Section 21
Original German
Von diesen exhortativen Tönen in die Stimmung zurückgleitend, die dem Beschaulichen geziemt, wiederhole ich, dass nur von den Griechen gelernt werden kann, was ein solches wundergleiches plötzliches Aufwachen der Tragödie für den innersten Lebensgrund eines Volkes zu bedeuten hat. Es ist das Volk der tragischen Mysterien, das die Perserschlachten schlägt: und wiederum braucht das Volk, das jene Kriege geführt hat, die Tragödie als nothwendigen Genesungstrank. Wer würde gerade bei diesem Volke, nachdem es durch mehrere Generationen von den stärksten Zuckungen des dionysischen Dämon bis in's Innerste erregt wurde, noch einen so gleichmässig kräftigen Erguss des einfachsten politischen Gefühls, der natürlichsten Heimatsinstincte, der ursprünglichen männlichen Kampflust vermuthen? Ist es doch bei jedem bedeutenden Umsichgreifen dionysischer Erregungen immer zu spüren, wie die dionysische Lösung von den Fesseln des Individuums sich am allerersten in einer bis zur Gleichgültigkeit, ja Feindseligkeit gesteigerten Beeinträchtigung der politischen Instincte fühlbar macht, so gewiss andererseits der staatenbildende Apollo auch der Genius des principii individuationis ist und Staat und Heimatssinn nicht ohne Bejahung der individuellen Persönlichkeit leben können.
Von dem Orgiasmus aus führt für ein Volk nur ein Weg, der Weg zum indischen Buddhaismus, der, um überhaupt mit seiner Sehnsucht in's Nichts ertragen zu werden, jener seltnen ekstatischen Zustände mit ihrer Erhebung über Raum, Zeit und Individuum bedarf: wie diese wiederum eine Philosophie fordern, die es lehrt, die unbeschreibliche Unlust der Zwischenzustände durch eine Vorstellung zu überwinden. Eben so nothwendig geräth ein Volk, von der unbedingten Geltung der politischen Triebe aus, in eine Bahn äusserster Verweltlichung, deren grossartigster, aber auch erschrecklichster Ausdruck das römische imperium ist.
Zwischen Indien und Rom hingestellt und zu verführerischer Wahl gedrängt, ist es den Griechen gelungen, in classischer Reinheit eine dritte Form hinzuzuerfinden, freilich nicht zu langem eigenen Gebrauche, aber eben darum für die Unsterblichkeit. Denn dass die Lieblinge der Götter früh sterben, gilt in allen Dingen, aber eben so gewiss, dass sie mit den Göttern dann ewig leben. Man verlange doch von dem Alleredelsten nicht, dass es die haltbare Zähigkeit des Leders habe; die derbe Dauerhaftigkeit, wie sie z.B. dem römischen Nationaltriebe zu eigen war, gehört wahrscheinlich nicht zu den nothwendigen Prädicaten der Vollkommenheit. Wenn wir aber fragen, mit welchem Heilmittel es den Griechen ermöglicht war, in ihrer grossen Zeit, bei der ausserordentlichen Stärke ihrer dionysischen und politischen Triebe, weder durch ein ekstatisches Brüten, noch durch ein verzehrendes Haschen nach Weltmacht und Weltehre sich zu erschöpfen, sondern jene herrliche Mischung zu erreichen, wie sie ein edler, zugleich befeuernder und beschaulich stimmender Wein hat, so müssen wir der ungeheuren, das ganze Volksleben erregenden, reinigenden und entladenden Gewalt der Tragödie eingedenk sein; deren höchsten Werth wir erst ahnen werden, wenn sie uns, wie bei den Griechen, als Inbegriff aller prophylaktischen Heilkräfte, als die zwischen den stärksten und an sich verhängnissvollsten Eigenschaften des Volkes waltende Mittlerin entgegentritt.
Die Tragödie saugt den höchsten Musikorgiasmus in sich hinein, so dass sie geradezu die Musik, bei den Griechen, wie bei uns, zur Vollendung bringt, stellt dann aber den tragischen Mythus und den tragischen Helden daneben, der dann, einem mächtigen Titanen gleich, die ganze dionysische Welt auf seinen Rücken nimmt und uns davon entlastet: während sie andrerseits durch denselben tragischen Mythus, in der Person des tragischen Helden, von dem gierigen Drange nach diesem Dasein zu erlösen weiss, und mit mahnender Hand an ein anderes Sein und an eine höhere Lust erinnert, zu welcher der kämpfende Held durch seinen Untergang, nicht durch seine Siege sich ahnungsvoll vorbereitet. Die Tragödie stellt zwischen die universale Geltung ihrer Musik und den dionysisch empfänglichen Zuhörer ein erhabenes Gleichniss, den Mythus, und erweckt bei jenem den Schein, als ob die Musik nur ein höchstes Darstellungsmittel zur Belebung der plastischen Welt des Mythus sei. Dieser edlen Täuschung vertrauend darf sie jetzt ihre Glieder zum dithyrambischen Tanze bewegen und sich unbedenklich einem orgiastischen Gefühle der Freiheit hingeben, in welchem sie als Musik an sich, ohne jene Täuschung, nicht zu schwelgen wagen dürfte. Der Mythus schützt uns vor der Musik, wie er ihr andrerseits erst die höchste Freiheit giebt. Dafür verleiht die Musik, als Gegengeschenk, dem tragischen Mythus eine so eindringliche und überzeugende metaphysische Bedeutsamkeit, wie sie Wort und Bild, ohne jene einzige Hülfe, nie zu erreichen vermögen; und insbesondere überkommt durch sie den tragischen Zuschauer gerade jenes sichere Vorgefühl einer höchsten Lust, zu der der Weg durch Untergang und Verneinung führt, so dass er zu hören meint, als ob der innerste Abgrund der Dinge zu ihm vernehmlich spräche.
