245

The "good old" days are gone. In Mozart they sang themselves out: - how lucky we are that his rococo still speaks to us, that his "good society," his loving raptures, his childish delight in Chinese effects and curlicues, the civility in his heart, his desire for delicacy, lovers, dancers, those with blissful tears, his faith in the south can still appeal to some remnant in us! Alas, at some point it will be gone! - But who can doubt that the understanding of and taste for Beethoven will be gone even earlier! - He was, in fact, only the final chords of a stylistic transition, a break in style, and not, like Mozart, the final notes of a great centuries-long European taste.5 Beethoven is something that happens between an old crumbling soul which is constantly breaking up and a very young soul of the future which is constantly coming. In his music there lies that half light of eternal loss and of eternally indulgent hoping - that same light in which Europe was bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced around the freedom tree of revolution and finally almost worshipped before Napoleon. But how quickly now this very feeling fades. Nowadays how difficult it has already become to know this feeling - how foreign to our ears sounds the talk of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron, in whom collectively the same European fate found a way in words which it knew how to sing in Beethoven!6 What has come in German music since then belongs to the Romantic period, that is, historically considered, to an even shorter, even more fleeting, even more superficial movement than was that great interlude, that transition in Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon and to the arrival of democracy. There's Weber: but what are Freischutz and Oberon these days for us! Or Marschner's Hans Heiling and Vampyr! Or even Wagner's Tannhauser! That music has faded, even if it has not yet been forgotten.7 In addition, all this Romantic music was not sufficiently noble, not sufficiently musical, to justify itself anywhere other than in the theatre and in front of crowds. Right from the start it was second-rate music, of little interest among true musicians. The situation was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master, who won rapid admiration for his lighter, purer, and happier soul and then was forgotten just as quickly, as the lovely intermission in German music.8 But in the case of Robert Schumann, who took his work seriously and from the beginning was also taken seriously - he was the last one who founded a school - nowadays don't we count it as good luck, as a relief, and as a liberation that this very Schumann-style Romanticism has been overthrown? Schumann ran off into the "Saxon Switzerland" of his soul, half like Werther, half like Jean-Paul, but certainly nothing like Beethoven, certainly nothing like Byron! - the music of his Manfred is an error in judgment and a misunderstanding to the point of injustice.9 - Schumann with his taste, which was basically a petty taste (that is, a dangerous tendency, doubly dangerous among the Germans, toward quiet lyricism and a drunken intoxication of feeling), always going off to the side, shyly withdrawing himself and pulling back, a nobly tender soul, who wallowed in nothing but anonymous happiness and sorrow, from the start a sort of young maiden and noli me tangere [do not touch me]: this Schumann was already merely a German event in music, no longer something European, as Beethoven was, and, to an even greater extent, Mozart. With him German music was threatened by its greatest danger, the loss of the voice for the soul of Europe and its descent to something dealing merely with the fatherland.

5. Mozart: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791);
Beethoven: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827).
6. Freedom tree of revolution: a reference to the French Revolution (1789-1799);
Napoleon: Napoleon Bonaparte (I1769-1821) French general, ruler of France, and conqueror of much of Europe;
Rousseau: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), critic, philosopher and writer whose work influenced the French Revolution;
Schiller: Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), German poet, playwright, and philosopher;
Shelley: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), a major English poet in the Romantic era;
Byron: George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron) (1788-1824), English poet in the Romantic era, a leading international presence in European Romanticism.
7. Weber: Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber (1786-1826), German musician during the Romantic period;
Marschner: Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861), German composer of operas.
8. . . . Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) German composer in the early Romantic period.
9. . . . Robert Schumann (1810-1856) German composer and music critic.
Werther: Hero of a famous Romantic novel by Goethe. He commits suicide.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
Part VIII - Aphorism # 245

« Prev - Random - Next »