| View Blog
|
|
|
|
| The Birth of Tragedy (06) |
the direct idea of this life. The work of the plastic artist has an entirely different purpose: here Apollo overcomes the suffering of the individual through the bright exaltation in the eternity of the illusion. Here beauty is victorious over the suffering inherent in life. The pain is, in a certain sense, brushed away from the face of nature. In Dionysian art and in its tragic symbolism this same nature speaks to us with its true, undisguised voice: “Be as I am! Under the incessant changes in phenomena, the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally forcing things into existence, eternally satisfied with the changing nature of appearances!”17Dionysian art thus wishes to convince us of the eternal delight in existence: only we are to seek this delight, not in appearances, but behind them; we are to recognize how everything which comes into being must be ready for painful destruction; we are forced to gaze directly into the terror of individual existence — and nonetheless are not to become paralyzed: a metaphysical consolation tears us momentarily out of the hustle and bustle of changing forms. For a short time we really are the primordial essence itself and feel its unbridled lust for and joy in existence; the struggle, the torment, the destruction of appearances now seem to us necessary, on account of the excess of innumerable forms of existence pressing and punching themselves into life and of the exuberant fecundity of the world will; we are transfixed by the raging barbs of this torment in the very moment when we become, as it were, one with the immeasurable primordial delight in existence and when, in Dionysian rapture, we sense the indestructible and eternal nature of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we are fortunate vital beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative joy we have been fused.The story of how Greek tragedy arose tells us now with clear certainty how the Greeks’ tragic work of art really was born out of the spirit of music. With this idea we think we have, for the first time, done justice to the original and astonishing meaning of the chorus. At the same time, however, we must concede that the significance of the tragic myth established previously was never conceptually and transparently clear to the Greek poets, to say nothing of the Greek philosophers. Their heroes speak to a certain extent more superficially than they act; the myth really does not find its adequate objectification in the spoken word.The structure of the scenes and the vivid images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can grasp in words and ideas. We can make the same observation about Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for example, in a similar sense speaks more superficially than he acts, so that we derive the doctrine of Hamlet we discussed earlier, not from the words, but from the deeper view and review of the totality of the work. With respect to Greek tragedy, which, of course, comes to us only as a drama of words, I have even suggested that the incongruity between myth and word can easily seduce us into considering it shallower and more empty of meaning than it is and thus also to assume a more superficial effect than it must have had according to the testimony of the ancients, for we easily forget that what the poet as a wordsmith could not achieve, the attainment of the highest intellectualization and idealization of myth, he could have achieved successfully at any moment as a creative musician!Admittedly we are almost forced to recreate through scholarship the extraordinary power of the musical effects in order to experience something of that incomparable consolation necessarily characteristic of true tragedy. But we would experience this superior musical power for what it is only if we ourselves were Greeks; whereas, considering the entire development of Greek music in comparison to the music we know and are familiar with — so infinitely richer by comparison — we believe that we are hearing youthful songs of musical genius, sung with only a timid sense of their power. The Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests say, eternal children, and in tragic art, only children who do not know what a sublime toy has arisen under their hands and which — will be destroyed.That struggle of the spirit of music for pictorial and mythic revelation, which becomes increasingly intense from the beginning of the lyric right up to Attic tragedy, suddenly breaks apart, right after it first attained full luxuriant bloom and, so to speak, disappears from the surface of Hellenic art, although the Dionysian world view born out of this struggle lives on in the mysteries and, in the most amazing transformations and degenerations, never stops attracting more serious natures to it. Is it not possible that one day it will rise from its mystic depths as art once more?At this point we are concerned with the question whether the power whose opposition broke tragedy has sufficient force for all time to hinder the artistic reawakening of tragedy and the tragic world view. If the old tragedy was derailed by the dialectical drive for knowledge and for the optimism of science, we might have to infer from this fact an eternal struggle between the