Habe ich dieser schwierigen Vorstellung mit den letzten Sätzen vielleicht nur einen vorläufigen, für Wenige sofort verständlichen Ausdruck zu geben vermocht, so darf ich gerade an dieser Stelle nicht ablassen, meine Freunde zu einem nochmaligen Versuche anzureizen und sie zu bitten, an einem einzelnen Beispiele unsrer gemeinsamen Erfahrung sich für die Erkenntniss des allgemeinen Satzes vorzubereiten. Bei diesem Beispiele darf ich mich nicht auf jene beziehn, welche die Bilder der scenischen Vorgänge, die Worte und Affecte der handelnden Personen benutzen, um sich mit dieser Hülfe der Musikempfindung anzunähern; denn diese alle reden nicht Musik als Muttersprache und kommen auch, trotz jener Hülfe, nicht weiter als in die Vorhallen der Musikperception, ohne je deren innerste Heiligthümer berühren zu dürfen; manche von diesen, wie Gervinus, gelangen auf diesem Wege nicht einmal in die Vorhallen. Sondern nur an diejenigen habe ich mich zu wenden, die, unmittelbar verwandt mit der Musik, in ihr gleichsam ihren Mutterschooss haben und mit den Dingen fast nur durch unbewusste Musikrelationen in Verbindung stehen. An diese ächten Musiker richte ich die Frage, ob sie sich einen Menschen denken können, der den dritten Act von „Tristan und Isolde“ ohne alle Beihülfe von Wort und Bild rein als ungeheuren symphonischen Satz zu percipiren im Stande wäre, ohne unter einem krampfartigen Ausspannen aller Seelenflügel zu verathmen? Ein Mensch, der wie hier das Ohr gleichsam an die Herzkammer des Weltwillens gelegt hat, der das rasende Begehren zum Dasein als donnernden Strom oder als zartesten zerstäubten Bach von hier aus in alle Adern der Welt sich ergiessen fühlt, er sollte nicht jählings zerbrechen? Er sollte es ertragen, in der elenden gläsernen Hülle des menschlichen Individuums, den Wiederklang zahlloser Lust- und Weherufe aus dem „weiten Raum der Weltennacht“ zu vernehmen, ohne bei diesem Hirtenreigen der Metaphysik sich seiner Urheimat unaufhaltsam zuzuflüchten? Wenn aber doch ein solches Werk als Ganzes percipirt werden kann, ohne Verneinung der Individualexistenz, wenn eine solche Schöpfung geschaffen werden konnte, ohne ihren Schöpfer zu zerschmettern—woher nehmen wir die Lösung eines solchen Widerspruches?
Hier drängt sich zwischen unsre höchste Musikerregung und jene Musik der tragische Mythus und der tragische Held, im Grunde nur als Gleichniss der alleruniversalsten Thatsachen, von denen allein die Musik auf directem Wege reden kann. Als Gleichniss würde nun aber der Mythus, wenn wir als rein dionysische Wesen empfänden, gänzlich wirkungslos und unbeachtet neben uns stehen bleiben, und uns keinen Augenblick abwendig davon machen, unser Ohr dem Wiederklang der universalia ante rem zu bieten. Hier bricht jedoch die apollinische Kraft, auf Wiederherstellung des fast zersprengten Individuums gerichtet, mit dem Heilbalsam einer wonnevollen Täuschung hervor: plötzlich glauben wir nur noch Tristan zu sehen, wie er bewegungslos und dumpf sich fragt: „die alte Weise; was weckt sie mich?“ Und was uns früher wie ein hohles Seufzen aus dem Mittelpunkte des Seins anmuthete, das will uns jetzt nur sagen, wie „öd und leer das Meer.“ Und wo wir athemlos zu erlöschen wähnten, im krampfartigen Sichausrecken aller Gefühle, und nur ein Weniges uns mit dieser Existenz zusammenknüpfte, hören und sehen wir jetzt nur den zum Tode verwundeten und doch nicht sterbenden Helden, mit seinem verzweiflungsvollen Rufe: „Sehnen! Sehnen! Im Sterben mich zu sehnen, vor Sehnsucht nicht zu sterben!“ Und wenn früher der Jubel des Horns nach solchem Uebermaass und solcher Ueberzahl verzehrender Qualen fast wie der Qualen höchste uns das Herz zerschnitt, so steht jetzt zwischen uns und diesem „Jubel an sich“ der jauchzende Kurwenal, dem Schiffe, das Isolden trägt, zugewandt. So gewaltig auch das Mitleiden in uns hineingreift, in einem gewissen Sinne rettet uns doch das Mitleiden vor dem Urleiden der Welt, wie das Gleichnissbild des Mythus uns vor dem unmittelbaren Anschauen der höchsten Weltidee, wie der Gedanke und das Wort uns vor dem ungedämmten Ergusse des unbewussten Willens rettet. Durch jene herrliche apollinische Täuschung dünkt es uns, als ob uns selbst das Tonreich wie eine plastische Welt gegenüber träte, als ob auch in ihr nur Tristan's und Isoldens Schicksal, wie in einem allerzartesten und ausdrucksfähigsten Stoffe, geformt und bildnerisch ausgeprägt worden sei.
