“Music makes its appearance as the last plant among all the arts which grow on the soil of a particular culture—perhaps because it is the most inward and hence arrives last, in the fall, when the culture which belongs to it is fading. Only in the art of the Dutch masters did the soul of the Christian Middle Ages attain its last vibrations: their tone architecture is the posthumous, but legitmate and equal sister of the Gothic. Only in Handel’s music did there resound what was best in the souls of Luther and those related to him, the Jewish-heroic trait that gave the Reformation a trait of greatness—the Old Testament become music, not the New. Only Mozart transformed the age of Louis XIV and the art of Racine and Claude Lorrain into ringing gold; only in the music of Beethoven and Rossini did the eighteenth century sing itself out—the century of enthusiasm, of broken ideals, and of evanescent happiness. All true, all original music, is a swan song.”
(Nietzsche, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, “A Music Without a Future”).