theoretical and the tragic world view; and only after the spirit of science is taken right to its limits and its claim to universal validity destroyed by the proof of that limit would it be possible to hope for a re-birth of tragedy. For a symbol of such a cultural form, we would have to set up Socrates the player of music, in the sense talked about earlier. By this confrontation I understand with respect to the spirit of science that belief, which first came to light in the person of Socrates, that nature can be rationally understood and that knowledge has a universal healing power.Whoever remembers the most immediate consequences of this restless forward-driving spirit of science will immediately recall how it destroyed myth and how through this destruction poetry was driven out of its naturally ideal soil as something which from now on was without a home. If we have correctly ascribed to music the power to be able to bring about out of itself a rebirth of myth, then we will also have to seek out the spirit of science on the path where it has its hostile encounter with the myth-creating power of music. This occurred in the development of the new Attic dithyramb, whose music no longer expressed the inner essence, the will itself, but only gave back an inadequate appearance in an imitation delivered through ideas. From such inwardly degenerate music those with a true musical nature turned away with the same aversion which they had shown when confronted by the art-killing attitude of Socrates.The instinct of Aristophanes, which had such a sure grasp, was certainly right when he linked together Socrates himself, the tragedies of Euripides, and the music of the new writers of dithyrambs, hating each of them equally and smelling in all three phenomena the characteristics of a degenerate culture. Through that newer dithyramb, music was, in an outrageous manner, turned into a mimetic demonstration of appearances, for example, a battle, a storm at sea, and in the process was certainly robbed of all its power to create myths. For when music seeks to arouse our indulgence only by compelling us to look for external analogies between an event in life and nature and certain rhythmic figures and characteristic musical sounds, when our understanding is supposed to be satisfied with the recognition of these analogies, then we are dragged down into a mood in which a conception of the mythic is impossible, for myth desires to be vividly felt as a single instance of universality and truth staring into the infinite.Truly Dionysian music confronts us as such a universal mirror of the world will: that vivid event reflected in this mirror widens out at once for our feelings into the image of an eternal truth. By contrast, in the sound painting of the newer dithyramb such a vivid event is immediately stripped of every mythic character; now the music has become a feeble copy of the phenomenon and, in the process, infinitely poorer than the phenomenon itself. Through this impoverishment the phenomenon itself is even lowered in our feelings, so that now, for example, a battle imitated in this kind of music exhausts itself in marches, trumpet calls, and so forth, and our imagination is held back by these very superficialities.Painting with music is thus in every respect the opposite to the myth-creating power of true music: through the former a phenomenon becomes even more impoverished than it is; whereas, through Dionysian music the individual phenomenon becomes richer and widens into a world picture. It was a powerful victory of the non- Dionysian spirit when, in the development of the newer dithyramb, it alienated music from itself and forced it down to be the slave of appearances. Euripides, who, in a higher sense, must be considered a thoroughly unmusical nature, is for this very reason an ardent supporter of the newer dithyrambic music and uses all its stock effects and styles with the open-handedness of a thief.From another perspective we see the force of this un-Dionysian spirit in action directing its effects against myth, when we turn our gaze toward the way in which the presentation of character and the psychological complexities increase alarmingly in the tragedies of Sophocles. The character can no longer be allowed to broaden out into an eternal type, but, by contrast, must come across as an individual because of the artistic qualifications and shading and the most delicate clarity of every line, so that the spectator generally no longer experiences the myth but the commanding naturalism of the artist, his power of imitation.Here, as a result, we become aware of the victory of appearances over the universal and of the delight in the particular, like an anatomical specimen, as it were. Already we breathe the air of a theoretical world, which values the scientific insight higher than the artistic reflection of a universal principle. The movement along the line of increasing characterization quickly goes further. While Sophocles still paints whole characters and yokes their sophisticated development to myth, Euripides already paints only large individual character traits, which are capable of expressing themselves in violent passions. In the newer Attic comedy there are only masks with one expression, silly old men, deceived pimps, and mischievous slaves in an inexhaustible