So entreisst uns das Apollinische der dionysischen Allgemeinheit und entzückt uns für die Individuen; an diese fesselt es unsre Mitleidserregung, durch diese befriedigt es den nach grossen und erhabenen Formen lechzenden Schönheitssinn; es führt an uns Lebensbilder vorbei und reizt uns zu gedankenhaftem Erfassen des in ihnen enthaltenen Lebenskernes. Mit der ungeheuren Wucht des Bildes, des Begriffs, der ethischen Lehre, der sympathischen Erregung reisst das Apollinische den Menschen aus seiner orgiastischen Selbstvernichtung empor und täuscht ihn über die Allgemeinheit des dionysischen Vorganges hinweg zu dem Wahne, dass er ein einzelnes Weltbild, z.B. Tristan und Isolde, sehe und es, durch die Musik, nur noch besser und innerlicher sehen solle. Was vermag nicht der heilkundige Zauber des Apollo, wenn er selbst in uns die Täuschung aufregen kann, als ob wirklich das Dionysische, im Dienste des Apollinischen, dessen Wirkungen zu steigern vermöchte, ja als ob die Musik sogar wesentlich Darstellungskunst für einen apollinischen Inhalt sei?
Bei jener prästabilirten Harmonie, die zwischen dem vollendeten Drama und seiner Musik waltet, erreicht das Drama einen höchsten, für das Wortdrama sonst unzugänglichen Grad von Schaubarkeit. Wie alle lebendigen Gestalten der Scene in den selbständig bewegten Melodienlinien sich zur Deutlichkeit der geschwungenen Linie vor uns vereinfachen, ertönt uns das Nebeneinander dieser Linien in dem mit dem bewegten Vorgange auf zarteste Weise sympathisirenden Harmonienwechsel: durch welchen uns die Relationen der Dinge in sinnlich wahrnehmbarer, keinesfalls abstracter Weise, unmittelbar vernehmbar werden, wie wir gleichfalls durch ihn erkennen, dass erst in diesen Relationen das Wesen eines Charakters und einer Melodienlinie sich rein offenbare. Und während uns so die Musik zwingt, mehr und innerlicher als sonst zu sehen, und den Vorgang der Scene wie ein zartes Gespinnst vor uns auszubreiten, ist für unser vergeistigtes, in's Innere blickendes Auge die Welt der Bühne eben so unendlich erweitert als von innen heraus erleuchtet. Was vermöchte der Wortdichter Analoges zu bieten, der mit einem viel unvollkommneren Mechanismus, auf indirectem Wege, vom Wort und vom Begriff aus, jene innerliche Erweiterung der schaubaren Bühnenwelt und ihre innere Erleuchtung zu erreichen sich abmüht? Nimmt nun zwar auch die musikalische Tragödie das Wort hinzu, so kann sie doch zugleich den Untergrund und die Geburtsstätte des Wortes danebenstellen und uns das Werden des Wortes, von innen heraus, verdeutlichen.
