Here, he goes out from his amazement that
music speaks with a language that can be immediately understood by everybody,
since there is no need of mediation by means of the description of concepts,
whereby it, first of all, differentiates itself completely from poetry whose
only material are concepts by means of their application, for the purpose of
the illustration of ideas. According to
the very understandable definition of the philosopher, the ideas of the world
and of its essential phenomena are, in Plato’s sense, the objects of the
beautiful arts themselves; while the poet makes these ideas clear to the
awareness that is considering them by means of the application of actually
rational concepts in an application that is peculiar only to his art,
Schopenhauer, however, believes that he has to recognize an idea of the world
in music itself since he who would be able to entirely exemplify it in concepts
would, at the same time, have presented a philosophy that is explaining the
world. While Schopenhauer presents this
hypothetical explanation of music as paradox, since it can actually not be
explained in concepts, he provides, on the other hand, the only sufficient
material for a further shedding of light on the correctness of his profound
explanation to which he, himself, did not want to apply himself merely due to
the fact that, as a layman, he was not familiar enough with music, and,
moreover, due to the fact that his knowledge of it could not yet refer with
enough certainty to an understanding of that musician whose works only revealed
to the world that deepest secret of music, since, Beethoven in particular, can
not be sufficiently evaluated if the profound paradox that Schopenhauer
presented is not properly explained and resolved for by and in philosophical
reflection and realization.--
In the use of the material provided by the philosopher I believe to
proceed most purposefully if I, at first, turn to one of his statement with
which Schopenhauer does not yet want to have the idea that emerged out of the
realization of relations considered as the essence of the thing as such, but
merely as a revelation of the objective character of things, thus still always
only of their appearance. “Und selbst
diesen Charakter” – continues Schopenhauer in the relevant passage, “würden wir
nicht verstehen, wenn uns nicht das
innerste Wesen der Dinge, wenigstens undeutlich im Gefühl, anderweitig bekannt
wäre. Dieses Wesen selbst nämlich kann
nicht aus den Ideen und überhaupt nicht durch irgendeine bloß objective
Erkenntnis verstanden werden, daher es ewig ein Geheimnis bleiben würde, wenn
wir nicht von einer ganz anderen Seite Zugang dazu hätten. Nur sofern jades Erkennende zugleich
Individuum und dadurch Teil der Natur ist, steht ihm der Zugang zum inner der
Natur offen, in seinem eigenen Selbstbewußtsein, also wo dasselbe sich am
unmittelbarsten und alsdann als Wille sich kundgibt.” (Die Welt als Wille
und Vorstellung [Insel-Ausg.] II, 1125.— And even this character we would
not understand, if not the innermost essence, at least in a yet unclear form
and based on our feelings, was known to us, otherwise. This essence itself can not be understood
based on ideas and not at all by means of any merely objective realization and
thus would eternally have to remain a secret to us if we would not have access
to it from another side. Only insofar
as every realizing entity is also an individual and thus part of nature, does
it have access to the innermost side of nature in its self-awareness, where the
same makes itself known most directly and then presents itself as will.)
If we then also consider what Schopenhauer demands as a condition or
prerequisite for the entering of the idea into our consciousness or awareness,
namely a “temporäres Überwiegen des Intellektes über den Willen, oder
physiologisch betrachtet, eine starke Erregung der anschauenden
Gehirntätigkeit, ohne alle Erregung der Neigungen oder Affekte” (Die Welt
als Wille und Vostellung [Insel-Ausg.] II, 1127—temporary stimulation of
the contemplating brain activity without any excitement or stimulation of the
inclinations and affects.), then we only have to keenly grasp the following
explanation of the fact that our awareness or consciousness has two sides: in part, this consciousness is, after all, a
consciousness or awareness of our own selves which is the will, in part
it is a consciousness or awareness of other things, and, as such, it is,
at first, a contemplative realization of the outer world, a grasping of
objects. “Je mehr nun die eine Seite
des gesamten Bewußtseins hervortritt, desto mehr weicht die andere zurück” (Die
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [Insel-Ausg.] II, 1127—the more the one side
of the entire awareness or consciousness emerges, the more the other side
retreats.)
From a thorough consideration of these statements that have been quoted
from Schopenhauer’s main work, it must become evident to us now that musical
conception, since it can not have anything in common with the perception of an
idea (since it is certainly tied to the consideration of the evident word), it
can only have its origin in that side of awareness or consciousness that
Schopenhauer describes as being directed towards the introspective. If this should temporarily retreat into its
functions of the realizing subject (meaning the conception of ideas) for the
benefit of the emergence of the realizing subject, then, on the other hand, the
result will be that only out of this inward-turned side of awareness or
consciousness does the capability of the intellect’s grasping of the character
of things become explainable. However,
if this awareness or consciousness is also the awareness or consciousness of
the self, thus of the will, then it has to be assumed that the holding-down of
the same is certainly necessary for the purity of the outward-directed
awareness that, however, the essence of the thing as such that is absolutely
necessary for this considering awareness is only possible to be perceived by
the inward-directed awareness when it is able to arrive at the ability to take
an as enlightened or illumined look at the introspective as it is able to do in
its outward perception of ideas.
Also for the continuance along this path, Schopenhauer provides us with
the right guidance by means of his profound hypothesis regarding this
physiological phenomenon of clairvoyance that is connected with it and with
respect to his dream theory that is based on it. When the inward-turned consciousness arrives at real clairvoyance
in this phenomenon, meaning to that capability of vision there, where our
“awake” consciousness that is directed towards our daily lives, can only dimly
or vaguely sense the powerful basis of the affects of our will, then also the tone
breaks through this night into real, awake perception, as immediate expression
of our will. As dreams confirm to every
capacity of experiencing, next to the world that is viewed by means of the functions
of the aware mind, stands a second world that is just as distinct as the first,
and not any less perceptible which, as object, can also not lies outside uf us
and, therefore, has to be brought before awareness for the purpose of
realization by an inward-directed function of the brain according to the terms
of forms of perception that are solely akin to it. A not any less certain experience is, however, this one that,
next to the world that presents itself visibly in our state of awareness as
well as in our deam state, a second world that is only perceptible to the ear,
a world that is perceived through sound, thus actually a world of sound next to
the world of light, that is available for the perception through our awareness
and of which we can state that it behaves itself towards the world of light
like the dream state towards the state of awareness, for it is quite as clearly
perceptible to us as the world of light, although we have to recognize it as
bein completely different from it. Just
as the perceptible dream world can only be formed by a specific brain activity,
music, too, only enters our awareness or consciousness by means of a similar
brain activity, yet, this activity is as different from that of that seeing
as the dream capability of the human brain differentiates itself from the
function of the brain that is stimulated by conscious perception.
Since the capability for dreaming can not be stimulated into activity by
external impressions against which it is completely closed off, this has to happen through internal
processes that are only indicated as vague feelings to our conscious
perception. It is this inner life,
then, through which we are immediately related to all of nature, so that they
are part of the essence of things in a manner that, in response to our
relationships to it, the forms of external realization, time and space, can no
longer be applied due to which Schopenhauer so convincingly points to the
formation of prophetic and predicting dreams that relate the most remote facts,
thus the dreams related to fate, or in rare, extreme cases, to the occurrence
of somnambulistic clairvoyance. From
the most frightening kinds of those dreams we awake with a cry in which
our frightened will finds its immediate expression which, accordingly,
certainly enters the world of sound in order to make itself known through
it. If we, then, consider this cry in
all its forms of intensity, including the more timid wailing of desire and as
basic element of that indication to the (human) ear and if we have to find that
it is the most immediate utterance of our will by means of which it turns most
quickly towards the external world, then we should be less amazed about its
immediate capability of being understood than about the formation of an art form
out of this element since, on the other hand, it can be seen that articstic
creativity as well as artistic perception can only emerge out of the
turning-away of awareness from the impulses of the human will.
In order to explain this miracle, at first, we recall here the
above-noted profound statements of our philosopher that we would also not be
able to understand the ideas that can be grasped according to their nature, by
objective perception, if we did not have another kind of access open to us to
the essence of things that lie at its basis, namely the immediate awareness of
ourselves. By means of this awareness
alone, we are after all, solely able to again understand the inner essence of
things outside of ourselves, and that in such a manner that we recognize in
them the same basic essence which manifests itself in our self-awareness as its
own self-awareness. All misconception
with respect to this originated, after all, only in our seeing an
external world outside of us, which we, through light’s reflection, perceived
as something completely different from us; only by means of mental perception
of ideas, thus by remote connection,
do we arrive at the next stage of our disappointment with
respect to the fact that we now no longer recognize the single entities that
are separated by space but their essence as such, and it speaks to us most
distinctively in the works of fine art, the actual element of which it,
therefore, is to use the misleading appearance of the world that is spread out
in front of us through light reflection by means of a most sophisticated play
with that appearance for the presentation of the essence of it that is veiled
by it. It is also in keeping with this
that the seeing of objects per se actually leaves us uninvolved, and only out
of our perception of the relationships of the viewed objects to our will does it affect us, due to which, quite
rightly, for this art, the first aesthetic principle has to be that in the
depiction of works of fine art, one has to evade those relationships to our
will in order to provide, to the contrary, for our viewing that calmness in
which only pure contemplation of the object as to its own character becomes
possible. However, the effect here will
always remain the appearance of things in the viewing of which we engage
during the moments of our aesthetic contemplation without the involvement of
our personal will. This calming effect
in the pure appreciation of appearance is therefore also what is transposed
from the effect on us of fine art to all art forms as a demand for aesthetic
satisfaction per se, and, by virtue of this, has brought forth the concept
of beauty as it, accordingly, is, in our language, pursuant to the root of
the word, distinctly related to the appearance (as object) and contemplation or
viewing (as subject).--
The awareness or consciousness that alone made possible to us in our
contemplation of its appearance the grasping of the idea that is manifesting
itself through it, however, ultimately, sees itself forced to explaim with Faust: “Welch Schauspiel! Aber ach, ein Schauspiel nur!
Wo faß ich dich, unendliche Natur?” (What a performance! However, oh, only a performance! Where can I grasp thee, infinite nature?).
This calling-out is now most certainly answered by music. Herein, the external world speaks so
incomparably comprehensible to us since
it conveys to our hearing, by means of the effect of sound, quite the
same which we, ourselves, call out to it from our innermost. The object of the perceived tone immediately
meets with the subject of the produced tone:
we understand, without any (necessity for) the explanation of any
concepts, what the perceived cry for help, of wailing, or of joy says and right
away respond to it accordingly. While
the cry of despair or that of joy that we release is the most direct expression
of the affect of our will, we also understand the same sound that reaches our
ears unmistakeably as an expression of the same affect, and no confusion as in
the viewing of an appearance in light, is possible here with respect to the
fact that the basic essence of the external world is not completely identical
with our basic essence, whereby the gap that is created in the viewing of an
appearance is immediately closed.
If we, then, see art (as art form) arising out of this direct awareness
of the unity of our inner essence with the external world, then it becomes,
above all, clear that it has to be subject to quite different laws than any art
form. So far, heretofore, all
aesthetics have objected to the idea that, from such a purely pathological
element, a real art from should be derived and they wanted to grant validity to
it only from that point on at which its products presented themselves to us in
a cool appearance that is akin to that of works of fine art. That its very element, however, as an idea
of the world, does no longer have to be viewed and contemplated but rather is
senses by our deepest consciousness, we immediately learned to realize with
such great success from Schopenhauer, and we understand this idea as a direct
revelation of the unity of the will which irrefutably presents itself to our
awareness or consciousness, going out from the unity of the essence of man,
also as unity with nature that we also perceive through sound.
We believe that enlightenment with respect to the essence of music as
art form, as difficult as it is, can most securely be gained by means of the
examination of the works and the creative process of the inspired
musician. In many respects, these have
to be totally different from those of other artists. Of that latter creativity we had to acknowledge that it must have
been preceded by the free and pure contemplation of objects as it has to be
evoked again in the viewer by the presentation of the art work. Such an object, which he is supposed to
elevate to an idea by pure contemplation, does, to the contrary, not present
itself to the musician, at all, since his music itself is an idea of the world
in which it presents its essence directly, while, in the other art forms, it
has to be presented after it has first been contemplated and
grasped. It can not be understood
otherwise than that the individual will that has been silenced in the fine
artist by pure contemplation, awakens as a universal will in the musician and
that actually only self-consciously recognizes itself as such beyond all
contemplation. From this arise also the
different states of the conceptualizing
musician and of the creative fine artist as well as the basically different
effects of music and of fine art. Here,
deepest consolation, there, highest stimulation and excitation of the
will: However, this says nothing but
that here, the will of the individual is conceptualized as such, in his
(owner’s) perception of his different essence from the essence of things
outside of him, that will that is just rising up in the pure, un-interested
contemplation of objects beyond its boundaries, contrary to which now there, in
the musician, his will feels unified beyond all individual boundaries: since, due his hearing, there is opened up
to him the gate through which the world reaches him. The immense overflowing of all boundaries of appearance has to
necessarily evoke in the musician a delight that can not be compared to any
other: in it, will recognizes itself as
omnipotent will and as such it does not have to silently refrain from
contemplation; rather, it loudly proclaims
itself as the conscious idea of the world.—Only one state can
surpass this: that of the saint,
and that also because it is permanent and unsurpassable, contrary to which the
blissful clairvoyance of the musician has to be exchanged with a recurring
state of the individual awareness of the musician, which has to be considered
all the more wretched as the enthusiastic state transports him higher above and
beyond all boundaries of individuality.
