Section 19
Original German
Man kann den innersten Gehalt dieser sokratischen Cultur nicht schärfer bezeichnen, als wenn man sie die Cultur der Oper nennt: denn auf diesem Gebiete hat sich diese Cultur mit eigener Naivetät über ihr Wollen und Erkennen ausgesprochen, zu unserer Verwunderung, wenn wir die Genesis der Oper und die Thatsachen der Opernentwicklung mit den ewigen Wahrheiten des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen zusammenhalten. Ich erinnere zunächst an die Entstehung des stilo rappresentativo und des Recitativs. Ist es glaublich, dass diese gänzlich veräusserlichte, der Andacht unfähige Musik der Oper von einer Zeit mit schwärmerischer Gunst, gleichsam als die Wiedergeburt aller wahren Musik, empfangen und gehegt werden konnte, aus der sich soeben die unaussprechbar erhabene und heilige Musik Palestrina's erhoben hatte? Und wer möchte andrerseits nur die zerstreuungssüchtige Ueppigkeit jener Florentiner Kreise und die Eitelkeit ihrer dramatischen Sänger für die so ungestüm sich verbreitende Lust an der Oper verantwortlich machen? Dass in derselben Zeit, ja in demselben Volke neben dem Gewölbebau Palestrinischer Harmonien, an dem das gesammte christliche Mittelalter gebaut hatte, jene Leidenschaft für eine halbmusikalisch Sprechart erwachte, vermag ich mir nur aus einer im Wesen des Recitativs mitwirkenden ausserkünstlerischen Tendenz zu erklären.
Dem Zuhörer, der das Wort unter dem Gesange deutlich vernehmen will, entspricht der Sänger dadurch, dass er mehr spricht als singt und dass er den pathetischen Wortausdruck in diesem Halbgesange verschärft: durch diese Verschärfung des Pathos erleichtert er das Verständniss des Wortes und überwindet jene übrig gebliebene Hälfte der Musik. Die eigentliche Gefahr, die ihm jetzt droht, ist die, dass er der Musik einmal zur Unzeit das Obergewicht ertheilt, wodurch sofort Pathos der Rede und Deutlichkeit des Wortes zu Grunde gehen müsste: während er andrerseits immer den Trieb zu musikalischer Entladung und zu virtuosenhafter Präsentation seiner Stimme fühlt. Hier kommt ihm der „Dichter“ zu Hülfe, der ihm genug Gelegenheiten zu lyrischen Interjectionen, Wort- und Sentenzenwiederholungen u.s.w. zu bieten weiss: an welchen Stellen der Sänger jetzt in dem rein musikalischen Elemente, ohne Rücksicht auf das Wort, ausruhen kann. Dieser Wechsel affectvoll eindringlicher, doch nur halb gesungener Rede und ganz gesungener Interjection, der im Wesen des stilo rappresentativo liegt, dies rasch wechselnde Bemühen, bald auf den Begriff und die Vorstellung, bald auf den musikalischen Grund des Zuhörers zu wirken, ist etwas so gänzlich Unnatürliches und den Kunsttrieben des Dionysischen und des Apollinischen in gleicher Weise so innerlich Widersprechendes, dass man auf einen Ursprung des Recitativs zu schliessen hat, der ausserhalb aller künstlerischen Instincte liegt. Das Recitativ ist nach dieser Schilderung zu definiren als die Vermischung des epischen und des lyrischen Vortrags und zwar keinesfalls die innerlich beständige Mischung, die bei so gänzlich disparaten Dingen nicht erreicht werden konnte, sondern die äusserlichste mosaikartige Conglutination, wie etwas Derartiges im Bereich der Natur und der Erfahrung gänzlich vorbildlos ist. Dies war aber nicht die Meinung jener Erfinder des Recitativs: vielmehr glauben sie selbst und mit ihnen ihr Zeitalter, dass durch jenen stilo rappresentativo das Geheimniss der antiken Musik gelöst sei, aus dem sich allein die ungeheure Wirkung eines Orpheus, Amphion, ja auch der griechischen Tragödie erklären lasse. Der neue Stil galt als die Wiedererweckung der wirkungsvollsten Musik, der altgriechischen: ja man durfte sich, bei der allgemeinen und ganz volksthümlichen Auffassung der homerischen Welt als der Urwelt, dem Traume überlassen, jetzt wieder in die paradiesischen Anfänge der Menschheit hinabgestiegen zu sein, in der nothwendig auch die Musik jene unübertroffne Reinheit, Macht und Unschuld gehabt haben müsste, von der die Dichter in ihren Schäferspielen so rührend zu erzählen wussten. Hier sehen wir in das innerlichste Werden dieser recht eigentlich modernen Kunstgattung, der Oper: ein mächtiges Bedürfniss erzwingt sich hier eine Kunst, aber ein Bedürfniss unaesthetischer Art: die Sehnsucht zum Idyll, der Glaube an eine urvorzeitliche Existenz des künstlerischen und guten Menschen. Das Recitativ galt als die wiederentdeckte Sprache jenes Urmenschen; die Oper als das wiederaufgefundene Land jenes idyllisch oder heroisch guten Wesens, das zugleich in allen seinen Handlungen einem natürlichen Kunsttriebe folgt, das bei allem, was es zu sagen hat, wenigstens etwas singt, um, bei der leisesten Gefühlserregung, sofort mit voller Stimme zu singen. Es ist für uns jetzt gleichgültig, dass mit diesem neugeschaffnen Bilde des paradiesischen Künstlers die damaligen Humanisten gegen die alte kirchliche Vorstellung vom an sich verderbten und verlornen Menschen ankämpften: so dass die Oper als das Oppositionsdogma vom guten Menschen zu verstehen ist, mit dem aber zugleich ein Trostmittel gegen jenen Pessimismus gefunden war, zu dem gerade die Ernstgesinnten jener Zeit, bei der grauenhaften Unsicherheit aller Zustände, am stärksten gereizt waren. Genug, wenn wir erkannt haben, wie der eigentliche Zauber und damit die Genesis dieser neuen Kunstform in der Befriedigung eines gänzlich unaesthetischen Bedürfnisses liegt, in der optimistischen Verherrlichung des Menschen an sich, in der Auffassung des Urmenschen als des von Natur guten und künstlerischen Menschen: welches Princip der Oper sich allmählich in eine drohende und entsetzliche Forderung umgewandelt hat, die wir, im Angesicht der socialistischen Bewegungen der Gegenwart, nicht mehr überhören können. Der „gute Urmensch“ will seine Rechte: welche paradiesischen Aussichten!
