[839W-{10/23/72}Letter to Friedrich Nietzsche: SLRW. p. 812]
[P. 812] {FEUER} “I have been thinking more and more about ‘what is German’, and, on the basis of a number of more recent studies, have succumbed to a curious scepticism which leaves me thinking of ‘Germanness’ as a purely metaphysical concept; but, as such, it is of immense interest to me, and certainly something that is unique in the history of the world, its only possible counterpart being Judaism … .” [839W-{10/23/72}Letter to Friedrich Nietzsche: SLRW. p. 812]
[840W-{11/4/72} CD Vol. I, p. 550]
[P. 550] {FEUER} “In the morning R. says that he has again been thinking about the birth of drama from music: ‘As the baby is nourished in the womb by the mother’s blood, so does drama emerge from music; it is a mystery; once it emerges into the world, the outward circumstances of life begin to exert their influence.” [840W-{11/4/72} CD Vol. I, p. 550]
[841W-{12/30/72} CD Vol. I, p. 577-578]
[P. 577-578] {FEUER} “R’s gaze falls on the globe: ‘There one can see what our planet is like, a little bit of earth and this monster of an ocean, against whose murderous inhabitants our armies are nothing but a joke; and on this patch of earth how many parts are as monstrous as [P. 578] the ocean itself – how fragile is the thing we call ideality!” [841W-{12/30/72} CD Vol. I, p. 577-578]
[842W-{2/73} Prologue to a Reading of Twilight of the Gods: PW Vol. V, p. 305-306]
[P. 305] {FEUER} The longing to raise the Opera to the dignity of genuine Drama could never wake and wax in the musician, before great masters had enlarged the province of his art in that spirit which now has made our German music acknowledgedly victorious over all its rivals. Through the fullest application of this legacy of our great masters we have arrived at uniting Music so completely with the Drama’s action, that this very marriage enables the action itself to gain that ideal freedom – i.e. release from all necessity of appealing to abstract reflection – which our great poets [P. 306] sought on many a road, to fall at last a-pondering on the selfsame possibility of attaining it through Music.
{FEUER} By incessantly revealing to us the inmost motives of the action, in their widest ramifications, Music at like time makes it possible to display that action itself in drastic definition: as the characters no longer need to tell us of their impulses [or ‘grounds of action’ – Beweggruende] in terms of the reflecting consciousness, their dialogue thereby gains that naïve pointedness (Praezision) which constitutes the very life of Drama. Again, whilst Antique Tragedy had to confine its dramatic dialogue to separate sections strewn between the choruses delivered in the Orchestra – those chants in which Music gave to the drama its higher meaning – in the Modern Orchestra, the greatest artistic achievement of our age, this archetypal element goes hand in hand with the action itself, unsevered from the dialogue, and in a profounder sense may be said to embrace all the action’s motives in its mother-womb.” [842W-{2/73} Prologue to a Reading of Twilight of the Gods: PW Vol. V, p. 305-306]
