the delight felt at the annihilation of the individual - The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche aspires to the condition of music

My final German Literature Month book (look at all of the participants!) will be The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) by Friedrich Nietzsche, his first book, an imaginative consideration of the psychological impulses that led to the creation, degeneration, and recovery – in the works of Richard Wagner – of Greek tragedy.  It is a strange book, not scholarly yet based on the latest German classical archaeology and anthropology, leaping far beyond the actual evidence, difficult, exhilarating, and preposterous.

Greek tragedy is, for Nietzsche, in the first form visible to us, the plays of Aeschylus, a balance between the rational and the irrational, the steady Apollonian and frenzied Dionysian sides of the human personality.  The chorus, the music, is the Dionysian side.

It is vain to try to deduce the tragic spirit from the commonly accepted categories of art: illusion and beauty.  Music alone allows us to understand the delight felt at the annihilation of the individual.  (Ch. 16, p. 101)

A strongly Schopenhauer-like claim, and one with which I roughly agree.  Literature, even at its craziest, is typically way over on the Apollonian side compared to dance and music.  Poetry moves towards the Dionysian to the extent that it resembles music.  I am beginning to sound like Walter Pater, or Pater sounds like Nietzsche.

Tragedy goes into sharp decline in the hands of the innovative parodistic screwball Euripides, mostly because he pulls too much music out of the chorus, destroying the Dionysian side of tragedy.  But Nietzsche forgives Euripides, for he is just a pawn of the true villain:

For in a certain sense Euripides was but a mask, while the divinity which spoke through him was neither Dionysos nor Apollo but a brand-new daemon called Socrates.  Thenceforward the real antagonism was to be between the Dionysiac spirit and the Socratic, and tragedy was to perish in the conflict...  The marvelous temple lies in ruins; of what avail is the destroyer’s lament that it was the most beautiful of all temples?  And though, by way of punishment, Euripides has been turned into a dragon by all later critics, who can really regard this as adequate compensation?  (Ch. 12, 77)

Turned into a dragon!  Like the greedy, murderous giant Fafner in Das Rheingold and Siegfried.

The creation of opera by, let’s say, Monteverdi in the 17th century should restore the balance, but Nietzsche does not believe such a thing happened before Wagner.  To use Shaw’s phrase, Rossini and Verdi are “opera, and nothing but opera,” not tragedy.  I did not understand Nietzsche’s argument, and would be pleased to dismiss it as prejudice, but I am too ignorant to do so.

Our art is a clear example of this universal misery: in vain do we imitate all the great creative periods and masters; in vain do we surround modern man with all of world literature and expect him to name its periods and styles as Adam did the beasts.  He remains eternally hungry, the critic without strength or joy, the Alexandrian man who is at bottom a librarian and scholiast, blinding himself miserably over dusty books and typographical errors.  (Ch. 18, 112)

Non-Wagnerian opera “is the product of the man of theory, the critical layman, not the artist.  (Ch. 19, 115), not even Socratic but, per the previous passage, Alexandrian, desiccated, the province of scholiasts.  I know, this is as bizarre and wrong-headed a description of Rossini as I can imagine.

Luckily Bach and Beethoven, alongside Kant and Schopenhauer, created the superstructure – “succeeded in destroying the complacent acquiescence of intellectual Socratism” – that allowed Wagner to save the day, at least for a while.

The end of The Birth of Tragedy is extraordinary.  Nietzsche is arguing for the value of the Dionysian impulse, arguing that you Swiss and Prussian and Victorian squares seek out the Dionysian a little more.

The reader may intuit these effects if he has ever, though only in a dream, been carried back to the ancient Hellenic way of life.  (146)

What a line – “if”!  In a dream, perhaps, but also, possibly, in some other way, such as time travel, or, and this is an example from German literature, madness, like that of poor Friedrich Hölderlin who at times seemed to believe he lived in Classical Greece.  I wonder if the line is actually referring to Hölderlin.  I wonder if poor Nietzsche ever thought it might refer to himself.

After a pause for the holiday, I will return to the idea of the Dionysian with the help of Walter Pater.

Page references are to the 1956 Francis Golffing translation.

all allegories come to an end somewhere - Shaw interprets Wagner - Bakunin, soap opera, and phossy jaw

George Bernard Shaw argues, in The Perfect Wagnerite, that the Ring operas are a response to the revolutions of 1848 and are an allegorical argument for democratic socialism.  Maybe so!  In Das Rheingold, a greedy dwarf acquires a gold ring of great, ill-defined power.  He uses it to force the other dwarfs into an industrial mining operation. 

