| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: selection of the pattern and the composition of the first stave
(a stave in music corresponds to a line in verse) generally
completes the creative effort. All the rest follows more or less
mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like a
wall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is
usually a perfectly obvious consequence of the first; and the
third and fourth an exact or very slightly varied repetition of
the first and second. For example, given the first line of Pop
Goes the Weasel or Yankee Doodle, any musical cobbler could
supply the remaining three. There is very little tune turning of
this kind in The Ring; and it is noteworthy that where it does
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: "Thus far I know," said the Dwarf, "that thy purpose is bad, thy
deed will be worse,, and the issue worst of all."
"And you like me the better for it, Father Elshie, eh?" said
Westburnflat; "you always said you did."
"I have cause to like all," answered the Solitary, "that are
scourges to their fellow-creatures, and thou art a bloody one."
"No--I say not guilty to that--lever bluidy unless there's
resistance, and that sets a man's bristles up, ye ken. And this
is nae great matter, after a'; just to cut the comb of a young
cock that has been crawing a little ower crousely."
"Not young Earnscliff?" said the Solitary, with some emotion.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: a pre-understanding and ready welcome for those rarer and rarely
gratified men, who are too comprehensive to find satisfaction in
any kind of fatherlandism, and know how to love the South when in
the North and the North when in the South--the born Midlanders,
the "good Europeans." For them BIZET has made music, this latest
genius, who has seen a new beauty and seduction,--who has
discovered a piece of the SOUTH IN MUSIC.
255. I hold that many precautions should be taken against German
music. Suppose a person loves the South as I love it--as a great
school of recovery for the most spiritual and the most sensuous
ills, as a boundless solar profusion and effulgence which
Beyond Good and Evil |
