/lit/ - Literature

>At lunch R. declares: “I have been thinking again about Don Quixote and, considering it from the angle of its ironic outlook on the world, I was reminded of a dialogue by Plato; it is in him, too, this irony, but there it appears free, confident, nothing is pressing on it. Whereas one senses the horrible pressure of Catholicism on Cervantes’s noble spirit; the way he finds it necessary to make the poor Moresco praise the Inquisition! In the Greek one sees the Olympic wreath, in the Spaniard the starving poet, treated by the nobility, just as D.Q. was treated, like a plaything, in a world hostile to things of the spirit. Oh, the misery of having been born in this millennium!”

>>19486482
Only good Jew.

>>19484628
>if we found the faculty of conscious suffering peculiarly developed in the so-called white race, in the Saviour's blood we now must recognise the quintessence of free-willed suffering itself (des bewusst wollenden Leidens selbst), that godlike Pity which streams through all the human species, its fount and origin.

>>19484258
>The Christian religion belongs to no specific national stock: the Christian dogma addresses purely - human nature. Only in so far as it has seized in all its purity this content common to all men, can a people call itself Christian in truth. However, a people can make nothing fully its own but what becomes possible for it to grasp with its inborn feeling, and to grasp in such a fashion that in the New it finds its own familiar self again. Upon the realm of aesthetics and philosophic Criticism it may be demonstrated, almost palpably, that it was predestined for the German spirit to seize and assimilate the Foreign, the primarily remote from it, in utmost purity and objectivity of intuition (in höchster objektiver Reinheit der Anschauung). One may aver, without exaggeration, that the Antique would have stayed unknown, in its now universal world-significance, had the German spirit not recognised and expounded it. The Italian made as much of the Antique his own, as he could copy and remodel; the Frenchman borrowed from this remodelling, in his turn, whatever caressed his national sense for elegance of Form: the German was the first to apprehend its purely-human originality, to seize therein a meaning quite aloof from usefulness, but therefore of the only use for rendering the Purely-human. Through its inmost understanding of the Antique, the German spirit arrived at the capability of restoring the Purely-human itself to its pristine freedom; not employing [156] the antique form to display a certain given 'stuff,' but moulding the necessary new form itself through an employment of the antique conception of the world. To recognise this plainly, let anyone compare Goethe's Iphigenia with that of Euripides. One may say that the true idea of the Antique has existed only since the middle of the eighteenth century, since Winckelmann and Lessing.

>>19473814
>What considerations may have joined forces to call into the world such an unworthy object under the title of a "Prophet" [Meyerbeer opera] we shall here leave unexplored; let it suffice us to observe the resultant, which is instructive enough in all conscience. First, we see in this example the complete moral and artistic dishonorment of the poet, in whose work even those who are most favorably disposed to the composer can find no single hair's breadth of merit: so!-the poetic aim is no longer to attract us in the slightest; on the contrary, it is to revolt us. The performer is now to interest us as nothing but a costumed singer; in the above-named scene, he can do this only by his singing of that aforesaid melody, which makes its effect entirely for itself-as melody. Wherefore the sun is likewise to work entirely for itself, namely, as a successful theatrical copy of the authentic sun: so that the ground of its "working" comes not at all into the province of drama, but into that of sheer mechanics-the only thing left for us to think about when it puts in its appearance; for how alarmed the composer would be, if one chose to take this appearance as an intentional transfiguration of the hero, in his capacity of champion of mankind! No, no: for him and his public, everything must be done to turn such thoughts away, and guide attention solely to that masterstroke of mechanism. And thus in this unique scene, so heaped with honors by the public, the whole of art is resolved into its mechanical integers: the externals of art are turned into its essence; and this essence we find to be-effect, the absolute effect, that is, the stimulus of an artificial love titillation, without the potence of an actual taste of love.

>Is part of the Western canon
Why aren't you reading him?

Where to start with him?