repetition.Where now has the myth-building spirit of music gone? What is still left for music now is music either of excitement or of memory, that is, either a means of stimulating jaded and worn out nerves or sound painting. As far as the first is concerned, the text is largely irrelevant. Already in Euripides, when his heroes or chorus first start to sing, things get really out of hand. What must it have been like with his impertinent successors?However, the new un-Dionysian spirit manifests itself with the utmost clarity in the conclusions of the newer plays. In the old tragedy, the metaphysical consolation was there to feel at the conclusion. Without that, the delight in tragedy generally cannot be explained. The sound of reconciliation from another world echoes most purely perhaps in Oedipus at Colonus. Now, once the genius of music flew away from tragedy, tragedy is, in the strong sense of the term, dead: for out of what are people now supposed to be able to create that metaphysical consolation? Consequently, people looked for an earthly solution to tragic dissonance. After the hero was sufficiently tortured by fate, he received a well-earned reward in an impressive marriage, in divine tributes. The hero became a gladiator, to whom people occasionally gave his freedom, after he had been well beaten and was covered with wounds. The deus ex machina moved in to take the place of metaphysical consolation. I don’t wish to say that the tragic world view was completely destroyed everywhere by the surging spirit of the un-Dionysian: we know only that it must have fled out of art into the underworld, so to speak, degenerating into a secret cult. But over the widest surface area of Hellenic existence raged the consuming wind of that spirit which announces itself in that form of “Greek serenity” to which I have already referred earlier, as an impotent, unproductive delight in existence. This cheerfulness is the opposite of the marvellous “naivete” of the older Greeks, which we must see, in accordance with its given characteristics, as the flowering of Apollonian culture, blossoming out of a dark abyss, as the victory over suffering and the wisdom of suffering, which the Hellenic will gains through its ability to mirror beauty.The noblest form of that other form of “Greek serenity,” the Alexandrian, is the cheerfulness of the theoretical man. It manifests the same characteristic features I have just derived out of the spirit of the un-Dionysian — it fights against Dionysian wisdom and art; it strives to dissolve myth; in place of a metaphysical consolation, it sets an earthy consonance, indeed a deus ex machina of its own, namely, the god of machines and crucibles, that is, the forces of nature spirits, recognized and used in the service of a higher egoism; it believes in correcting the world through knowledge, in a life guided by science, and thus is really in a position to confine the individual man in the narrowest circle of soluble problems, inside which he can cheerfully say to life: “I want you. You are worth knowing.”18 It’s an eternal phenomenon: the voracious will always finds a way to keep its creatures alive and to force them on to further living by an illusion spread over things. One man is fascinated by the Socratic desire for knowledge and the delusion that with it he will be able to heal the eternal wound of existence. Another is caught up by the seductive veil of artistic beauty fluttering before his eyes, still another by the metaphysical consolation that underneath the hurly-burly of appearances eternal life flows on indestructibly, to say nothing of the more common and almost even more powerful illusions which the will holds ready at all times. In general, these three stages of illusion are only for nobly endowed natures, those who especially feel with a more profound lack of enthusiasm the weight and difficulty of existence and who have to be deceived out of this lack by these exquisite stimulants. Everything we call culture consists of these stimulants: depending on the proportions of the mixture we have a predominantly Socratic or artistic or tragic culture — or if you’ll permit historical examples — there is either an Alexandrian or a Hellenic or a Buddhist culture.Our entire modern world is trapped in the net of Alexandrian culture and recognizes as its ideal the theoretical man, equipped with the highest intellectual powers and working in the service of science, a man for whom Socrates is the prototype and progenitor. All our methods of education originally have this ideal in view; every other existence has struggled on with difficulty alongside this ideal as a way of life we permit, not as one we desire. For a long time now, in an almost frightening sense, an educated person here has been found only in the form of the scholar. Even our poetic arts have had to develop out of scholarly imitations, and in the important effect of rhyme we recognize still the development of our poetical form out of artificial experiments with what is essentially a really scholarly language, not one native to us.To a true Greek how incomprehensible Faust would have to have appeared, the man of modern culture, who is inherently intelligible to us, who storms dissatisfied through all faculties, that Faust whose drive for knowledge makes him devoted to magic