Music, The Birth of Tragedy, and Nietzche's ... - Nietzsche Circle

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P a g e | 44 Today the terminology of the “emancipation of dissonance” is usually attributed to Arnold Schoenberg’s most famous invocation of it. 140 Yet it is not by accident that Nietzsche invokes “the wondrous significance of musical dissonance” (BT §24) towards the conclusion of his book. Indeed, the Birth of Tragedy is prefaced with a visual metaphor for a patently titanic “emancipation” — referring both thetically and objectly both to Beethoven and to Goethe — in the woodcut illustrating the liberation of Prometheus which Nietzsche himself commissioned to set as the frontispiece for his first book. The liberation of the titanic is thus the liberation of a certain, humanly creative dissonance. The reference is to Beethoven’s Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, Op. 43, which is routinely described in terms of such dissonance, and Nietzsche alludes to Aeschylus’s Prometheus as molding the human being as expressed in Goethe’s Prometheus: “Here sit I, fashioning humanity in my own image.” (BT §9) 141 The passage is crucial for Nietzsche who also uses it to distinguish between active and passive transgression (Greek and Judeao-Christian) as well active (or masculine) and passive (or feminine) creativity. And to be sure, the “titanic figures” of Prometheus and Oedipus are characterized as “masks” of the primordial tragic hero, Dionysus. Fig. 14. Woodcut, Fontispiece to Nietzsche’s 1872 Geburt der Tragödie. Despite these and the many other complexities traced above, Nietzsche continues to be read as if the project of his book had little to do with the tragic musical work of antiquity but only sought to articulate a cultural revival such that Wagner might thrive. 142 The
P a g e | 45 result of this interpretation sets Nietzsche not only as a deficient philologist but a nonetoo-distinctive Wagnerian. If Nietzsche would go on for the rest of his life to contest both judgments, his protests are still not heard. 143 I have argued that Nietzsche’s understanding of dissonance was drawn from contemporary musical accounts, including Beethoven as exemplar of the same, a focus Wagner also repeated for his own part in his own celebration of Beethoven. 144 I have emphasized that Nietzsche’s resolution of the question of tragedy was as explicitly or plainly musical as implied by his initial subtitle 145 and that as author of ‘Music and Word,’ what was always at stake for Nietzsche was the sound, the “music,” of the words themselves, that is Greek as intoned, as spoken, as sung. 146 By referring to the paradoxical question that illuminates the problem of pleasure and pain in the ancient Greek tragedy play, Nietzsche invoked the phenomenon of “musical dissonance,” 147 to explain tragedy, as he argued that if we could “imagine” as he expressed it the “becoming human” 148 of that same dissonance, we would begin to approach ancient tragedy. The same tentative point resonates musically by underscoring the relevance of Nietzsche’s inquiry into what he titles in his notes the “Origin and Goal of Tragedy.” 149 To explore what might in this sense be called Nietzsche’s Harmonienlehre would need a hermeneutic of influence and reference. 150 Here, it may be enough to recall that any reference to dissonance is also part of a discourse of tonality and one that inevitably includes references to consonance, and some are fond of taking this to be Apollo, where, like chaos, dissonance refers to Dionysus. What is certain as we learn from Nietzsche’s conjugal yoke between the two gods — and this also behind Loraux’s attention, as already cited, to Nietzsche’s focus on tragedy’s birth as such rather than its development or its genealogy — is that consonance and dissonance refer to harmony. The harmonious question of the human being who has turned out well, as Nietzsche likes to put it, also involves raising the question of the artist as indeed of the actor and the poet. This performative question also raises the question of the dynamic actuality of the singer, of the dance, and thereby of the working power of the work of art composer, as this was for Nietzsche the very political question of musical culture.
Page 1 and 2: P a g e | 1 On the Phenomenology of
Page 3 and 4: P a g e | 3 way of parsing Nietzsch
Page 5 and 6: P a g e | 5 then-contemporaries ‘
Page 7 and 8: P a g e | 7 F. Joseph Smith, who wa
Page 9 and 10: P a g e | 9 Figs. 2A and 2B. Kittle
Page 11 and 12: P a g e | 11 Nietzsche’s resoluti
Page 13 and 14: P a g e | 13 phenomenological refle
Page 15 and 16: P a g e | 15 Fig. 3. Ludwig van Bee
Page 17 and 18: P a g e | 17 Fig. 5. Ludwig van Bee
Page 19 and 20: P a g e | 19 Prior to and along wit
Page 21 and 22: P a g e | 21 Fig. 9. Nietzsche, Zur
Page 23 and 24: P a g e | 23 utterly offensive to o
Page 25 and 26: P a g e | 25 choral movement of the
Page 27 and 28: P a g e | 27 is reading words not m
Page 29 and 30: P a g e | 29 If we wish to understa
Page 31 and 32: P a g e | 31 Fig. 12. Poussin, Bacc
Page 33 and 34: P a g e | 33 Fig. 15. Dionysiac pro
Page 35 and 36: P a g e | 35 not the notes, as thes
Page 37 and 38: P a g e | 37 As Nietzsche goes on t
Page 39 and 40: P a g e | 39 writing “music about
Page 41 and 42: P a g e | 41 appears for Nietzsche
Page 43: P a g e | 43 formulation of “the
Page 47 and 48: P a g e | 47 It in this same musica
Page 49 and 50: P a g e | 49 those who bother to th
Page 51 and 52: P a g e | 51 I leave the last word
Page 53 and 54: P a g e | 53 17 Bremer’s book, Pl
Page 55 and 56: P a g e | 55 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 3
Page 57 and 58: P a g e | 57 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 5
Page 59 and 60: P a g e | 59 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 7
Page 61 and 62: P a g e | 61 85 86 87 88 89 Ibid. I
Page 63 and 64: P a g e | 63 Published in 1896. The
Page 65 and 66: P a g e | 65 124 Nietzsche, KGW III
Page 67 and 68: P a g e | 67 von Geist, — Die Pri

Music, The Birth of Tragedy, and Nietzche's ... - Nietzsche Circle

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