The Birth of Tragedy (Chap. 19)

We can designate the innermost meaning of this Socratic culture no more precisely than when we call it the culture of opera, for in this area this 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?2 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 similarly 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.1

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 seriousminded 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 that 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 those 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 replica of man’s original artistic world.1

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 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.1 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 hunting 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.2 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.1

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 scientific 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, to use an analogy, we are, as it were, living through the great high ages 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 continuously 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?

Footnotes:

2Palestrina: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 to 1594), Italian musician, famous for his polyphonic vocal harmonies.

1In Greek mythology Orpheus and Amphion were extraordinarily gifted musicians.

1In the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Roman poet Virgil is the narrator’s guide through the circles of Hell but has to leave him as the narrator moves up into Purgatory and Paradise.

1Hercules . . . Omphale: In Greek mythology, the great hero Hercules had to serve for three years as a slave to Omphale, queen of Lydia, in retribution for murder.

2Otto Jahn: (1813 to 1869), German scholar of archaeology and philology and writer on music.

1Heraclitus : ( c. 535 to 475 BC), pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Asia Minor.