The cynic speaks. – My objections to Wagner’s music are physiological objections: why disguise them with aesthetic formulas? My ‘fact’ is that I stop breathing easily once this music starts affecting me; that my foot immediately gets angry at it and revolts – it has a need for tempo, dance, march; it demands chiefly from music the raptures found in good walking, striding, leaping, and dancing – but doesn’t my stomach protest, too? My heart? My circulation? My intestines? Do I not unnoticeably grow hoarse as I listen? And so I ask myself: what does my whole body actually want from music? Its own relief, I believe, as if all animal functions should be quickened by easy, bold, exuberant, self-assured rhythms; as if iron, leaden life should be gilded by golden, good, tender harmonies. My melancholy wants to rest in the hiding-places and abysses of perfection: that’s what I need music for. “What is the drama to me! The cramps of its moral ecstasies that give the ‘people’ satisfaction! The whole hocus-pocus of gestures of the actor! You will guess that I am essentially anti-theatrical – but Wagner was, conversely, essentially a man of the theatre and an actor, the most enthusiastic mimomaniac that ever existed, also as a musician. And, incidentally, if it was Wagner’s theory that ‘the drama is the end; the music is always merely its means’,38 his practice was always, from beginning to end, ‘the attitude is the end; the drama, and music, too, is always merely its means’. Music as a means of clarification, strengthening, internalization of the dramatic gesture and the actor’s appeal to the senses; and the Wagnerian drama a mere occasion for many dramatic attitudes! Beside all other instincts, he had the commanding instinct of a great actor in absolutely everything – and, as I said, also as a musician. I once made this clear to an upright Wagnerian, with some trouble; and I had reasons to add: ‘Do be a bit more honest with yourself – after all, we’re not at the theatre! At the theatre, one is honest only as a mass; as an individual one lies, lies to oneself. One leaves oneself at home when one goes to the theatre; one relinquishes the right to one’s own tongue and choice, to one’s taste, even to one’s courage as one has it and exercises it within one’s own four walls against god and man. No one brings the finest senses of his art to the theatre; nor does the artist who works for the theatre: there, one is people, public, herd, woman, pharisee, voting cattle, democrat, neighbour, fellow man; there, even the most personal conscience is vanquished by the levelling magic of the “greatest number”; there, stupidity breeds lasciviousness and is contagious; there, the “neighbour” reigns; there, one becomes a neighbour’. (I forgot to mention my enlightened Wagnerian’s retort to the physiological objections: ‘So, you simply aren’t healthy enough for our music?’)