Ich stelle daneben noch eine eben so deutliche Bestätigung meiner Ansicht, dass die Oper auf den gleichen Principien mit unserer alexandrinischen Cultur aufgebaut ist. Die Oper ist die Geburt des theoretischen Menschen, des kritischen Laien, nicht des Künstlers: eine der befremdlichsten Thatsachen in der Geschichte aller Künste. Es war die Forderung recht eigentlich unmusikalischer Zuhörer, dass man vor allem das Wort verstehen müsse: so dass eine Wiedergeburt der Tonkunst nur zu erwarten sei, wenn man irgend eine Gesangesweise entdecken werde, bei welcher das Textwort über den Contrapunkt wie der Herr über den Diener herrsche. Denn die Worte seien um so viel edler als das begleitende harmonische System, um wie viel die Seele edler als der Körper sei. Mit der laienhaft unmusikalischen Rohheit dieser Ansichten wurde in den Anfängen der Oper die Verbindung von Musik, Bild und Wort behandelt; im Sinne dieser Aesthetik kam es auch in den vornehmen Laienkreisen von Florenz, durch hier patronisirte Dichter und Sänger, zu den ersten Experimenten. Der kunstohnmächtige Mensch erzeugt sich eine Art von Kunst, gerade dadurch, dass er der unkünstlerische Mensch an sich ist. Weil er die dionysische Tiefe der Musik nicht ahnt, verwandelt er sich den Musikgenuss zur verstandesmässigen Wort- und Tonrhetorik der Leidenschaft im stilo rappresentativo und zur Wohllust der Gesangeskünste; weil er keine Vision zu schauen vermag, zwingt er den Maschinisten und Decorationskünstler in seinen Dienst; weil er das wahre Wesen des Künstlers nicht zu erfassen weiss, zaubert er vor sich den „künstlerischen Urmenschen“ nach seinem Geschmack hin d.h. den Menschen, der in der Leidenschaft singt und Verse spricht. Er träumt sich in eine Zeit hinein, in der die Leidenschaft ausreicht, um Gesänge und Dichtungen zu erzeugen: als ob jeder Affect im Stande gewesen sei, etwas Künstlerisches zu schaffen. Die Voraussetzung der Oper ist ein falscher Glaube über den künstlerischen Prozess und zwar jener idyllische Glaube, dass eigentlich jeder empfindende Mensch Künstler sei. Im Sinne dieses Glaubens ist die Oper der Ausdruck des Laienthums in der Kunst, das seine Gesetze mit dem heitern Optimismus des theoretischen Menschen dictirt.
Sollten wir wünschen, die beiden eben geschilderten, bei der Entstehung der Oper wirksamen Vorstellungen unter einen Begriff zu vereinigen, so würde uns nur übrig bleiben, von einer idyllischen Tendenz der Oper zu sprechen: wobei wir uns allein der Ausdrucksweise und Erklärung Schillers zu bedienen hätten. Entweder, sagt dieser, ist die Natur und das Ideal ein Gegenstand der Trauer, wenn jene als verloren, dieses als unerreicht dargestellt wird. Oder beide sind ein Gegenstand der Freude, indem sie als wirklich vorgestellt werden. Das erste giebt die Elegie in engerer, das andere die Idylle in weitester Bedeutung. Hier ist nun sofort auf das gemeinsame Merkmal jener beiden Vorstellungen in der Operngenesis aufmerksam zu machen, dass in ihnen das Ideal nicht als unerreicht, die Natur nicht als verloren empfunden wird. Es gab nach dieser Empfindung eine Urzeit des Menschen, in der er am Herzen der Natur lag und bei dieser Natürlichkeit zugleich das Ideal der Menschheit, in einer paradiesischen Güte und Künstlerschaft, erreicht hatte: von welchem vollkommnen Urmenschen wir alle abstammen sollten, ja dessen getreues Ebenbild wir noch wären: nur müssten wir Einiges von uns werfen, um uns selbst wieder als diesen Urmenschen zu erkennen, vermöge einer freiwilligen Entäusserung von überflüssiger Gelehrsamkeit, von überreicher Cultur. Der Bildungsmensch der Renaissance liess sich durch seine opernhafte Imitation der griechischen Tragödie zu einem solchen Zusammenklang von Natur und Ideal, zu einer idyllischen Wirklichkeit zurückgeleiten, er benutzte diese Tragödie, wie Dante den Virgil benutzte, um bis an die Pforten des Paradieses geführt zu werden: während er von hier aus selbständig noch weiter schritt und von einer Imitation der höchsten griechischen Kunstform zu einer „Wiederbringung aller Dinge“, zu einer Nachbildung der ursprünglichen Kunstwelt des Menschen überging. Welche zuversichtliche Gutmüthigkeit dieser verwegenen Bestrebungen, mitten im Schoosse der theoretischen Cultur!—einzig nur aus dem tröstenden Glauben zu erklären, dass „der Mensch an sich“ der ewig tugendhafte Opernheld, der ewig flötende oder singende Schäfer sei, der sich endlich immer als solchen wiederfinden müsse, falls er sich selbst irgendwann einmal wirklich auf einige Zeit verloren habe, einzig die Frucht jenes Optimismus, der aus der Tiefe der sokratischen Weltbetrachtung hier wie eine süsslich verführerische Duftsäule emporsteigt.
