THE SUFFERING SON
I believe that artist often do not know what they can do best:
they are too vain. They are intent on something prouder than
these small plants seem to be which grow on their soil, new,
strange and beautiful, in real perfection.
What is ultimately good in their garden and
vineyard they esteem lightly, and their love and
insight are not equal. There is a musician who,
more than any other musician, is a master at finding
the tones in the realm of suffering,
depressed, and tortured soul,
at giving language even to mute misery.
None can equal him in the colors or late fall,
in the indescribably moving happiness of the last,
truly last, truly shortest joy; he knows a sound for those quiet,
disquieting midnights of the soul,
where cause and effect seem to be out of joint and where at
any moment something might originate "out of nothing."
He draws most happily of all out of the profoundest depth of
human happiness, and, as it were, out of its drained goblet,
where the bitterest and most repulsive drops have finally and
evilly run together with the sweetest,
He knows that weariness of the soul which drags itself,
unable to leap or fly and more, even to walk;
he masters the shy glance of concealed pain,
of understand without comfort, of the farewell without confession--
indeed, as the Orpheus of all secret misery he is greater than any;
and some things have been added to the realm of art by him alone,
things that has hitherto seemed inexpressible and even
unworthy of art --
the cynical rebellion, for example, of which only
those are capable who
suffer most bitterly; also some very minute and microscopic
aspects of the soul, as it were the scales of its amphibian nature:
indeed, he is the master of the very minute.
But he does not want to be that!
His character prefers large walls and audacious frescoes.
It escapes him that his spirit has a different taste and inclination --
the opposite perspective--and prefers to sit quietly in the nooks
of collapsed houses: there, hidden, hidden from himself,
he paints his real masterpieces, all of which are very short,
often only one beat long--only then does he become wholly good,
great, and perfect, perhaps there alone.
Wagner is one who has suffered deeply--
that is his distinction above other musicians.
I admire Wagner where he puts himself into music.
NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER
