These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner's writings;--the rest is merely--"literature." --Not every kind of music hitherto has been in need of literature; and it were well, to try and discover the actual reason of this. Is it perhaps that Wagner's music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear precisely the reverse.--that it was too easy,--that people might _not understand it with sufficient difficulty?_--As a matter of fact, his whole life long, he did nothing but repeat one proposition: that his music did not mean music alone! But something more! Something immeasurably more!... "_Not music alone_"--_no_ musician would speak in this way. I repeat, Wagner could not create things as a whole; he had no choice, he was obliged to create things in bits; with "motives," attitudes, formulæ, duplications, and hundreds of repetitions, he remained a rhetorician in music,--and that is why he was at bottom _forced_ to press "this means" into the foreground. "Music can never be anything else than a means": this was his theory; but above all it was the only _practice_ that lay open to him. No musician however thinks in this way.--Wagner was in need of literature, in order to persuade the whole world to take his music seriously, profoundly, "because it _meant_ an infinity of things"; all his life he was the commentator of the "Idea."--What does Elsa stand for? But without a doubt, Elsa is "the unconscious _mind of the people_" (--"when I realised this, I naturally became a thorough revolutionist"--). Do not let us forget that, when Hegel and Schelling were misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is--"the idea,"--that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,--rigorously, but also unjustly; for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more "honest" than his more famous contemporaries. But let us leave morality out of the question, Hegel is a _matter of taste...._ And not only of German but of European taste! ... A taste which Wagner understood!--which he felt equal to! which he has immortalised!--All he did was to apply it to music--he invented a style for himself, which might mean an "infinity of things,"--he was _Hegel's_ heir.... Music as "Idea."--