[482W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 81]
[P. 81] [Speaking of Mozart, Wagner states that:] “Instinctively his music ennobled all the conventional stage-characters presented him … . In this way he was able to lift the characters of ‘Don Juan,’ for instance, into such a fulness of expression that a writer like Hoffmann could fall on the discovery of the deepest, most mysterious relations between them, relations of which neither poet nor musician had been ever really conscious.” [482W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 81]
[483W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 105-107]
[P. 105] {FEUER} “Christianity had choked the organic impulse of the Folk’s artistic life, its natural force of procreation: it had hacked into its flesh, and with dualistic scissors had played havoc with even its artistic organism.
[P. 106] {FEUER} With Beethoven, on the contrary, we perceive the natural thrust of Life, to breed Melody from out music’s inner Organism. In his weightiest works, he by no means posits Melody as something ready in advance, but in a measure lets it be born from Music’s organs before our very eyes; he [P. 107] inducts us into this act of bearing, inasmuch as he sets it before us in all its organic Necessity. But his most decisive message, at last given us by the master in his magnum opus, is the necessity he felt as Musician to throw himself into the arms of the Poet, in order to compass the act of begetting the true, the unfailingly real and redeeming Melody. To become a human being, Beethoven perforce must become an entire, i.e. a social (gemeinsamer) being, subjected to the generic conditionments of the manly and the womanly.” [483W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 105-107]
[484W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 109]
[P. 109] “Yet again, the new Form could only have been a genuine art-form, provided it showed itself as the explicit utterance of a specific musical Organism; but every musical organism is by its nature -- a womanly; it is merely a bearing, and not a begetting factor; the begetting-force lies clean outside it, and without fecundation by this force it positively cannot bear. – Here lies the whole secret of the barrenness of modern music.” [484W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 109]
[485W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 110]
[P. 110] {FEUER} “Beethoven but discloses to us here the inner organism of Absolute Music: his concern was, in a sense, to restore this organism from its mechanical state (diesen Organismus aus des Mechanik herzustellen), to vindicate its inner life, and to show it at its livingest in the very act of Bearing. But what he employed to fertilise this organism, was still the Absolute Melody; he thus put life into this organism only so far as he practised it in Bearing – so to say – and indeed, let it re-bear an already finished melody. Precisely through that process, however, he found himself driven on to supply this musical organism, now freshly quickened into bearing-power, with the fecundating seed as well; and this he took from the Poet’s power of begetting.” [485W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 110]