Es liegt also auf den Zügen der Oper keinesfalls jener elegische Schmerz eines ewigen Verlustes, vielmehr die Heiterkeit des ewigen Wiederfindens, die bequeme Lust an einer idyllischen Wirklichkeit, die man wenigstens sich als wirklich in jedem Augenblicke vorstellen kann: wobei man vielleicht einmal ahnt, dass diese vermeinte Wirklichkeit nichts als ein phantastisch läppisches Getändel ist, dem jeder, der es an dem furchtbaren Ernst der wahren Natur zu messen und mit den eigentlichen Urscenen der Menschheitsanfänge zu vergleichen vermöchte, mit Ekel zurufen müsste: Weg mit dem Phantom! Trotzdem würde man sich täuschen, wenn man glaubte, ein solches tändelndes Wesen, wie die Oper ist, einfach durch einen kräftigen Anruf, wie ein Gespenst, verscheuchen zu können. Wer die Oper vernichten will, muss den Kampf gegen jene alexandrinische Heiterkeit aufnehmen, die sich in ihr so naiv über ihre Lieblingsvorstellung ausspricht, ja deren eigentliche Kunstform sie ist. Was ist aber für die Kunst selbst von dem Wirken einer Kunstform zu erwarten, deren Ursprünge überhaupt nicht im aesthetischen Bereiche liegen, die sich vielmehr aus einer halb moralischen Sphäre auf das künstlerische Gebiet hinübergestohlen hat und über diese hybride Entstehung nur hier und da einmal hinwegzutäuschen vermochte? Von welchen Säften nährt sich dieses parasitische Opernwesen, wenn nicht von denen der wahren Kunst? Wird nicht zu muthmaassen sein, dass, unter seinen idyllischen Verführungen, unter seinen alexandrinischen Schmeichelkünsten, die höchste und wahrhaftig ernst zu nennende Aufgabe der Kunst—das Auge vom Blick in's Grauen der Nacht zu erlösen und das Subject durch den heilenden Balsam des Scheins aus dem Krampfe der Willensregungen zu retten—zu einer leeren und zerstreuenden Ergetzlichkeitstendenz entarten werde? Was wird aus den ewigen Wahrheiten des Dionysischen und des Apollinischen, bei einer solchen Stilvermischung, wie ich sie am Wesen des stilo rappresentativo dargelegt habe? wo die Musik als Diener, das Textwort als Herr betrachtet, die Musik mit dem Körper, das Textwort mit der Seele verglichen wird? wo das höchste Ziel bestenfalls auf eine umschreibende Tonmalerei gerichtet sein wird, ähnlich wie ehedem im neuen attischen Dithyrambus? wo der Musik ihre wahre Würde, dionysischer Weltspiegel zu sein, völlig entfremdet ist, so dass ihr nur übrig bleibt, als Sclavin der Erscheinung, das Formenwesen der Erscheinung nachzuahmen und in dem Spiele der Linien und Proportionen eine äusserliche Ergetzung zu erregen. Einer strengen Betrachtung fällt dieser verhängnissvolle Einfluss der Oper auf die Musik geradezu mit der gesammten modernen Musikentwicklung zusammen; dem in der Genesis der Oper und im Wesen der durch sie repräsentirten Cultur lauernden Optimismus ist es in beängstigender Schnelligkeit gelungen, die Musik ihrer dionysischen Weltbestimmung zu entkleiden und ihr einen formenspielerischen, vergnüglichen Charakter aufzuprägen: mit welcher Veränderung nur etwa die Metamorphose des aeschyleischen Menschen in den alexandrinischen Heiterkeitsmenschen verglichen werden dürfte.
Wenn wir aber mit Recht in der hiermit angedeuteten Exemplification das Entschwinden des dionysischen Geistes mit einer höchst auffälligen, aber bisher unerklärten Umwandlung und Degeneration des griechischen Menschen in Zusammenhang gebracht haben—welche Hoffnungen müssen in uns aufleben, wenn uns die allersichersten Auspicien den umgekehrten Prozess, das allmähliche Erwachen des dionysischen Geistes in unserer gegenwärtigen Welt, verbürgen! Es ist nicht möglich, dass die göttliche Kraft des Herakles ewig im üppigen Frohndienste der Omphale erschlafft. Aus dem dionysischen Grunde des deutschen Geistes ist eine Macht emporgestiegen, die mit den Urbedingungen der sokratischen Cultur nichts gemein hat und aus ihnen weder zu erklären noch zu entschuldigen ist, vielmehr von dieser Cultur als das Schrecklich Unerklärliche, als das Uebermächtig-Feindselige empfunden wird, die deutsche Musik, wie wir sie vornehmlich in ihrem mächtigen Sonnenlaufe von Bach zu Beethoven, von Beethoven zu Wagner zu verstehen haben. Was vermag die erkenntnisslüsterne Sokratik unserer Tage günstigsten Falls mit diesem aus unerschöpflichen Tiefen emporsteigenden Dämon zu beginnen? Weder von dem Zacken- und Arabeskenwerk der Opernmelodie aus, noch mit Hülfe des arithmetischen Rechenbretts der Fuge und der contrapunktischen Dialektik will sich die Formel finden lassen, in deren dreimal gewaltigem Licht man jenen Dämon sich unterwürfig zu machen und zum Reden zu zwingen vermöchte. Welches Schauspiel, wenn jetzt unsere Aesthetiker, mit dem Fangnetz einer ihnen eignen „Schönheit“, nach dem vor ihnen mit unbegreiflichem Leben sich tummelnden Musikgenius schlagen und haschen, unter Bewegungen, die nach der ewigen Schönheit ebensowenig als nach dem Erhabenen beurtheilt werden wollen. Man mag sich nur diese Musikgönner einmal leibhaft und in der Nähe besehen, wenn sie so unermüdlich Schönheit! Schönheit! rufen, ob sie sich dabei wie die im Schoosse des Schönen gebildeten und verwöhnten Lieblingskinder der Natur ausnehmen oder ob sie nicht vielmehr für die eigne Rohheit eine lügnerisch verhüllende Form, für die eigne empfindungsarme Nüchternheit einen aesthetischen Vorwand suchen: wobei ich z.B. an Otto Jahn denke. Vor der deutschen Musik aber mag sich der Lügner und Heuchler in Acht nehmen: denn gerade sie ist, inmitten aller unserer Cultur, der einzig reine, lautere und läuternde Feuergeist, von dem aus und zu dem hin, wie in der Lehre des grossen Heraklit von Ephesus, sich alle Dinge in doppelter Kreisbahn bewegen: alles, was wir jetzt Cultur, Bildung, Civilisation nennen, wird einmal vor dem untrüglichen Richter Dionysus erscheinen müssen.