and the devil. We have only to stand him beside Socrates for comparison in order to recognize that modern man is beginning to have a premonition of the limits of that Socratic desire for knowledge and is yearning for a coastline in the wide, desolate sea of knowledge. When Goethe once remarked to Eckermann, with reference to Napoleon, “Yes, my good man, there is also a productivity in actions,” in a delightfully naive way he was reminding us that the non-theoretical man is something implausible and astonishing to modern human beings, so that, once again, it required the wisdom of a Goethe to find out that such a strange form of existence is comprehensible, indeed, forgivable.And now we should not conceal from ourselves what lies hidden in the womb of this Socratic culture! An optimism that thinks itself all powerful! Well, people should not be surprised when the fruits of this optimism ripen, when a society that has been thoroughly leavened with this kind of culture, right down to the lowest levels, gradually trembles with an extravagant turmoil of desires, when the belief in earthly happiness for everyone, when faith in the possibility of such a universal knowledge culture gradually changes into the threatening demand for such an Alexandrian earthly happiness, into the plea for a Euripidean deus ex machina!People should take note: Alexandrian culture requires a slave class in order to be able to exist over time, but with its optimistic view of existence, it denies the necessity for such a class and thus, when the effect of its beautiful words of seduction and reassurance about the “dignity of human beings” and the “dignity of work” has worn off, it gradually moves towards a horrific destruction. There is nothing more frightening than a barbarian slave class which has learned to think of its existence as an injustice and is preparing to take revenge, not only for itself, but for all generations.In the face of such threatening storms, who dares appeal with sure confidence to our pale and exhausted religions, which themselves in their foundations have degenerated into scholarly religions, so that myth, the essential precondition for every religion, is already paralyzed everywhere, and even in this area that optimistic spirit which we have just described as the germ of destruction of our society has gained control.While the disaster slumbering in the bosom of theoretical culture gradually begins to worry modern man and while he, in his uneasiness, reaches into the treasure of his experience for ways to avert the danger, without himself having any real faith in these means, and while he also begins to have a premonition of the particular consequences for him, some great wide-ranging natures have, with an incredible circumspection, known how to use the equipment of science itself to set out the boundaries and restricted nature of knowledge generally and, in the process, decisively to deny the claim of science to universal validity and universal goals. With proofs like this, the delusion which claims that with the help of causality it can fathom the innermost essence of things has for the first time become recognized for what it is.The immense courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer achieved the most difficult victory, the victory over the optimism lying concealed in the essential nature of logic, which is, in turn, the foundation of our culture. While this logic, based on aeternae veritates [eternal truths] which it did not consider open to objection, believed that all the riddles of the world could be recognized and resolved and had treated space, time, and causality as totally unconditional laws with the most universal validity, Kant showed how these really served only to raise mere appearance, the work of Maja, to the complete and highest reality and to set it in place of the innermost and true essence of things and thus to make true knowledge of this essence impossible, that is, in the words of Schopenhauer, to get the dreamer to sleep even more soundly (World as Will and Idea, I, 498).With this recognition there is introduced a culture which I venture to describe as a tragic culture. Its most important distinguishing feature is that wisdom replaces science as the highest goal, a wisdom which, undeceived by the seductive diversions of science, turns its unswerving gaze onto the all-encompassing picture of the world and, with a sympathetic feeling of love, seeks in that world to grasp eternal suffering as its own suffering. Let us picture for ourselves a generation growing up with this fearlessness in its gaze, with this heroic push into what is tremendous; let us picture for ourselves the bold stride of these dragon slayers, the proud audacity with which they turn their backs on all the doctrines of weakness associated with that optimism, in order “to live with resolution,” fully and completely. Would it not be necessary that the tragic man of this culture, having trained himself for what is serious and frightening, to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical consolation, the tragedy, as his own personal Helen of Troy, and to have to cry out with Faust:With my desire's power, should I not call