Scene 2 of act 3 of Meistersinger sufficiently laid the basis for all further psychoanalysis.

>My friend, it is precisely the poet's task to interpret and record his dreamings. Believe me, man's truest madness is disclosed to him in dreams: all poetry and versification is nothing but true dream interpretation.

>>19300165
>IN any serious investigation of the essence of our art of today, we cannot make one step forward without being brought face to face with its intimate connection with the art of ancient Greece. For, in point of fact, our modern art is but one link in the artistic development of the whole of Europe; and this development found its starting point with the Greeks.
>Nothing could equal the sublime emotion with which the Agamemnon inspired me, and to the last word of the Eumenides I remained in an atmosphere so far removed from the present day that I have never since been really able to reconcile myself with modern literature.

>a Jew may have the amplest store of specific talents, may own the finest and most varied culture, the highest and the tenderest sense of honour—yet without all these pre-eminences helping him, were it but one single time, to call forth in us that deep, that heart-searching effect which we await from Art because we know her capable thereof, because we have felt it many a time and oft, so soon as once a hero of our art has, so to say, but opened his mouth to speak to us. To professional critics, who haply have reached a like consciousness with ourselves hereon, it may be left to prove by specimens of Mendelssohn's art-products our statement of this indubitably certain thing; by way of illustrating our general impression, let us here be content with the fact that, in hearing a tone-piece of this composer's, we have only been able to feel engrossed where nothing beyond our more or less amusement-craving Phantasy was roused through the presentment, stringing-together and entanglement of the most elegant, the smoothest and most polished figures—as in the kaleidoscope's changeful play of form and colour—but never where those figures were meant to take the shape of deep and stalwart feelings of the human heart.

Sums up Brecht pretty well.

Looking for recommendations on good musical biographies. Particularly interested in Wagner and Beethoven, can any anon help me out?

where do I start with him?

If anyone is interest, Wagner was linking the coming of modernity with the Jews in 19th century. Here is the essay:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200706042200/users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagmodern.htm

>>18537082
The most important aesthetic thinker between the German Idealists and Nietzsche.

>Nietzsche declared, "He knows of a chord which expresses those secret and weird midnight hours of the soul, when cause and effect seem to have fallen asunder."
Redpill me on Wagner. Was he really that great? What made his works "pre-Freudian"?

>One day, over lunch, Wagner rates Plato's Symposium above all other literary works: 'In Shakespeare we see Nature as it is, here we have the artistic awareness of the benefactor added; what would the world know about redeeming beauty without Plato?'
What is redeeming beauty?

>>18268379
>Is this the best christzooms can come up with in the year of their lord 2021?
No.

>>18263188
It's actually drama and music.

t. Wagner

Why was he obsessed with spears?

>>17889486
>Has anyone written successfully against him?
Yes.

Why does he use 'redemption' to mean literally anything he wants?

>>17816399
>The emergence of huge deserts, like the African Sahara, must certainly have cast the dwellers on the once luxuriant coasts of inland seas into such straits of hunger as we can only form an idea of by recalling stories of the awful sufferings of the shipwrecked, whereby completely civilised citizens of our modern states have been reduced to cannibalism. On the swampy margins of Canadian lakes animal species allied to the panther and tiger still live as fruit-eaters, whereas upon those desert fringes the historic tiger and lion have become the most bloodthirsty of all the beasts of prey. That it must have been hunger alone, which first drove man to slay the animals and feed upon their flesh and blood; and that this compulsion was no mere consequence of his removal into colder climes, as those assert who deem the consumption of animal-food in northern parts a duty of self-preservation,—is proved by the patent fact that great nations with ample supplies of grain suffer nothing in strength or endurance even in colder regions through an almost exclusively vegetable diet, as is shewn by the eminent length of life of Russian peasants; while the Japanese, who know no other food than vegetables, are further renowned for their warlike valour and keenness of intellect.

Why does he only appeal to 60 year old autists?

>>17773628