On Music and Words by Friedrich Nietzsche — Read

(Fragment, 1871)

What we here have asserted of the relationship between language and music must be valid too, for equal reasons concerning the relationship of _Mime_ to _Music._ The Mime too, as the intensified symbolism of man's gestures, is, measured by the eternal significance of music, only a simile, which brings into expression the innermost secret of music but very superficially, namely on the substratum of the passionately moved human body. But if we include language also in the category of bodily symbolism, and compare the _drama,_ according to the canon advanced, with music, then I venture to think, a proposition of Schopenhauer will come into the clearest light, to which reference must be made again later on.