On German music. – Today German music is, more than any other, the music of Europe only because it alone has given expression to the transformation that Europe underwent through the Revolution: only German composers know how to lend expression to animated masses of people; how to create that enormous artificial noise that doesn’t even have to be very loud – whereas for example Italian opera knows only choruses of servants or soldiers, but not ‘people’.69 Moreover, in all German music one can hear a deep bourgeois envy of nobility, especially of esprit and élégance as expressions of a courtly, knightly, old, self-assured society. This music is not like that of Goethe’s singer before the gate, which also pleases ‘in the great hall’ and actually pleases the king; the idea is not ‘The knights looked bravely thither, and the fair down at their laps’.70 Even grace (Grazie) does not appear in German music without pangs of conscience; only in the presence of native charm (Anmut), the rustic sister of grace, does the German begin to feel wholly moral – and from that point on increasingly so, all the way up to his rapturous, erudite, often gruff ‘sublimity’, the sublimity of Beethoven. If you want to picture the human being for this music, well, just imagine Beethoven as he appears beside Goethe – say, at their encounter at Teplitz:71 as semi-barbarism beside culture, as the people beside nobility, as the good-natured human being next to the good and more than merely ‘good’ human being, as the visionary beside the artist, as the man in need of comfort next to the man who is comforted, as the exaggerating and suspicious man next to the fair-minded, as the moody self-tormentor, the foolishly ecstatic, the blissfully unhappy, the guilelessly immoderate, as the presumptuous and crude – and all in all, the ‘untamed human being’:72 that is how Goethe himself experienced and characterized him – Goethe, the exception among Germans for whom no music of equal rank has yet been found! Consider finally whether the ever more widely reaching contempt for melody and the atrophy of the melodic sense among Germans can be understood as a democratic boorishness and after-effect of the Revolution. For melody has such an open joy in lawfulness and such a revulsion towards everything that is inchoate, unformed, and arbitrary that it sounds like a strain from the old order of things European and like a seduction and return to it.