Out of this latter reason, for the suffering(s) with which he has to pay
for his bliss and enthusiasm, in which he delights us so unspeakably, the
musician should, again, appear to us more venerable than any other artist, nay,
even with a right to sanctity since the complexity of his art is related to the
of all other art forms In a manner that is similar to the relationship of
religion and church.
We saw that, if, in the other
art forms, the will desires to completely turn into realization, this is only
possible insofar, as it silently remains in the individual’s deepest
introspective: it is as if it was
awaiting a message of salvation with respect to itself from the outside; if
that is not sufficient to it, it and its owner transfer themselves into a state
of clairvoyance in which the will is recognized as one and all of the world
beyond the boundaries of time and space.
What it saw here, cannot be conveyed in any language, (just) as the
dream of the deepest sleep can only be translated into the language of a
second, allegorical dream, that immediately precedes the awakening in order to
enter conscious human awareness; the will creates for itself for the direct
image of its self-contemplation a second mode of communication that, while it
is, with one side, turned towards its inner contemplation, it touches, with its
other side, the direct sympathetic communication, utterance or emergence of
sound with the awakening of the re-energizing outside world. It calls out, and is the response it
recognizes itself, again, as well:
thus, to it, calling-out and response develop into a comforting,
ultimately also again delightful play with itself.
In a sleepless night, I once stepped onto the balcony outside my window
at the great canal in Venice: like a
deep dram, the fairy-tale lagoon city lay stretched out before me in the
shadow. Out of the most noiseless
silence arose the powerful, harsh cry of a gondolier who had just awoken on his
bark, a cry with which he called out into the night in repreated intervals
until, from the farthest distance, the same cry answered along the nightly
canal. I recognized the age-old,
melancholy phrase, to which, in times past, also the verses of Tasso were
recited, which as such, however, is certainly as old as the canals of Venice
with their inhabitants. After some
solemn intervals, this widely audible dialogue became more lively and appeared
to be melting in unison, until, from near and from afar, the cries died down in
a renewed slumber of those who uttered them.
What could the brightly-sunlit, people-crowded daytime Venice tell me
about itself that this nocturnal dream could bring to my awareness infinitely
deeper and infinitely more immediately?—Another time, I walked through the
sublime solitude of a high Alpine valley
of (the Swiss Canton) Uri. It
was a bright day when I, on a high Alpine pasture, heard the shrill and
exuberant call of an Alpine herdsman that he sent out across the wide valley;
soon, the same exuberant call answered it from there amidst the incredible
silence: here, the echo chimed in from
the high mountain slopes, and in this competition, the silent valley joyfully
resounded.—Thus, the child awakens from the night of the womb with its cry of
yearning and thus it is answered by its mother’s soothing caress, thus the
yearning young man understands the call of the birds in the woods, thus speaks
the wailing cry of animals, of the airs, the angry shout of the organs to the
pondering man whom now befalls that dream-like state in which he perceives by
hearing that with which his vision held him captive by the illusion of
distraction, namely that his innermost essence is one with the innermost
essence of all that he perceives and that only in this perception also
the essence of that which is outside of him is actually recognized.
The dream-like state into which these described effects transpose (one)
by means of sympathetic hearing and in which, due to this, that other world
opens itself up to us out of which the musician speaks to us, we immediately
recognize out of the experience that is accessible to everyone that through the
effect of music, our vision is de-potentialized in such a manner that we no
longer see intensively with our open eyes.
We experience this in the concert hall while we listen to a truly moving
composition, where the most distracting and most ugly as such occurs before our
very eyes which would distract us from the music and put us into a completely
ridiculous mood, were we to see it intensively, namely, besides the very
trivial appearance of the demeanour of the audience as such, the mechanical
movements of the musicians, the entire peculiarity of the movement of the
musical apparatus of an orchestral production. That this sight which solely occupies him who is not moved by
the music, yet, does not bother him who is completely involved into listening
to the music, clearly shows us that we are no longer consciously aware of it
and, to the contrary, with our open eyes, have moved into that state to which
that of the somnambulistic clairvoyant is very similar. And, in reality, is is also only this state
in which we directly become part of the world of the musician. From this world that cannot be described by
any other means, the musician, so-to-say, casts his net into our direction by
his arrangement of sounds, or even he, too, sprinkles our perceptive
capabilities with the miraculous drops of his sounds in such a manner, that he,
as if by magic, renders these perceptive capabilities incapable of perceiving
anything else but that which we have become involved in perceiving from our
deepest introspective.
If we want to gain some clear understanding with respect to the
musician’s process, then we can do this best again only by coming back to the
analogy of the same with the inner process by means of which, according to
Schopenhauer’s so enlightening assumption, the dream of the deepest sleep that
is so removed from the conscious, cerebral awareness, is so-to-say, translated
into the lighter, allegorical dream that immediately precedes awakening. For the musician, the analogously considered
language capability stretches from the cry of horror to the exercise of the
calming play of harmonious sounds.
Since he, in the application of the here abundantly prevalent nuances is
virtually directed by his urge to arrive at an understandable manner of
conveying of the innermost dram image, he approaches, like the second,
allegorical dream, the concepts of the consciously aware (human) brain by means
of which the latter ultimately can take hold of this dream image for
itself. However, in this approach he
only touches, as an external momentum, the concepts of that time which it
conveys, during which he receives those of space behind that impenetrable veil,
the lifting of which would immediately make his viewed dream image
unrecognizable. While the harmony of
tones that neither belongs to space nor to time remains the actual element of
music, the now creating and creative musician of the consciously aware world of
appearances virtually extends his hand out for the purpose of understanding as
to how the allegorical dream attaches itself to the prevalent and common
concepts of the individual in such a way that
the conscious awareness that is turned toward the external world, even
though it, too, immediately recognizes the great difference between this dream
image and the process of real life, can, nevertheless, take hold of it. Through the mythical arrangement of
tones, the musician comes into contact with the visible, plastic world, namely
by means of the similarity of laws pursuant to which the movements of visible
bodies convey themselves to us comprehensibly.
The human gesture that seeks to make itself understood in dance by means
of its expressively-changing motions that follow (certain) principles, appears,
thus, to be that for music what bodies, again, are to light which, without
refracting in their appearance, would not shine up, while we can say that
without rhythm, music would not be perceptible to us. Precisely here, at the point of congruence between plastic
appearance and harmony, however, the essence of music that can only be grasped
by the analogy of the dram, shows itself very clearly as an essence that is
completely different from that of fine art and, just as the latter expresses
the gesture that it only freezes in space, music expresses the innermost
essence of gesture with such immediate comprehensibility that it, as soon as we are filled with music, even
become immune against the intensive perception of the gesture, so that we
finally understand it without seeing it.
If music, thus, even pulls the aspects of the external world that are
most related to it, into its dream realm, that we have thus defined as such,
then this only occurs in order to turn the contemplating realization by means
of a wonderful transformation that happens to it virtually inward, where it is
now enabled to grasp the essence of things in its most immediate expression,
and thus to virtually explain the dream image which the musician has perceived,
himself, in his deepest sleep.--
About the behaviour of music towards the plastic forms of the external
world as well as about the things, themselves, hardly anything more enlightened
can be stated than what we can read in that part of Schopenhauer’s work on the
basis of which we turn from a superfluous remaining with it to the actual tasks
of the investigations herein, namely to the exploration of the essence of the
musician, himself.
We only have to pause for a moment in order to consider an important
decision with respect to the aesthetic evaluation of music as art form, since
we find that, from the forms of music with which it appears to from a
connection to the external appearance, there has been derived quite a senseless
and erroneous demand of the character of its expressions and conveyances. As it has already been mentioned before,
there have been transferred to music concepts and opinions that stem only from
the evaluation of fine art. That this
confusion could happen, we have, in any case, to ascribe to the just-mentioned
coming-into contact with and approach of music of the visible side of the world
and of its appearances. In this sense,
musical art has really gone through a process of development which subjected it
to the ambiguity of its true character to such an extent that one demanded of
it an effect that should be similar to that of the works of fine art, namely
the evoking of a delight in beautiful forms.
Since here, at the same time, an increasing decline of the judgment of
fine art itself occurred with this, it can be easily imagined how music has
been demeaned by it, if, what was basically demanded of it, was that it should
completely suppress its own essence in order to stimulate our excitement by its
showing to us (only) its outward appearance.
Music, which only speaks to us by brining to life for us the most
general concept of that actual dark feeling in the most varying degrees
imaginable, can, actually only be judged by the category of the sublime
, since it, as soon as it fills us up with itself, it stimulates the highest
ecstasy of our awareness of boundlessness.
What, contrary to this, only occurs to us as a consequence of our
sinking into contemplation of a work of fine art, namely the finally-won temporary
liberation of the intellect from the service of our will which happens through
our letting-go of the relationship of the contemplated object to our individual
will, thus the demanded effect of beauty on our “emotional” frame of
mind; music has this effect immediately at the first moment of its being
played, by immediately detracting our intellect from any grasping of
relationships of things outside of us and by virtually closing us off against
the external world and, to the contrary, solely letting us turn to our
introspective, like into the innermost essence of all things. According to this, a judgment with respect
to any music would have to be based on the recognition of those laws pursuant
to which the most immediate progression occurs from the effect of beautiful
appearance, which is the first effect of music at the very instant of it being
played, to the revelation of its most inherent character by means of the effect
of the sublime. To the contrary, the character
of an actually expressionless music that says nothing to us would be that which
remains hovering around the prismatic play with its effects after its first
beginning and thus would constantly retain us in those relationships with which
the most superficial aspect of music turns towards the visible world.
In reality, a lasting development of music was only afforded to it
towards this side, namely by means of a systematic structure of the design of
its rhythmic periods which has, on the one hand, brought it close to being
compares with architecture, and, on the other hand, given it a
comprehensibility which had to expose it to the false judgment according to the
analogy with fine arts. Here, in its
outer limitation, by trivial forms and conventions it appeared to, for example
Goethe, to be so fortunately adequate for the forming of poetic concepts. To be able to solely play with these
conventional forms with the incredible possibilities of music in such a manner,
that its actual effect, that of the conveying of the inner essence of all things
can be evaded—just like the danger of flooding—has, according to the opinion of
musicians, been the true and only favourable result of the development of
music. To have ventured forward through
these forms towards the innermost essence of
music in such a manner that he was able to again reflect the inner light
of the clairvoyant towards the outside in order to also only show these forms
according to their inner meaning, that was the work of our great Beethoven.
Whom we, therefore, have to consider as the true embodiment of the musician.--
If we want to conceptualize music for ourselves by means of holding on
to the (already) often-used analogy of the allegorical dream, stimulated by a
contemplation of the innermost, then we have to pre-suppose that the actual
organ for this, lie the dream organ there, possesses a cerebral capability
through which the musician, at first, perceives the inner “per se” that is
closed off from all recognition and realization, an eye that is turned inward,
which, turned towards the outside, becomes hearing. If we want to imagine for ourselves the innermost (dream) image
of the world that he has perceived, then we can do this in a most instructive
manner if we listen to one of those famous sacred works of Palestrina. Here, rhythm is still only perceptible
through the change of chord sequences while it, without these, as a symmetrical
time sequence as such, does not exist, at all; according to this, time sequence
is still bound so directly to the actually timeless and space-less essence of
harmony in such a manner that the help of the laws of time cannot be utilized
for the understanding of such music.
The time sequence that is only expressed in the most subtle change of a
basic colour which presents to us the manifold nuances in the establishment of
the record of its remotest relations to us, without our being able to perceive
a delineation in this change. However,
since this colour, itself, does not appear in space, we receive an image that
is as timeless as it is also space-less, a completely spiritual revelation by
which we are moved due to the fact that it makes us realize the innermost
essence of religion, free from all dogmatic fiction of concepts, more
explicitly than anything else, at the same time.
