“A grand man of action, paralyzed little by little by his incomparable analysis.” Nietzsche burned his brain away by a too strenuous analysis of life.
I can recommend to all Wagnerites Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner. It is bound to take the edge off their uncritical worship. But read it after the first study, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. It will also demonstrate that Wagner is great, and Wagnerism dangerous. Nietzsche saw with clear eyes the peril that threatens music because of the Wagnerian principles. We must never lose sight of the fact that with Wagner the drama almost always takes precedence. His deviation from his own theory was his artistic salvation. But there lies the danger in him for young composers. He is a man of the theatre. His music, divested of all the metaphysical verbiage heaped upon it by Wagner and Wagnerian critics, is music of the footlights. A great formalist he is; but it is Wagner’s form, not the form for orchestral writers. It is all well enough to say that the symphony has had its day; but its structure, despite numberless modifications, will survive as long as absolute music itself. And music pure and simple, for itself, undefiled by costumes, scenery, limelights, and vocal virtuosi, is the noblest music of all.
Nietzsche writes of Germany as “being arbitrarily stupefied by itself for nearly a thousand years.”
“Nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been more wickedly misused. Recently a third has been introduced, with which alone every refined and bold activity of intellect can be wiped out—music, our sluggish, ever more sluggish, German music. How much moody heaviness, lameness, humidity, and dressing-gown mood, how much beer is in German intelligence!” You may readily understand that this Nietzsche is a Slav. He is agile of temperament, his mind is a supple one; he loves the keen rapier thrusts, the glancing thrust of the Celt. He hates Germany. Was he a German? He is wholly Slavic at times, and yet what a contradictory man and how naïve his egotism! More feminine altogether than masculine was this febrile, capricious mind, and a hater of the Teuton, a race that is at once both fat and nervous.
Nietzsche is par excellence the thinker for the artistic. If Wagner was a painter, or a symphonist manqué, then Nietzsche was an artist manqué. His prose, swift, weighty, concentrated and brilliant, attracts readers who dislike his doctrines. One must read what he says in his Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher.
“Seneca, or the toreador of virtue.”
“Rousseau, or return to nature in impuris naturalibus.”
“Schiller, or the moral Trumpeter of Säckingen.”
“Dante, or the hyena poetising in tombs.”
“Kant, or cant, as an intelligent character.”