VOLUME V, ISSUE I, SPRING 2012
Abstract
To be sure apart from all the hasty hopes and faulty applications to the present with which I spoiled my first book, there still remains the great Dionysian question mark I raised – regarding music as well: what would a music have to be like that would no longer be of romantic origin, like German music – but Dionysian? (Nietzsche 25).
With the benefit of hindsight, Nietzsche concedes in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” (added to the third edition of The Birth of Tragedy) that much of the contemporary mythopoeic ambition of his first book can be dismissed as youthful naïveté. Indeed, his subsequent critiques of nationalism, as well as his personal and public repudiations of Wagner, necessitate repositioning or distancing from certain key pleas Nietzsche makes in the later sections of the book. Walter Kaufmann rather apologetically notes “the book might well end” with section 15, before Nietzsche shifts from the birth and death of tragedy in antiquity to his romanticist cum modernist appeal for a rebirth (98). Kaufmann’s efforts to redeem Nietzsche from fascist affiliation renders the defense of Nietzsche’s most overt politically aestheticized hopes burdensome and problematic; embarrassing if not outright indefensible. But Nietzsche’s insistence that this great question mark remains should dismiss such simplistic apologetics. What hopes remained for Nietzsche, filtered out from those later dismissed as hasty and what applications to the present would he still consider in attempting an answer to that great Dionysian question mark?
By this point (1886) Nietzsche was deeply disillusioned with Bayreuth. If Wagner had failed him, so too was he now beyond the identification with Germany as a spiritual figure of collective historical destiny (as one finds eerily echoed in Heidegger’s “Rectoral Address”). I don’t want here to focus on this question concerning Germany – not out of any personal avoidance or repression of this question, but instead to move forward with Nietzsche by returning to what was a contemporary urgency by asking what remains as relevant and necessary. If the question of what would constitute an authentically Dionysian music remained unanswered in Nietzsche’s lifetime, does it still?
To attempt an answer to this question we must negotiate a further question Nietzsche poses, in section 16 of Birth of Tragedy: “how is music related to image and concept?” Reducing this relationship to binary opposition analogous to body and soul isn’t Nietzsche’s intent. But for Nietzsche, music is “the immediate language of the will” (103) and is therefore pre-mimetic – perhaps one might employ Kristeva’s terms semiotic whereas the mimetic arts are inherently symbolic. This is not to say that Dionysian music would be pure sound without signification, for as Nietzsche explains:
music incites to the symbolic intuition of Dionysian universality, and music allows the symbolic image to emerge in its highest significance. From these facts, intelligible in themselves and not inaccessible to a more penetrating examination, I infer the capacity of music to give birth to myth (the most significant example) and particularly the tragic myth: the myth which expresses Dionysian knowledge in symbols. (103)
So there is an intimate correspondence between the nature and power of a given musical modality and the imagistic states that emerge organically from this sonic condition. Using Heidegger’s terms from “The Origin of the Work of Art,” music is the earth from which certain worlds appear. The Dionysian world view, then, must come from a certain musical sensibility, and a correspondence or synthesis must unite sound and concept.
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