If we now recall to our minds a piece of dance music or a movement of an
orchestral symphony that is based on a dance motive, or finally even an actual
opera piece, we immediately find our fantasy fascinated by the regular
arrangement of the repetition of rhythmic periods by which, at first, the
intensity of the melody is shaped through the plastic form that is given to
it. Quite rightfully, the music that
has been developed along this path, has been described as profane in contrast
to sacred music. On the principle of
this development, I have commented precisely enough, elsewhere (I did so
briefly and generally in an essay entitled “Zukunftsmusik” (Music of the
Future) which has been published in Leipzig about twelve years ago [1860]
without, however, having been noticed) and therefore only summarize its
tendency in the analogy with the allegoribal dream already referred to ,
herein, according to which it appears that the now awakened eye of the musician
is attached to the appearances of the outside world insofar, as these become
immediately understandable to him from their inner essence. The outer laws according to which this
holding-on to gesture, ultimately on any motion process of life, fulfills
itself become, in his creative process, those of rhythmical repetition by means
of which he constructs the intervals of contrast and recurrence. The more that these intervals are now filled
with the actual spirit of music, the less they will distract our attention as
architectural markings from the pure effect of music. Contrary to this, wherever this sufficiently explained inner
spirit of music is weakened in favor of this regular arrangement of pillars,
only this external regularity will fascinate us, and, necessarily, we will
lower our demands on music, itself, in our now only relating it to this
regularity.—Through this, music is leaving its state of sublime innocence, it
loses the power of deliverance from the guilt of appearance, which means that
it is no longer proclaiming the essence of things, but rather, is interwoven into
the illusion of things outside of us, itself, since, tho this music, one now
also wants to see something, and this viewing, then, becomes the main
purpose, as “opera” shows quite clearly, where the specacle, the ballet, etc.,
comprise the fascinating and attractive, which evidently ehough points out the
decadence of the music that is used for this purpose.--
What has been stated thus far, shall now be made clear to us here by our
looking at the process of development of Beethoven’s genius, whereby we, at first,
in order to leave the generality of our presentation, have to take a look at
the practical process of the development of the peculiar style of the master.--
The talent of a musician for his art, his predestination for it, can
certainly not become apparent in any other way than by the effect on him of
music-making outside of him. In what
manner his capability for inner self-observation, that clairvoyance into the
deepest reaches of space, has been stimulated in this, we only learn from his
completely attained goal of his self-development, since he, until then, obeyed
the laws of the effect of outer impressions on him, and for the musician, these
are, at first, derived from the tone masters of his time. Here, we find Beethoven to the least extent
stimulated by oeratic works, contrary to which, sacred works of his time were
closer to him. The musical genre of the
pianist which he, in order to “be somebody” as a musician, had to pursue,
constantly brought him into closest and most familiar contact with the
pianistic compositions of the masters of his era. In it, the “sonata” had developed as the pattern to be
followed. One can say that Beethoven
was and remained a sonata composer, since, for most of his – preferably –
instruments compositions, their basic form of the sonata remained the
arrangement of veils through which he looked into the realm of tones or also
that through which he, merging from this realm, made himself understood to us,
while other musical forms, particularly the mixed forms of vocal music, despite
his most incredible achievements in them, were only touched by him in passing,
as if in a trial manner.
The musical laws of the sonata form had been developed, valid for all
times, by Emanuel Bach, Haydn and Mozart.
They were the achievement of a compromise which the German musical
genius formed with the Italian musical genius.
Their outer character has been provided by the tendency of their
application: with the sonata, the
pianist presented himself before the public which he was supposed to delight
and pleasantly entertain with his virtuosity, per se. This was now, no longer, Sebastian Bach who gathered his
congregation in church around his organ, or the connoisseur and fellow
musician, for the purpose of a musical competition; a deep gap separated the
wonderful master of the fugue from the master of the sonata. By the latter, the art of the fugue was
learned for the purpose of the solidification of their musical studies;
however, only used as an artificiality in the sonata: the rough consequences of
pure counterpoint made room for the comfort of stable eurythmics, to fill their
pre-determined pattern(s) in the spirit of Italian euphonics appeared to be the
only manner in which music could be done justice to. In Haydn’s instrumental music, we seem to observe the tamed demon
of music playing before us in the child-like spirit of a born old man. Not unjustifiedly, one considers that
Beethoven, in his early works, followed Haydn’s example and even in his more
mature development of his genius, one believed that one has to consider him to
be closer related to Haydn than to Mozart.
With respect to the peculiar nature of this relationship, a remarkable
trait in Beethoven’s behavior towards Haydns is very revealing, whom he did not
want to acknowledge as his teacher—which Haydn was considered to be—and against
whom he also allowed himself a few hurtful remarks in his youthful
insolence. It appears that he felt
related to Haydn in the way in which a born man feels related to the childish
old man. Far beyong the formal
similarity to his teacher, he was driven by the unruly demon of his inner music
that was constrained by this form, to an expression of his force that, as all
behavior of this incredible musician, could only express itself with incomprehensible
roughness.—Of his meeting with Mozart, when he was still a yough, we are told
that he had jumped up angrily from the piano after he had played a sonata for
the master in order to present himself favourably, contrary to which he then,
in ordeer to show his true talent, asked to be allowed to improvise freely and
which he then, as we learn, did by leaving such an important impression on
Mozart that the latter said to his friends, “of this one, the world will still
get to hear!” This would have been a
statement by Mozart at a time at which the latter, himself, matured towards the
unfolding of his inner genius with distinct self-assurance, the urge of which,
until then, had been delayed by incredible hindrances and aberrations based on
the constraints of his wretchedly cumbersome existence as a musician. We know how he looked towards and foresaw
his own all too early death with the bitterness of his knowledge that only now,
he had arrived at the point at which he would have shown the world that he was
actually capable of in music.
Contrary to this, we see Beethoven confronting the world with his spirit
and temperament of defiance which kept him, throughout his life, almost wildly
independent from it: his immense
feeling of self-worth that was supported by his pride and courage, provided to
him, at all times, a shield against the frivolous demands on music by the
pleasure-seeking world. Against the
importunity of an effeminate taste, he had to protect a treasure of immense
(musical) wealth. In the same forms in
which music was only supposed to present itself as pleasant art, he had to
convey the revelations of an innermost contemplation of the world of tone. Thus, at all times, he appears like being
truly posssed since, with respect to him, it holds true what Schopenhauer says
of the musician per se: that he
proclaims the highest wisdom in a language that his reason does not understand.
He confronted the “reason” of his art only in the spirit in which it had
pursued the formal development of its outer structure. That was, then, quite a meagre reason that
spoke to him through this architectural periodic structure when he learned that
even the great masters of his youth moved in it with trivial repetition of phrases
and conventionalities, with the precisely dictated contrasts of strong and
soft, with the obediently prescribed grave and solemn introductions of so and
so many measures, through the unavoidable gate of so and so many half-closes to
the only possible redemption in the noise of the final cadenza. That was the reason which had constructed
the operatic aria, which had dictated the sequence of opera pieces, through
which Haydn chained his genius to the counting of the pearls on his rosary.
After all, with Palenstrina’s music, religion also vanished from church,
contrary to which, now, the articial formalism of the Jesuit practice
counter-reformed religion as well as music.
Thus, the same Jesuit architectural style of the last two centuries also
covers up, for the thoughtfully contemplating observer, the reverently noble
Rome, thus the glorious Italian art of painting was effeminated and
disgustingly sweetened, thus developed, under its guidance, the “classical”
French poetry in the mind-numbing laws of which we can find a quit pronounced
analogy to the laws of the construction of the operatic aria and of the sonata.
We know that is was the “German mind” that is so feared and hated
“across the mountains”, that stood up as a saviour everywhere, thus also in the
realm of art, against this artificially-directed demise of the spirit of
European nations. While we have
celebrated, in other realms, our Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and others as our
saviours from our demise in that depravity, then now is the time to prove with
this musician Beethoven that through him, since he spoke in the purest language
of all nations, the German mind saved the human spirit from deep shame. Since, in his elevating of music that had
been degraded to the status of mere entertainment for pleasure, out of its very
own essence, to the heights of its sublime calling, he has opened up to us the
understanding of that art out of which the world explains itself to every
awareness with a certainty with which only the most profound philosophy could
explain it to that thinker who knows its concepts. And in this alone is based the great Beethoven’s relationship
to the German nation, which we now also want to try to make clearer in the
special traits of his life and work that have become part of our knowledge. –
About the manner in which the artistic process behaves towards
construction on the basis of the concepts of reason, nothing can provide more
enlightenment than a faithful recording and following of the procedure and
manner which Beethoven followed in the unfolding and development of his
genius. It would have meant to proceed
according to the concepts of reason were he to consciously have changed or even
cast aside the prevailing outer forms of music; of this, however, we never see
a trace. Certainly was there never an
artist who had thought as much about his art as Beethoven. Contrary to this, the already mentioned
intensity of his human temper would be an indication of the kind of personal
suffering that these outer form and constraints put on his genius and subjected
him to. His reaction, on the other
hand, only consisted of the exuberantly free unfolding of his inner genius that
could not even be held in by those forms and constraints. He never basically or principally changed
the forms of instrumental music that he found; in his late sonatas, quartets,
symphonies, etc., the same structure as in his first can irrefutably be
shown. However, if one now compares
these works with each other, as for example the Eighth Symphony in F major with
the Second Symphony in D major, one will be amazed at the entirely new world
that confronts us there in almost the same form!
Here, there shows itself again the uniqueness of the German nature that
is so richly and profoundly endowed in its innermost that it is capable of
impregnating its essence on every form in re-shaping it from the inside and in
being thereby saved from having to discard it.
Thus, the German is not revolutionary, but reformatory (in his nature),
and thus he preserves for himself, for the communication of his inner essence to
the outside, a wealth of forms that no other nation has at its disposal. This profound inner source appears to have
dried up in the Frenchman, due to which he, being frightened by the outer form
of the state of affairs in his country as well as in his art, believes that he
has to immediately proceed with their entire destruction, so-to-say in the
assumption that the new, more comfortable form must shape itself quite
automatically. Due to this, peculiarly,
his protest is always directed against his own nature which does not show
itself more profoundly than as it expresses itself in its frightening
form. Contrary to this, the development
of the German mind was not harmed by the fact that our poetic medieval literature
received its nourishment from the transposition of French medieval
subjects: the inner depth of a Wolfram
von Eschenbach formed and shaped eternal types of poetry out of the same
material that, in its original form, has only been preserved as a curiosity. Thus we amalgamated the classical forms of
ancient Roman and Greek culture into our culture, adapted their language, the
style of their poetry, were able to adapt the antique view, however, only by
expressing our own mind through them.
Thus we also received music in all of its forms from the Italians and
what we formed into them, we now have before us in the amazing works of
Beethoven’s genius.
An attempt at explaining these works, themselves, would be a foolish
undertaking. In our successive
examination of them, we have to become aware of an ever-increasing clarity of
the musical genius with which they are endowed. It is as if we, in the works of his predecessors, have seen the
painted transparent image in daylight and here, in delineation and colour were
confronted with a pseudo-work-of-art
that can obviously not be compared with the works of the real painter,
belonging to a quite low art form; this was presented for the decoration of
festivals, at princely dining tables, for entertainment in large company and
the like, and the virtuoso put his artistry in front of it as the image that
should be illuminated, instead of behind it.
Now, Beethoven, however, places this image into the silence of the
night, between the world of appearance and the deeply innermost one of the
essence of all things, out of which now, after all, shines the light of the
clairvoyant behind the image: now this
comes to life before us in such a wonderful manner, and a second world stands
before us of which even the greatest masterwork of a Raffael could not give us an
idea.
Here, the power of the musician can not be grasped in any other way than
by the imagination of magic. It is
certainly a magical state into which we are transferred when we, in listening
to a truly Beethovenish work of music, in which we, in a sober state, can only
recognize a kind of technical suitability of the arrangement of form, now
become aware of and sense a spiritual liveliness, sometimes tender, sometimes
frightening activity, a pulsating swinging, rejoicing, yearning, fearing,
moaning and delight which, again, only seems to be set in motion from the
deepest recesses of your own innermost.
For, the moment that is so important for art history in the musical
creative process of Beethoven is this, that here, every technical accent of art
by means of which the artist puts himself outside of any conventional behaviour
towards the world, becomes elevated, itself, to the highest meaning as
immediate outpouring. As I already
expressed it elsewhere, there is no longer any addition, no framing of the
melodic, rather, everything becomes melody, every voice of the accompaniment,
every rhythmic note, nay, even every pause.
Since it is quite impossible to discuss the actual essence of Beethoven’s
music without immediately falling into a state of entrancement and delight, and
since we have already tried to educate ourselves more thoroughly with respect
to the true essence of music as such [by which was to be understood Beethoven’s
music in particular] through the guidance of the philosopher, then the personal
Beethoven will have to fascinate us again (as our next step) as the focus of
the beams of light of the world of wonders that emanate from him (if we want to
refrain from pursuing the impossible).—
Let us, therefore, investigate where Beethoven gained this strength from
or rather, since the secret of natural talent must remain hidden and veiled
from us and since we have to assume this strength unquestioningly from the
affect of its presence, we try to make it clear to ourselves through which
peculiarity of his personal character and through which moral motivations of
the same the great musician made the concentration of this strength towards
this one incredible effort—that makes up his artistic
achievement—possible. We realized that
we have to rule out in this any assumption of a realization of reason through
which, perhaps, the development of his artistic motivation might have been
guided. Contrary to this, we will have
to merely consider the manly strength of his character, the influence on the
unfolding of the inner genius of the master of which we came to touch, very soon, in this.