This gloomy place need not be a mine: it might just as well be a match-factory, with yellow phosphorus, phossy jaw, a large dividend, and plenty of clergymen shareholders.  Or it might be a whitelead factory, or a chemical works, or a pottery, or a railway shunting yard, or a tailoring shop, or a little gin-sodden laundry [Zola reference!], or a bakehouse, [etc.] (18)

The factory is in the music as well as the text, as eighteen behind-the-scenes anvils bang out the dwarf motif when Wotan and Loge descend into the mine.  If Shaw is right about this scene, and it seems undeniable to me, he could be right about others.

In Die Walküre, Wotan begins to play the long game, manipulating events to further the birth of an ideal hero, Siegfried, who can recover the ring from the dragon who guards it.  He succeeds, in that Siegfried is some kind of anarchist creature of nature who is beyond wealth and other earthly things, so far beyond them that it is not clear whether Wotan has created a hero or a new kind of monster.  He is

in short, a totally unmoral person, a born anarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin [!], an anticipation of the “overman” of Nietzsche.  (48)

In other words, a Russian revolutionary, even Chernyshevskian, hero, supreme in righteousness and upper body strength.  I love Shaw’s description of Bakoonin forging his magic sword:  “Meanwhile Siegfried forges and tempers and hammers and rivets, uproariously singing the while as nonsensically as the Rhine-daughters themselves” (54).  You know, like “Heiaho! haha! / haheiaha!”  First, Shaw’s summaries are a lot of fun; second, good allegorists know how far to push things.

But then comes the point where Shaw does not push enough.  Siegfried slays the dragon, acquires the ability to speak with birds, casually murders his foster father, etc., etc., terrific fairy tale stuff, before encountering and defying his grandfather Wotan – “But all this is lost of Siegfried Bakoonin” (60), and he breaks Wotan’s staff, allegorical representation of the rule of law, and plunges past the illusionary flames of received truth (of, for example, Christianity) into the true Truth, overthrowing Church and State and ushering in the Revolution.

If Shaw is laying it on a little thick, it is because he has still has one scene left in Siegfried and one entire opera left, and he has run out of allegory.

And now, O Nibelungen Spectator, pluck up; for all allegories come to an end somewhere; and the hour of your release from these explanations is at hand.  The rest of what you are going to see is opera, and nothing but opera.  (61)

By which Shaw means both opera – the usual choruses and ensemble singing and so on missing from the early Ring plays – and what we would call soap opera, because the rest of the story of the ring is about love, sex, jealousy, betrayal, and other melodrama about which Shaw does not care, so he simply expels it from his interpretation. 

Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of the Saga cannot by any perversion of ingenuity be adapted to the perfectly clear allegorical design of The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and Siegfried.  (63)

It is exactly here that Shaw betrays himself, because even as limited an ingenuity as mine can see that the allegory continues, that Bakoonin is corrupted not by money, to which he is genuinely immune, but by women, and that as a result he is murdered by a rival political faction, Leninists, I suppose.  Then comes, inevitably, the apocalypse.  Shaw has no better idea than I do what new horrors will fill the vacuum.  The soap opera is just as allegorical as the less soapy opera, if I want it to be.  As Shaw says, thinking of Wagner, not himself, “Constancy has never been a great man’s virtue” (98).

To my loathing I find only ever myself - notes on Richard Wagner's Ring as literature

I am going to write one post about Richard Wagner’s four Ring of the Nibelunga operas, or really the texts.  To do that I need a translation, a book.  The book is Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (1993), edited by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, which has German and English texts (translated by Spencer) side by side, along with a number of helpful essays  about the operas’ sources, composition, performance, and also the minor side issue of the music.  What a helpful book.  The translator’s general method is to sound like he is translating the Poetic Edda, with punchy lines and lots of alliteration, while Wagner’s method was to sound like he was imitating the Poetic Edda.

Das Rheingold (1869), Die Walküre (1870), Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (both 1876).  I have identified the dates of first performance, but the texts go back to the 1848, with some version of them published – without any music – as early as 1853.  Wagner began with the idea of an operatic version of the great medieval German epic Die Nibelungenlied, but kept discovering that he needed to move backwards.

The history of the text and score, evolving over almost thirty years, gives Wagner experts a lot to do.  My favorite part of this story is that Wagner insisted that his texts embodied the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, until he discovered the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, after which, having changed almost nothing, he claimed that the Ring exemplified the ideas of Schopenhauer.  I assume Wagner was as right as wrong each time.