Erinnern wir uns sodann, wie dem aus gleichen Quellen strömenden Geiste der deutschen Philosophie, durch Kant und Schopenhauer, es ermöglicht war, die zufriedne Daseinslust der wissenschaftlichen Sokratik, durch den Nachweis ihrer Grenzen, zu vernichten, wie durch diesen Nachweis eine unendlich tiefere und ernstere Betrachtung der ethischen Fragen und der Kunst eingeleitet wurde, die wir geradezu als die in Begriffe gefasste dionysische Weisheit bezeichnen können: wohin weist uns das Mysterium dieser Einheit zwischen der deutschen Musik und der deutschen Philosophie, wenn nicht auf eine neue Daseinsform, über deren Inhalt wir uns nur aus hellenischen Analogien ahnend unterrichten können? Denn diesen unausmessbaren Werth behält für uns, die wir an der Grenzscheide zweier verschiedener Daseinsformen stehen, das hellenische Vorbild, dass in ihm auch alle jene Uebergänge und Kämpfe zu einer classisch-belehrenden Form ausgeprägt sind: nur dass wir gleichsam in umgekehrter Ordnung die grossen Hauptepochen des hellenischen Wesens analogisch durcherleben und zum Beispiel jetzt aus dem alexandrinischen Zeitalter rückwärts zur Periode der Tragödie zu schreiten scheinen. Dabei lebt in uns die Empfindung, als ob die Geburt eines tragischen Zeitalters für den deutschen Geist nur eine Rückkehr zu sich selbst, ein seliges Sichwiederfinden zu bedeuten habe, nachdem für eine lange Zeit ungeheure von aussen her eindringende Mächte den in hülfloser Barbarei der Form dahinlebenden zu einer Knechtschaft unter ihrer Form gezwungen hatten. Jetzt endlich darf er, nach seiner Heimkehr zum Urquell seines Wesens, vor allen Völkern kühn und frei, ohne das Gängelband einer romanischen Civilisation, einherzuschreiten wagen: wenn er nur von einem Volke unentwegt zu lernen versteht, von dem überhaupt lernen zu können schon ein hoher Ruhm und eine auszeichnende Seltenheit ist, von den Griechen. Und wann brauchten wir diese allerhöchsten Lehrmeister mehr als jetzt, wo wir die Wiedergeburt der Tragödie erleben und in Gefahr sind, weder zu wissen, woher sie kommt, noch uns deuten zu können, wohin sie will?
Musean translation
Complete machine-assisted Musean translation of the 1886 issue, with the Attempt at Self-Criticism and the Preface to Richard Wagner, made directly from the German of the Fritzsch Neue Ausgabe and read against its page images; reviewed against the German before publication.
The innermost substance of this Socratic culture cannot be characterized more sharply than by calling it the culture of opera. For in this sphere that culture has spoken with a naivety all its own about what it wills and knows—to our astonishment, when we set the genesis of opera and the facts of its development beside the eternal truths of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Let me recall first the emergence of the representational style and recitative. Is it credible that this wholly externalized operatic music, incapable of devotion, could have been received and cherished with rapturous favor, almost as the rebirth of all true music, by an age from which Palestrina’s inexpressibly sublime and sacred music had only just arisen? And who, on the other hand, would hold only the distraction-seeking luxury of those Florentine circles and the vanity of their dramatic singers responsible for the delight in opera that spread so impetuously? That in the same age, indeed among the same people, beside the vaulted edifice of Palestrina’s harmonies, on which the entire Christian Middle Ages had labored, this passion for a half-musical manner of speaking should awaken—I can explain this to myself only through an extra-artistic tendency at work in the very nature of recitative.
