Chapter 6 5

Now for the decadent artist.I am serious about this issue.I cannot stand by while this decadent damages our health and our music!After all, was Wagner alone?Is he not more of a disease? He sickens everything he touches—he makes music sick— A typical decadent who feels himself indispensable in his depraved taste, which he uses to take possession of a higher taste, who is good at presenting his depravity as law, as progress, as value realization. There was no resistance.His allure is astonishing, cigarettes are lingering around him, and misunderstandings about him are advertised as "gospel"-it is definitely not just the poor in spirit who are tempted by him!

I like to open a window.Air!More air! I am not surprised that people in Germany deceive themselves about Wagner, but it would surprise me otherwise.The Germans made themselves a Wagner to worship.They were never psychologists, and they benefit from their misunderstanding.But in Paris, too, people deceive themselves about Wagner!The people there are almost exclusively psychologists and nothing else!And in St. Petersburg!The people there can understand what the Parisians can't!How closely related must Wagner be to the whole decadent power in Europe that the latter do not feel that he is a decadent!He belongs to the latter: he is its protagonist, its greatest name... people lift him to the sky, and they praise themselves by it. —for the lack of resistance to him is itself a sign of decadence.Instincts are weakened.People are drawn to what they should be afraid of, and to what will kill them more quickly. —Want to give an example?Just look at the recipes (Regime) that patients with anemia, gout or diabetes make for themselves.Definition of Vegetarian: A person who must consume nutritious food.It is a sign of youth and vitality to be able to regard harmfulness as harmful and to abstain from harmful things.Harmful things attract the exhausted; vegetables attract the vegetarian.Disease itself can be a stimulant to life, but one must be healthy enough for this stimulant! — Wagner intensifies exhaustion!So he attracts the feeble and the exhausted.Oh, the Rattlesnake-like happiness of the old master, precisely because he always saw the "boy" coming towards him!

I advance the point: Wagner's art is morbid.The problems he brought to the stage (purely hysterical problems), his convulsive passions, his hyperactive sensibility, his taste for more and more exciting condiments, his glorification into principles The inconsistencies, and the choice of his heroes and heroines (who are seen as biological types—a gallery of patient portraits!): all this paints a picture of a disease, there is no doubt about it.Wagner was a neurotic There is perhaps nothing more familiar today, or at least nothing more studied, than the degenerated Protean character, which here chrysalises as art and artist.Our physicians and physiologists can find the most interesting, at least quite complete, case in Wagner.Since there is nothing more modern than this syndrome, this twilight and hyperactivity of the nervous mechanism, Wagner is par excellence the modern artist, the modern Callioster. ③In his art, the three main stimulants of the exhausted man, which are most necessary in the whole world today, namely cruelty, artificiality and innocence (dementia), are mixed in the most seductive way.

①The original text of this sentence is French. ②Proteus (proteus), the fickle god of the sea in Greek mythology. ③Cagliostro, an alchemist and liar in Sicily in the eighteenth century. Wagner badly corrupted music.He sees music as a means of stimulating weary nerves—thus he makes music sick.In the art of lifting the exhausted, of awakening the half-dead, his contribution was invaluable.He is a master of hypnotism, he can make a strong man like a bull lie down.Wagner's achievements—his achievements in nerves and thus in women—made the whole musical world of fame a follower of his mystical art.And not just the famed music industry, but also the smart and well-behaved music industry... Only sick music makes money these days;

Our grand theater lives off Wagner.