Aber von diesem geschilderten Vorgang wäre doch eben so bestimmt zu sagen, dass er nur ein herrlicher Schein, nämlich jene vorhin erwähnte apollinische Täuschung sei, durch deren Wirkung wir von dem dionysischen Andrange und Uebermaasse entlastet werden sollen. Im Grunde ist ja das Verhältniss der Musik zum Drama gerade das umgekehrte: die Musik ist die eigentliche Idee der Welt, das Drama nur ein Abglanz dieser Idee, ein vereinzeltes Schattenbild derselben. Jene Identität zwischen der Melodienlinie und der lebendigen Gestalt, zwischen der Harmonie und den Charakterrelationen jener Gestalt ist in einem entgegengesetzten Sinne wahr, als es uns, beim Anschauen der musikalischen Tragödie, dünken möchte. Wir mögen die Gestalt uns auf das Sichtbarste bewegen, beleben und von innen heraus beleuchten, sie bleibt immer nur die Erscheinung, von der es keine Brücke giebt, die in die wahre Realität, in's Herz der Welt führte. Aus diesem Herzen heraus aber redet die Musik; und zahllose Erscheinungen jener Art dürften an der gleichen Musik vorüberziehn, sie würden nie das Wesen derselben erschöpfen, sondern immer nur ihre veräusserlichten Abbilder sein. Mit dem populären und gänzlich falschen Gegensatz von Seele und Körper ist freilich für das schwierige Verhältniss von Musik und Drama nichts zu erklären und alles zu verwirren; aber die unphilosophische Rohheit jenes Gegensatzes scheint gerade bei unseren Aesthetikern, wer weiss aus welchen Gründen, zu einem gern bekannten Glaubensartikel geworden zu sein, während sie über einen Gegensatz der Erscheinung und des Dinges an sich nichts gelernt haben oder, aus ebenfalls unbekannten Gründen, nichts lernen mochten.
Sollte es sich bei unserer Analysis ergeben haben, dass das Apollinische in der Tragödie durch seine Täuschung völlig den Sieg über das dionysische Urelement der Musik davongetragen und sich diese zu ihren Absichten, nämlich zu einer höchsten Verdeutlichung des Drama's, nutzbar gemacht habe, so wäre freilich eine sehr wichtige Einschränkung hinzuzufügen: in dem allerwesentlichsten Punkte ist jene apollinische Täuschung durchbrochen und vernichtet. Das Drama, das in so innerlich erleuchteter Deutlichkeit aller Bewegungen und Gestalten, mit Hülfe der Musik, sich vor uns ausbreitet, als ob wir das Gewebe am Webstuhl im Auf- und Niederzucken entstehen sehen—erreicht als Ganzes eine Wirkung, die jenseits aller apollinischen Kunstwirkungen liegt. In der Gesammtwirkung der Tragödie erlangt das Dionysische wieder das Uebergewicht; sie schliesst mit einem Klange, der niemals von dem Reiche der apollinischen Kunst her tönen könnte. Und damit erweist sich die apollinische Täuschung als das, was sie ist, als die während der Dauer der Tragödie anhaltende Umschleierung der eigentlichen dionysischen Wirkung: die doch so mächtig ist, am Schluss das apollinische Drama selbst in eine Sphäre zu drängen, wo es mit dionysischer Weisheit zu reden beginnt und wo es sich selbst und seine apollinische Sichtbarkeit verneint. So wäre wirklich das schwierige Verhältniss des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen in der Tragödie durch einen Bruderbund beider Gottheiten zu symbolisiren: Dionysus redet die Sprache des Apollo, Apollo aber schliesslich die Sprache des Dionysus: womit das höchste Ziel der Tragödie und der Kunst überhaupt erreicht ist.
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.
Slipping back from these exhortations into the mood appropriate to contemplation, I repeat that only from the Greeks can we learn what such a miraculous, sudden awakening of tragedy means for the innermost ground of a people’s life. It is the people of the tragic mysteries that fights the battles against the Persians; and in turn, the people that has waged those wars needs tragedy as a necessary healing draught. Who would still expect, precisely in this people, after it had been stirred to its depths for several generations by the most violent convulsions of the Dionysian demon, so steadily vigorous an outpouring of the simplest political feeling, the most natural instincts of attachment to home, the primal masculine delight in battle? Whenever Dionysian excitements spread significantly, one can always sense how the Dionysian release from the fetters of the individual makes itself felt first of all in a weakening of political instincts that intensifies to indifference, even hostility; just as surely, on the other hand, the state-founding Apollo is also the genius of the principle of individuation, and neither the state nor attachment to home can live without an affirmation of individual personality.
From orgiastic ecstasy only one path leads onward for a people: the path to Indian Buddhism, which, with its longing for nothingness, needs those rare ecstatic states that lift one above space, time, and the individual if it is to be bearable at all; just as those states in turn demand a philosophy that teaches one to overcome, through an idea, the indescribable distress of the intervening states. With equal necessity, a people that starts from the unconditional authority of political drives is driven onto a course of utter worldliness, whose grandest but also most terrifying expression is the Roman empire.
Placed between India and Rome and pressed toward a seductive choice, the Greeks succeeded in inventing a third form in classical purity—not, admittedly, for their own prolonged use, but for immortality for that very reason. For the saying that the gods’ favorites die young holds true in all things; but it is equally certain that they then live eternally with the gods. Let us not demand that what is noblest of all should have the lasting toughness of leather; the coarse durability characteristic, for example, of the Roman national drive is probably not among the necessary attributes of perfection. But if we ask what remedy enabled the Greeks in their great age, despite the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political drives, to avoid exhausting themselves either in ecstatic brooding or in a consuming pursuit of world power and world renown, and instead to achieve that magnificent blend found in a noble wine, at once kindling the spirit and disposing it to contemplation, we must remember the enormous power of tragedy, which stirs, purifies, and discharges the entire life of a people. We will only begin to divine its highest value when it confronts us, as it did the Greeks, as the sum of all preventive healing powers, as the mediator that holds sway between a people’s strongest and inherently most fatal qualities.
