do not cost those
anything who utter them. Since my fifteenth year I have been paid for
every labor I've performed and should have considered it a disgrace to
be compelled to do something for nothing. Fifty years of fruitless
struggling! Can anybody be so stubborn as not to have that convince him
of the impossibility of his dreams! What did you get out of your life?
You have sinfully wasted it! I have never striven for anything out of
the ordinary; but, Sir, I can assure you of one thing: that since my
earliest childhood days I have never had enough time left to stand out
in the street for a whole week. And if I were to think that in
my old days I might be compelled to do that very thing--Sir, I am
speaking only for myself now--but I cannot imagine how I could still
muster the courage to look people in the face.

DUeHRING. What? With such an opera in your hands! Remember, I am not
doing it for my own sake; I am doing it for art's sake.

GERARDO. You overestimate art. Let me tell you that art is something
quite different from what people make themselves believe about it.

DUeHRING. I know nothing higher on earth!

GERARDO. That's a view shared only by people like yourself to whose
interest it is to make this view prevail generally. We artists are
merely one of bourgeoisie's luxuries in paying for which they will
outbid each other. If you were right, how would an opera like _Walkuere_
be possible which deals with things the exposure of which is absolutely
abhorrent to the public. Yet when _I_ sing the part of Siegmund, the
most solicitous mothers will not hesitate to bring in their thirteen or
fourteen year old daughters. And indeed, as I am standing on the stage,
I know for certain that not one person in the audience any longer pays
the slightest attention to the action itself. If they did they would
get up and out. That's what they actually did when the opera was still
new. Now they have accustomed themselves to ignoring it. They notice it
as little as they notice the air separating them from the stage. That,
you see, is the meaning of what you call art! To this you have
sacrificed fifty years of your life! Our real duty as artists is to
produce ourselves to the paying public night after night under one
pretense or another. Nor is its interest limited to such exhibitions;
it fastens itself as tenaciously upon our private life. One belongs to
the public with every breath one draws; and because we submit to this
for