The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms.
the art of bewildering others and himself. Thus he remained ignorant about
himself all his life; for there was, as Nietzsche rightly points out (p.
37, _note_), not sufficient pride in the man for him to desire to know or
to suffer gladly the truth concerning his real nature. As an actor his
ruling passion was vanity, but in his case it was correlated with a
semi-conscious knowledge of the fact that all was not right with him and
his art. It was this that caused him to suffer. His egomaniacal behaviour
and his almost Rousseauesque fear and suspicion of others were only the
external manifestations of his inner discrepancies. But, to repeat what I
have already said, these abnormal symptoms are not in the least
incompatible with Wagner’s music, they are rather its very cause, the root
from which it springs.
In reality, therefore, Wagner the man and Wagner the artist were
undoubtedly one, and constituted a splendid romanticist. His music as well
as his autobiography are proofs of his wonderful gifts in this direction.
His success in his time, as in ours, is due to the craving of the modern
world for actors, sorcerers, bewilderers and idealists who are able to
conceal the ill-health and the weakness that prevail, and who please by
intoxicating and exalting. But this being so, the world must not be
disappointed to find the hero of a preceding age explode in the next. It
must not be astonished to find a disparity between the hero’s private life
and his “elevating” art or romantic and idealistic gospel. As long as
people will admire heroic attitudes more than heroism, such
disillusionment is bound to be the price of their error. In a truly great
man, life-theory and life-practice, if seen from a sufficiently lofty
point of view, must and do always agree, in an actor, in a romanticist, in
an idealist, and in a Christian, there is always a yawning chasm between
the two, which, whatever well-meaning critics may do, cannot be bridged
posthumously by acrobatic feats _in psychologicis_.
Let anyone apply this point of view to Nietzsche’s life and theory. Let
anyone turn his life inside out, not only as he gives it to us in his
_Ecce Homo_, but as we find it related by all his biographers, friends and
foes alike, and what will be the result? Even if we ignore his works—the
blooms which blowed from time to time from his life—we absolutely cannot
deny the greatness of the man’s _private practice_, and if we fully
understand and appreciate the latter, we must be singularly deficient in
instinct and in _flair_ if we do not suspect that some of this greatness
is reflected in his life-task.
ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI
London, _July 1911_.
THE CASE OF WAGNER: A MUSICIAN’S PROBLEM
A LETTER FROM TURIN, MAY 1888
“RIDENDO DICERE SEVERUM.…”
Preface
I am writing this to relieve my mind. It is not malice alone which makes
me praise Bizet at the expense of Wagner in this essay. Amid a good deal
of jesting I wish to make one point clear which does not admit of levity.
To turn my back on Wagner was for me a piece of fate, to get to like
anything else whatever afterwards was for me a triumph. Nobody, perhaps,
had ever been more dangerously involved in Wagnerism, nobody had defended
himself more obstinately against it, nobody had ever been so overjoyed at
ridding himself of it. A long history!—Shall I give it a name?—If I were a
moralist, who knows what I might not call it! Perhaps a piece of
_self-mastery_.—But the philosopher does not like the moralist, neither
does he like high-falutin’ words.…
What is the first and last thing that a philosopher demands of himself? To
overcome his age in himself, to become “timeless.” With what then does the
philosopher have the greatest fight? With all that in him which makes him
the child of his time. Very well then! I am just as much a child of my age
as Wagner—_i.e._, I am a decadent. The only difference is that I
recognised the fact, that I struggled against it. The philosopher in me
struggled against it.
My greatest preoccupation hitherto has been the problem of _decadence_,
and I had reasons for this. “Good and evil” form only a playful
subdivision of this problem. If one has trained one’s eye to detect the
symptoms of decline, one also understands morality,—one understands what
lies concealed beneath its holiest names and tables of values: _e.g._,
_impoverished_ life, the will to nonentity, great exhaustion. Morality
_denies_ life.… In order to undertake such a mission I was obliged to
exercise self-discipline:—I had to side against all that was morbid in
myself including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including the whole of
modern _humanity_.—A profound estrangement, coldness and soberness towards
all that belongs to my age, all that was contemporary: and as the highest
wish, Zarathustra’s eye, an eye which surveys the whole
phenomenon—mankind—from an enormous distance,—which looks down upon
it.—For such a goal—what sacrifice would not have been worth while? What
“self-mastery”! What “self-denial”!
The greatest event of my life took the form of a _recovery_. Wagner
belongs only to my diseases.
Not that I wish to appear ungrateful to this disease. If in this essay I
support the proposition that Wagner is _harmful_, I none the less wish to
point out unto whom, in spite of all, he is indispensable—to the
philosopher. Anyone else may perhaps be able to get on without Wagner: but
the philosopher is not free to pass him by. The philosopher must be the
evil conscience of his age,—but to this end he must be possessed of its
best knowledge. And what better guide, or more thoroughly efficient
revealer of the soul, could be found for the labyrinth of the modern
spirit than Wagner? Through Wagner modernity speaks her most intimate
language: it conceals neither its good nor its evil: it has thrown off all
shame. And, conversely, one has almost calculated the whole of the value
of modernity once one is clear concerning what is good and evil in Wagner.