Here, we immediately began to compare Beethoven with Haydn and
Mozart. If we observe the lives of these
two, then the result will be—if we, again, hold these against each other—a
transition from Haydn through Mozart to Beethoven. Haydn was and remained the servant of a prince who had to provide
entertainment for his glamour-loving lord, as a musician; temporary
interruptions, such as his visits to London, did not change the character of
his music to a great extent, since even there, he was always only the musician
that was recommended to and paid by noble patrons. Submissive and devoted, the peace of his well-meaning, serene
personality remained undisturbed into his old age; only his eyes that look at us from his portraits, are filled with
soft melancholy.—Mozart’s life, however, was a constant fright for a
peacefully-secured existence, as it would, peculiarly enough, remain difficult
for him to attain. Hugged, kissed and
spoiled as a child by half of Europe, as a youth, he finds every satisfaction
of his vividly excited inclination agonizingly difficult to achieve, in order
for him to merely drift towards his early death as a man. Immediately, his service for a princely
master was unbearable to him: he seeks
to make a living on the basis of the applause of the public-at-large, gives
concerts and “academies”, that which he gained in hast was immediately
sacrificed to his thirst for enjoyment of life. While Haydn’s princely master demanded ever-ready new
entertainment, Mozart had to, not to any lesser degree, provide something new every day in order to
attract the public, haste in the conceptualization and in the execution based
on his acquired routine becomes a main source of explanation for the character
of these works. Haydn wrote his truly
noble masterworks as an old man, in the enjoyment of a comfort that had also
been secured by his success abroad.
Mozart, however, never attained that state: his most beautiful works were written in a state between the
exuberance of the moment and the fear of the next hour. Thus, time and again, only a well-paying
position with a noble patron would be a prospect for him with regards to the
possibility of leading a life that would facilitate his artistic
production. What his emperor withholds
from him, a King of Prussia offes to him:
he remains faithful to “his” emperor and, in turn, ends in squalor.
If Beethoven had made his lifestyle choice on the basis of mere
reational decision-aming, this thus-arrived-at decision could not have guided
him any more securely than his having, in actuality, the naïve expression of
his inherent character. It is amazing
to see how everything was decided here by a strong natural instinct. It speaks quite clearly in Beethoven’s
shying-away from a life-tendency like that of Haydn. One look at the young Beethoven would also suffice, indeed, to
distract every noble or princely patron from thinking of hiring him as a
kapellmeister. More peculiarly, the
complexity of his character traits shows itself in his features, chracter
traits that saved him from falling prey to the same fate as Mozart. Quite like the latter, exposed to the world
without any possessions of his own, a world in which the beautiful is only
rewarded when it caters to enjoyment, in which, however, the sublime will not
receive any reciprocation in kind, Beethoven found himself immediately excluded
from it by his being unable to gain the world’s favor by means of mere
beauty. That beauty and softness had to
be synonymous to him, is immediately expressed in his physical constitution
with amazing clarity. The world of
appearances barely had access to him.
His almost sinisterly piercing eyes did not notice in the outside world
anything else but disturbances to his inner world, the fending-off of which
seemed to comprise his only rapport with it.
Thus tension becomes the main expression in his face, the tension of
resistance holds his nose, his mouth, in check, a tension that could never be
loosened in a smile, but only in enormous laughter. While there prevailed the physical axiom that such a highly
intellectual talent, such a great brain, should be closed in by a tenderly thin
skull, in order to quasi facilitate the immediate recognition of external
things, several years ago, on the occasion of an investigation of the remains
of Beethoven we could, to the contrary, observe that, in keeping with the
extraordinary strength of his entire bone structure, the skull was also of
unusual thickness and sturdiness. Thus,
nature protected his brain from an extreme delicacy so that it was capable of
only looking to the inside and that it could carry out a contemplation of the
world by a great heart in undisturbed calm.
What this terribly sturdy strength enclosed and contained was an inner
world of such glowing tenderness that it would have softly melted away it if
would have been exposed to the outside world without protection—like the
delicate genius of light and love of Mozart.
Now one should consider how such a being, locked into the world from
such a sturdy, protective shell! – Certainly, the inner affects of the will of
this human being could never determine his concept of the outside world; they
were too intense and too delicate at the same time in order from them to cling
to any of these outside appearances, which his look could only pass by in shy
haste and ultimately with the mistrust of the constant dissatisfaction. Here, nothing captivated him with that
fleeting misconception or illusion which Mozart could still summon from his
inner world after his enjoyment of outside distractions; a childish delight or
pleasure in the distractions of a lively big city could hardly touch Beethoven
since the impulses of his will were too strong in order for them to find the
least satisfaction in such superficial, lively goings-on. While, out of these strong impulses, his
tendency towards solitude took nourishment, then again the latter coincided
with his destiny for independence. An
admirably sure instinct guided him precisely in this and became his main
motivation for the displayed tendencies of his character. No capability for realization at the level
of his rreason could have guided him more clearly in this, than the irrefutable
tendency of his instinct. What guided
Spinoza’s consciousness or awareness to make a living as a glass polisher, what
filled our Schopenhauer with the inexplicable traits of his character that were
guided by his sorrow to ensure that he maintained his msall in heritance
undiminishedly, namely, ultimately with the realization that the truthfulness
and honesty of every philosophical investigation is seriously in danger by
dependence on any activity towards the necessary acquisition of money: the same strengthened Beethoven in his
resistance against the world, in his tendency towards solitude as well as in
his almost rough tendencies that he displayed in the carrying out of his
lifestyle choice.
In reality, Beethoven, too, had to earn a living by means of the profits
of his musical work. Since he was,
however, not enticed into developing
for himself comfortable surroundings and a general state of comfort, the
result of this was a lesser need for a quick, superficial working style as well
as a lesser need for making allowances for public taste that could only be
satisfied with the “leasing”. The more
he thus lost his connection to the outside world, the clearer his focus was
directed towards his inner world. The
more confident he feels in the management of his inner wealth, the more
consciously he makes his demands to the outside world and actually asks his
patrons that they no longer merely pay him for his actually completed work, but
rather that they make it possible for him that he can work, for himself without
any considerations of the outside world.
This truly happened here, for the first time in the life of a musician
that a few well-disposed nobles obligated themselves to keep Beethoven
independent in the manner that he demanded.
At a similar turning point in his life, Mozart, exhausted too soon, had
perished. The great and fortunate act,
even if not uninterruptedly and undiminished, nevertheless, laid the foundation
for the peculiar harmony that unfolded in the master’s peculiar life. He felt himself as a victor and knew that he
would only have to belong to the world as a free man. This world had to put up with him as he was. He treated his noble patrons like a despot,
and nothing could be had from him than that towards which he was inclined at
any given moment and to any given extent.
However, he was never inclined towards anything but that which
captivated him now: the play of a
magician with the creations of his inner world, since the outer world became
entirely dark for him now, not because blindness robbed him of the sight of it,
but because deafness finally kept it from his ears. The ear had still been the only organ through which the world
reached and disturbed him; for his eyes, it had long been dead. What did the delighted dreamer see when he
walked through the hustle and bustle of the streets of Vienna and stared ahead
with open eyes, only alive through the presence of the inner world of his
tones?—The development and progression of his loss of hearing pained him
terribly and evoked in him a melancholy; with respect to his completed, in
particular with respect to his inability to listen to musical performances, we
do not learn of complaints of any extent from him, only his communication with
others became very difficult for him, which actually did not hold any
attraction for him, and which he evaded with an ever-increasing decisiveness.
A deaf musician! -- Can one
imagine a blind painter?
However, we know of a blind visionary.
Like Teiresias to whom the world of appearances was closed off now and
who, in turn, becomes aware of the essence of all appearance with his inner
eye—the deaf musician is like him, now, who, undisturbed from the noise of life
only listens to the harmonies of his innermost now, who speaks to this world
only from his depth, from now on, a world that has nothing to say to him,
anymore. Thus, the genius is freed from
any outside influences, totally resting in himself, by himself. He who would have seen Beethoven with the
“eyes” of Teiresias at that time, what miracle would have opened itself up to
him: a world that was walking, by
itself, among human beings: the ‘world
as such’ as a walking human being!—
And now, the musician’s eye began to light up from inside. Now he also turned his eye on that
appearance that, illumined by his inner light, in turn, again communicated with
his innermost in wonderful reflex. Now,
again only the essence of things speaks to him and shows him those in the calm
light of beauty. Now he understands the
forest, the brook, the meadow, the blue ether, the cheerful crowd, the loving
couple, the singing of the birds, the drifting of the clouds, the raging of the
storm, the delight of blissfully moved calm.
There, all of his vision and creativity is filled with a wonderful
serenity that only came into its own in music through him. Even the wailing, so intensely innate to all
sounds, is calmed down to a smile: the
world regains its childlike innocence.
“You shall be in paradise with me, today!”—who would not hear this word
of the saviour when he is listening to the “Pastoral Symphony”?
Now, his creative force of the incomprehensible, never-seen,
never-experienced is growing which, however, through it, turns into the most
immediate experience of visible comprehension.
His joy of exercising this force turns into humour: all pain of existence breaks away in this
incredible pleasure of his play with it, the world-creator Brahma laughs about
himself since he realizes his own self-deception; his re-gained innocence
jestingly plays with the sting of redeemed guilt, freed conscience teases
itself with its overcome pain.
Never has art created something as delightful and serene for this world
as these symphonies in A major and F major, with all those so closely related
works of the master from this divine period of his complete deafness. The effect of these on the listener is this
very liberation from all guilt, as much as the after-effect is the feeling of
the knowledge of a lost paradise, with which we return to the world of
appearances. Thus, these wonderful
works preach remorse and repentance in the deepest sense of a divine
revelation.
Here alone can be applied the concept of the sublime: since, after all, the effect of the serene,
immediately goes far beyond all satisfaction through beauty. Every stubbornness of reason that is proud
of its own realization immediately breaks up before the magic of the
overwhelming force of our entire nature; realization flees with the confession
of its error, and the incredible joy of this confession is that out of which we
rejoice from the bottom of our souls, regardless of how serious the completely
captivated countenance of the listener reveals to us his amazement in the face
of this true world.—
What of the human nature of this world-removed genius could be retained
for the contemplation of this world?
What could the eye of the everyday person who would encounter him, still
discern in him? Certainly only causes
for misunderstandings, as much as he, himself, only communicated through
misunderstandings with this world, with respect to which he, due to his naïve
generosity, found himself in constant contradiction to and conflict with
himself, a conflict which could only again be resolved on the most sublime plain
of art, since, as far as his reason tried to understand the world, his mind and
his personality that was associated with it felt, at first, reassured by
optimistic views, in which he was raised in the enthusiastic humanistic
tendencies of the last century as a genrally accepted concept of the
bourgeois-religious world. Every
emotional doubt out of his own life experience that he encountered against the
veracity of these tendencies, he fought against with ostensible documentation
of basic religious maxims. His
innermost told him: love is God, and
thus he decreed: God is Love. Only what touched those dogmas emphatically
out of the works of our poets, received his applause; while Faust always
strongly fascinated him, Klopstock and many a shallower troubadour of humanity
actually appeared particularly venerable to him. His morality was of the strictest bourgeois exclusiveness; a
frivolous mood had him fume with anger.
Certainly, in this way, he did not offer even to the most considerate
contact any trace of wit, and Goethe, in his conversations with him, in spite
of Beetina’s soulful fantasies, must have had a difficult time with him. However, in the same manner as he, without
any demands for luxury, anxiously watched his income with an intensity bordering
on miserliness, the surest instinct is expressed in his religious morality,
through the strength of which he preserved his most noble (possession), the
freedom of his genius, against the enslaving influence of the outside world.
He lived in Vienna and only knew Vienna: that says enough.
The Austrian who, after the eradication of every trace of German
Protestantism, was raised and educated in the school of Romanic Jesuits, had,
himself, lost the right accent for his language which was presented to him now,
like the classical names of the antique world, only in an un-German, strange
pronunciation. German mind, German
names and customs were explained to him out of the textbooks of Spanish and
Italian origin; on the basis of a falsified history, a falsified science, a
falsified religion, a population that was, actually good-natured, serene and
cheerful, was educated to that scepticism that, since above all, was to
undermine the holding-on to the true, genuine and free, which had to show
itself as the actual frivolity.
This was actually the same spirit that had brought to the only art from
that is practiced in Austria, the discussed training and, in actuality,
debasing tendency that we had already discussed previously and rendered our
opinion on. We saw how Beethoven saved
himself from this tendency due to the powerful inclination of his nature, and
now also recognize in him quite the same strengths and forces that are at work
at saving him from a frivolous outlook on life and on the development of his
mind. Having been baptized in the
Catholic faith, through this attitude, there lived in him the entire spirit of
German Protestantism. And this spirit
also guided him again as artist on that
path, on which he would meet the only companion in his art before whom he would
bough reverently, whom he could integrate into his own nature as the revelation
of the deepest secret. While Haydn is
considered to have been the teacher of the young artist, the great Sebastian
Bach was the guide of the powerfully unfolding artistry of Beethoven as a man.
