Offenbach; trench music imbued with Voltaire's intellect, free, wanton, with a slight sardonic grin, but clear and intellectual almost to the point of banality (Offenbach never titivates), and free from the mignardise of morbid or blond-Viennese sensuality.
834.
If by artistic genius we understand the most consummate freedom within the law, divine ease, and facility in overcoming the greatest difficulties, then Offenbach has even more right to the title genius than Wagner has. Wagner is heavy and clumsy: nothing is more foreign to him than the moments of wanton perfection which this clown Offenbach achieves as many as five times, six times, in nearly every one of his buffooneries. But by genius we ought perhaps to understand something else.
835.
Concerning "music."—French, German, and Italian music. (Our most debased periods in a political sense are our most productive. The Slavs?)—The ballet, which is the outcome of excessive study of the history of strange civilisations, has become master of opera.—Stage music and musicians music.—It is an error to suppose that what Wagner composed was a. form: it was rather formlessness. The possibilities of dramatic construction have yet to be discovered.—Rhythm. "Expression" at all costs. Harlotry in instrumentation.—All honour to Heinrich Schütz; all honour to Mendelssohn: in them we find an element of Goethe, but nowhere else! (We also find another element of Goethe coming to blossom in Rahel; a third element in Heinrich Heine.)
836.
Descriptive music leaves reality to work its effects alone.... All these kinds of art are easier, and more easy to imitate; poorly gifted people have recourse to them. The appeal to the instincts; suggestive art.
837.
Concerning our modern music.—The decay of melody, like the decay of "ideas," and of the freedom of intellectual activity, is a piece of clumsiness and obtuseness, which is developing itself into new feats of daring and even into principles;—in the end man has only the principles of his gifts, or of his lack of gifts.
"Dramatic music"—nonsense! It is simply bad music.... "Feeling" and "passion" are merely substitutes when lofty intellectuality and the joy of it (e.g. Voltaire's) can no longer be attained. Expressed technically, feeling and "passion" are easier; they presuppose a much poorer kind of artist. The recourse to drama betrays that an artist is much more a master in tricky means than in genuine ones. To-day we have both dramatic painting and dramatic poetry, etc.