The singer accommodates the listener who wants to hear the words distinctly beneath the singing by speaking more than singing, and by intensifying the impassioned expression of the words in this half-song. Through this intensification of pathos, he makes the words easier to understand and overcomes the remaining half of music. The real danger now threatening him is that he may at some point give music the upper hand at the wrong moment, which would immediately destroy the pathos of the speech and the clarity of the words. On the other hand, he always feels the drive toward musical release and a virtuoso display of his voice. Here the “poet” comes to his aid, knowing how to offer him enough opportunities for lyrical interjections, repetitions of words and maxims, and the like: at these points the singer can now rest in the purely musical element, without regard for the words. This alternation between emotionally insistent yet only half-sung speech and wholly sung interjection, inherent in the representational style—this rapidly shifting effort to affect now the listener’s concepts and ideas, now his musical depths—is something so completely unnatural, so inwardly at odds with the artistic drives of the Dionysian and the Apollonian alike, that we must infer an origin for recitative outside all artistic instincts. On this account, recitative must be defined as a mixture of epic and lyrical delivery: by no means an inwardly stable mixture, which could not be achieved with things so wholly disparate, but the most external, mosaic-like gluing together, something utterly without a model in nature or experience. But this was not the opinion of those inventors of recitative: rather, they themselves, and their age with them, believed that this representational style had solved the mystery of ancient music, which alone could explain the tremendous effect of an Orpheus, an Amphion, indeed of Greek tragedy itself. The new style was regarded as the reawakening of the most powerful music, that of ancient Greece. Indeed, given the general and thoroughly popular conception of the Homeric world as the primordial world, people could surrender to the dream that they had now descended once again into humanity’s paradisiacal beginnings, when music, too, must necessarily have possessed that unsurpassed purity, power, and innocence of which the poets could tell such moving tales in their pastoral plays. Here we look into the innermost becoming of this quintessentially modern art form, opera: a powerful need compels an art into existence, but a need of an unaesthetic kind—the longing for the idyll, the belief in an existence of the artistic and good human being in the primordial past. Recitative was regarded as the rediscovered language of that primordial human being; opera as the recovered land of that idyllically or heroically good creature who at the same time follows a natural artistic drive in all his actions, who sings at least a little in everything he has to say, only to begin singing at full voice at the slightest stirring of feeling. For our present purposes it is immaterial that, with this newly created image of the paradisiacal artist, the humanists of the time were fighting the old ecclesiastical conception of the human being as inherently corrupt and lost. Opera must thus be understood as the opposing dogma of the good human being, which at the same time supplied a consolation against the pessimism to which precisely the serious-minded people of that age were most strongly impelled by the horrifying uncertainty of all circumstances. It is enough if we have recognized that the real enchantment, and thus the genesis, of this new art form lies in satisfying a wholly unaesthetic need: in the optimistic glorification of humanity as such, in conceiving the primordial human being as naturally good and artistic. This principle of opera has gradually turned into a threatening and terrifying demand, which, in the face of the socialist movements of the present, we can no longer fail to hear. The “good primordial human being” wants his rights: what paradisiacal prospects!
Alongside this I place another equally clear confirmation of my view that opera is built on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the offspring of the theoretical person, the critical layman, not the artist: one of the strangest facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of listeners unmusical in the strictest sense that the words must be understood above all else, so that a rebirth of the art of music could be expected only if some manner of singing were discovered in which the words of the text ruled over counterpoint as the master over the servant. For words, they said, were as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul was nobler than the body. With the unmusical crudity of a layman inherent in these views, the union of music, image, and word was handled in the beginnings of opera. In the spirit of this aesthetics, the first experiments also took place in the aristocratic lay circles of Florence, through poets and singers patronized there. The person powerless to create art produces a kind of art for himself precisely because he is the unartistic person as such. Because he has no inkling of music’s Dionysian depths, he transforms the enjoyment of music into an intellectual rhetoric of passion in words and tones in the representational style, and into sensuous delight in the arts of singing. Because he cannot behold a vision, he forces the stage machinist and the scenery painter into his service; because he does not know how to grasp the artist’s true nature, he conjures before him the “artistic primordial human being” to his own taste—that is, the person who sings and speaks in verse when impassioned. He dreams himself into an age when passion is enough to produce songs and poetry, as though every emotion had been capable of creating something artistic. Opera presupposes a false belief about the artistic process, namely that idyllic belief that everyone who feels is really an artist. In the sense of this belief, opera is the expression of the lay mentality in art, dictating its laws with the cheerful optimism of the theoretical person.
If we wished to unite under one concept the two ideas just described as active in the birth of opera, we would have no choice but to speak of an idyllic tendency in opera, using only Schiller’s terminology and explanation. Either, he says, nature and the ideal are an object of sorrow, when nature is presented as lost and the ideal as unattained; or both are an object of joy, when they are represented as real. The first gives elegy in the narrower sense, the second idyll in the broadest. Here we must immediately draw attention to the common feature of those two ideas in the genesis of opera: in them the ideal is not felt to be unattained, nor nature to be lost. According to this feeling, there was a primordial age of humanity when the human being lay against nature’s heart and, in this naturalness, had at the same time attained the ideal of humanity in a paradisiacal goodness and artistry. We were all supposed to descend from this perfect primordial human being, indeed still to be his faithful likeness: we needed only to cast off a few things in order to recognize ourselves once again as this primordial human being, by voluntarily divesting ourselves of superfluous learning and overabundant culture. Through his operatic imitation of Greek tragedy, the cultivated person of the Renaissance allowed himself to be led back to such a harmony of nature and ideal, to an idyllic reality. He used this tragedy as Dante used Virgil, to be led to the gates of paradise; from there, however, he advanced further on his own, passing from an imitation of the highest Greek art form to a “restoration of all things,” to a re-creation of humanity’s original world of art. What confident good nature in these audacious endeavors, in the very womb of theoretical culture!—It can be explained only by the consoling belief that the “human being as such” is the eternally virtuous operatic hero, the eternally piping or singing shepherd, who must always finally rediscover himself as such if at some time he has really lost himself for a while. It is solely the fruit of that optimism which rises here from the depths of the Socratic view of the world like a cloyingly seductive column of fragrance.
