Moreover, was Wagner really true to the theory of the relation between music and words? "Danger lest the motives for the movement of the music should lie in the movements and actions of the drama, lest the music should be led instead of leading." Were there even possible contradictions in the idea of "music drama"?[1] The relation between music and words might be organic in a song, but how about a drama?[2] The idea hovered in Nietzsche's mind of a symphony covering itself with a drama, as a melody does with the words of a song—there were suggestions of such a thing in the old Dionysian chorus;[3] but Wagner, he felt, was inclining to make the music a means of illustrating the drama—and this was to forget the lyric, Dionysiac quality of music altogether, and to bring "music-drama" down to the level of old-time opera (only linking the music a little closer to the words and situations, and dispensing with trills and arias that had no sense). In time Nietzsche came to the clear, positive conclusion that either the music must dominate, or the drama must dominate, that parallelism was out of the question;[4] and now he has feelings that way, and thinks that with Wagner the organic unity is in the drama and often fails to reach the music.[5] Wagner himself once said, "The nature of the subject could not induce me, in sketching my scenes, to consider in advance their adaptability to any particular musical form, the kind of musical treatment being, in every case, suggested by the scenes themselves."[6] So far as this was really Wagner's practice, the conclusion is inevitable: he starts with scenes, i.e., dramatic material, and then finds musical tones appropriate to them, which is just to reverse the method and theory of music in which Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer before him, believed—and, as Nietzsche at first supposed, Wagner also.
Besides all this, Nietzsche came to have doubts as to Wagner's general attitude and way of thinking. Was he maintaining his old heroic attitude to existing German life? Was he not compromising, making too much of the Emperor's favor,
