[779W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 96]
[P. 96] {FEUER} “ … he [Beethoven] is perpetually hurled from the paradise of his inner harmony to the hell of an existence filled with fearful discords, and only as artist can he finally resolve them into harmony.” [779W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 96]
[780W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 101]
[P. 101] {FEUER} “It has always been a stumbling-block, not only to Criticism, but to the ingenuous Feeling, to see the master here [in the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony] falling of a sudden out of Music, in a manner, as if stepping outside the magic circle he himself had drawn, and appealing to a mental faculty entirely distinct from that of musical conception. In truth this unprecedented stroke of art resembles nothing but the sudden waking from a dream, and we feel its comforting effect upon the tortured dreamer; for never had a musician led us through thetorment of the world so relentlessly and without end. So it was with a veritable leap of despair that the divinely naïve master, inspired by nothing save his magic, set foot on that new world of Light from out whose soil the long-sought godlike-sweet and guileless-human melody bloomed forth to greet him with its purity.” [780W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 101]
[781W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 104-105]
[P. 104] {SCHOP} {anti-FEUER} “ … the experience that a piece of music loses nothing of itscharacter even when the most diverse texts are laid beneath it, shows the relation of Music to Poetry to be a sheer illusion: for it transpires that in vocal music it is not the poetic thought one seizes – which in choral singing, in particular, one does not even get intelligibly articulated – but at most the mood that thought aroused in the musician when it moved him to music. The union of Music and Poetry must therefore always end in such a subordination of the latter that we can only wonder above all at our great German poets returning again and again to the problem, to say nothing of the attempt. (…) [P. 105] What continually held them back from serious attempts in this direction may have been a vague, but legitimate doubt whether Poetry would be noticed at all, as such, in its co-operation with Music. Upon careful consideration it cannot have escaped them that in Opera, beyond the music, only the scenic goings-on, but not the explanatory poetic thought, engrossed attention; that Opera, in fact, merely arrested hearing and sight in turn. That a perfect aesthetic satisfaction was not to be gained for either the one receptive faculty or the other, is fully accounted for by the circumstance noted above, namely that opera-music did not attune us to that devotional state (Andacht) – the only one in keeping with Music – in which vision is so far reduced in power that the eye no longer sees objects with the wonted intensity … .” [781W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 104-105]
[782W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 106-107]
[P. 106] “ … this opera-subject [Beethoven’s Fidelio] embraced so much that was foreign to Music and unassimilable, that in truth the great Overture to Leonora alone makes really plain to us how Beethoven would have the drama understood. Who can ever hear the thrilling tone-piece without being filled with the conviction that Music includes within itself the most consummate Drama? What is the