The Ring is a cosmological story, beginning, obliquely, with the creation and ending with the apocalypse.  Less symbolically, a dwarf steals a gold treasure from some mermaids, and the pursuit of this treasure by various parties, especially the Norse gods, Wotan and so on, leads eventually to the destruction of the heroes and gods by fire.  The dwarf puts a curse on the gold when, in Das Rheingold, it is seized from him by the might-makes-right gods, and supposedly this curse generates much of the subsequent action:

No joyful man
shall ever have joy of it;
on no happy man
shall its bright gleam smile;
may he who owns it,
and he who does not
be ravaged by greed!  (Das Rheingold, Sc. 3, p. 98)

But one of the finest subtleties of Wagner’s conception is that there is no curse.  No curse is needed to evoke ordinary human nature at its worst.  Almost all of the characters – the dragon, the dwarfs, the gods – are credibly human.

The Ring is gigantic enough – Götterdämmerung in particular always seems like it will never end – to include many stories.  The Ring is about many things.  What struck me most strongly this time was what I will call the Tragedy of Wotan, the Shakespeare-like story of the king with too strong of a sense of fate, the existentialist Odin.  He schemes, he acts, he even triumphs, but always with the knowledge that in the end, even for an all-powerful, all-knowing being, none of it matters:

How can I make that other man                                                
who’s no longer me
and who, of himself, achieves
what I alone desire? –
O godly distress!
O hideous shame!
To my loathing I find
only ever myself
in all that I encompass!  (Die Walküre , Act II, Sc. 2, p. 152)

What will strike me next time I read the Ring is anybody’s guess.  Would a reading of the Ring plays have any meaning to someone who had no interest at all in the operas, the music?  I don’t know.  Probably not.

I found that backstage image of Siegfried slaying Fafner the dragon, as portrayed in Paris in 1902, in The New Grove Book of Operas, 2000 edition, p. 586.

I summarize the Thomas Mann story "The Blood of the Walsungs"

Thomas Mann, “The Blood of the Walsungs,” 1905.  A story in two scenes.

Scene 1:  Lunch with the Aarenhold family, massively wealthy Polish Jews who have become assimilated Prussians, so assimilated that the oldest son has become an Erich von Stroheim-like Prussian officer, “a stunning tanned creature with curling lips and a killing scar” and the youngest son and daughter, nineteen year-old twins, are named after Richard Wagner characters.

The aestheticized manners and grandiose wealth of the characters are a sight to see:  “With careful, skinny hands Herr Aarenhold settled the pince-nez half-way down his nose and with a mistrustful air read the menu, three copies of which lay on the table,” for example.  They are at home.  I am going to institute this practice.  Hand-written menus at every meal for every guest.  This will be easy because they will only need one word: BEANS.  And I can reuse the menus every night.

A more ordinary German has had the bad luck (“[t]owards the end of the luncheon [his] eyes were red and he looked slightly deranged”) of becoming engaged to the daughter.  He apparently has not noticed that she and her brother “were always hand in hand, heedless that the hands of both inclined to moisture.”

Scene 2:  The twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, are going to attend Die Walküre for the last time before her marriage.  He dresses, exchanging his “rose-tinted silk drawers and socks” for “black silk drawers, black silk socks, and heavy black silk garters with silver buckles.”  His sister joins him, and they make out (“They spent another minute on the chaise-lounge in mutual caresses”).

The next quarter or so of the story shows the twins at the opera.  Many pages present a detailed summary of the plot of the opera, focusing mostly on the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde who fall in love, discover that they are brother and sister, and behave in a manner that eventually produces the hero Siegfried:

Crouching on the bearskin they looked at each other in the white light, as they sang their duet of love.  Their bare arms touched each other’s as they held each other by the temples and gazed into each other’s eyes, and as they sang their mouths were very near…  In ravishment he stretched out his arms to her, his bride, she sank upon his breast – the curtain fell as the music swelled into a roaring, rushing, foaming whirlpool of passion – swirled and swirled and with one might throb stood still.

Rapturous applause.

Curiously, the “real” Siegmund has a white bearskin rug in his white room lit by “soft milky” light.

The twins return home, eat caviar sandwiches with red wine (“a combination offensive to good taste”), and copulate on the bearskin rug.  “Thus Mann has life imitate art” writes Peter Gay in Savage Reprisals (2002, p. 120) after his own summary of the story.

Gay is wrong.  Mann has art imitate art.  There is not a hint of life in any of this.

How I hated this story when I read it long ago; how it poisoned Mann.  On re-reading it, I have changed my mind, although without cleansing the story of its toxins – it is deliberately poisonous – but I will save the defense for the next post.