Everything is broadened and peppered and directed to obtaining
you the Pasha-power you craved. Besides being windy and theatrical, your
music is what Nietzsche so bitterly called it, "Die Schule der
Gelaeufichkeit--nach Frauen."
So your vast artistic endowment lies squandered, your ideas shallowly
set, your science misused. For while fate showered you magnificently
with gifts, it seems to have at the same time sought to negate its
liberality by fusing in your personality the base alloy, by decreeing
that you should have enormous powers and yet abuse them. It prevented
you from often being completely genuine, completely incandescent,
completely fine. It refused you for the greater part the true adamantine
hardness of the artist, the inviolability of soul, the sense of style.
It made you, the prodigiously fecund inventor, the mine of thematic
material, prodigal; unable to refine your ore, to chase your ideas, and
give them their full value. Wagner could have said of you, had he so
wished, what Haendel is reported to have said of the composer from whom
he borrowed, "Of what use is such a good idea to a man like him?" One
must indeed go to Wagner for the appreciation of many of the inventions,
the Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Parsifal and Kundry, music, which you
cast from you so carelessly.
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