Tragedy absorbs the highest orgiastic ecstasy of music, so that, among the Greeks as among ourselves, it positively brings music to fulfillment; but it then places beside it the tragic myth and the tragic hero, who, like a mighty Titan, takes the whole Dionysian world upon his back and lifts its burden from us. At the same time, through that same tragic myth, in the person of the tragic hero, tragedy knows how to deliver us from the greedy urge for this existence, and with an admonishing hand reminds us of another being and a higher delight, for which the struggling hero, with a sense of foreboding, prepares himself through his downfall, not his victories. Between the universal validity of its music and the listener receptive to Dionysian experience, tragedy places a sublime likeness, the myth, and awakens in that listener the semblance that music is merely the supreme means of representation for bringing the sculptural world of myth to life. Trusting in this noble illusion, music may now move its limbs in dithyrambic dance and surrender without misgiving to an orgiastic feeling of freedom in which, as music in itself, without that illusion, it would not dare to revel. Myth shields us from music, while on the other hand it alone grants music its highest freedom. In return, as a countergift, music lends tragic myth a metaphysical significance so penetrating and convincing that word and image could never attain it without this unique assistance. Through music, in particular, the tragic spectator is seized by precisely that sure presentiment of a supreme delight to which the path leads through downfall and negation, so that he seems to hear the innermost abyss of things speaking audibly to him.
If in these last sentences I have perhaps managed to give this difficult conception only a provisional expression, immediately intelligible to few, then precisely here I must not cease urging my friends to make another attempt, and asking them to prepare themselves to grasp the general proposition through a single example from our shared experience. In this example I cannot appeal to those who use the images of events onstage, the words and emotions of the characters, to help them approach the experience of music; for none of them speaks music as a native language, and even with this help they get no farther than the antechambers of musical perception, never being allowed to touch its innermost sanctuaries; some of them, like Gervinus, do not even reach the antechambers by this route. Rather, I must address only those who are directly akin to music, who have in it, as it were, their mother’s womb, and are connected with things almost exclusively through unconscious musical relations. I ask these genuine musicians whether they can imagine a human being capable of perceiving the third act of “Tristan and Isolde,” without any assistance from word or image, purely as an immense symphonic movement, without breathing his last in a convulsive stretching of all the soul’s wings. A human being who, as here, has laid his ear, as it were, against the heart chamber of the world-will, who feels the raging desire for existence pour from here into all the world’s veins, as a thundering torrent or the most delicate brook dissolved into spray—would he not shatter suddenly? Could he bear, within the wretched glass shell of the human individual, to hear the echo of countless cries of delight and pain from the “vast expanse of the world’s night,” without fleeing irresistibly, at this shepherd’s song of metaphysics, to his primordial home? Yet if such a work can be perceived as a whole without negating individual existence, if such a creation could be created without crushing its creator—where do we find the solution to this contradiction?
Here the tragic myth and the tragic hero thrust themselves between our highest musical excitement and that music—fundamentally only as a likeness of the most universal facts, of which music alone can speak directly. Yet as a likeness, if we felt as purely Dionysian beings, the myth would remain beside us utterly ineffectual and unnoticed, and would not for a moment turn us away from offering our ears to the echo of universals prior to things. Here, however, the Apollonian power breaks forth, intent on restoring the almost shattered individual, with the healing balm of a blissful illusion: suddenly we believe we see only Tristan, motionless and dazed, asking himself, “The old tune; why does it wake me?” And what earlier seemed to us like a hollow sigh from the center of being now wishes to tell us only how “desolate and empty the sea” is. And where we imagined we were being extinguished, breathless, in the convulsive stretching of all our feelings, and only a little still bound us to this existence, we now hear and see only the hero wounded to death and yet not dying, with his despairing cry: “Longing! Longing! In dying still to long, not to die of longing!” And where earlier, after such an excess and such a multitude of consuming torments, the horn’s jubilation cut through our hearts almost like the greatest torment of all, now the rejoicing Kurwenal stands between us and this “jubilation in itself,” turned toward the ship carrying Isolde. However powerfully compassion reaches into us, in a certain sense it nevertheless saves us from the primordial suffering of the world, just as the figurative image of myth saves us from the immediate vision of the supreme world-Idea, and thought and word save us from the undammed outpouring of the unconscious will. Through that magnificent Apollonian illusion, it seems to us that even the realm of sound confronts us as a sculptural world, as though in it, too, only the fate of Tristan and Isolde had been shaped and given visible form, as in the most delicate and expressive of materials.
