On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 4.5)

—So what do ascetic ideals mean? In the case of an artist, we know the answer immediately:—absolutely nothing! . . . Or they mean so many things, that they amount to nothing at all! . . . So let’s eliminate the artists right away. They do not stand independent of the world and against the world long enough for their evaluations and the changes in those evaluations to merit our interest for their own sake! They have in all ages been valets to a morality or philosophy or religion, quite apart from the fact that, often enough, they unfortunately have been the all-too-adaptable courtiers of groups of their followers and their patrons and flatterers with a fine nose for old or simply newly arriving powers. At the very least, they always need a means of protection, a support, an already established authority. The artists never stand for themselves—standing alone contravenes their deepest instincts. Hence, for example, “once the time had come” Richard Wagner took the philosopher Schopenhauer as his point man, as his protection. Who could have even imagined that he would have had the courage for an ascetic ideal without the support which Schopenhauer’s philosophy offered him, without the authority of Schopenhauer, which was becoming predominant in Europe in the 1870's? (And that’s not even considering whether in the new Germany it would have been generally possible to be an artist without the milk of a pious, imperially pious way of thinking).*—And with this we come to the more serious question: What does it mean when a real philosopher pays homage to the ascetic ideal, a truly independent spirit like Schopenhauer, a man and a knight with an bronze gaze, who is courageous to himself, who knows how to stand alone and does not first wait for a front man and hints from higher up?—Here let us consider right away the remarkable and for many sorts of people even fascinating position of Schopenhauer on art, for that was apparently the reason Richard Wagner first moved over to Schopenhauer (persuaded to do that, as we know, by a poet, by Herwegh). That shift was so great that it opened up a complete theoretical contrast between his earlier and his later aesthetic beliefs— between, for example, the earlier views expressed in “Opera and Drama” and the later views in the writings which he published from 1870 on. In particular, what is perhaps most surprising is that from this point on Wagner ruthlessly altered his judgment of the value and place of music itself. Why should it concern him that up to that point he had used music as a means, a medium, a “woman,” something which simply required a purpose, a man, in order to flourish—that is, drama! Suddenly he realized that with Schopenhauer’s theory and innovation he could do more in majorem musicae gloriam [for the greater glory of music]—that is, through the sovereignty of music, as Schopenhauer understood it: music set apart from all other arts, the inherently independent art, not, like the other arts, offering copies of phenomena, but rather the voice of the will itself speaking out directly from the “abyss” as its most authentic, most primordial, least derivative revelation. With this extraordinary increase in the value of music, as this seemed to grow out of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the musician himself also suddenly grew in value to an unheard of extent: from now on he would be an oracle, a priest, more than a priest, in fact, a kind of mouthpiece of the “essence” of things, a telephone from the world beyond—in future he didn’t speak only of music, this ventriloquist of God—he talked metaphysics. Is it any wonder that finally one day he spoke about ascetic ideals? .