Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/249

Rh organ of speech, also serves to communicate conceptions is an accidental circumstance, which music can certainly also make use of, in order to enter into a connection with poetry; but it must never make this the principal matter, and concern itself entirely with the expression of what for the most part, nay (as Diderot gives us to understand in Le Neveu de Rameau), essentially are insipid verses. The words are and remain for the music a foreign addition, of subordinate value, for the effect of the tones is incomparably more powerful, more infallible, and quicker than that of the words. Therefore, if words become incorporated in music, they must yet assume an entirely subordinate position, and adapt themselves completely to it. But the relation appears reversed in the case of the given poetry, thus the song or the libretto of an opera to which music is adapted. For the art of music at once shows in these its power and higher fitness, disclosing the most profound ultimate and secret significance of the feeling expressed in the words or the action presented in the opera, giving utterance to their peculiar and true nature, and teaching us the inmost soul of the actions and events whose mere clothing and body is set before us on the stage. With regard to this superiority of the music, and also because it stands to the libretto and the action in the relation of the universal to the particular, of the rule to the example, it might perhaps appear more fitting that the libretto should be written for the music than that the music should be composed for the libretto. However, in the customary method, the words and actions of the libretto lead the composer to the affections of the will which lie at their foundation, and call up in him the feelings to be expressed; they act, therefore, as a means of exciting his musical imagination. Moreover, that the addition of poetry to music is so welcome to us, and a song with intelligible words gives us such deep satisfaction, depends upon the fact that in this way our most direct and most indirect ways of knowing are called into play at once and