Into this life the fairest form of all?However, now that Socratic culture has been shaken on two sides and can hang onto the sceptre of its infallibility only with trembling hands — once by the fear of its own consequences, which it is definitely beginning to sense and, in addition, because it is itself no longer convinced with that earlier naive trust of the eternal validity of its foundations, it’s a sorry spectacle how the dance of its thinking constantly dashes longingly after new forms in order to embrace them and then how, like Mephistopheles with the seductive Lamias, it suddenly, with a shudder, lets them go again.*That is, in fact, the characteristic mark of that “fracture” which everyone is in the habit of talking about as the root malady of modern culture, that theoretical man is afraid of his own consequences and, in his dissatisfaction, no longer dares to commit himself to the fearful ice currents of existence. He runs anxiously up and down along the shore. He no longer wants to have anything completely, any totality with all the natural cruelty of things. That’s how much the optimistic way of seeing things has mollycoddled him. At the same time he feels how a culture which has been built on the principle of science must collapse when it begins to become illogical, that is, when it begins to run away once it is faced with its own consequences.Our art reveals this general distress: in vain people use imitation to lean on all the great productive periods and natures; in vain they gather all “world literature” around modern man to bring him consolation and place him in the middle of artistic styles and artists of all ages, so that he may, like Adam with the animals, give them a name. But he remains an eternally hungry man, the “critic” without joy and power, the Alexandrian man, who is basically a librarian and copy editor and goes miserably blind from the dust of books and printing errors.19We can designate the innermost form of this Socratic culture no more precisely than when we call it the culture of opera, for in this area our Socratic culture, with characteristic naivete, has expressed its wishes and perceptions, something astonishing to us if we bring the genesis of opera and the facts of the development of opera together with the eternal truths of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. First, I bring to mind the emergence of the stilo rappresentativo [the representational style] and of recitative. Is it credible that this entirely externalized opera music, something incapable of worship, could be accepted and preserved with wildly enthusiastic favour, as if it were the rebirth of all true music, during an age in which Palestrina’s inexpressibly awe-inspiring and sacred music had just arisen?* On the other hand, who would make the diversion-loving voluptuousness of those Florentine circles or the vanity of its dramatic singers responsible for such an impetuously spreading love of opera? The fact that in the same age — indeed, in the same peoples — alongside the vaulted structure of Palestrina’s harmonies, which the entire Christian Middle Ages had developed, there awoke that passion for a half-musical way of speaking — that I can explain only by some tendency beyond art at work in the very nature of recitative.To the listener who wishes to hear clearly the word under the singing, there corresponds the singer who speaks more than he sings and who intensifies the expressions of pathos in this half-singing. Through this intensification of pathos he makes the words easier to understand and overpowers that part of the music which remains. The real danger now threatening him is that at an inopportune moment he may give the music the major emphasis, so that the pathos in the speech and the clarity of the words necessarily disappear at once. On the other hand, he always feels the urge for musical release and a virtuoso presentation of his voice. Here the “poet” comes to his assistance, the man who knows how to provide him sufficient opportunities for lyrical interjections, repetitions of words and sentences, and so on, places where the singer can now rest in the purely musical element, without considering the words. This alternation of urgently emotional speech which is only half sung and interjections which are all singing, which lies at the heart of the stilo rappresentativo, this rapidly changing effort at one moment to affect the understanding and imagination of the listener and, at another, to work on his musical sensibility, is something so completely unnatural and at the same time so inwardly contradictory to the Dionysian and Apollonian artistic drives that we must infer an origin of recitative which lies outside all artistic instincts.According to this account, we can define recitative as the mixing of epic and lyric performing, and, to be precise, not at all in an inwardly consistent blending, which could not have been attained with such entirely disparate things, but in the most external conglutination, in the style of a mosaic, something the like of which has no model whatsoever in the realm of nature and experience. But this was not the opinion of those inventors of recitative. By contrast, they themselves, along with their age, believed that through that stilo rappresentativo the secret of ancient music had been resolved, that only through it could one explain the tremendous effect of an Orpheus, Amphion, indeed, even of Greek tragedy. The