"Have you ever, at a musical rehearsal, looked at the strange, shrivelled-up, good-natured species of men who usually form the German orchestra? What changes and fluctuations we see in that capricious goddess 'form'! What noses and ears, what clumsy, danse macabre movements! Just imagine for a moment that you were deaf, and had never dreamed of the existence of sound or music, and that you were looking upon the orchestra as a company of actors, and trying to enjoy their performance as a drama and nothing more. Undisturbed by the idealising effect of the sound, you could never see enough of the stern, medieval, wood-cutting movement of this comical spectacle, this harmonious parody on the homo sapiens.
"Now, on the other hand, assume that your musical sense has returned, and that your ears are opened. Look at the honest conductor at the head of the orchestra performing his duties in a dull, spiritless fashion: you no longer think of the comical aspect of the whole scene, you listen—but it seems to you that the spirit of tediousness spreads out from the honest conductor over all his companions. Now you see only torpidity and flabbiness, you hear only the trivial, the rhythmically inaccurate, and the melodiously trite. You see the orchestra only as an indifferent, ill-humoured, and even wearisome crowd of players.
"But set a genius—a real genius—in the midst of this crowd; and you instantly perceive something almost incredible. It is as if this genius, in his lightning transmigration, had entered into these mechanical, lifeless bodies, and as if only one demoniacal eye gleamed forth out of them all. Now look and listen—you can never listen enough! When you again observe the orchestra, now loftily storming, now fervently wailing, when you notice the quick tightening of every muscle and the rhythmical necessity of every gesture, then you too will feel what a pre-established harmony there is between leader and followers, and how in the hierarchy of spirits everything impels us towards the establishment of a like organisation. You can divine from my simile what I would understand by a true educational institution, and why I am very far from recognising one in the present type of university."
[From a few MS. notes written down by Nietzsche in the spring and autumn of 1872, and still preserved in the Nietzsche Archives at Weimar, it is evident that he at one time intended to add a sixth and seventh lecture to the five just given. These notes, although included in the latest edition of Nietzsche's works, are utterly lacking in interest and continuity, being merely headings and sub-headings of sections in the proposed lectures. They do not, indeed, occupy more than two printed pages, and were deemed too fragmentary for translation in this edition.]
[9] The reader may be reminded that a German university student is subject to very few restrictions, and that much greater liberty is allowed him than is permitted to English students. Nietzsche did not approve of this extraordinary freedom, which, in his opinion, led to intellectual lawlessness.—TR.
[10] Hegel's.—TR.
[11] A German students' association, of liberal principles, founded for patriotic purposes at Jena in 1813.
[12] Weber set one or two of Körner's "Lyre and Sword" songs to music. The reader will remember that these lectures were delivered when Nietzsche was only in his twenty-eighth year. Like Goethe, he afterwards freed himself from all patriotic trammels and prejudices, and aimed at a general European culture. Luther, Schiller, Kant, Körner, and Weber did not continue to be the objects of his veneration for long, indeed, they were afterwards violently attacked by him, and the superficial student who speaks of inconsistency may be reminded of Nietzsche's phrase in stanza 12 of the epilogue to Beyond Good and Evil: "Nur wer sich wandelt, bleibt mit mir verwandt"; i.e. only the changing ones have anything in common with me.—TR.