I can perfectly well understand a musician of to-day who says: “I hate
Wagner but I can endure no other music.” But I should also understand a
philosopher who said, “Wagner is modernity in concentrated form.” There is
no help for it, we must first be Wagnerites.…
1.
Yesterday—would you believe it?—I heard _Bizet’s_ masterpiece for the
twentieth time. Once more I attended with the same gentle reverence; once
again I did not run away. This triumph over my impatience surprises me.
How such a work completes one! Through it one almost becomes a
“masterpiece” oneself—And, as a matter of fact, each time I heard _Carmen_
it seemed to me that I was more of a philosopher, a better philosopher
than at other times: I became so forbearing, so happy, so Indian, so
_settled_.… To sit for five hours: the first step to holiness!—May I be
allowed to say that Bizet’s orchestration is the only one that I can
endure now? That other orchestration which is all the rage at present—the
Wagnerian—is brutal, artificial and “unsophisticated” withal, hence its
appeal to all the three senses of the modern soul at once. How terribly
Wagnerian orchestration affects me! I call it the _Sirocco_. A
disagreeable sweat breaks out all over me. All my fine weather vanishes.
Bizet’s music seems to me perfect. It comes forward lightly, gracefully,
stylishly. It is lovable, it does not sweat. “All that is good is easy,
everything divine runs with light feet”: this is the first principle of my
æsthetics. This music is wicked, refined, fatalistic, and withal remains
popular,—it possesses the refinement of a race, not of an individual. It
is rich. It is definite. It builds, organises, completes, and in this
sense it stands as a contrast to the polypus in music, to “endless
melody”. Have more painful, more tragic accents ever been heard on the
stage before? And how are they obtained? Without grimaces! Without
counterfeiting of any kind! Free from the _lie_ of the grand style!—In
short: this music assumes that the listener is intelligent even as a
musician,—thereby it is the opposite of Wagner, who, apart from everything
else, was in any case the most _ill-mannered_ genius on earth (Wagner
takes us as if … , he repeats a thing so often that we become
desperate,—that we ultimately believe it).
And once more: I become a better man when Bizet speaks to me. Also a
better musician, a better _listener_. Is it in any way possible to listen
better?—I even burrow behind this music with my ears. I hear its very
cause. I seem to assist at its birth. I tremble before the dangers which
this daring music runs, I am enraptured over those happy accidents for
which even Bizet himself may not be responsible.—And, strange to say, at
bottom I do not give it a thought, or am not aware how much thought I
really do give it. For quite other ideas are running through my head the
while.… Has any one ever observed that music _emancipates_ the spirit?
gives wings to thought? and that the more one becomes a musician the more
one is also a philosopher? The grey sky of abstraction seems thrilled by
flashes of lightning; the light is strong enough to reveal all the details
of things; to enable one to grapple with problems; and the world is
surveyed as if from a mountain top—With this I have defined philosophical
pathos—And unexpectedly _answers_ drop into my lap, a small hailstorm of
ice and wisdom, of problems _solved_. Where am I? Bizet makes me
productive. Everything that is good makes me productive. I have gratitude
for nothing else, nor have I any other touchstone for testing what is
good.
2.
Bizet’s work also saves; Wagner is not the only “Saviour.” With it one
bids farewell to the _damp_ north and to all the fog of the Wagnerian
ideal. Even the action in itself delivers us from these things. From
Merimée it has this logic even in passion, from him it has the direct
line, _inexorable_ necessity, but what it has above all else is that which
belongs to sub-tropical zones—that dryness of atmosphere, that
_limpidezza_ of the air. Here in every respect the climate is altered.
Here another kind of sensuality, another kind of sensitiveness and another
kind of cheerfulness make their appeal. This music is gay, but not in a
French or German way. Its gaiety is African; fate hangs over it, its
happiness is short, sudden, without reprieve. I envy Bizet for having had
the courage of this sensitiveness, which hitherto in the cultured music of
Europe has found no means of expression,—of this southern, tawny, sunburnt
sensitiveness.… What a joy the golden afternoon of its happiness is to us!
When we look out, with this music in our minds, we wonder whether we have
ever seen the sea so _calm_. And how soothing is this Moorish dancing!
How, for once, even our insatiability gets sated by its lascivious
melancholy!—And finally love, love translated back into _Nature_! Not the
love of a “cultured girl!”—no Senta-sentimentality.(7) But love as fate,
as a fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel,—and precisely in this way
_Nature_! The love whose means is war, whose very essence is the _mortal
hatred_ between the sexes!—I know no case in which the tragic irony, which
constitutes the kernel of love, is expressed with such severity, or in so
terrible a formula, as in the last cry of Don José with which the work
ends:
“Yes, it is I who have killed her,
I—my adored Carmen!”
—Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare:
it distinguishes one work of art from among a thousand others. For, as a
rule, artists are no better than the rest of the world, they are even
worse—they _misunderstand_ love. Even Wagner misunderstood it. They
imagine that they are selfless in it because they appear to be seeking the