AESTHETICS A paybill for the Prague premiere of Don Giovanni, which Kierkegaard argued was the most perfect possible opera characters mere planets, who are half in darkness, with only that side which is turned towards him illuminated Only the Commendatore is independent; but he is outside the substance of the opera as its antecedent and consequent, and both before and after his death he is the voice of spirit Because music is uniquely suitable to express the immediacy of sensual desire, in Don Giovanni we have a perfect match of subject matter and creative form Both matter and form are essential to a work of art, Kierkegaard says, even though philosophers overemphasize now one and now the other It is because of this that Don Giovanni, even if it stood alone, was enough to make Mozart a classic composer and absolutely immortal Nietzsche on Tragedy For the young Nietzsche it is not Mozart but Wagner whose operas are supreme This is because of a shared debt to Schopenhauer In 1854 Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt that Schopenhauer had come into his life like a gift from heaven ‘His chief idea, the final negation of the desire for life, is terribly gloomy, but it shows the only salvation possible.’1 In his The Birth of A Goldman, Wagner on Music and Drama (New York: Dutton, 1966) 260