the artwork should be a celebration of the national community, it should be the religion. In that respect the definitive arts are literary and musical. Theoretically, music is to be a means for achieving effective drama; in reality, however, music in the form of opera becomes the authentic art. Drama possesses its importance and essential character, not in poetic originality, i.e., not in the well-wrought truth of the linguistic work, but in things pertaining to the stage, theatrical arrangements and gala productions. Architecture serves merely for theater construction, painting provides the backdrops, sculpture portrays the gestures of actors. Literary creation and language remain without the essential and decisive shaping force of genuine knowledge. What is wanted is the domination of art as music, and thereby the domination of the pure state of feeling—the tumult and delirium of the senses, tremendous contraction, the felicitous distress that swoons in enjoyment, absorption in "the bottomless sea of harmonies," the plunge into frenzy and the disintegration into sheer feeling as redemptive. The "lived experience" as such becomes decisive. The work is merely what arouses such experience. All portrayal is to work its effects as foreground and superficies, aiming toward the impression, the effect, wanting to work on and arouse the audience: theatrics. Theater and orchestra determine art. Of the orchestra Wagner says:
The orchestra is, so to speak, the basis of infinite, universally common feeling, from which the individual feeling of the particular artist can blossom to the greatest fullness: it dissolves to a certain extent the static, motionless basis of the scene of reality into a liquid-soft, flexible, impressionable, ethereal surface, the immeasurable ground of which is the sea of feeling itself. (The Artwork of the Future, in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 2nd ed., 1887, p. 157.)
To this we should compare what Nietzsche says in The Will to Power (WM, 839) about Wagner's "means of achieving effects":
Consider the means of achieving effects to which Wagner most likes to turn (and which for the most part he had to invent): to an astonishing extent they resemble the means by which the hypnotist achieves his effect (his selection