[648W-{2/57} On Liszt’s Symphonic Poems: PW Vol. III, p. 238]
[P. 238] {FEUER} “No doubt you … noticed how chary I often was with words, and you surely held this for nothing but the hush of deep emotion? And such, at first, it really was; yet I must tell you, this hush of mine is now maintained with consciousness, through my having come to a more and more fixed conviction that the own-est essence of our thoughts [‘Anschauungen’; i.e. intuitive vision] is unconveyable in direct ratio as they gain in depth and compass and thus withdraw beyond the bounds of speech – of speech, which does not belong to our own real selves, but is given us second-hand to help our converse with an outer world that, at bottom, can only understand us clearly when we place our-selves entirely on the level of life’s vulgar needs. The more our thoughts depart from that level, the more laborious becomes the effort to express them: until at last the philosopher, at risk of being not understood at all, uses language merely in its inverse sense, or the artist takes refuge in the wondrous workshop of his art, quite useless for the life of everyday, to forge himself an expression of what even then – and in the best of cases – can be understood by none but those who already share with him his thought. Now Music is indisputably the fittest medium for the thought (Anschauung) that cannot be conveyed by Speech, and one well might call the inmost essence of all Beholding (Anschauung) Music.” [648W-{2/57} On Liszt’s Symphonic Poems: PW Vol. III, p. 238]
[649W-{2/57} On Liszt’s Symphonic Poems: PW Vol. III, p. 242-243]
[P. 242] {FEUER} “… the artist, without his knowing it, is always creating forms … . (…) [P. 243] … has anybody ever seen a sabre borne without a hilt? Does not its swift and steady slash bear witness, on the contrary, that it is mounted in a good strong hilt? No doubt, this hilt does not grow visible and tangible for others, until the sword has been laid down; when the master is dead and his weapon has been hung up in the armoury, at last one perceives the handle (Griff) too, and haply plucks it from the blade – as an abstraction (‘Begriff’) – yet can’t imagine that the next man who sallies forth to fight must necessarily bear his sword-blade also in a hilt.” [649W-{2/57} On Liszt’s Symphonic Poems: PW Vol. III, p. 242-243]
[650W-{2/57} On Liszt’s Symphonic Poems: PW Vol. III, p. 246-247]
[P. 246] {FEUER} {SCHOP} “Hear my creed: Music can never and in no possible alliance cease to be the highest, the redeeming art. It is of her nature, that what all the other arts but hint at, through her and in her becomes the most undoubtable of certainties, the most direct and definite of truths. Look at the very coarsest dance, listen to the vilest doggerel: its Music (if only she has taken it seriously, and not intentionally caricatured it) ennobles even that; for just by reason of her own peculiar earnestness, she is of so chaste and wonderful a nature that she transfigures everything she touches. But it is equally manifest, equally sure, that Music will only let herself be seen in forms erst borrowed from an aspect or utterance of Life, which, originally strangers to Music, obtain through her their deepest meaning as if through revelation of the [P. 247] music latent in them. Nothing is less absolute (as to its appearance in Life, of course) than Music, and the champions of an Absolute Music evidently don’t know what they’re talking about; to utterly confound them, one would only have to bid them show us a music without the form which it has borrowed from either bodily motion or spoken verse (as regards the causal connexion).” [650W-{2/57} On Liszt’s Symphonic Poems: PW Vol. III, p. 246-247]
