THE GREEK MUSIC DRAMA

(This entry has become rather lengthy and perhaps unnecessarily so on account of Nietzsche’s long quotation. Yet I am reluctant to cut anything out of it, so the reader must bear with me, and hopefully suffer the ordeal of reading it all with gladness.)

Nietzsche’s Basel Lecture of January 18^th, 1870, under the title Das Griechische Musikdrama, is as always a highly valuable philological exercise, but it is definitely more than that. Its principal idea seems to be above all inspired not so much by the author’s scholarly pursuits in the aesthetics of Greek antiquity as by a direct influence on him by the towering figure of Richard Wagner. Although the name of Wagner isn’t mentioned once in the course of the lecture, the spirit of Wagner permeates it, and Wagner’s revolutionary work Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, written back in 1849, seems to be the proper inspiration of Nietzsche’s insight into the nature of Greek drama.

The opening lines of the lecture immediately contain clear references to Wagner, and Nietzsche’s deliberate use of the term “Grand Opera” makes it even more explicit, as he contrasts it to the common term “opera,” to identify it thus as non-Wagnerian opera. (…The following fairly large excerpt from the beginning of the lecture will give the reader some taste of it, which I am eager to do, despite the fact that it rather distorts the architecture of the present entry. The reader may read it independently from the rest of my entry, and skip it when reading the entry itself.)---

In our contemporary drama we do not find only memories and echoes of the dramatic arts of Greece: rather its basic forms are rooted in Hellenic soil, from which they grow naturally or to which they are more artificially related. Only their names have become subject to numerous shifts and changes…

We encounter similar confusions in the field of dramatic terminology: what the Athenians called tragedy is something which, if we had to find a term, we would call “Grand Opera”; at least, this is what Voltaire did in a letter to Cardinal Quirini.

By contrast, a Greek would recognize in our tragedy almost nothing corresponding to his tragedy; although he would certainly guess that the entire structure and fundamental character of Shakespeare’s tragedy was borrowed from what he would call New Comedy. In fact, it is from this source, after incredible stretches of time, that the Romanic-Germanic mystery- or morality-play, and finally Shakespearian tragedy, arises: in a similar way that in its external form the genealogical relationship of Shakespeare’s stage to that of the New Attic Comedy cannot be overlooked. Whilst we can recognize here a development that progresses naturally across the millennia, modern art has deliberately immunized itself against the real tragedy of antiquity, the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles. What, today, we call opera, the distorted image of the music drama of antiquity, has arisen through a direct mimicry of antiquity: without the unconscious force of a natural drive, but formed in accordance with an abstract theory, it has behaved like an artificially produced homunculus, as if it were the evil imp of our modern musical development. The noble and scholarly Florentines to whom opera owes its origin at the beginning of the seventeenth century had a clearly articulated intention of renewing precisely those musical effects which music, according to numerous eloquent testimonies, had had in antiquity. It’s quite remarkable! The first thought concerning opera already involved a striving for effect. Through such experiments the roots of an unconscious art nourished by the life of the people were cut off or at least severely mutilated. Thus, in France popular drama was displaced by so-called classical tragedy, in other words a genre that had arisen in a purely scholarly way and supposedly contained the quintessence of tragedy, without any admixture. In Germany too, the natural root of drama, the Shrovetide play, has been undermined since the Reformation; ever since, the new creation of national form has hardly ever been tried, instead the models of foreign nations govern our thinking and writing. The real obstacle to the development of modern art-forms is erudition, conscious knowledge, and an excess of knowledge: all growth and development in the realm of art has to take place in deepest night. The history of music teaches us that a healthy progressive development of Greek music in the early Middle Ages was suddenly blocked and hindered in an extreme way when one used scholarship in theory and practice to return to the age of antiquity. The result was an unbelievable impoverishment of taste: […]. This was “literary music,” music to be read. What seems to us like an obvious absurdity may well have immediately appeared as such only to a few in the field I wish to discuss. I maintain that such well-known writers as Aeschylus and Sophocles are known to us only as librettists, as writers of lyrics; in other words, that we do not know them at all. While in the sphere of music we have long gone beyond the scholarly shadow-play of music to be read, in the sphere of poetry the unnaturalness of writing accompanying texts is itself so dominant that it requires considerable effort to tell oneself just how unfair we must be to Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, which is the reason why we do not really know them. If we call them poets, we mean writers of lyrics: but for precisely that reason we lose the insight into their being that we can only have if we present the opera to our mind’s eye in a moment of imaginative power and in such an idealized way that we are granted an intuition into the music drama of antiquity. For, however distorted all its relations to so-called grand opera are, and however much it is a product of distraction, rather than composure, the slave of the poorest rhyming and unworthy music: however much everything connected with it is lies and shamelessness: nevertheless, there is no other means of understanding Sophocles than to try to discern the original image in this caricature, excluding from thought in moments of enthusiasm all its distortions and deformations. That fantasy image then has to be carefully examined and, in its individual parts, held up against the tradition of antiquity, so that we do not over-Hellenize the Hellenics and invent a work of art that has never existed anywhere in the world. This is no small danger. After all, until recently it was considered to be an unconditional axiom of art that all idealistic sculpture had to be uncolored and that sculpture in antiquity did not permit the use of color. Quite slowly and encountering the resistance of all those ultra-Hellenists it has gradually become possible to accept the polychrome view of ancient sculpture, according to which we should no longer imagine that statues were naked, but clothed in a colorful coating. Similarly, general approval is now given to the aesthetic principle that a union of two or more art forms cannot produce an intensification of aesthetic pleasure, but is rather a barbaric error of taste. But this principle proves above all the bad modern way we have become accustomed to the idea that we can no longer enjoy as complete human beings: we are, as it were, torn into little pieces by absolute art-forms, and hence enjoy as little pieces — in one moment as human beings who listen, in another as human beings who see, and so on.