Thus the Apollonian tears us away from Dionysian universality and enchants us with individuals; it binds our compassion to them, and through them satisfies the sense of beauty thirsting for great and sublime forms; it leads images of life past us and urges us to grasp in thought the living core they contain. With the enormous force of the image, the concept, the ethical teaching, the stirring of sympathy, the Apollonian snatches the human being up out of his orgiastic self-annihilation, and, by deceiving him about the universality of the Dionysian process, brings him to the delusion that he is seeing a single image of the world—Tristan and Isolde, for example—and is meant only to see it still better and more inwardly through music. What can the healing magic of Apollo not accomplish, if it can even arouse in us the illusion that the Dionysian really could serve the Apollonian by intensifying its effects—indeed, that music is even essentially an art of representation for an Apollonian content?
Through the preestablished harmony that reigns between the perfected drama and its music, drama attains a supreme degree of vivid visibility otherwise inaccessible to spoken drama. As all the living figures onstage simplify themselves before us in the independently moving melodic lines to the clarity of a sweeping line, we hear these lines side by side in the shifting harmonies that respond with the most delicate sympathy to the unfolding action. Through those harmonies, the relations between things become immediately perceptible to us in a sensuous, by no means abstract way; through them we likewise recognize that only in these relations does the essence of a character and of a melodic line reveal itself purely. And while music thus compels us to see more, and more inwardly, than usual, and to spread the action onstage before us like a delicate web, the world of the stage is both infinitely expanded and illuminated from within for our spiritualized eye, which looks into the interior. What could the poet of words offer that compares with this, as he struggles, with a far less perfect mechanism and by an indirect route, starting from word and concept, to achieve that inward expansion of the visible stage-world and its inner illumination? Although musical tragedy, too, brings in the word, it can at the same time place beside it the ground and birthplace of the word, and make clear to us, from within, how the word comes into being.
But we would have to say just as firmly of the process described here that it is only a magnificent semblance: that Apollonian illusion mentioned earlier, whose effect is meant to relieve us of the Dionysian onrush and excess. Fundamentally, the relation of music to drama is precisely the reverse: music is the actual Idea of the world, drama only a reflection of this Idea, an isolated shadow-image of it. That identity between the melodic line and the living figure, between the harmony and the relations of that figure’s character, is true in the opposite sense to what we might suppose while watching musical tragedy. We may make the figure move before us as vividly as possible, bring it to life, and illuminate it from within: it always remains only appearance, from which no bridge leads into true reality, into the heart of the world. Yet music speaks out of that heart; and countless appearances of that kind might pass before the same music without ever exhausting its essence, remaining always only its externalized images. The popular and utterly false opposition between soul and body can, of course, explain nothing about the difficult relation between music and drama, and can confuse everything; but the unphilosophical crudity of that opposition seems to have become a readily professed article of faith precisely among our aestheticians, for who knows what reasons, while they have learned nothing about an opposition between appearance and the thing in itself, or, for equally unknown reasons, have wished to learn nothing.
If our analysis should have shown that the Apollonian in tragedy, through its illusion, has triumphed completely over music’s primordial Dionysian element and harnessed music to its own purposes, namely the highest possible clarification of drama, then a very important qualification would certainly have to be added: at the most essential point of all, that Apollonian illusion is broken through and destroyed. The drama that unfolds before us with the help of music, in such inwardly illuminated clarity of every movement and figure, as though we were watching the fabric come into being on the loom with its darting up and down—achieves, as a whole, an effect that lies beyond all Apollonian artistic effects. In the total effect of tragedy, the Dionysian regains the upper hand; tragedy closes with a sound that could never come from the realm of Apollonian art. And so the Apollonian illusion proves to be what it is: a veiling of the actual Dionysian effect that lasts throughout the tragedy. Yet that effect is powerful enough, at the end, to drive the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom, and where it negates itself and its Apollonian visibility. Thus the difficult relation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy could truly be symbolized by a fraternal alliance between the two divinities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo finally speaks the language of Dionysus. With this, the highest aim of tragedy, and of art in general, is attained.
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.
Returning from these words of encouragement to the mood appropriate for contemplation, I repeat that only the Greeks can teach us what such a sudden, almost miraculous awakening of tragedy means for the deepest foundations of a people’s life. The people who celebrate the tragic mysteries are the people who fight the battles against Persia. And the people who have fought those wars in turn need tragedy as an essential restorative drink. Who would have expected this particular people to express basic political feeling, natural attachment to home, and the original masculine desire for battle with such steady strength, after the most powerful convulsions of the Dionysian spirit had stirred them to their depths for several generations? Whenever Dionysian excitement spreads widely, we can always feel that its release from the individual’s chains first makes itself known by weakening political instincts, even to the point of indifference or hostility. On the other hand, Apollo, who creates states, is also the genius of the principle of individuation. Neither the state nor attachment to home can live without an affirmation of individual personality.
