Grace#
Summary#
Grace appears in Nietzsche’s analysis of Wagner’s Mastersingers overture as a quality conspicuously absent from German art. While praising the music’s magnificence and German potency, Nietzsche notes it lacks “beauty, no South, nothing of the delicate southern clearness of the sky, nothing of Grace, no dance, hardly a will to logic.” Grace thus represents a southern, Mediterranean aesthetic quality of lightness and clarity that stands opposed to the heavy, cumbersome, and arbitrarily barbaric character of German artistic expression.