or not—they sang and danced from inner impulse; Raphael's Cecilia, we feel, is not singing to others, but to herself and heaven.[1] True music is a kind of soliloquy, and Wagner reaches this, Nietzsche feels, in his great works, "Tristan and Isolde," the "Meistersinger," and the "Ring."[2] Wagner too has the right view of the relation of words to music (i.e., Nietzsche thinks so at the start): the music, through which the ground-emotion of the persons in the drama is communicated to the hearer, is for him the primary thing; then comes the action or gestures of the persons, and last of all the words, as a still paler reflection of the original emotional state.[3] The music is not an accompaniment to the words (as is the case in ordinary opera—something which Nietzsche detests), rather are the words a kind of halting accompaniment to the music. b Yes, in such words as Wagner knows how to use, he gets back, Nietzsche feels, to the primitive significance of language—which was itself half poetry and feeling; the words are often tones more than anything else—and to Wagner's sympathetic imagination, all nature, alive and striving, seeks to express itself in tones. In this connection Nietzsche refers to Schiller's confession that in poetical composition his mind had no definite and clear object before it at the start, the first impulse being a certain musical mood, and that the poetical idea came afterwards and as a consequence.[4] Nietzsche interprets the folk-song in a similar way—the air or melody is primary, and the accompanying poetry is born out of it, and may even be of different sorts: the music is the standard, with which the words strive to harmonize.[5] He goes so far as to say of music in general, that it tolerates the image, word, or concept rather than needs it, language never touching its inner depths.[6] c Feeling is equally, he holds, the original element in myths such as Wagner uses or fashions—in them he poetizes. In the "Ring," for instance, we have a series of myths, which Wagner partly adopted, partly created, as an objectivation of his feeling about the world and society—they are utterly unintelligible as scientific statements, and can only be comprehended as we pass into