For a people starting from orgiastic ecstasy, there is only one road: the road to Indian Buddhism. With its longing for nothingness, Buddhism needs those rare ecstatic states that lift people above space, time, and individuality if it is to be bearable at all. Those states in turn demand a philosophy that teaches people to overcome the indescribable distress of the intervening states through an idea. A people starting from the absolute authority of political impulses is just as inevitably drawn toward extreme worldliness. The Roman empire is its grandest but also its most terrifying expression.
Placed between India and Rome and pressed toward a tempting choice, the Greeks managed to invent a third form, in classical purity. They did not keep it for their own use for long, but for that very reason it became immortal. That the gods’ favorites die young is true in everything. It is equally certain that they then live forever with the gods. We should not demand that the very noblest things have the tough durability of leather. The crude staying power found, for example, in the Roman national impulse probably does not belong among the necessary qualities of perfection. But what remedy enabled the Greeks, in their great period, not to exhaust themselves either in ecstatic brooding or in a consuming pursuit of world power and worldly honor, despite the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political impulses? How did they instead achieve that wonderful blend found in a fine wine that both fires us up and puts us in a reflective mood? We must remember the immense power of tragedy, which excites, purifies, and releases the energies of a people’s whole life. We will only begin to understand its highest value when, as it did for the Greeks, it comes before us as the embodiment of every preventive healing power: the mediator between a people’s strongest qualities, which in themselves are also the most dangerous.
Tragedy absorbs the highest orgiastic ecstasy of music. It thus brings music itself to perfection, among the Greeks as among us. But it then places the tragic myth and the tragic hero beside it. Like a mighty Titan, the hero takes the whole Dionysian world onto his back and relieves us of its weight. At the same time, through that same tragic myth in the person of its hero, tragedy can free us from the greedy urge for this existence. Its warning hand reminds us of another kind of being and a higher pleasure, for which the struggling hero prepares himself with a sense of what is coming, through his destruction rather than his victories. Tragedy places a sublime symbolic image—the myth—between its music’s universal reach and the listener who is open to Dionysian experience. It makes the listener imagine that music is only a supreme means of representation for bringing the myth’s world of visible forms to life. Trusting this noble illusion, music can now move its limbs in a dithyrambic dance and give itself freely to an orgiastic feeling of liberty. As music in itself, without that illusion, it would not dare revel in this feeling. Myth protects us from music, while also giving music its highest freedom. In return, music gives tragic myth a metaphysical significance so powerful and convincing that words and images could never achieve it without this unique help. In particular, through music the tragic spectator gains a sure foretaste of a supreme pleasure, reached by a path through destruction and negation. He seems to hear the deepest abyss of things speaking clearly to him.
Perhaps these last sentences have only given this difficult idea a provisional expression, immediately understandable to very few people. If so, this is precisely where I must keep encouraging my friends to try again. I ask them to prepare themselves to understand the general statement by looking at a single example from our shared experience. For this example I cannot turn to people who use the images of events onstage, or the characters’ words and emotions, as aids to approaching musical feeling. None of them speaks music as a native language. Even with those aids, they get no further than the entrance halls of musical perception and are never permitted to touch its innermost sanctuaries. Some, such as Gervinus, do not even reach the entrance halls by this route. I must instead turn only to those who are directly related to music, who find their mother’s womb in it, so to speak, and who connect with things almost exclusively through unconscious musical relationships. I ask these genuine musicians whether they can imagine someone capable of perceiving the third act of “Tristan and Isolde,” without any help from words or images, purely as an immense symphonic movement, without gasping his life away as every wing of his soul stretches out convulsively. Someone who, as happens here, has placed his ear against the heart chamber of the world’s will, who feels its raging desire for existence pour from there into every vein of the world as a thundering torrent or the finest spray of a stream—should he not suddenly break apart? Should he be able to hear, inside the miserable glass shell of a human individual, the echo of countless cries of pleasure and pain from the “vast realm of the world’s night,” without rushing irresistibly back to his original home during this shepherds’ round dance of metaphysics? Yet if such a work can be perceived as a whole without denying individual existence, if such a creation could be made without smashing its creator, where do we find the solution to this contradiction?
