Part Eight

Peoples and Fatherlands

240

I heard once again for the first time Richard Wagner's Overture to the Meistersinger: it is a splendid, overloaded, difficult, and late art, which prides itself on the fact that, in order to understand it, one has to assume that two centuries of music is still vital. It is to the Germans' credit that such a pride did not make an error! What juices and forces, what seasons and heavenly strokes are intermingled here! It impresses us sometimes as old fashioned, sometimes as strange, dry, and too young; it is as arbitrary as it is conventionally grandiose, if not infrequently mischievous, still more frequently tough and coarse - it has fire and courage and, at the same time, the loose dun-coloured skin of fruits which become ripe too late. It streams out wide and full, and suddenly a moment of inexplicable hesitation, a gap, as it were, springs up between cause and effect, a pressure which makes us dream, almost a nightmare - but already the old stream of contentment is spreading and widening once more, the stream of contentment, of manifold contentment, of old and new happiness, which very much includes the happiness of the artist with himself, something he will not conceal, his amazed and happily shared knowledge of the mastery of the means he has used here, new and newly acquired artistic means, so far untried, as he seems to inform us. All in all, no beauty, nothing of the south, nothing of the fine southern brightness of heaven, nothing of grace, no dance, scarcely any will for logic, indeed a certain awkwardness that is even emphasized, as if the artist wanted to tell us, "That is part of my purpose," a ponderous drapery, something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonial, a shimmy of scholarly and reverend treasures and fine points; something German, in the best and worst senses of the word, something manifold, formless, and inexhaustible in the German way, a certain German power and spiritual excess, which has no fear of hiding under the refinements of decay - and which perhaps feels at its best only there, a truly authentic landmark of the German soul, young and obsolete both at the same time, over-rotten and still over-rich for the future. This kind of music expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow - but they still have no today.