new style was valued as the reawakening of the most effective music, the music of the ancient Greeks; in fact, under the universal and totally popular conception of the Homeric world as the primitive world, people could abandon themselves to the dream that they had now climbed down once more into the paradisal beginnings of humankind, in which music must necessarily have had that superb purity, power, and innocence which the poets knew how to talk about so movingly in their pastoral plays.Here we see into the innermost development of this truly genuine modern style of art, the opera. A powerful need forcibly creates an art, but it is a need of an unaesthetic sort: the yearning for the idyllic, the belief in a primordial existence of the artistic and good man. Recitative served as the rediscovered language of that primordial man, and opera as the rediscovered land of that idyllic or heroically good being, who at the same time follows a natural artistic drive in all his actions, who sings at least something in everything he has to say, so that, given the slightest emotional arousal, he immediately sings out in full voice.For us now it is unimportant that contemporary humanists used this newly created picture of the paradisal artist to fight against the old church idea of human beings as inherently corrupt and lost, so that opera is to be understood as the opposing dogma of good people, something with which they simultaneously discovered a way of consoling themselves against that pessimism to which the serious-minded people of that time, given the horrifying uncertainties of all social conditions, were attracted most strongly. It’s enough for us to recognize how the real magic and thus the origin of this new artistic form lies in the satisfaction of an entirely unaesthetic need, in the optimistic glorification of man as such, in its view of primitive man as a naturally good and artistic man. This operatic principle has gradually transformed itself into a threatening and terrible demand, which we, faced with the socialist movement of the present day, can no longer fail to hear. The “good primitive man” wants his rights: what paradisal prospects!Alongside this point I set still another equally clear confirmation of my view that opera is constructed on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the offspring of the theoretical man, of the critical layman, not of the artist — one of the strangest facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of essentially unmusical listeners that people had to understand the words above all, so that a rebirth of music was only to be expected when some way of singing was discovered according to which the words of the text rule over the counterpoint the way a lord rules over his servants. For the words, they claimed, are much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system, just as the soul is much nobler than the body. In the beginning of opera, the union of music, image, and word was treated according to the amateurish, unmusical crudity of these views. The first experiments with the meaning of this aesthetic were launched even in distinguished amateur circles in Florence by the poets and singers patronized there.The man who is artistically impotent produces for himself a form of art precisely because he is the inherently inartistic man. Because he has no sense of the Dionysian depths of music, for his own sake he transforms musical taste into easy-to-understand verbal and musical rhetoric of the passions in the stilo rappresentativo and into the voluptuousness of the art of singing; because he is incapable of seeing a vision, he presses mechanics and decorative artists into his service; because he has no idea how to grasp the true essence of the artist, he conjures up in front of him the “artistic primitive man” to suit his own taste, that is, the man who, when passionate, sings and speaks verse. He dreams himself back in an age in which passion was sufficient to produce songs and poems, as if every feeling is capable of creating something artistic. The precondition of opera is a false belief about the artistic process; more precisely, it is the idyllic faith that in reality every sensitive man is an artist. In keeping with the sense of this belief, opera is the expression of lay amateurs in art, something which dictates its laws with the cheerful optimism of the theoretical man.If we wanted to bring together into a single conception both of these ideas I have just described, which were at work in the origin of opera, all we would have left to do is to speak of an idyllic tendency in opera, and for that the only thing we would need to use is Schiller’s way of expressing himself and his explanation. He claimed that nature and the ideal are either an object of sorrow, when the former is represented as lost and the latter as unattained, or both are an object of joy, when they are represented as real. The first produces the elegy in a narrower sense, and the other produces the idyll in its broadest sense. Now we can immediately draw attention here to the common characteristic of both of these ideas in the genesis of opera, that in them the ideal does not register as unattained and nature does not register as lost.According to this feeling, there was a primordial time for man when he lay on the heart