Here the tragic myth and the tragic hero push between our highest musical excitement and that music. At bottom, they are only a symbolic image of the most universal facts, which music alone can speak of directly. But if we felt as purely Dionysian beings, myth as an image would remain beside us completely ineffective and unnoticed. It would not distract us for even a moment from listening to the echo of universals before things. Here, however, the Apollonian power bursts out, directed toward restoring the individual who has almost been shattered. It brings the healing balm of a delightful illusion. Suddenly we think we see only Tristan, lying still and dazed, asking himself, “The old tune—why does it wake me?” What previously struck us as a hollow sigh from the center of being now seems only to tell us how “desolate and empty is the sea.” Where we thought we were breathlessly fading away as all our feelings stretched out convulsively, with very little still tying us to this existence, we now hear and see only the mortally wounded hero who nevertheless does not die, with his desperate cry: “Longing! Longing! To long while dying, not to die of longing!” Earlier, after such an excess and abundance of consuming agonies, the horn’s jubilation cut into our hearts almost like the greatest agony of all. Now the jubilant Kurwenal stands between us and this “jubilation in itself,” turned toward the ship carrying Isolde. However powerfully compassion reaches into us, in a certain sense compassion nevertheless saves us from the world’s primal suffering. In the same way, the symbolic image of myth saves us from directly contemplating the supreme idea of the world, and thought and language save us from the unrestrained outpouring of the unconscious will. Through that splendid Apollonian illusion, even the world of sound seems to confront us as a world of visible forms. It seems that here too only Tristan and Isolde’s fate has been shaped and given a sculptural form in a material of the greatest delicacy and expressiveness.
In this way the Apollonian pulls us out of Dionysian universality and makes us delight in individuals. It attaches our compassion to them. Through them it satisfies our sense of beauty, which thirsts for great and sublime forms. It leads images of life past us and encourages us to grasp in thought the core of life they contain. With the immense force of the image, the concept, ethical teaching, and sympathetic feeling, the Apollonian lifts people out of their orgiastic self-destruction. It deceives them about the universal character of the Dionysian process, making them imagine that they see one particular picture of the world, such as Tristan and Isolde, and should simply see it better and more deeply through music. What is beyond Apollo’s healing magic, if it can even make us imagine that the Dionysian really serves the Apollonian by strengthening its effects, and that music is essentially an art of representation for Apollonian content?
Through the preestablished harmony between the completed drama and its music, drama reaches a supreme degree of visibility that a drama of words alone could not otherwise attain. Every living figure onstage becomes simpler before us in the independently moving melodic lines, taking on the clarity of a curved line. We hear these lines side by side in changes of harmony that respond with the greatest delicacy to the movement of the action. Through these changes, the relationships between things become immediately perceptible to our senses, never merely abstract. We also recognize through them that the true nature of a character and a melodic line reveals itself purely only in these relationships. Music thus makes us see more, and more inwardly, than usual, and spread the action onstage before us like a delicate web. To our spiritualized eye, which looks within, the stage world is both infinitely expanded and illuminated from inside. What comparable result could a poet working with words offer? Using a much less perfect mechanism, he struggles to achieve that inward expansion and illumination of the visible stage world indirectly, starting from words and concepts. Musical tragedy also adds words, but it can at the same time place beside them the ground from which they arise, their birthplace, and make clear to us from within how words come into being.
But we could say just as firmly that the process described here is only a splendid semblance: the Apollonian illusion mentioned earlier, whose effect is meant to relieve us of the Dionysian pressure and excess. At bottom, the relationship between music and drama is exactly the reverse. Music is the actual idea of the world; drama is only a reflection of that idea, one particular shadow image of it. The identity between a melodic line and a living figure, or between harmony and the relationships defining that figure’s character, is true in the opposite sense from what we might suppose while watching musical tragedy. We may move the figure as visibly as possible, bring it to life, and illuminate it from inside. It always remains only an appearance, with no bridge leading from it into true reality, into the heart of the world. Music, however, speaks from that heart. Countless appearances of that kind could pass before the same music without ever exhausting its nature. They would always be only its outward images. The popular and completely false opposition between soul and body explains nothing about the difficult relationship between music and drama and confuses everything. Yet the unphilosophical crudeness of that opposition seems, for who knows what reasons, to have become a favorite article of faith among our aesthetic thinkers. Meanwhile, they have learned nothing about the opposition between appearance and the thing in itself, or, for equally unknown reasons, have not wanted to learn anything about it.
Our analysis might seem to have shown that the Apollonian in tragedy wins a complete victory, through its illusion, over music’s original Dionysian element, and makes music serve its own purpose: the greatest possible clarification of the drama. If so, a very important qualification must be added. At the most essential point of all, that Apollonian illusion is broken through and destroyed. With music’s help, the drama unfolds before us with every movement and figure illuminated clearly from within, as though we were watching fabric take shape through a loom’s rising and falling movements. As a whole, it achieves an effect beyond every Apollonian artistic effect. In tragedy’s total effect, the Dionysian regains the upper hand. Tragedy closes with a sound that could never come from the realm of Apollonian art. The Apollonian illusion thus reveals itself for what it is: a veil maintained throughout the tragedy over its actual Dionysian effect. That effect is so powerful that, at the end, it drives the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and denies both itself and its Apollonian visibility. We could therefore truly symbolize the difficult relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy through a brotherly alliance of the two gods. Dionysus speaks Apollo’s language, but finally Apollo speaks Dionysus’s language. With this, the highest goal of tragedy and of art altogether is reached.
About this section
Section 21 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 29 of 33 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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