Bach’s miraculous oeuvre became to him the Bible of his faith; in it, he
read and forgot over it the world of sound that he no longer perceived,
now. There it was written, the clue to
the puzzle of his innermost dream, that the poor Leipzig Cantor had once
written as eternal symbol of the new, other world. These were the same mysteriously intertwined lines with which, to
the great Albrecht Dürer, the secret of the world and its figures that are
illuminated by light was revealed, the book of magic of the necromancer who
lets the light of macrocosm shine over microcosm. What only the eye of the German mind can see, only its ear could
hear, what drove it, out of listening to its innermost, to the unavoidable
protestation against all outer traits forced upon it, Beethoven now read clear
and distinctly recognizable in his most sacred book and—was a saint, himself. –
However, how could this saint, again, behave towards his own sanctity,
for life, since he was certainly enlightened “to pronounce the most profound
wisdom, but in a language that his reason did not understand”? Did not his contact with the world have to
only express the state of him who had awoken out of the deepest sleep who is
desperately trying to remember his blissful dream? We may assume a similar state to be prevalent in the religious
saint when he, driven by the dire needs of life, turns again towards performing
those tasks of ordinary life: it is
just that he takes up the dire needs of life distinctly as his chastisement and
punishment for his own sinful existence and, in his patient suffering through
them, enthusiastically sees his means for redemption, while the other holy
visionary considers the meaning of this chastisement as a pain and bears the
guilt of his existence merely as a suffering individual. The error of the optimist is now taking
revenge by the increase of these sufferings and by his sensitivity towards
them. Every insensitivity that he
encounters, every trace of selfishness or hardness that he perceives again and
again, outrages him as an incomprehensible debasement of the original goodness of man that he is holding on to in his
beliefs religiously. Thus he constantly
falls out of the paradise of his inner harmony into the hell of the terribly
disharmonious existence, which he ultimately also only knows how to
harmoniously dissolve as an artist.
If we want to let the image of a day in the life of our saint pass by
before our eyes, then one of those miraculous tone works of the master, itself,
might provide us the best mirror image for this, whereby we, in order not to
deceive ourselves, only have to constantly hold on to the procedure with which
we analogously applied to art the phenomenon of the dream, yet, did not
identify it with it. Thus I choose, in
order to really bring to life such a true Beethovenish day ot of its innermost
processes, the great quartet in C-sharp minor which would hardly be possible
while listening to it, since we, then, would instantly be forced to let go
every distinct comparison in order to only perceive the immediate revelation of
another world; however, this becomes possible to a certain extent if we only
call this tonal work back to us from our memories. Even here, I have to leave it up to the fantasy of the reader
alone to fill this image with life in its closer particulars, wherefore I shall
only rely on a very general outline, here.
The longer introductory Adagio, probably the most melancholy
musical statement that has ever been made, I want to compare with the awakening
in the morning of this day “which, during its long course, shall not fulfill
one wish, not even one!” Yet, at the
same time, it is a prayer of repentance, a consulting with God in the belief in
the eternally good. -- Here, the
inward-directed eye only sees the comforting appearance that is recognizable to
it (Allegro 6/8), in which the yearning turns into the sadly delightful
play with itself; the innermost dream image comes to life in a most lovely
memory. And now it is as if (with the
transitional, short Allegro moderato, the master, aware of his artistry,
prepares for his magical task; the re-livened strength of this magic of his
own, he now exercises (Andante 2/4) in his drawing the image of a
delicate figure in order to delight himself with it incessantly in a blissful
witnessing of the deepest innocence in a constantly new, incredible
metamorphosis, by means of the refractions of the eternal light that he sheds
on it.
We believe to see this profoundly self-delighted artist to direct his
delighted gaze towards the outside world (Presto 2/2): there, it is
standing before him, again, like in the Pastoral Symphony; everything is
illumined by his inner happiness; it is as if he is listening to the inherent
sound of the appearances that move before him merrily and also roughly, in
rhythmic dance. He observes life and
appears to consider (short Adagio ¾) how he could begin to play his own
dance tune to this life: a brief, yet
serious pondering as if he was retreating into the deppest dream of his soul. Again, one glance has shown him the world’s
innermost: now, he awakens and plucks
the strings for a dance tune such as the world has never heard, before (Allegro,
finale). That is the dance of the
world, itself: wild longing, painful
wailing and moaning, love’s delight, highest bliss, agony, raging, lust and
suffering, lighting, flashes, thunders roll, and above it all that incredible
musician who forces and contains everything, proud and secure, from whirl to
whirl, towards the abyss:--he smiles about himself, since this magic-making was
only a game to him, after all.—Thus, night beckons to him. His day’s work is done.—
It is not possible to hold on to the human being Beethoven for any
contemplation without immediately referring to the wonderful musician
Beethoven, again.
We saw that his instinctive life tendency coincided with the
emancipatory tendency of his art, how he, himself, could not be a servant of
luxury, thus also his music had to be freed of all characteristics of
subordination to a frivolous taste.
How, moreover, his religiously optimistic belief went hand in hand with
an instinctive tendency towards the expansion of the sphere of his art, of this
we have evidence of the most sublime naivete in his Ninth Symphony with
its choral ending, the genesis of which we have to examine more closely here,
in order to make clear to ourselves the miraculous cross-connections and
interrelationships between the described basic tendencies of the nature of our
saint.—
The same urge that guided Beethoven’s realization of reason towards
constructing for himself the good human being led him to the creation of
the melody of this good human being.
To this melody, which had lost its innocence in the course of its being
used by professional art musicians, he wanted to return this purest
innocence. One just call to one’s mind
the Italian opera melody of the last century in order to realize what entirely
servile creature that catered to the fashion of the day and its purposes this
peculiarly empty tone phenomenon was: through it and its applcation, this very
music had been debased to such an extent, that the lustful taste always
demanded something new of it, since yesterday’s melody was unbearable to listen
to today. At first, however, also our
instrumental music lived off this melody,
the use of which for the not in the least noble societal purposes we
already mentioned above.
Here, it was Haydn who soon resorted to the rough and endearing folk
dance tune which he derived, often easily recognizable, from Hungarian peasant
dances; with this, he remained in a lower sphere that was determined by its
local character. Out of which sphere
should this natural melody be taken, however, if it was to attain a nobler,
eternal character? After all, this
Haydnesque peasant dance tune fascinated more as a spicy peculiarity than as a
purely human art type that could retain validity for all times. These melodies could, however, hardly be
derived from the higher spheres of our society, since at these heights, there
ruled the distortingly refined, richly ornamented melody of the opera singer
and ballet dancer that was burdened with every guilt. Beethoven, too, took Haydn’s path, only, he no longer used the
folk dance tune for entertainment at a princely dining table; rather, he played
it in an ideal sense to the people, themselves. Here it is a Scottish, there a Russian, elsewhere an old French
folk tune in which he recognized the dreamed-up nobility of innocence and at
the feet of which he reverently laid his entire art. However, with a Hungarian peasant dance (in the final movement of
his Symphony in A major), he played for all of nature so that, whoever would be
able to dance to it, would have to believe that a new planet is being born
before his very eyes, in whirlwind fashion.
However, the aim was to find the archetype of innocence, the ideal “good
human being” of his faith in order to wed it to his “God is Love”. One might almost think that one already sees
the master on this path in his “Sinfonia eroica”: the incredibly simple theme of its last movement which he also
used elsewhere in other variations, appeared to have been intended to serve him
as a basic structure for this, however, what he develops here in form of an
enchanting melos still belongs too much to the peculiar Cantabile that
he developed and expanded out of Mozart’s sentimental cantabile, in order for
it to be considered an achievement in the sense as we just described it.—A more
distinct trace of it can be heard in the joyful final movement of his C minor
Symphony where the so simple march tune, almost only based on tonica and
dominant, in the natural scale of the horns and trumpets, speaks to us all the
more through its naivete, so that the preceding symphony now appears to us like
a suspenseful preparation for it, just like the clouds that are moved by storm
here, by soft winds there, and out of which now break forth sun’s mighty rays.
At the same time (here, we interject this apparent digression from the main
topic as being of importance in its relationship to the object of our
investigation), this C minor Sympony also fascinates us as one of the rarer
conceptions of the master, in which painfully excited passion, as the basic
mood at the outset of the word, swings itself up on the ladder of consolation,
of elevation, to the outbreak of victorious joy. Here, the lyrical pathos almost steps onto the soil of ideal
dramatics in a more definite sense, and, as it would appear doubtful as to
whether, along this path, the musical conception would not already be spoilt in
its purity since it would have to mislead us to the calling-up of concepts that
would , as such, appear alien to the spirit of music, it can, on the other
hand, not be denied that the master was not guided by a straying aesthetical
speculation, but merely by an altogether ideal instinct that arose out of
music, itself. This coincided, as we
had shown at the outset of this last investigation, with his striving to
perhaps save or re-gain, for man’s consiousness/awareness, faith in the
original goodness of human nature against all objections of life experience
that would merely have to be attributed to illusions and appearance.
The master’s conceptions, nearly all of which have been created in a
spirit of most sublime serenity belonged, as we already saw here, predominantly
to the period of his blissful solitude which appeared to have removed him from
the world of suffering after the completion of his deafness. Perhaps we do not need to base the recurring
painful mood in certain particular conceptions of Beethoven on our assumption
that his serenity had left him, since we would be quite wrong if we wanted to
believe that the artist was capable of conceptualizing anything in any other
state than that of innermost serenity.
The mood that is expressed in that conception must therefore belong to
the idea of the world as such which the artist grasps and exemplifies in his
work of art. While we, after all,
assumed with certainty that the idea of the world reveals itself in music, then
the conceptualizing musician is, above all, also contained in this idea and
what he expresses is not his view of the world but the world itself in which
pain and joy, well-being and pain change.
Also the conscious doubt of the human being Beethoven was
contained in this world, and thus he speaks out of it immediately, not as an
object of reflection, when he, for example, expresses the world in a manner
such as in his Ninth Symphony, the first movement of which, indeed, shows us
the idea of the world in its most cruel light.
Undeniably, however, on the other hand, precisely in this work reigns
the deliberately organizing will of its creator, we encounter its expression
directly, when he calls out the really spoken word, the real meaning of which
is none other than “man is good, after all!”, to the raging of the despair that
returns after every attempt at placating it, just like to him who wakes up from
a frightening dream with a cry of fear.
From the outset, not only criticism, but also uninhibited observation
had taken offence at the master’s, so-to-say, suddenly “falling out of his
music”, his virtual stepping out of the magic circle that he had drawn in order
to appeal to a capability of imagination that is entirely different than that
of musical conception. In reality, this
outrageous artistic process is like the sudden awakening from a dream; at the
same time, however, we therefore sense the placating effect of it on him who
had been utterly frightened by this dream, since never before did a musician
allow his listeners allow to experience the pain of the world so cruelly and
endlessly. Thus it was really a
desperate leap with which the divinely-naïve master who was only filled with his
magic thus entered into the new world of light from the soil of which the long
searched-for, divinely-sweet, innocently-pure melody of humanity blossomed
towards him.
Also with his above-described organizing will, that led him to this
melody, we thus see the master constantly contained in music as the idea of the
world, since, in reality, it is not the meaning of the words that captures us
at the entrance of the human voice, but the character of this human voice,
itself. It is also not the thoughts
that Schiller expressed in his verses that captivate us from then on, but the
familiar sound of the chorus which we feel invited to join in order to—as it
actually happened in the great passion music works of S. Bach at the entrance
of the chorale, with the congregation’s actually participating in the
service. It is quite obvious that
Schiller’s words, particularly in the main melody, have been inserted with
little finesse, since, all by itself, carried only by the instruments, the
melody developed before us in full breadth at first, and has filled us there
with the nameless joy in the gained paradise.
Never has highest art brought forth something artistically simpler than
this tune, the child-like innocence of which fills us with holy shudders when
we, at first, perceive the theme in the most balanced whispering from the wind
instruments to the strings. Now, it
becomes the cantus firmus, the chorale of the new congregation, around
which, like around the sacred chorale of S. Bach, the added voices are grouped
contrapuntally: nothing is like this
blissful intensity with which every added voice fills this archetypical tune of
purest innocence up, until every adornment, every glory of heightened sensation
is unified around it and in it, like the breathing world and a finally
pronounced dogma of purest love.—
If we take a look at the art-historical progress that music has made
through Beethoven, then we can sum him up as the gaining of a capability which
one had to previously deny art: by
means of this capability, it has stepped far beyond the realm of the
aesthetically beautiful into the sphere of the truly sublime, in which it is
really freed from every constraint by traditional or conventional forms by
means of complete penetration and enlivenment of these forms with music’s very
own spirit. And this gain or
achievement shows itself immediately to every human mind by the character with
which the main form of all music, melody, has been endowed by Beethoven, as
which now, the highest natural simplicity has been regained as the source out
of which, at any time, and for every need, melody renews itself and nourishes
itself up to the highest, richest diversity.
And this we may summarize by one term that is understandable to all:
through Beethoven, melody has been emancipated from the influence of fashion
and changing tastes, and elevated to the eternally valid, pure human type. Beethoven’s music will be understood at any
time, in all eras, while the music of his predecessors will, to a large extent,
remain understandable only through the help of the medium of art-historical
reflection.—
However, also another progress will become evident along the path on
which Beethoven has achieved the decisive ennoblement of melody, namely the
significance which vocal music now receives in its relationship to
instrumental music.
This significance was alien to the previous mixed vocal and instrumental
music, which we heretofore mainly found in sacred musical works, we may, at
first, without hesitation, consider a debased vocal music, inasmuch as here,
the orchestra is only used as fortification or also as accompaniment to the
singing voices. The sacred compositions
of the great S. Bach can only be understood by considering the chorus, only
that here, it is already treated with the freedom and flexibility of the
instrumental orchestra, which automatically and naturally resulted in the
inclusion of it for fortification and support.
