96 Nietzsche
With Schopenhauer's ideas in mind, Wagner formulated his concept
of redemption through art: "In solemn hours, when all possible appear-
ances dissolve away as though in a dream full of foreboding, we already
seem to be partaking of this redemption in anticipation of it: we are no
longer alarmed by the image of the yawning abyss, the gruesome mon-
sters of the deep, all of the grasping debris of the will that devours
itself, as the day—alas!—presented the history of mankind to us: then
only the cry of nature, feadess, hopeful, mitigating everything, redeem-
ing the world resounds to us in all of its purity and longing for peace.
The soul of mankind, rendered pure in this cry, made aware by this cry
of its high office of redemption of the whole of nature, which suffers
with it, soars up from the abyss of appearances, and, freed ... the rest-
less will feels ... liberated from itself" (Wagner, Denken 396).
If art is to rescue the essence of religion, it must succeed in bringing
about a lasting inner transformation of people. Ephemeral pleasure in
art will not suffice. The will to art as religion pushes at the boundaries of
the merely aesthetic event, which is a source of great distress to artists
who, like Wagner, regard themselves as founders of a religion. An explo-
sive potential for hostility is brewing in this conflict: hostility with a
world that is ruled by money and in which no one expects anything of
art but art plain and simple, or possibly even just entertainment. The
roots of Wagner's sometimes fanatical anti-Semitism lay in the hostility
of art's emphatic will toward the secular and perhaps also banal wodd.
Wagner saw the Jews as the personification of the economic principle
and of vacuous entertainment
Wagner sought to achieve a sacral, redemptive effect by means of his
Gesamtkunstwerk. Art must mobilize all of its power. The music supplies
a language for the "inexpressible," which comprehends only feelings,
and combines with the action on the stage, the gestures, the facial
expressions, the set design, and, above all, the solemn ritual of the festi-
val days in which people gather around the altar of art.
Wagner had to pull out all the stops in order to emerge from the pre-
serve of the merely pretty arts and to devise a mythical experience on