Let us contrast this view with what the brilliant Anselm Feuerbach has to say about the drama of antiquity as a total work of art:

“It is not surprising,” he says, “that a profound elective affinity allows the individual art forms to blend together again into an inseparable whole, into a new art-form. The Olympic Games brought the separate Greek tribes together into a political and religious unity: the dramatic festival is like a festive reunification of the Greek art-forms. The model for this already existed in those temple festivals where the plastic appearance of the god was celebrated in front of a devout audience by means of dance and song. As there, so here architecture constituted the framework and the foundation, by means of which the higher poetic sphere is visibly separated from reality. We see the painter at work on the backdrop and all the charm of a bright display of color in the magnificence of the costumes. The art of poetry has taken over the soul of the whole; but it has done so, not as a single poetic form, as in the worship of the temple, for instance, as a hymn. The reports of the Angelos and the Exangelos, so important for the Greek drama, or of the actors themselves, lead us back to the epic. Lyric poetry has its place in the scenes of passion and in the chorus, in all its various degrees from the unmediated outbreak of feeling in exclamations, from the most delicate blossoming of song up to the hymn and the dithyramb. In recitation and song, in the playing of the flute and in the rhythmic steps of the dance, the circle is not entirely closed. For if poetry is the innermost basic element of the drama, it is in its new form that it meets together with sculpture.”

(End of the lengthy quotation. The following is the proper ending of my entry.)

Nietzsche’s basic idea about the Greek drama as an organic and perfectly harmonious unity of mainly word and music (plus dance and visual arts, such as costume and sets coloring, etc.) effectively bestows on Wagner the mantle of the heir to Aeschylus whom Nietzsche suspects of being not just the writer of the lyrics of his tragedies, but the music composer, the set decorator, etc.---

Tightly bound, yet possessing grace; a multiplicity, yet a unity; many arts working at their highest level, yet one single work of art — that is the ancient music drama.

And here at the very end of the lecture is the most direct reference to Wagner without mentioning his name, yet unmistakable:

Whoever looks at it and is reminded of the ideal espoused by a certain contemporary reformer of art, will at the same time say to himself that this art-work of the future is by no means a gleaming, yet deceptive mirage: what we hope for the future is something that was once reality — in a past that belongs two thousand years ago.