Nest to this combination we find, in the course of an ever-increasing
demise of the spirit of sacred music, the inclusion of Italian operatic vocal music
with orchestra accompaniment in the styles that were in favour at any given
time. It was left up to Beethoven’s
genius to use this artificial complex that was formed out of these
combinations, purely in the sense of an orchestra of heightened capability. In his great Missa Solemnis, we have
before us a purely symphonic work of the purest Beethovenian spirit. Here, the human voices are, quite in this
spirit, treated like human instruments, a role which Schopenhauer quite
correctly wanted to have solely ascribed to them: the inserted text, particularly in these sacred works, is not
considered from its literal meaning; rather, it serves, in the sense of a
musical work of art, only as material for the voices and, due to this, does not
act as a distraction to our musically-oriented perception, since it does not
stimulate any concepts of reason in us, but rather, as this is also caused by
its church character, touches us only with the impression of well-known
formulas of faith.
Through the experience that music loses nothing of its character when
different texts are used with it, on the other hand, the relationship of music
to poetry becomes clearer as an entirely illusory one: after all, it is confirmed that, when it is
sung to music, not the poetical thought which, in choral pieces, will not even
be heard in clear articulation, but, at the most, that of it will be perceived
what it stimulated in the musician as music, to music. A unification of music and poetry must
therefore, necessarily, lead to a putting into a lower place of the latter so
that it is, again, amazing when we see that our great German poets pondered or
even challenged the problem of unification of both art forms. In this, they ware apparently guided by the
effect of music in opera: and, indeed, only here appeared to be an area in
which this had to lead to a solution of the problem. While the expectations of our poets might have been related, on
the one hand, to the formal balance of its structure, on the other hand, more
to the deep emotional stimulation of music, it always remains evident that they
could only think of using the powerful support offered here, in order to
furnish the poetic intention with both a more precise and deeper-reaching
expression. They might have thought
that music would be able to gladly perform this service for them if they were
to provide it with a seriously meant poetic conception instead of a trivial
opera subject and text. What always
prevented them from pursuing serious attempts in this direction might have been
an unclear, yet correctly guided doubt as to whether poetry as such will still
be paid attention to in its connection with music. By carefully considering this it could not escape them that, in
opera, next to music, only the scenic procedure, but not the explanatory
thought process behind it, will captivate the attention, and that opera
actually only attracts either one’s hearing or one’s viewing
interest. That there could not be
gained a perfect aesthetic satisfaction for either the one or the other
receptive capability, is obviously explained by what I already referred to
above, namely that opera music did not put listeners into the attentive mood
that was singularly adequate for music in which vision is depotentialized to
such a degree that they eye no longer perceives objects with the usual
intensity, contrary to which we just had to find that we here, only
superficially touched by music, are more agitated by it than filled with it,
now also demand to see something—however, not in the least, anything to think
about, since, for this, we were—due to the interaction between these two
demands for entertainment, as a consequence of a distraction that was actually
only fighting boredom—robbed of this capability.
With the above considerations and deliberations, we have become familiar
enough with Beethoven’s specific nature, in order to immediately understand the
master with respect to his behaviour and attitude towards opera when he most
decidedly refused to ever compose an opera the libretto of which was based on a
frivolous tendency. Ballet, stage
spectacles, fire works, lustful love intrigues—to write music to that, he
refused with disdain. His music should
be able to totally penetrate an entire, nobly passionate plot. What poet would have been able to lend him a
hand in this? A once-started attempt
brought him in contact with a dramatic situation that did, at least, not have
anything frivolous about it, and above that, really suited the master’s guiding
humanitarian dogma well with its glorification of womanly virtue and faith. And
yet, this opera subject also entailed so much that was alien to music and could
not easily be assimilated with it so that, actually, only the great Leonore
overture really makes it clear how Beethoven wanted this drama to be
understood. Who will listen to this
captivating tonal work without becoming convinced that the music also contained
within it the most perfect drama?
What else but an almost stubborn weakening of the drama experienced in
the overture is the text of the opera “Leonore”, just as, for example, a boring
explanatory comment by Gervinus on a scene by Shakespeare?
This perception that forces itself onto every feeling, however, can
become a completely clear realization to us when we go back to the philosophical
explanation of music, itself.
Music that does not depict the ideas that are contained in the
appearance of the world but rather is itself, and, at that, a comprehensive
idea of the world, includes drama as a matter of course, since drama, again,
itself, expresses the only idea of the world that is adequate to music. Drama surpasses the boundaries of poetry
quite in that manner as music those of every other (art form), in particular
those of fine art in that its effect lies solely in the sublime. As (much as) drama does not describe human
characters but rather lets them directly portray themselves, in the same
manner, music, in its motives, presents to us the character of all appearances
of the world as to their innermost “as such” (per se). The movement, arrangement and change(s) of
these motives are not only, analogously, solely related to drama; rather, drama
that presents the idea can, in reality only be completely and clearly
understood through these thus-moving, forming and changing motives. Therefore, we should not be wrong if we
wanted to recognize in music the “aprioristic” capability of man for the
creation of drama, as such. As we
construct for ourselves the world of appearances through the application of the
laws of space and time, which are “aprioristically” pre-formed in our brains,
this again conscious presentation of the idea of the world in drama would,
gain, be pre-formed by those inner laws of music which make themselves known as
unconsciously in the dramatic writer as those also unconsciously applied laws
of causality for the apperception of the world of appearances.
The sensing of this was, after all, what captured our great German
poets, and, perhaps they also expressed in this hunch, at the same time, the
mysterious reason of the inexplicability of Shakespeare that prevails,
otherwise. This incredible dramatic
writer could really not be understood by any analogy or comparison with any
other poet, due to which any aesthetic judgment with respect to him has
remained without any basis, to this date.
His dramas appear as such an immediate image of the world that its
artistic conveyance by means of the presentation of the idea can not be
perceived and particularly not critically proven, due to which they, as
products of a super-human genius, are received with amazement and thus, to our
great poets, almost in the same manner as natural laws, became their course of
study for the finding of the laws of their production.
How far Shakespeare was at his own level, far above the actual poet,
expresses itself in the incredible truth of very trait of his character
depictions, strikingly enough, every ofeten, when the poet as, for example, in
the scene of the argument between Brutus and Cassius (in “Julius Cesar”) is
almost treated like something trivial, contrary to which we meet the actual
“poet” Shakespeare mowhere else than in the very character of the persons that
move before us in his dramas.—Therefore, Shakespeare remained completely
incomparable until the German genius brought forth a being that can only be
explained in an analogous comparison to him, in Beethoven.—Let us sum up the
complex of the world of Shakespeare’s characters with the incredible clarity of
the dramatis personae contained
in them and touching each other, in an overall impression on our innermost
sensations and feelings, and let us hold next to this the same complex of the
world of Beethoven’s motives with their irrefutable clarity and certainty, then
we must realize that one of these worlds is completely identical with the
other, even though they certainly appear to be moving in two different
spheres.
In order to make this concept easy for us to understand, we call to our
minds the example of the Coriolan overture in which Beethoven and
Shakespeare treat the same subject. Let
us recollect our memory of the impression that the figure of Coriolan made on
us in Shakespeare’s drama, and let us, of the details of the complicated plot,
only call to our minds that which should remain impressive to us with respect
to its being related to the main character, so that we, out of the confusion,
see the figure of the defiant Coriolan in his conflict with his innermost voice
emerge, which, again, speaks more impressive and luder to his pride out of his
own mother, and let us only hold on to his overcoming of his pride through that
voice, to the breaking of the defiance of a nature that was over-abundantly
endowed with strength, as dramatic development. For his drama, Beethoven only chooses these two main motives,
which lets us sense the inner essence of these two characters with greater
certainty than any explanation by means of concepts. Now, let us follow attentively the motion that develops out of
this only confrontation of these motives that only belongs to its own musical
character and let, again, only the purely musical detail that includes the
nuances, interrelationships, tangents, moving-apart and accelerations of these
motives, impress upon us, and thereby, at the same time, we follow a drama
which, in its peculiar expression, contains all that captivated us in the stage
drama as a complicated plot and frictions(s) of also its minor character. What moved us there as an immediately
presented course of action that we almost experienced directly, ourselves, we
grasp here as the innermost core of this plot or course of action, since there,
it was determined by the characters that impressed us like natural forces as
here, we are impressed by the motives of the musician that work in the
characters and are identical with them as to their innermost essence, only that
in that sphere, those and in this sphere, these laws of expansion
and movement prevail.
When we called music the revelation of the innermost dream image of the
essence of the world, then we should consider Shakespeare as the Beethoven who
continues his dream in an awake state.
What keeps their spheres apart are the formal pre0considitons of the
laws of apperception that work in them.
According to this, the most perfect form of art would have to be formed
at that borderline at which those laws can touch each other. What makes Shakespeare as incomprehensible
and as incomparable as he his is that the forms of drama that still determined
the plays of the great Calderon with a conventional stiffness as veritable
artist’s works, have been filled with so much life that they appear to be
completely removed from nature to us; no longer do we believe to see
artificially formed, but rather real human beings before us, whereas they, on
the other hand, also appear so miraculously distant from us that we have to
consider an actual, real contact with them as impossible as if we had ghostly
apparitions before us.—When Beethoven now is completely equal to Shakespeare in
his behaviour towards the formal laws of his art and in the liberating
penetration of the same, then we should hope to be able to describe the
hinted-at borderline and transition point between those mentioned spheres most
clearly when we, once again, summon our philosopher as our immediate guidance,
and that in such a manner that we return to the aim of his hypothetical dream
theory, the explanation of the ghostly appearances.
Here, the essential point would, at first, not be the metaphysical but
rather, the physiological explanation of the so-called “second vision”. There, the dream organ was considered as
working in that part of the brain that is, analogously, stimulated by the
impressions that are occupying the activity of the organism during the
deep-sleep phase of the individual, as the now completely resting, outward-directed
part of the brain that is directly connected to the sensory organs by
impressions received from the outer world, received in the awake state of the
individual. The dram message that has
been conceptualized by this inner organ could only be transmitted by a second
dram that immediately preceded the individual’s awakening, which would only
convey the true content of the first dream, in allegorical form, since here, in
the prepared and finally occurring complete awakening of the brain, towards the
outside, the forms of realization of the world of appearances as to time and
space had to be applied, already, and that, thus, an image that is certainly
related to general life experiences, had to be constructed.—Now we compared the
work of the musician to the vision of the clairvoyant somnambulist, as the
immediate image of his innermost dram of truth viewed by him and now, in his
excited state of clairvoyance, turned to the outside, and found the channel to
this, his communication and conveyance, on the path of the development and
formation of the world of tones.—To this phenomenon of somnambulistic
clairvoyance that is attracted physiologically here, we now hold the other
phenomenon of ghostly visions and apparitions and, in this, we use again
Schopenhauer’s hypothetical explanation according to which this is supposed to
be a clairvoyance that occurs in the awakened state of the brain, namely in
such a manner that this occurs on account of a depotentialization of one’s
clear vision of the awakened state, the now clouded or veiled state of which
the inner drive uses for the conveyance and communication to the awareness and
consciousness that is right next to the awakened state in order to clearly
present to it the form that had appeared to it in its innermost dream of
truth. The form that has thus been
projected from the innermost to the eye does, in no way, belong to the real
world of appearances, and yet, to him who perceives this ghostly vision or
form, it is alive with all the characteristics of a real being. Next to this extraordinary and only seldom
occurring projecting of the image that is only viewed by him, we now hold the
of Shakespeare in order to explain the latter to ourselves as the ghost-seer
and conjurer who knows how to project the images of human beings of all times
out of his innermost contemplation before his own and our awakened eyes so that
they really appear to be alive to us.
As soon as we take hold of this analogy with all of its consequences to
the fullest, we may desribe Beethoven, whom we compared to the clairvoyant
somnambulist, as the working “underground” or basis of the ghost-seeing
Shakespeare: what Beethoven’s melody
brings forth also projects the Shakespearean ghost images, and together, they
will move on to expressing the same essence if we let the musician, in his
stepping into the world of sound, also step into the world of light. This would happen analogously to that
physical process which, on the one hand, becomes the basis for the ability to
see ghostly images and, on the other hand, brings forth somnambulistic
clairvoyance and of which it has to be assumed that an inner stimulation
penetrates the brain in a reverse manner that the outer impression does in the
awakened state, thus from the inside to the outside, where it ultimately meets
and determines respectively influences the sensual organs to perceive that on
the outside which has come forth as object from the inside. However, now we confirm the irrefutable fact
that, in the concentrated listening to music, vision is depotentialized in such
a manner that it would no longer perceive objects intensively: thus, this would
be the state that has been stimulated by the innermost dream world that made
possible the appearance of ghostly visions and apparitions due to the depotentializing
of vision.
We can apply this hypothetical explanation of an otherwise inexplicable
physiological process from the most varying sides to the explanation of the
artistic problem that lies before us now in order to arrive at the same result. The ghostly apparitions of Shakespeare would
be turned into sound by the complete awakening of the inner musical organ, or
also: Beethoven’s motives would spurn
the de-potentialized vision on to the clear perception of those apparitions in
the form of which these now move before our clairvoyant eyes. In the one as well as in the other of the
actually identical cases, the incredible force that moved here against the
order of the laws of nature in the described manner of the formation of the
appearance from the inside to the outside, would have to be brought forth out
of a deepest need, and this need would probably be the same that, in ordinary
life, brings forth the cry of fear out of the beleaguered dream vision of him
who just awakens from deep sleep, only that here, in the extraordinary,
incredible case of the formation of the life of mankind’s genius, this need
leads to the awakening in a new world of the brightest realization and the
highest capability that can only be unveiled through this awakening.