Thus the features of opera bear by no means that elegiac pain of an eternal loss, but rather the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery, the easy pleasure in an idyllic reality that we can at least imagine as real at any moment. In doing so we may occasionally suspect that this supposed reality is nothing but a fantastically silly dalliance, at which anyone able to measure it against the terrible seriousness of true nature and compare it with the actual primal scenes of humanity’s beginnings would have to cry out in disgust: “Away with the phantom!” Yet we would be deceiving ourselves if we believed that such a trifling creature as opera could simply be banished like a ghost by a forceful shout. Whoever wants to annihilate opera must take up the struggle against that Alexandrian cheerfulness which speaks so naively in it about its favorite idea, and of which it is indeed the proper art form. But what is art itself to expect from the workings of an art form whose origins do not lie in the aesthetic sphere at all, which has instead stolen over into the artistic domain from a half-moral sphere and has managed only here and there to disguise this hybrid origin? On what juices does this parasitic operatic creature feed, if not those of true art? Must we not suppose that, under its idyllic seductions, under its Alexandrian flatteries, art’s highest and truly serious task—to redeem the eye from gazing into the horrors of night, and through the healing balm of semblance to rescue the subject from the convulsions of the will’s stirrings—will degenerate into an empty pursuit of distracting amusement? What becomes of the eternal truths of the Dionysian and the Apollonian in such a mixture of styles as I have demonstrated in the nature of the representational style? Where music is regarded as servant, the words of the text as master, music compared with the body, the words with the soul? Where the highest goal will at best be directed toward a paraphrasing tone painting, as formerly in the new Attic dithyramb? Where music has been wholly estranged from its true dignity as a Dionysian mirror of the world, so that nothing remains for it but, as the slave of appearance, to imitate the formal character of appearance and arouse an external delight in the play of lines and proportions? To a rigorous examination, this fatal influence of opera on music simply coincides with the entire development of modern music. The optimism lurking in the genesis of opera and in the nature of the culture it represents has succeeded with alarming speed in stripping music of its Dionysian vocation in the world and stamping it with a playful, entertaining character absorbed in forms. This change can perhaps be compared only with the metamorphosis of the Aeschylean human being into the cheerful Alexandrian human being.
But if, in the example just indicated, we have rightly connected the fading of the Dionysian spirit with a most striking yet hitherto unexplained transformation and degeneration of the Greek human being—what hopes must awaken within us when the surest of auspices guarantee the reverse process, the gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit in our present world! It is not possible for the divine strength of Heracles to languish forever in voluptuous servitude to Omphale. From the Dionysian ground of the German spirit a power has arisen that has nothing in common with the primordial conditions of Socratic culture and can neither be explained nor excused in terms of them; rather, that culture feels it as something terrifyingly inexplicable, overwhelmingly hostile: German music, as we must understand it above all in its mighty solar course from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. What, in the most favorable case, can the knowledge-hungry Socratism of our day do with this demon rising from inexhaustible depths? Neither the jagged patterns and arabesques of operatic melody nor the help of the fugue’s arithmetical counting board and contrapuntal dialectic will yield the formula in whose thrice-mighty light that demon could be subdued and forced to speak. What a spectacle, when our aestheticians now swipe and snatch at the genius of music with the catching net of a “beauty” all their own, as it romps before them with incomprehensible life, in movements that will no more submit to judgment by eternal beauty than by the sublime. We need only take a close, bodily look at these patrons of music as they cry so tirelessly, “Beauty! Beauty!” Do they look like nature’s favorite children, nurtured and pampered in the lap of beauty, or are they not rather seeking a mendaciously concealing form for their own crudity, an aesthetic pretext for their own sober poverty of feeling? Here I am thinking, for example, of Otto Jahn. But let liars and hypocrites beware of German music: for amid our entire culture it alone is the pure, clear, and purifying spirit of fire, from which and toward which all things move in a double circular course, as in the teaching of the great Heraclitus of Ephesus. Everything we now call culture, cultivation, civilization must one day appear before the unerring judge Dionysus.
Let us recall, furthermore, how the spirit of German philosophy, flowing from the same sources, was enabled through Kant and Schopenhauer to annihilate the contented joy in existence of scientific Socratism by demonstrating its limits; how this demonstration inaugurated an infinitely deeper and more serious consideration of ethical questions and art, which we may simply call Dionysian wisdom grasped in concepts. Where does the mystery of this unity between German music and German philosophy point us, if not toward a new form of existence, whose substance we can learn to divine only through Hellenic analogies? For us, standing at the boundary between two different forms of existence, the Hellenic model retains this immeasurable value: in it, all those transitions and struggles are also stamped into a classically instructive form. Only, we experience by analogy the great principal epochs of the Hellenic spirit in, as it were, reverse order, and now seem, for example, to be stepping backward from the Alexandrian age into the period of tragedy. In this we feel as though the birth of a tragic age could mean for the German spirit only a return to itself, a blissful rediscovery of itself, after tremendous powers pressing in from outside had for a long time forced it, living on in a helpless barbarism of form, into bondage to their form. Now at last, after returning home to the primal source of its being, it may dare stride boldly and freely before all peoples, without the leading strings of a Romance civilization—if only it knows how to learn unswervingly from one people from whom even to be able to learn at all is already a high honor and a distinguishing rarity: the Greeks. And when have we needed these supreme teachers more than now, as we experience the rebirth of tragedy and are in danger of neither knowing where it comes from nor being able to interpret for ourselves where it seeks to go?
Plain English translation
Complete machine-assisted Plain English edition, made independently and directly from the same German text, without reference to the Musean edition or to any English translation.
We cannot describe the innermost content of this Socratic culture more sharply than by calling it the culture of opera. In this field the culture has spoken out, with a naivety all its own, about what it wants and what it knows. That is astonishing when we hold the origin of opera and the facts of its development up against the eternal truths of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. First I recall how the representational style and recitative began. Is it believable that this wholly externalized music of opera, which is incapable of devotion, could be welcomed and cherished with such enthusiastic favor, as if it were the rebirth of all true music? And that by an age out of which the unspeakably sublime and holy music of Palestrina had just risen? On the other hand, who would want to blame only the amusement-hungry luxury of those Florentine circles, and the vanity of their dramatic singers, for the delight in opera that spread so impetuously? In the same period, indeed among the same people, a passion for a half-musical way of speaking awoke. This happened right beside the vaulted structure of Palestrina’s harmonies, on which the whole Christian Middle Ages had been building. I can explain it to myself only by a tendency from outside art that was at work in the very nature of recitative.