of nature and, in this state of nature, at the same time attained the ideal of humanity in paradisal goodness and artistry. We all are said to have descended from these perfect primitive men, indeed, we still were their faithful image; we only had to cast some things away from us in order to recognize ourselves once again as these primitive people, thanks to a voluntary renunciation of superfluous scholarship, of lavish culture.Through his operatic imitation of Greek tragedy, the educated man of the Renaissance let himself be led back to such a harmony of nature and the ideal, to an idyllic reality. He used this tragedy, as Dante used Virgil, in order to be led right up to the gates of paradise, while from this point on he strode even further on his own and passed over from an imitation of the highest Greek art form to a “restoration of all things,” to a copy of man’s original artistic world.*What a confident good nature there is in these audacious attempts, right in the bosom of theoretical culture! Something to be explained only by the comforting faith that “the essential man” is the eternally virtuous hero of opera, the eternally piping or singing shepherd, who must always in the end rediscover himself as such, should he find out at some time or other that he has really lost himself for a while: the only fruit of that optimism which here arises out of the depths of the Socratic world view, like a sweetly seductive fragrant column of air.Hence, among the characteristics of opera there is no sense at all of that elegiac pain of an eternal loss; instead there is the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery, the comfortable joy in an idyllic reality, the truth of which man can at least imagine for himself in every moment. In doing this, man may perhaps at some point suspect that this imagined reality is nothing other than a fantastically silly indulgence, at which anyone able to measure it against the fearful seriousness of true nature and to compare it with the actual primitive scenes of the beginnings of humanity would have to cry out in disgust: Get rid of that phantom!Nevertheless, we would be deceiving ourselves if we believed that such a flirtatious being as opera could be frightened off simply by a powerful shout, like a ghost. Whoever wants to destroy opera must undertake the struggle against that Alexandrine cheerfulness, which expresses its favourite idea so naively in opera; in fact, opera is its real artistic form. But what can we expect for art itself from the effect of a form of art whose origins do not lie in the aesthetic realm at all but which have, by contrast, stolen from a half moralistic sphere over into the sphere of art and which can deceive people about this hybrid origin only now and then?On what juices does this parasitic operatic being feed itself, if not from the sap of true art? Are we not to assume that, among the influence of opera’s idyllic seductions, among its Alexandrine arts of flattering, the highest task of art, the one we should truly call serious — saving the eye from a glimpse into the horror of the night and through the healing balm of illusion rescuing the subject from the spasms brought about by the stirrings of the will — would degenerate into a tendency to empty and scattered diversion? What becomes of the eternal truths of the Dionysian and the Apollonian in such a mixture of styles of the sort I have set down as the essence of the stilo rappresentativo, where the music is considered the servant and the libretto the master, where the music is compared to the body and the libretto to the soul, where the highest goal at best will aim at a descriptive tone painting, as it was earlier with the new Attic dithyramb, where the music is completely alienated from its true dignity, which is to be a Dionysian world- mirror, so that the only thing left for it is to imitate the essential forms of appearances, like a slave of phenomena, and to arouse a superficial entertainment in the play of lines and proportions? A rigorous examination shows how this fatal influence of opera on music coincides precisely with the entire modern development of music; the optimism lurking in the genesis of opera and in the essence of the culture represented through opera has succeeded with alarming speed in stripping music of its Dionysian world meaning and stamping on it a formally playful, amusing character. This transformation can be compared only to something like the metamorphosis of Aeschylean man into the Alexandrian cheerful man. However, if in the explanation given above we have been right to link the disappearance of the Dionysian spirit with an extremely striking but so far unexplained transformation and degeneration of Greek man, what hopes must revive in us when the surest favourable signs bring us the guarantee of the reverse process, of the gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit in our contemporary world! It is not possible that the divine power of Hercules should remain always impotent in voluptuous bondage to Omphale.