dramatic action of the librettist’s opera ‘Leonora’ but an almost repulsive watering of the drama we have lived through in its overture, a kind of tedious commentary by Gervinus on a scene of Shakespeare’s?
(…)
{SCHOP} {FEUER} Seeing that Music does not portray the Ideas inherent inthe world’s phenomena, but is itself an Idea of the World, and a comprehensive one, it naturally includes the Drama in itself; as Drama, again, expresses only the world’s idea proportionate (adaequat) to Music. Drama towers above the bounds of Poetry in exactly the same manner as Music above those of every other art, and especially of plastic art, through its effect residing solely in the Sublime. As a drama does not depict human characters, but lets them display their immediate selves, so a piece of music gives us in its motives the character of all the world’s appearances according to their inmost essence (An-sich). Not only are the movement, interchange and evolution of these motives analogous to nothing but the Drama, but a drama representing the [world’s] Idea can be understood with perfect clearness through nothing but those moving, evolving and alternating motives of Music’s. We consequently should not go far astray, if we defined Music as man’s qualification a priori for fashioning the Drama. Just as we construct for ourselves the world of semblances through application of the laws of Time and Space existing a priori in our brain, so this conscious representment of the world’s idea in Drama would thus be foreordained by those inner laws of Music, operating in the dramatist equally unconsciously [P. 107] with the laws of Causality we bring into employment for apperception of the phenomenal world.” [782W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 106-107]
[783W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 107]
[P. 107] “This prodigy of a dramatist [Shakespeare] … was comprehensible by noanalogy with any poet you please; for which reason, also, all aesthetic judgment of him has remained as yet unbased. His dramas seem to be so direct a transcript of the world, that the artist’s intervention in their portrayal of the Idea is absolutely untraceable, and certainly not demonstrable by criticism. So, marvelled at as products of a superhuman genius, they became to our great poets a study for discovery of the laws of their creation wellnigh in the same manner as the wonders of Nature herself.” [783W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 107]
[784W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 108]
[P. 108] {FEUER} “We have called Music the revelation of the inner vision of theEssence of the world, and Shakespeare we might term a Beethoven who goes on dreaming though awake. What holds their spheres asunder, are the formal conditions of the laws of apperception obtaining in each. The perfect art-form would therefore have to take its rise from the point where those respective laws could meet.” [784W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 108]
[785W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 109-111]
[P. 109] {SCHOP} {FEUER} “We have … seen that the dream-message received by this inner organ can be transmitted [to the waking consciousness] only through a second type of dream, a
