Thread 24807441

>One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. I contemplate the youthlets who have long been exposed to his infection. The first[Pg 41] relatively innocuous effect of it is the corruption of their taste. Wagner acts like chronic recourse to the bottle. He stultifies, he befouls the stomach. His specific effect: degeneration of the feeling for rhythm. What the Wagnerite calls rhythmical is what I call, to use a Greek metaphor, "stirring a swamp." Much more dangerous than all this, however, is the corruption of ideas. The youthlet becomes a moon-calf, an "idealist." He stands above science, and in this respect he has reached the master's heights. On the other hand, he assumes the airs of a philosopher; he writes for the Bayreuth Journal; he solves all problems in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Master. But the most ghastly thing of all is the deterioration of the nerves. Let any one wander through a large city at night, in all directions he will hear people doing violence to instruments with solemn rage and fury, a wild uproar breaks out at intervals. What is happening? It is the disciples of Wagner in the act of worshipping him.... Bayreuth is another word for a Hydro. A typical telegram from Bayreuth would read bereits bereut (I already repent). Wagner is bad for young men; he is fatal for women. What medically speaking is a female Wagnerite? It seems to me that a doctor could not be too serious in putting this alternative of conscience to young women: either one thing or the other. But they have already made their choice. You cannot serve two Masters when one of these is Wagner. Wagner redeemed woman; and in return woman built Bayreuth for him. Every sacrifice, every[Pg 42] surrender: there was nothing that they were not prepared to give him. Woman impoverishes herself in favour of the Master, she becomes quite touching, she stands naked before him. The female Wagnerite, the most attractive equivocality that exists to-day: she is the incarnation of Wagner's cause: his cause triumphs with her as its symbol.... Ah, this old robber! He robs our young men: he even robs our women as well, and drags them to his cell.... Ah, this old Minotaur! What has he not already cost us? Every year processions of the finest young men and maidens are led into his labyrinth that he may swallow them up, every year the whole of Europe cries out "Away to Crete! Away to Crete!" ...
He truthed out

>>24807441 (OP)
>youthlet
I now know how to piss off the young. Deliciously insulting.

>>24807441 (OP)
Nietzsche should have bern a novelist instead of a philosopher. His writing is always the most beautifully written non-arguments I have ever seen

>>24807461
Dostoevsky should have been playwright.

>>24807472
a* damn it

>>24807441 (OP)
You have to but admire where Nietzsche is coming from. He was the nigger who understood Wagner more than anyone in this world. Hence the best interpreter and ironically the greatest critic to his music. There wasn't a single Nietzsche critique that felt pale and sloppy. On point attacks with lethality.

Nevertheless, fuck Nietzsche.

>>24807562
Schoenberg was the best critic of Wagner. Nietzsche was too retarded to understand even the basics of music theory.

>>24807568
>Schoenberg

>>24807568
A musician can never be a critic of Wagner. It only has to be a philosopher. All musicians should drop on their knees and suck Wagner's golden haired cock.

>>24807576
I mean, Bernstein did say that he hated Wagner on his knees, if I recall correctly.

>Furtwängler contra Nietzsche

>It was in Nietzsche's nature that he could only be active in opposition to something. He stood against his era and held up the mirror to it; that was part of his attitude towards life. As long as it was to promote Wagner against rejection and dullness, as long as Wagner was not yet famous, Nietzsche was at his side and fought with him against the "educated" Germany. Then it became senseless. Then, after those highbrows also had swung over to Wagner, he had to keep fighting them on another level, even at the price of turning against the man he had previously esteemed.

>The last sentences of the "case of wagner" read: "The three demands to which I'm driven by my love of art: that the theater doesn't become master of the arts, that the actor does not become the seducer of the real, that music does not become an art of deception."
>With this definition, this hate-driven devil's advocate has done the best-aimed blow. Because by "exposing" Wagner as an actor - what in the eyes of Germans who easily think of theater as something suspicious, means no less than "Swindler" - he took from Wagner what every artist needs most of all, trust.
>Hereby Wagner is judged before all the world. He's never a poet, never a musician, never an artist of first rank. He was "theater" and nothing more, and therefore - and now the ring is closing - the typical decadent. Wagner is downright a school example of what decadence means in art.