The listener wants to hear the words clearly beneath the singing. The singer meets this wish by speaking more than singing, and by sharpening the emotional expression of the words in this half-song. By sharpening the emotional force in this way, the singer makes the words easier to understand and overcomes the half of the music that is left over. The real danger that now threatens the singer is giving the music the upper hand at the wrong moment. That would immediately destroy both the emotional force of the speech and the clarity of the words. Yet at the same time the singer always feels the urge to let out the music and to show off the voice like a virtuoso. Here the “poet” comes to the singer’s aid. The poet knows how to offer plenty of occasions for lyrical outcries, for repeating words and maxims, and so on. At these places the singer can now rest in the purely musical element, with no regard for the words. In the representational style, speech that is forceful with feeling but only half sung alternates with outcries that are fully sung. This quickly shifting effort works now on the listener’s concepts and ideas, now on the listener’s musical ground. It is so completely unnatural, and so deeply opposed to the artistic drives of the Dionysian and the Apollonian alike, that we have to conclude recitative has an origin outside all artistic instincts. By this description, recitative is to be defined as a mixing of epic and lyric delivery. It is by no means an inwardly lasting mixture, which could not be achieved with things so utterly unlike. It is the most external, mosaic-like gluing together, and nothing like it has any model in nature or experience. But this was not the opinion of the inventors of recitative: they themselves believed, and their age with them, that the representational style had solved the secret of ancient music. Only that secret, they thought, could explain the immense effect of an Orpheus, an Amphion, and even of Greek tragedy. The new style was regarded as the reawakening of the most effective music, the music of ancient Greece. Indeed, the general and thoroughly popular view saw the Homeric world as the primal world. So people could give themselves over to the dream that they had now climbed back down into the paradise-like beginnings of humanity. In that time music, too, must necessarily have had the unsurpassed purity, power and innocence that the poets tell of so touchingly in their shepherd plays. Here we see into the innermost coming-to-be of this truly modern art form, opera. A powerful need forces an art into being here, but it is a need of a nonaesthetic kind: the longing for the idyll, the belief in a primeval existence of the artistic and good human being. Recitative was regarded as the rediscovered language of that primal human being. Opera was regarded as the rediscovered land of that idyllically or heroically good creature, who at the same time follows a natural artistic drive in all its actions. Whatever it has to say, it sings at least a little, so as to sing at once in full voice at the slightest stirring of feeling. It does not matter to us now that the humanists of the time used this newly created picture of the paradisal artist to fight the old church idea of the human being as inherently corrupt and lost. So opera is to be understood as the opposing dogma of the good human being. But with that dogma a comfort had also been found against the pessimism toward which the serious-minded people of that time, in the dreadful insecurity of all conditions, were most strongly pushed. It is enough that we have recognized how the real magic of this new art form, and so its origin, lies in the satisfaction of a wholly nonaesthetic need. That need was the optimistic glorification of the human being as such, and the view of the primal human being as naturally good and artistic. This principle of opera has gradually turned into a threatening and horrifying demand, which we, in the face of the socialist movements of the present day, can no longer ignore. The “good primal human being” wants their rights. What paradisal prospects!
Beside this I place another confirmation, just as clear, of my view that opera is built on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical person, the critical layperson, not of the artist. It is one of the strangest facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of truly unmusical listeners that above all one must understand the words. So a rebirth of music was to be expected, they said, only if someone discovered some manner of singing in which the text ruled over the counterpoint like a master over a servant. For the words, they said, were as much nobler than the accompanying system of harmony as the soul is nobler than the body. In the beginnings of opera, the combination of music, picture and word was handled with the amateurish, unmusical crudeness of these views. In the spirit of this aesthetic, the first experiments also came about in the distinguished lay circles of Florence, through poets and singers whom those circles patronized. The person who is powerless in art produces a kind of art for themselves, precisely because they are the unartistic human being as such. Because they have no sense of the Dionysian depth of music, they turn their enjoyment of music into an intellectual rhetoric of words and tones for passion in the representational style, and into the sensual pleasure of vocal artistry. Because they cannot see a vision, they force the stage machinist and the set designer into their service. Because they do not know how to grasp the true nature of the artist, they conjure up before them, to their own taste, the “artistic primal human being,” that is, the human being who sings and speaks verses in passion. They dream themselves into a time when passion was enough to produce songs and poems, as if every emotion had been able to create something artistic. The precondition of opera is a false belief about the artistic process. It is that idyllic belief that really every feeling human being is an artist. In the sense of this belief, opera is the expression of amateurism in art, which dictates its laws with the cheerful optimism of the theoretical person.
If we wished to unite the two ideas just described, both at work in the origin of opera, under one concept, we would have nothing left but to speak of an idyllic tendency of opera. For this we would need to use only Schiller’s way of putting it and his explanation. Either, he says, nature and the ideal are an object of grief, when nature is presented as lost and the ideal as unattained. Or both are an object of joy, when they are imagined as real. The first gives the elegy in the narrower sense, the other the idyll in the widest sense. Now we must point out at once what the two ideas in the origin of opera have in common: in them the ideal is not felt as unattained, nor nature as lost. According to this feeling, there was a primeval age of humanity in which human beings lay at the heart of nature. In this naturalness they had also reached the ideal of humanity, in a paradisal goodness and artistry. We were all supposed to descend from this perfect primal human being. Indeed, we would still be that being’s faithful likeness. We would only have to throw something off ourselves in order to recognize ourselves again as this primal human being. We would do it by freely shedding superfluous scholarship and overly rich culture. The educated person of the Renaissance let their operatic imitation of Greek tragedy lead them back to such a harmony of nature and ideal, to an idyllic reality. They used this tragedy as Dante used Virgil, to be led as far as the gates of paradise. From there they went on further by themselves. They passed from an imitation of the highest Greek art form to a “restoration of all things,” to a re-creation of the original art world of human beings. What confident good-naturedness these daring efforts show, right in the womb of theoretical culture!—a good-naturedness that can be explained only by the comforting belief that “the human being as such” is the eternally virtuous opera hero, the eternally fluting or singing shepherd. Such a person must in the end always find themselves again as that, if they should ever really have lost themselves for a time. It is only the fruit of that optimism, which rises here out of the depths of the Socratic view of the world like a sweetish, seductive column of fragrance.