* Out of the Dionysian foundation of the German spirit a power has arisen which has nothing in common with the most fundamental assumptions of Socratic culture, something which those assumptions can neither explain nor excuse, but which instead is experienced by this culture as something frightening, inexplicable, as overpowering and hostile — that is German music, above all as we must understand it in its mighty solar orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. Even in the best of circumstances what can the Socratism of our day, greedy for knowledge, begin to make of this daemon rising out of the inexhaustible depths? Neither from the lacework or arabesques of operatic melodies nor with the help of the arithmetical abacus of fugue and contrapuntal dialectic will a formula reveal itself in whose triple- powered light people can render that daemon obsequious and compel it to speak. What a spectacle when our aestheticians nowadays, with the net of “beauty” all of their own, strike at and try to catch that musical genius romping around in front of them with incredible life, with movements which will not be judged according to standards of eternal beauty any more than of the sublime. We should inspect these patrons of music for a moment, in person and at close quarters, when they cry out so tirelessly “Beauty! Beauty!” to see whether, in the process, they look like discriminating darling children of nature educated in the lap of beauty or whether they are not, by contrast, seeking a deceptively euphemistic form for their own crudity, an aesthetic pretext for their characteristically unfeeling sobriety. Here, for example, I’m thinking of Otto Jahn.* But the liar and hypocrite should beware of German music, for in the midst of all our culture it is precisely the one unalloyed, pure, and purifying fire spirit out from which and towards which all things move in a double orbit, as in the doctrine of the great Heraclitus of Ephesus: everything which we now call culture, education, civilization must at some point appear before the unerring judge Dionysus.* Furthermore, let’s remember how the spirit of German philosophy in Kant and Schopenhauer, streaming from the same springs, was able to annihilate the contented joy in existence of scholarly Socratism by demonstrating its boundaries, how with this demonstration an infinitely deeper and more serious consideration of ethical questions and of art was introduced, which we can truly describe as Dionysian wisdom conceptually understood. Where does the mystery of this unity between German music and German philosophy point if not to a new form of existence, about whose meaning we can inform ourselves only by speculating on the basis of analogies with the Greeks? For the Greek model has this immeasurable value for us who stand on the border line between two different forms of existence — in it are also stamped all those transitions and struggles in a classically instructive form, except that we are, as it were, living through the great high points of Greek being in the reverse order: for example, we seem to be moving now out of an Alexandrian period backwards into a period of tragedy. At the same time, we feel as if the birth of a tragic time period for the German spirit only means a return to itself, a blessed rediscovery of self, after hugely invasive forces from outside had for a long time forced it into servitude under their form, that spirit which, so far as form is concerned, had lived in helpless barbarism. And now finally, after its return home to the original spring of its being, it can dare to stride in here before all peoples, bold and free, without the guiding reins of a Romanesque civilization. If only it can now understand how to keep learning from a single people, the Greeks; being at all capable of learning from them is already a high honour and a remarkable distinction. And when have we needed these most eminent of mentors more than now, when we are experiencing the rebirth of tragedy and are in danger of not knowing where it is coming from and of being incapable of interpreting where it wants to go?20At some point under the eyes of an incorruptible judge we may determine in what age and in which men up to now the German spirit has struggled most powerfully to learn from the Greeks, and if we can assume with confidence that this extraordinary praise must be awarded to the noblest cultural struggles of Goethe, Schiller, and Winckelmann, then we would certainly have to add that, since that time and the most recent developments of that battle, the attempt to attain a culture and to reach the Greeks by the same route has become incomprehensibly weaker and weaker.* In order to avoid being forced into total despair about the German spirit, should we not conclude from all this that in some important point or other even those fighters could not succeed in penetrating into the core of the Hellenic spirit and creating a lasting bond of love between German and Greek culture? Perhaps an unconscious recognition of this failure even gives rise in more serious people to the enervating doubt whether, after such predecessors, they could go even further than those men had along this cultural path and reach their goal at all. For that reason since that time we’ve seen the judgment about the educational value of the Greeks degenerate in the most disturbing way. We can hear expressions of sympathetic condescension in the most varied encampments of the spirit and of the lack of spirit.
|
|
Posted by symbolic on 2008-06-18 05:44:27 | Rating: | Views: 144
|
|
| |
|
|
Email This to a Friend 