>Nietzsche is himself guilty of every accusation that he bitterly throws at Wagner. He himself is the aphorist, who is unable or doesn't want to create something grand and coherent. He himself is the man of nuance, the relation, the finest and most fleeting associations, the rarest, delayed, most deep-seated sensations. And what concerns the will to effects - well, he really doesn't fall behind Wagnerians in this regard. His style proves this no less than his success which - to use his own words - tells against him as it tells against Wagner. Both are typical decadents but there's a difference. Wagner is, as it were, naive, believes in himself, doesn't know that he is decadent. But Nietzsche is more sincerely and truthfully - as he believes - conscious of it. Now a fact isn't overcome simply via diagnosis. I will not become healthier by knowing that I am sick. But this knowledge brings with it one thing: it makes me face myself differently. That's why it's so typical of the decadent that he cannot stand himself. Today that's all too often the reason for the preference of many people for ancient art from finished epochs - in music e.g. for the art of Mozart and Bach. You flee into the distance because you can't bear closeness; above all, you want to forget yourself and everything related to it, forget it as thoroughly as possible, just so as not to have to meet yourself. Where Nietzsche rages against Wagner, he rages against himself.

>>24808237
>Nietzsche has great art at hand when it comes to using it as a foil, as a contrast, because in and of itself his relationship to the great composers was rather loose. Certainly he was musical, as they say. He even composed. But he made little use of the "Great Ones" of music for himself. In his garrulous manner he by no means left us in the dark about this. He speaks of Bach and Beethoven without any sympathy or understanding. For him, Beethoven is a representative of the 18th century, and the best thing about him is his ability to "find the notes of late bliss in faded love". (I wonder which works by Beethoven he might have had in mind with this strange definition.) No, Nietzsche certainly didn't care much about the organic and architectonic in music. What affected him about the music was the color, the perfume, the nuance, the sensuality, everything that was morbid, fleeting, seductive. Significantly, he once said that for Chopin he would "like to give all the rest of the music". Of course for that, which was unique about Chopin - the perfume - not what connected him to the other great musicians. As a musician, Nietzsche remained in his later days what he was from the start: "Wagnerian". How could he not? With regard to the basic attitude to an art - something that belongs entirely to the subconscious of our nature - one cannot change in the course of life despite all other developments.

>He is sensitive to the small values, but not to the large ones; for the nuance, but not for the full, whole vitality where he encounters it. This is not only the case in music. As the greatest German lyric poet, he does not consider Goethe, not Hölderlin, but - Heinrich Heine. He values Roman stylists and Roman poets far more than the Greeks. His concepts of fine arts are downright pitiful. That does not prevent him from trying again and again more than anyone else to define, to justify art. But it is precisely this justification that reveals the true character of his understanding of art. He says: "Art is intoxication, it has to be. Art can only be born from the exuberance, from the greatest excess of a person." The artist as "Dionysicist" - that is his experience. Exuberance, intoxication, perfume, Chopin as he understands it - all of this is the effect of art, not art itself.

>Wagner as he understood him - that was once art for him. When this column wavers, everything falls down. When Wagner begins to be questionable for him, so does the artist in general; yes, behind the fact "art" in general, the same Nietzsche is now beginning to put a question mark, after having oriented his life and thought to this very art. The dualism of his being, this thorn in his own flesh, shows itself in a terrible way. With that, however, his position against Wagner becomes obsolete in itself. Nietzsche, however much it may appear to be the opposite, is not a qualified witness to speak against Wagner.

t. Furtwängler article/speech 1942

>>24808237
>>24808239
Trvthnvke from Furt-god

I read nietzsche for his writing and only half ass put together his philosophical ideas

>>24807441 (OP)
If you haven't listened to the entirety of Wagner's Ring Cycle you are a fake Nietzsche fan. He didn't want to deter people from listening to him anymore than he wanted people to stop reading Dante. As he makes clear in Ecce Homo, to critique someone or something is a sign of honour, to recognise an opponent is to place him on equal footing with oneself, and he devoted more time to writing about Wagner, good and bad, than to any other individual. Ironically their positions have reversed today, Wagner is an enormous trouble for the ordinary man to 'get into', if he knows about him at all, while Nietzsche is universally known and suffers from every kind of reduction and misunderstanding in pop-culture.

