Page of the Blaue Reiter Almanach

33 Thus I had fully understood the Schubert songs, along with the poetry, purely from the music, Stefan George's poems purely from the sound. With a perfection that could hardly be achieved, certainly not surpassed, by analysis and synthesis. However, such impressions mostly appeal to the intellect afterwards and demand from it that it prepares them for a common use, that it disassembles and sorts, measures and tests, that it resolves them into expressible details at any time, and that one possesses the whole but cannot use it. However, even artistic creation often takes this detour to arrive at the actual conception. But there are indications that the other arts, whose material appearance is closer, are leading us to overcome the belief in the omnipotence of the intellect and consciousness. And when Karl Kraus calls language the motor of thought, when W. Kandinsky and Oskar Kokoschka paint pictures in which the material external object is hardly more than an occasion to fantasize in colors and forms and to express themselves as only the musician has expressed himself so far, then these are symptoms for a gradually spreading understanding of the true essence of art. And with great joy I read Kandinsky's book "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", in which the path for painting is shown and the hope arises that those who ask about the text, about the material, will soon have been asked enough. Then it will also become clear what was already clear in another case. No one doubts that a poet who deals with historical material may move with the greatest freedom, and that if a painter today still wanted to paint historical pictures, he would not be obliged to compete with a history professor. Because one must adhere to what the artwork wants to give, and not to what is of external nature. Because even in all compositions, after poems, the accuracy of the reproduction of the events is just as irrelevant for the artist as the similarity of the portrait to the model, where after a hundred years no one can check this similarity anymore, while the artistic effect still remains. And it does not remain because, as perhaps the Impressionists believe, a real person, namely the seemingly depicted, but because the artist speaks to us, who has expressed himself here, who, in a higher reality, is to be similar to the portrait. Once this has been understood, it is still easy to grasp that the external agreement between music and text, as it appears in declamation, tempo, and dynamics, has little to do with the inner, and on the same level as primitive natural intuition, like the gradual development of a model. And that apparent direction on the surface may be necessary because of a parallel in a higher plane. Therefore, the evaluation according to the text is just as reliable as the evaluation of the protein level according to the properties of carbon.