However, we experience this awakening in the peculiar transition from
instrumental to vocal music that has remained so objectionable to common
aesthetical criticism, from the explanation of which we went out, in the
discussion of the Ninth Symphony as well as to this extensive
investigation. What we feel here is a
certain abundance, a being forced to an emptying-out towards the outside, quite
comparable to the urge after our awakening from a deeply frightening dream, and
the important factor for mankind’s enjoyment of art is that here, this urge
evoked an artistic act through which to this genius is led a new capability,
the capability of producing the highest form of art.
Of this work of art we have to assume that it must be the most
perfect drama, thus one that lies far beyond the actual art of
poetry. With respect to this we may
conclude that we recognized the identity of the Shakespearean and the
Beethovenian drama, of which we, on the other hand, have to assume that it is
related to “opera” in the same way as a play of Shakespeare is related to an
ordinary literary drama and a Beethovenian symphony to opera music.
That Beethoven, during the course of his Ninth Symphony, simply returns
to the formal choral cantata with orchestra, should not confuse us in our
evaluation of that peculiar transition from instrumental to vocal music; we
have evaluated the importance of this choral part of the symphony before and
have recognized it as belonging to music’s very won realm: in it lies, besides
an initially treated refinement of the melody, nothing formally outrageous for
us, it is a cantata with text to which the music enters into no other
relationship than to any other text for vocal music. We know that it is not the words of the poet, and be this
Goethe’s and Schiller’s words, that can determine music; drama alone can do
that, and, at that, not the dramatic poem, but the drama that really moves
before our eyes, where word and speech belong to the action alone, but no
longer to the poet’s thoughts or concepts.
Thus, not the work of Beethoven, but the incredible artistic act
of the musician that is contained in it, is what we have to note as the zenith
of the unfolding of his genius in that we declare that the work of art that is
inspired by this act would also have to offer the most perfect art form,
namely that form in which both for the drama and, especially also for music,
every conventionality would have to be eliminated. This would then, at the same time, also be the only art form that
would be entirely equivalent to the so strongly individualized German spirit
that has found expression in our great Beethoven and that has also been created
by him as a purely human and yet also very much his own new art form that has,
heretofore, been missing in our newer times as opposed to the antique world.
He who will be persuaded by the views that I expressed here, with
respect to Beethoven’s music, will not be spared from being considered a
fantastic and eccentric individual, and this criticism will not only be made of
him by today’s educated and uneducated musicians who have experienced the dream
image we referred to mostly only in form of Zettel’s dream in the
Midsummernight’s dream, but particularly also by our literary poets and even by
fine artists insofar as these are even concerned with questions that do not
touch their own spheres. However, it
should be easy for us to resolve to bear this criticism calmly, even if it is
made with disdain, nay even with a kind of disregard and disrespect, bordering
on insult, since we can understand that these (critics) can, at first, not see
what we have realized, whereas they, in the best of cases, can only realize as
much of its as should be necessary in order to explain to them their own
un-productivity, that they, however, shrug back from their realization, must,
on the other hand, not remain incomprehensible to us.
If we consider the character of our present literary and artistic scene,
then we discern a remarkable change that has taken place within one
generation. There does not only prevail
“hope” but a high degree of certainty that the great period of German re-birth
with its Goethe and Schiller, is viewed with a certain “well-tempered”
disregard. One generation ago, this was
quite different: that time professed to
be far more critical, called its “Zeitgeist” (spirit) to be quite “bookish” and
believed that it could accord even to fine arts a reproductive effect in the
combination and use of traditional forms that were devoid of any originality. We have to assume that in those days, one
saw things with more honesty and also expressed oneself more honestly than is
the case today. However, in those who,
in spite of the confident behaviour of our literates and literary creators and
other artists who share this official “Zeitgeist”, would share the views of the
past generation even today, we could hope to find more understanding if we want
to put the incorprable importance that music has gained for the development of
our art, into the right light, for which purpose we have to turn from a
predominant contemplation of the inner world as it was occasioned by our
investigation up to this point, to our considering the outer world in
which we live and under the pressure of which this inner essence empowered
itself to the acquisition of its own force that is reacting to the outside.
In order for us not to become trapped in the labyrinth of a widely-spun
net of cultural history, we immediately take note of a characteristic trait of
the spirit of our times.--
While German armed forces are advancing victoriously towards the center
of French civilization, suddenly, there arises here a feeling of shame with
respect to our dependency on this civilization and steps forward as a public
demand to take off or discard Parisian fashions. Thus, that which our sense of aesthetic propriety not only
suffered and tolerated for so long without any protest but which our public
opinion has also emulated hastily and eagerly finally appears objectionable to
our patriotic feeling. What did a
glance at our public life, indeed, tell the creative mind, a public life that,
on the one hand, only provided material for the cartoons of our satirical
appears while, on the other hand, our poets continued unperturbedly to
congratulate and praise the “German woman”?—We are of the opinion that no word
of enlightenment has to be said with respect to these peculiarly complicated
phenomena.—However, perhaps these can be seen as a passing evil: one could
expect that the blood of our sons, brothers and husbands, shed on the most murderous
battlefields of history for the most sublime ideas of the German mind, should
at least redden the cheeks of our daughters, sisters and wives with shame, and
suddenly, the most noble need would have to awaken their pride not to present
themselves to their men as the most ridiculous caricatures, any more. In honor of our German women we now also
want to gladly believe that they will be moved by noble motivations in this
respect, and yet, everybody will have had to laugh when he took note of the
initial requests put to them to adopt a new style of clothing. Who did not sense that this could only refer
to a new and presumably very clumsy kind of masquerade? After all, it is not a coincidental caprice
of our public life that we are subject to the rule of fashion, as much as it is
very well founded in the history of modern civilization that the whims of
Parisian taste dictate the laws of fashion.
In reality, French taste, i.e. the spirit of Paris and Versailles, has
been the only productive ferment of European education for two hundred years;
while the spirit of no other nation was capable of developing forms of art, the
French spirit, at least, produced the outer form of society and, to this day,
also fashion(s).
While these may be undignified phenomena, they do, at least, reflect the
French mind adequately, they express it as distinctly and as immediately
recognizable as the Italians of the Renaissance era, the ancient Romans and
Greeks, Egyptians and Assyrians expressed themselves in their forms of art;
through nothing do the French show us more clearly that they are the ruling
nation of today’s civilization than by the fact that our fantasy immediately
stumbles upon the ridiculous when we imagine (for ourselves) that we could
merely emancipate ourselves from them by emancipating ourselves from their
fashion(s). We immediately realize that
“German fashions” that we would hold up against French fashions would be
something utterly absurd and, since our feelings will again revolt against such
a supremacy, we have to ultimately realize that we are subject to a true curse
from which only a profound re-birth would save us. Our very essence and nature would, therefore, have to change to
such a degree that the concept of fashion itself would have to become
totally meaningless for the development and formation of our outer lives.
With respect to the question as to what this re-birth would have to be
comprised of, we can only draw the most careful conclusions after we will, first,
have investigated the reasons for the deep decline of the public taste in
art. Since the application of analogy
already guided us with some luck with respect to the main topic of our
investigations in the reaching of conclusions that would have been difficult to
arrive at, otherwise, we will again attempt to move into a seemingly remote
area of investigation en route which we might, at least, gain a rounding-off of
our views with respect to the plastic character of our public life.—
If we want to imagine a true paradise of productivity of the human mind
then we have to think ourselves back into the days before the invention of
writing and of its use in recordings on parchment and apper. We will have to find that here, all of
cultural life as such, was born that now is only preserved as an object of
reflection or of adequate application.
Here, poetry was nothing else but the invention of myths, i.e. of
ideal processes in which human life was reflected according to its varying
character with objective reflections.
We see this capability as having existed in every noble-minded people
until the use of writing reached these people.
From then on, its respective poetic power vanishes, its hitherto lively
development of its language in a natural process moves into the crystallization
process and becomes fixed, the art of poetry is transformed into the art of the
adornment and illustration of the old myths that no longer have to be invented
now and ends up as rhetoric and dialectics.—Now, let us consider the transition
from writing to printing. The precious,
hand-written book, the head of the family read to his family, to his guests;
now, however, everyone reads by themselves, for themselves, out of the printed
book, and the writer writes for the readers now. One has to call back to one’s mind the religious sects of the
reformation period, their disputes and their treatises and pamphlets in order
to gain insight into the raging of insanity that had taken hold of the minds of
the humans that became obsessed by letters and the printed word. One can assume that only Luther’s wonderful
chorale saved the healthy spirit of reformation since it shaped people’s
feelings and thereby healed the letter-sickness of the brain(s). However, at this time there was still an
opportunity for the genius of the people to communicate with the printers, no
matter how awkward and inadequate this conversation might have appeared to it;
however, with the invention of the newspapers, ever since the complete
development of journalism, this good spirit of the people had to retreat from
public life, entirely, since from then on, only opinions ruled, namely “public
opinions”; these can be had for money just like public whores: whoever keeps a
newspaper, had, next to the paper and the printed ink on it, also bought
himself an opinion; he does not have to think for himself, anymore, let alone
ponder or contemplate; on black and white, everything has been thought out for
him, already what he should think of God and the world. Thus also the Parisian fashion journal tells
the “German woman” how she should dress, since the Frenchman has completely
earned the right to tell us what we should think of such matters, since he has
elevated himself to the actual illustrator of our journal and newspaper world.
If we hold on to the transformation of the poetic world into a world of
journalism next to that transformation that the world has experienced with
respect to form and colour, we look at an identical result.
Who would be as presumptuous as stating of himself that he would really
be capable of gaining or having gained a realistic idea of the greatness and
divinely sublime character of the plastic world of ancient Greece? Every glance at a single fragment of its
preserved remnants lets us sense with awe that we stand before a life here for
the judgment of which we can not even find the least kind of an approach. That world has earned itself the privilege
of teaching us how the remainder of earthly life could be somewhat bearably
designed, even out of its fragments and remnants, for all times. We have to thank the great Italians
for having put new life into this lseeon by nobly guiding it over into our
newer world. This highly talented
nation that is so richly endowed with fantasy we see being completely consumed
by its passionate fostering and preservation of this classical ideal; after a
wonderful century it steps out of history like in a dream which is now taken
hold of by an apparently related people by mistake as if it wanted to see what
could be extracted out of it with respect to form and colour. A clever statesman and Prince of the church
tried to inoculate the French mind with Italian art and education, after
the Protestant spirit had been completely eradicated in this nation; it had
seen its noblest heads roll and what was spared from the “bloody wedding of
Paris” was finally carefully burnt out, down to its last roots. With the rest of the nation, one proceeded
in an “artistic” manner now; however, since it was lacking or robbed of every
fantasy, productivity never wanted to show itself and they literally remained
incapable of crating even one work of art.
What turned out better was the attempt of turning the Frenchman into an
artificial human being, himself; the artistic imagination that his fantasy
could not be enriched with could be turned into an artificial presentation of
man, himself. This could even be
considered “antique”, namely when one assumed that man as such has to be an
artist, himself, before he would bring forth works of art. If now an adored, gallant King set the right
example with his incredibly delicate posture in each and everything, then it
was easy to bring the entire nation to the acceptance of gallant manners on the
descending climax via the courtiers, in the observance and practice of which
the Frenchman, once they had become second nature to him, could deign himself
justified to elevate himself above the Renaissance Italian insofar as the
latter had only created works of art while, to the contrary, the Frenchman had become
a work of art, himself.
One can say that the Frenchman is the product of a special art of
expressing himself, of moving and of dressing.
His law for this is “taste”—a word that has been directed towards an
intellectual tendency from the lowest sensual function, and with this taste, he
tastes himself, namely in the manner in which he has prepared himself, as a
tasty gravy. Undoubtedly he has
achieved virtuosity in this: he is
“modern” through and through, and when he presents himself in such a manner for
imitation, it is not his fault that he is imitated clumsily; contrary to which
it will always be c compliment to him that he is only original in that in which
others feel urged to imitate him.—Accordingly, this man is completely
“journal”, to him, fine arts as well as music are a subject of
“feuilleton”. The first he, as a
completely modern man, has arranged for himself in the same style as his
clothes in, which he purely goes by the craving for novelty, i.e. constant
change. In this, furniture is the main
aspect, to which the architect constructes the building surrounding it. The tendency according to which this
occurred was, at least up to the great revolution, still original in the sense
that it adapted itself to the character of the ruling class in the same manner
as the clothing to the bodies and the hairstyle to the heads of the same. Ever since, this tendency has seen a decline
insofar was the nobler classes shyly refrain from setting the tone in fashions
and has left the initiative to the broader segments of the population (here, we
are always looking at Paris). Here, the
so-called “demi-monde” with his fans has become the trendsetter: the Parisian lady seeks to make herself
attractive to her husband by imitating the customs and the style of the same,
since here, on the other hand, everything is at least as original in that sense
that customs and styles belong to each other and compliment each other. From this side, every influence over fine
art is given up, which ultimately became the domain of the art (fashion)
dealer, as quincaillerie and tapestry—almost like in the very beginnings of the
nomadic people. The only source of
information that is available to fashion in its constant desire for the new—since
it can not produce anything really new, itself—is the change between
extremes: it is truly this tendency
which our peculiarly advised fine artist adhere to in order to also bring forth
noble forms of art that have, of course, not been invented by them. Thus the antique, rococo, gothic and
renaissance take their turns, factories deliver Laokoon groups, Chinese
porcellaine, copies Raffaels and Murillos, Etrurian Vases, medieval tapestries,
to that “meubles a la Pompadour”, stucco forms a la Louis XIV, the architect
encloses all of this in a Florentime style and tops it with an Ariadne group.
