immeasurable importance of this art-form would then consist herein: purged of the cramping element of narrower nationality, it would be a universally understandable form, accessible to every nation. Though as regards Literature the diversity of European tongues presents an obstacle, yet in Music, that language understandable by all the world alike, there would be supplied the great conforming force, which, resolving the language of abstractions into that of feelings, would transmute the inmost secret of the artist’s thought (Anschauung) into a universal message … .” [679W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 302]
[680W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 312-313]
[P. 312] {FEUER} “… in his diction the poet seeks to replace the abstract, conventional meaning of words by their original sensuous meaning, and through a rhythmic arrangement of his verse, as finally through the wellnigh musical adornment of rhyme, to ensure for his phrase an effect that shall take the Feeling captive and control it as if by a spell. In this tendency of the poet, essential to his very being, we see him arrive at last at the limit of his art-branch, where he comes already into immediate contact with Music; and thus that work of the poet’s must rank as the most excellent, which in its final consummation should become entirely music.I therefore believe I must term the ‘mythos’ the poet’s ideal Stuff – that native, nameless poem of the Folk, which throughout the ages we ever meet new-handled by the great poets of periods of consummate culture; for in it there almost vanishes the conventional form of man’s relations, merely explicable to abstract reason, to show instead the eternally intelligible, the purely human, but in just that inimitable concrete form which lends to every sterling myth an individual shape so swiftly cognisable. (…)
“… I plunged into an examination of the technical possibilities of such a Form, with the end-result [P. 313] that only the extraordinarily rich development – entirely unknown to former centuries – attained by Music in our times could bring about the baring of those possibilities.” [680W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 312-313]
[681W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 317-318]
[P. 317] {FEUER} {SCHOP} In this Symphony [Beethoven’s] instruments speak a language whereof [P. 318] the world at no previous time had any knowledge: for here, with a hitherto unknown persistence, the purely-musical Expression enchains the hearer in an inconceivably varied mesh of nuances; rouses his inmost being, to a degree unreachable by any other art; and in all its changefulness reveals an ordering principle so free and bold, that we can but deem it more forcible than any logic, yet without the laws of logic entering into it in the slightest – nay, rather, the reasoning march of Thought, with its track of causes and effects, here finds no sort of foothold. So that this Symphony must positively appear to us a revelation from another world; and in truth it opens out a scheme (Zusammen-hang) of the world’s phenomena quite different from the ordinary logical scheme, and whereof one foremost thing is undeniable: -- that it thrusts home with the most over-whelming conviction, and guides our Feeling with such a sureness that the logic-mongering Reason is completely routed and disarmed thereby.” [681W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 317-318]
