willingly yields itself, in utmost excitation, to the guidance of those new laws whereby Music makes herself so wondrously intelligible and – in a profounder sense – supplies withal the only fitting answer to that ‘Why?’ “ [683W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 319-320]
[684W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 326]
[P. 326] {FEUER} “Let me … tell you that even my boldest conclusions as to the attainable, dramatico-musical form were thrust upon me through my at like time carrying in my head the plan for my great Nibelungen drama, a portion of which I had even turned into verse already; and there [in my head] I was maturing it in such a fashion, that my theories were wellnigh nothing but an abstract expression of the productive process going on within me.” [684W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 326]
[685W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 328-329]
[P. 328] {FEUER} “… I once for all forsook the realm of history, even in my choice of stuff, for that of legend (Sage). (…)
{FEUER} (…) The legend, in whatever age or nation it occurs, has the merit of seizing nothing but the purely-human Content of that age and nation, and of giving forth that content in a form peculiar [P. 329] to itself, of sharpest outline, and therefore swiftly understandable. A ballad, a refrain of the Folk, suffices to acquaint us with this telling character in the twinkling of an eye. This legendary colouring, for the display of a purely-human event, has in particular the real advantage of uncommonly facilitating the task I assigned to the poet above, the task of silencing the question ‘Why?’ Just as through the characteristic scene, so also through the legendary tone, the mind is forthwith placed in the dream-like state wherein it presently shall come to full clairvoyance, and thus perceive a new coherence in the world’s phenomena: a coherence it could not detect with the waking eye of everyday, wherefore it had ever asked about the Why as though to conquer its abashedness in presence of the world’s incomprehensible, of that world which now becomes to it so clear and vividly intelligible. How Music is at last to fully round this quickening spell, you now will lightly comprehend.
{FEUER} But even for the poet’s manipulation of the stuff, its legendary character affords the essential advantage that whereas the simple sequence of the plot, so easily surveyable in all its outward bearings, renders it needless to linger on any outer explanation of its course, on the other hand the poem’s far largest space can be devoted to exhibiting the inner springs of action, those inner soul-motives which are finally and alone to stamp the Action as a ‘necessary’ one – and that through the sympathetic interest taken in these motives by our own inmost hearts.” [685W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 328-329]
[686W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 330-331]
[P. 330] {FEUER} “You perhaps will find the plot of ‘Tannhaeuser’ already far more markedly evolving from its inner motives. Here the decisive catastrophe proceeds with-out the least constraint from a lyric tournament of bards, in which no other power save the most hidden inner workings of the soul drives toward the decisive blow, and in such a manner that even this denouement’s form belongs purely to the lyric element.