Now, “modern” art also becomes a new principle for the aesthetic: its originality is its utter lack of
originality, and its immeasurable gain consists of the turnover of all styles
which now become recognizable to the most common perception and thus useable by
everybody.—However, also a new principle of humanity is attributed to it,
namely the democratization of taste in art.
They say that one should be hopeful with respect to this phenomenon for
the education of the population, since now, art and its products do not only
exist for the enjoyment by the privileged classes but even the lowest commoner
now has the opportunity to put on his mantelpiece the most noble art forms
right before his eyes, what even the beggar can still do by looking into the
store windows. In any event, one should
be satisfied with this, for how could, after all, since everything lies before
us now in confusion, even the most talented mind still invent a new style for
fine arts as well as for literature; this would have to be almost impossible
and unfathomable.--
This verdict we have to completely agree with, since we are faced here
with a result of history of the same consequence as with that of our
civilization, as such. It would be
conceivable that these consequences would fade out, namely in the decline of
our civilization; what could approximately be expected if all of history would
be turned upside down, as this would, for example, lie in the consequences of
social communism if it would take hold of the world in form of a practical
religion. In any event, with respect to
our civilization, we have arrived at the end of all true productivity with
respect to plastic form and would do well to get used to not expect anything,
anymore, that would be like that in which the antique world served us as
unattainable ideal, contrary to which we would have to be satisfied with the
sometimes even apparently amazing achievements of modern civilization, and that
with the same awareness with which we must now recognize the creation of a new
German “fashion” for us, particularly for our women, as a futile attempt at
reacting to the spirit of our civilization.
After all, as far as we can see, fashion rules us.—
However, in addition to these fashions,
a new world has opened itself up for us.
As under the Roman universal civilization, Christianity emerged, thus,
music now breaks out of the chaos of modern civilization. Both tell us: “Our kingdom is not of this world.” That actually means: we
come from within, you from without, we are derived from the essence, you from
the appearance of things.
Everyone experience for himself how the entire modern world which to his
despair surrounds him like an impenetrable wall from all sides, suddenly vanishes
into thin air before him as soon as he only hears a few measures of one of
those divine symphonies. How would it
be possible, in a concert hall of our time (in which, however, Turks and Zuaves
would feel comfortable) to listen to this music with some attention and
devotion if, to our optical perception—as we already discussed this phenomenon
above—the visible environment would not vanish by becoming imperceptible? This, however, is, considered in the most
serious sense, the same effect of music on our entire modern civilization;
music eradicates it, just like daylight makes lamplight superfluous.--
It is difficult to imagine in what manner music has always exercised its
special power over the world of appearances.
And we would have to think that the music of the ancient Greeks
penetrated the world of appearances thoroughly and virtually melted into the
laws of its appearance. The figures of
Pythagoras can surely only be actually understood on the basis of music; the
architect built according to the laws of eurythmics, the sculptor formed the
human shape according to the laws of harmony, the rules of melody turned the
poet into a singer, and out of the chorus, the drama projected itself onto the
stage. Everywhere, we see that only the
inner law that has to be understood out of the spirit of music determines the
outer law that constitutes the forming law of the visible: the truly antique Dorian State that Plato
wanted to develop as a concept out of philosophy, even the order of war, of
battle, were guided by the laws of music with the same certainty as dance.—This
paradise was lost, however: the
original source of the motion of a world dried up. It moved like the ball moves after it has received a push, in the
whirl of radial motion; however, no driving force dwelled in it, anymore, and
thus this motion had to finally come to an end, until the soul of the world
would be newly discovered.
It was the spirit of Christianity that brought new life to the soul of
music. It transformed the eye of the
Italian painter and inspired his power of vision, so that he could, through the
appearance of things, arrive at the
soul of Christianity in an otherwise declining spirit of the church. Almost all of the great painters were also
musicians and it is the spirit of music that lets us—at the sight of their
saints and martyrs, forget that we are seeing here.—However, the rule of
fashion arrived: as much as the spirit
of the church fell prey to Jesuit chastisement, thus also fine arts and music
turned into something artificial without a soul. In our great Beethoven we could observe the wonderful process of
emancipation of the melody out of the bondage of fashion and can confirm that
he, due to his incomparable use of all of the material which his marvellous
predecessors cumbersomely wrested from the influence of fashion, returned to
melody its eternally valid form, to music itself, its immortal soul. With the divine naivete that was his alone,
our master put onto his victory the stamp of his full awareness of how he had
achieved this. In Schiller’s poem which
he puts at the basis of the wonderful last movement of his Ninth Symphony, he
recognized, above all, the joy of nature that was freed from the rule of
fashion. Let us look at the peculiar
meaning which he gives to the words of the poet:
“Deine Zauber binden wieder (thy magic re-unites)
Was die Mode streng geteilt
(what custom/fashion has strictly divided).”
As we already found, Beethoven merely added the words to the melody as a
text to be sung, in the sense of a general congruence of the character of the
poem and the spirit of the melody. That
which one understands by proper declamation, namely in a dramatic sense, he
left almost entirely disregarded: thus
he also lets the words “was die Mode streng geteilt (what custom/fashion has
strictly divided)” pass before us without particular emphasis during the
singing of the first three verses.
However, then, after an incredible heightening of the dithrambic
enthusiasm, he ultimately takes up these words of the verse with full dramatic
affect, and when he has them repeated in an almost angry unisono, the word
“streng (strict)” does not appear to be sufficient for the expression of his
rage. It is peculiar that this
epitheton arose only out of a later, milder version of the original text by the
poet who, in his first edition of his Ode to Joy still had this printed:
“Was der Mode Schwert geteilt (what custom’s/fashion’s sword has
divided).”
Now, this “sword” appeared to Beethoven not to be the right word,
either; it appeared to him, applied to custom/fashion to be too noble and too
heroic. Thus he replaced it by his own
deliberation with
“Was die Mode frech geteilt! (What custom/fashion has brazenly
divided!)”
(*In the otherwise so valuable complete Härtel edition of Beethoven’s
works, there has been crossed out by a member of the musical “Mäßigkeitsverein
(Temperance Society)” that has been characterized by me elsewhere and which
provided the “criticism” of this edition, on page 260 ff. of the score of the
Ninth Symphony this so characteristic passage, and for the “frech” (brazen) of
Schott’s original edition the morally strict “streng” has been inserted
deliverately. A coincidence had me
recently discover this falsification that, if we think about its motives, might
well serve to fill us with misgivings with respect to the fate of the works of
our great Beethoven if we would have to consider them falling prey to
progressively developing criticism.--)
Can anything be more telling than this peculiar artistic process that is
almost executed with great passion?
Here, we believe to see Luther before us in his anger against the
pope!--
It might certainly appear to us that our civilization, as far as it also
expressively forms the artistic individual, could only be given a new soul or
life out of the spirit of music, the music which Beethoven liberated from the
bondage of custom or fashion. And the
task of leading the civilization to the new religion by the penetration through
which it might, perhaps, become more soulful, can only be that of the German
mind which we, ourselves, only now learn to truly understand if we let go of
every false tendency that has been attributed to it.
How difficult, however, self-realization is, particularly for an entire
nation, we now experience, to our dismay, in our hitherto so powerful
neighbouring nation of France, and from this we may take a serious incentive
for our own self-investigation, whereby we, fortunately, only have to follow
the example of our great German poets whose basic striving, consciously as well
as unconsciously, was this self-investigation.
To them it had to appear questionable or doubtful how the so clumsy and
awkwardly formed German nature could hold its own to some success next to the
assured and easily-moving form of our neighbours of Romanic descent. Since, on the other hand, the German mind
had always been endowed with the undeniable advantage of its inherent
profundity and intensity of its grasping of the world and its appearances,
there always existed the question as to how this advantage could be guided into
the development of a national character and from there to a positive influence
on the spirit and the character of its neighbouring nations while, heretofore,
very recognisably, attempts at influences of this kind had always worked more
harmfully from there on us.
If we, now, correctly understand the two basic poetic designs that run
through the life of our greatest poet like main arteries, then we receive from
this the most excellent instruction for the evaluation of the problem that,
from the very outset of his incomparable career as a poet, presented itself to
this most liberated German.--
We know that the concepts of “Faust” and of “Wilhelm Meister” fell
entirely into the period of the first abundant blossoming of Goethe’s poetic
genius. The fervent nature of the
thoughts he was filled with led him, at first, to an execution of the first
beginnings of “Faust”; as if frightened by the magnitude of his own concept, he
turned from this gigantic project to the calming form of the evaluation of this
problem in “Wilhelm Meister”. In the
maturity of his years as a man he completed this easily-flowing novel. His hero is the German son of a bourgeois in
search of the secure and pleasing form who is led, via the theatre and the
world of nobility, inito an existence of a useful citizen of the world; he is
endowed with a genius that he only understands superficially; almost in the
same manner as Goethe, at that time, understood music, “Mignon” is recognized
by Wilhelm Meister. The poet lets us
become aware of the fact that an outrageous crime is committed on “Mignon”;
however, he leads his hero beyond the same emotional perception in order to
know hum securely arrived in a sphere of beautiful education that is free from
all intensity and tragic eccentricity.
He has him look at paintings in a gallery. Music is played on the occasion of Mignon’s death, and Robert
Schumann has actually composed it later.—It appears that Schiller was outraged
by the last book of “Wilhelm Meister”, and yet, he could hot help his friend
out of his peculiar aberration, particularly since he had to assume that Goethe
who had just written Mignon and brought to life a wonderful new world with this
creation, would have fallen into a deep distraction out of which his friend
would not be able to awaken him. Only
Goethe, himself, could awaken himself out of it,--and he awoke: since, in his very old age, he completed his
“Faust”. Whatever had distracted him,
he now combined in an archetypical image of beauty: Helena herself, the entire, complete classical ideal is what he
brings to life out of the realm of shadows and weds her to his Faust. However, the shadow can not be held onto, it
vanishes like a beautiful, once-hovering cloud which Faust follows with
painless, thoughtful reflection. Only Gretchen
could save him: out of the world of the
blessed souls, the hand of her who had been sacrificed early, is extended to
him in whose memory she, nevertheless, remained in its deepest recesses. Nad if we, who have, in the course of our
investigation, used analogous comparisons from philosophy and physiology, many
now also try to bestow a certain interpretation for us upon the post profound
poetic work, then we understand by the “Alles Vergängliche ist nur eiin
Gleichnis (all that passes is only a metaphor)”, the spirit of fine art that
Goethe wanted to strive for predominantly for such a long time, by the “Das
ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan (the eternally feminine lifts us upward)”,
however, the spirit of music that lifted itself up from the poet’s innermost
awareness, that hovers now above him and lead him to the path of salvation.
And along this path out of the innermost experience is the path long
which the German mind has to lead its people if it wants to enrich the nations
as would be its destiny. May anyone
whom it pleases to do so scorn and ridicule us if we accredit this immeasurable
importance to music, and we will not let ourselves be perturbed by it as the German
people let themselves be perturbed when their enemies believed to be allowed to
insult them with respect to a well-calculated doubt as to their unanimous
capabilities. Our great poet also knew
this when he searched for comfort at the idea that to him, the Germans appeared
so soft-brained and inane in their bearing that they derived from their bad
imitation of manners and gestures that were alien to them, and this comfort
was: “The German is brave”. And that is something!--
Be the German people now also brave in peace, may they foster and
nurture their true worth and may they cast false appearances far away, may they
never want to appear as something that they are not and, on the contrary,
recognize in themselves that in which they are unique. The pleasing is denied to them; on the other
hand, their true poetry and actions are profound and sublime. And nothing can stand besides the victories
of their braveness of the year with more dignity than the memory of our great
Beethoven who had been born into the German people one hundred years ago. There, where our weapons are advancing now,
at the seat of the “freche Mode” (brazen fashion), his genius had already begun
the most noble act of conquering: what
our thinkers and our poets can only convey there with great difficulty and only
touch in an unclear manner with incomprehensible words, that had already been
evoked by Beethoven’s symphony from its innermost: the new religion, the world-redeeming gospel of the most sublime
innocence had already been understood there—as here.
Thus, let us celebrate the great reformer and way-shower in the
wilderness of the lost paradise! Let us
celebrate him with dignity, however—not with any less dignity than the
victories of German bravery: since he
who showers the world with his gifts of beauty still ranks above him who
conquers it!