[486W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 111]
[P. 111] “Music is the bearing woman, the Poet the begetter; and Music had therefore reached the pinnacle of madness, when she wanted, not only to bear, but also to beget.
{FEUER} Music is a woman.” [486W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 111]
[487W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 111-112]
[P. 111] {FEUER} “The nature of Woman is love: but this love is a receiving (empfangende), and in receival (Empfangniss) an unreservedly surrendering, love.
{FEUER} Woman first gains her full individuality in the moment of surrender. She is the Undine who glides soulless through the waves of her native element, till she receives her soul through love of a man. The look of innocence in a woman’s eye is the endlessly pellucid mirror in which the man can only see the general faculty for love, till he is able to see in it the likeness of himself. When he has recognised himself therein, then also is the woman’s all-faculty condensed into one strenuous necessity, to love him with the all-dominant fervour of full surrender.
{FEUER] The true woman loves unconditionally, because she must. She has no choice, excepting where she does not love. But where she must love, there she experiences a vast constraint (Zwang), which withal develops for the first time her Will. This Will, which rebels against that constraint, is the first and mightiest stirring (Regung) of the individuality of the beloved object; and, taken up by sympathy into the woman, it is that individuality which has gifted her with Will and Individuality. This is the honourable pride (Stolz) of woman, a pride that comes solely from the force of the [P. 112] individuality that has won her and constrains her with all the exigence (Noth) of Love.” [487W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 111-112]
[488W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 112-113]
[P. 112] “Someone has very appropriately called the modern Italian opera-music a wanton. A courtesan may pride herself on always remaining her self; she never steps outside herself, never sacrifices herself but when she wishes for either pleasure or profit in return, and in this case she only offers to the joys of others that portion of her being which she can lightly enough dispose of, since it has become an object of her own caprice. In the embraces of a courtesan the Woman is never present, but only a portion of her physical organism: from love she reaps no individuality, but gives herself in general to the general world. Thus the wanton is an undeveloped, wasted woman: yet she at least fulfils the physical functions of the female sex, by which we can still – albeit with regret – detect the Woman in her.
French opera-music passes rightly for a coquette. The coquette adores to be admired, nay even loved: but her peculiar joy at being admired and loved she can only taste, providing she herself be snared by neither love nor [P. 113] nor admiration for the object she inspires with each. The profit she seeks is delight in herself, satisfaction of her vanity: the whole enjoyment of her life lies in being admired and loved; and this would be instantly disturbed, were she herself to feel either love or admiration for another. Were she in love, she would be robbed of her self-enjoyment; for in Love she must necessarily forget herself, and make surrender to the distressful, often suicidal enjoyment of another. From nothing, therefore, does the coquette so guard herself, as from Love, in order to preserve untouched the only thing she loves – to wit her Self … . Wherefore the coquette