>How is the success of Wagner’s works to be explained?

>That success I explain to myself in this way: thanks to his exceptional position in having at his disposal the resources of a king, Wagner was able to command all the methods for counterfeiting art which have been developed by long usage, and, employing these methods with great ability, he produced a model work of counterfeit art. The reason why I have selected his work for my illustration is, that in no other counterfeit of art known to me are all the methods by which art is counterfeited—namely, borrowings, imitation, effects, and interestingness—so ably and powerfully united.

>From the subject, borrowed from antiquity, to the clouds and the risings of the sun and moon, Wagner, in this work, has made use of all that is considered poetical. We have here the sleeping beauty, and nymphs, and subterranean fires, and gnomes, and battles, and swords, and love, and incest, and a monster, and singing-birds: the whole arsenal of the poetical is brought into action.

>Moreover, everything is imitative: the decorations are imitated and the costumes are imitated. All is just as, according to the data supplied by archæology, they would have been in antiquity. The very sounds are imitative, for Wagner, who was not destitute of musical talent, invented just such sounds as imitate the strokes of a hammer, the hissing of molten iron, the singing of birds, etc.

>>24809301
>Furthermore, in this work everything is in the highest degree striking in its effects and in its peculiarities: its monsters, its magic fires, and its scenes under water; the darkness in which the audience sit, the invisibility of the orchestra, and the hitherto unemployed combinations of harmony.

>And besides, it is all interesting. The interest lies not only in the question who will kill whom, and who will marry whom, and who is whose son, and what will happen next?—the interest lies also in the relation of the music to the text. The rolling waves of the Rhine—now how is that to be expressed in music? An evil gnome appears—how is the music to express an evil gnome?—and how is it to express the sensuality of this gnome? How will bravery, fire, or apples be expressed in music? How are the leit-motive of the people speaking to be interwoven with the leit-motive of the people and objects about whom they speak? Besides, the music has a further interest. It diverges from all formerly accepted laws, and most unexpected and totally new modulations crop up (as is not only possible but even easy in music having no inner law of its being); the dissonances are new, and are allowed in a new way—and this, too, is interesting.

>And it is this poeticality, imitativeness, effectfulness, and interestingness which, thanks to the peculiarities of Wagner’s talent and to the advantageous position in which he was placed, are in these productions carried to the highest pitch of perfection, that so act on the spectator, hypnotising him as one would be hypnotised who should listen for several consecutive hours to the ravings of a maniac pronounced with great oratorical power.

>>24809301
>>24809303
If you agree with Tolstoy's criteria for evaluating art then you also have to throw Dante, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Aeschylus and many others in the garbage with him. Posting Tolstoy's opinions as if they're a serious critique is profoundly retarded, but that should have been obvious when Tolstoy hypothesizes in the first sentence that Wagner's success was due to the patronage of a king and not an inevitable development owing to the revolutionary nature of his art.

>>24809595
He liked Beethoven and Michelangelo just not all their works. He makes a good point about brain-spun works like Wagner's you gotta admit

>>24809930
>brain-spun works like Wagner's
Not at all, he fundamentally misunderstands Wagner's creative process and the effect of his art, because Tolstoy insisted on only seeing second-rate performances instead of going to Bayreuth when invited because he had already decided that there was no genuine unity of feeling in the Gesamtkunstwerk. This allowed him to critique the performance and point out the poorly painted backdrop, the soprano failing to act, the stilted conducting, in short the ridiculousness of a second-rate performance, as if it reflected Wagner's intentions. But in reality the Gesamtkunstwerk is no more unnatural or 'intellectual' a form than a singspiel by Mozart.