Written on the face of opera, then, is by no means that elegiac pain of an eternal loss. It is rather the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery, the comfortable pleasure in an idyllic reality, which at least one can picture as real at every moment. One may sense now and then that this supposed reality is nothing but fantastic, silly trifling. Anyone who could measure it against the terrible seriousness of true nature, and compare it with the actual primal scenes of humanity’s beginnings, would have to call out to it in disgust: Away with the phantom! Even so, one would be fooling oneself to think that such a trifling thing as opera could be chased away simply by a forceful shout, as one chases off a ghost. Whoever wants to destroy opera must take up the fight against that Alexandrian cheerfulness. It speaks out so naively in opera about its favorite idea, and opera is its true art form. But what can art itself expect from the working of an art form whose origins do not lie in the aesthetic realm at all? This art form has instead stolen across into the artistic territory from a half-moral sphere, and only here and there has it managed to disguise its hybrid origin. On what juices does this parasitic thing, opera, feed, if not on those of true art? Must we not suspect that, under its idyllic seductions and its Alexandrian flattering arts, the highest task of art, the one truly to be called serious, will degenerate into an empty, distracting tendency toward amusement? That task is to free the eye from the look into the horror of night, and to rescue the subject from the cramp of the stirrings of the will by the healing balm of semblance. What becomes of the eternal truths of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, with such a mixing of styles as I demonstrated from the nature of the representational style? Where music is regarded as the servant and the text as the master, where music is compared to the body and the text to the soul? Where the highest goal will at best be aimed at a descriptive tone-painting, much as formerly in the New Attic dithyramb? Where music is completely estranged from its true dignity of being the Dionysian mirror of the world, so that nothing is left for it but to imitate the formal nature of appearance, as a slave of appearance, and to stir an external delight in the play of lines and proportions. Looked at strictly, this fateful influence of opera on music simply coincides with the whole development of modern music. The optimism lurking in the origin of opera and in the nature of the culture it represents has succeeded, with alarming speed, in stripping music of its Dionysian destiny in the world. It has stamped on music a character of playing with forms and giving pleasure. Only the metamorphosis of the Aeschylean human being into the Alexandrian person of cheerfulness may perhaps be compared with this change.
But suppose we were right, in the example just indicated, to connect the disappearance of the Dionysian spirit with a highly striking but so far unexplained transformation and degeneration of the Greek human being. Then what hopes must spring to life in us, if the surest omens guarantee us the reverse process, the gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit in our present world! It is not possible that the divine strength of Heracles will go slack forever in the luxurious servitude to Omphale. Out of the Dionysian ground of the German spirit a power has risen that has nothing in common with the basic conditions of Socratic culture. It can be neither explained nor excused by them. Rather, that culture feels it to be the terribly inexplicable, the overpoweringly hostile. This power is German music, as we must understand it above all in its mighty course like the sun’s, from Bach to Beethoven and from Beethoven to Wagner. What can the knowledge-hungry Socratism of our day do, at best, with this demon rising from inexhaustible depths? No formula can be found, either from the jagged points and arabesques of operatic melody or with the help of the arithmetical counting board of the fugue and of contrapuntal dialectic, in whose thrice-mighty light one could make that demon submit and force it to speak. What a spectacle, when our aestheticians now, with the catching-net of a “beauty” of their own, strike and grab at the genius of music romping before them with incomprehensible life, in movements that want to be judged by eternal beauty no more than by the sublime. One need only look at these patrons of music once, in the flesh and up close, when they cry so tirelessly Beauty! Beauty! See whether they look like nature’s favorite children, formed and spoiled in the lap of the beautiful, or whether they are not rather looking for a lying, concealing form for their own coarseness, and an aesthetic pretext for their own sober lack of feeling. I am thinking, for example, of Otto Jahn. But before German music the liar and hypocrite had better watch out. For it is precisely German music that, in the midst of all our culture, is the only pure, clear and purifying spirit of fire. From it and toward it, as in the teaching of the great Heraclitus of Ephesus, all things move in a double orbit. Everything we now call culture, education, civilization will one day have to appear before the unerring judge, Dionysus.
Let us remember next how the spirit of German philosophy, flowing from the same sources, was able, through Kant and Schopenhauer, to destroy the contented delight in existence of scientific Socratism by showing its limits. Let us remember how this showing introduced an infinitely deeper and more serious view of ethical questions and of art, which we can call outright Dionysian wisdom put into concepts. Where does the mystery of this unity between German music and German philosophy point us, if not to a new form of existence, about whose content we can inform ourselves only by guessing from Hellenic analogies? For the Hellenic model keeps an immeasurable value for us, who stand at the dividing line between two different forms of existence. All those transitions and struggles are also stamped in it in a classic, instructive form. Only we, as it were, live through the great main epochs of the Hellenic character by analogy in reverse order. For example, we now seem to be walking backward from the Alexandrian age to the period of tragedy. At the same time we have the feeling that the birth of a tragic age can mean, for the German spirit, only a return to itself, a blessed finding of itself again. For a long time immense powers pressing in from outside had forced it, while it lived on in helpless barbarism of form, into servitude under their own form. Now at last, after its homecoming to the original spring of its being, it may dare to stride along boldly and freely before all peoples, without the leading strings of a Romance civilization. It needs only to know how to keep learning, unswervingly, from one people, the Greeks. Just to be able to learn from them at all is already a high honor and a distinguishing rarity. And when did we ever need these highest of teachers more than now, when we are living through the rebirth of tragedy and are in danger of knowing neither where it comes from nor being able to explain to ourselves where it wants to go?
About this section
Section 19 is part of The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is section 27 of 33 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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