“Perhaps there never has been a philosopher who was, to this degree
at least, as much a musician as I am…”
(From a letter to conductor Hermann Levi – 1887)
“Without music, Life would be a mistake.”
(From Twilight of the Idols)[i]
Introduction
Written shortly before the mental breakdown
that would last the rest of his life, Nietzsche attempted to explain all of his
major writings in his autobiographical work Ecce
Homo.[ii]
Concerning the book he thought most highly of, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, what he has to say is particularly interesting
given its unusual character: philosophical in content, but unlike any other philosophical
text.[iii]
Rather than a work of logic and
argumentation, its three-part narrative focuses on the historical character
Zarathustra, founder of the Zoroastrian religion, followed by a fourth chapter
made up of a series of epigrams. Describing when and where it was “the basic
conception of this work” was first formulated, the idea of eternal recurrence (“this highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be
attained”), what he says is especially interesting.
If I reckon back a few months from this day [that the idea
of eternal recurrence first occurred to him], I find as an omen a sudden and
profoundly decisive change in my taste, especially in music. Perhaps the whole of Zarathustra may be
reckoned as music [italics mine];—certainly a rebirth of the art of hearing
was among its preconditions.
What an understanding of Zarathustra as music would actually mean
is therefore a question well worth asking even though an answer is hardly
obvious. Its difficulty being not a sufficient reason to not make such an
attempt, however (especially when faced with such a direct injunction as given
here by Nietzsche), this essay will try to make sense of this possibility.
Nietzsche
and Music
Nietzsche’s relation to music is most well
known through his complex relationship with Richard Wagner. At first friendly,
and in the case of the dedicatory preface to his The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music arguably crossing
over into worshipful, their friendship soured around 1876 with the completion
of the “Maestro’s” (as he desired to be called) specially built opera house at
Bayreuth. Nietzsche’s increasing disenchantment with Wagner led to him public
breaking off their friendship.[iv]
Although the story of his relationship to Wagner is well known to readers of
Nietzsche, his love of and familiarity with music is not appreciated to the
same degree. Even less well known are his numerous compositions—mostly from the
1860’—that while showing a lack of formal musical training, reveal a deeply
musical sensibility not unfamiliar with the harmonic language of the late-19th
century.[v]
What
of Zarathustra in particular, this
work that Nietzsche declares, “a Goethe, a Shakespeare,
would be unable to breathe even for a moment in this tremendous passion and
height, that Dante is, compared with Zarathustra, merely a believer and not one
who first creates truth” (EH)?
What does music, or an understanding of it as
music, have to do with its philosophical content?
Zarathustra
as Symphnoy
One possible to think about Zarathustra as music would be to look at
its structure. What is perhaps most obvious in this regard is the book’s
division into four parts, thus possibly mirroring the (for the most part)
standardized four part form of that most exalted of musical forms: the
symphony.[vi]
By the early years of the 19th century, for many the symphony was
not simply another musical form alongside all others. Instead, it was the
musical form that best reflected the society and culture of which it was a
product.[vii]
Given Nietzsche’s love and passion for music, he undoubtedly would have to some
degree shared such sentiments.
The expression
of Nietzsche’s understanding of the need for the willing of eternal return—that
everything that has and will occur returns again eternally—as the way of
overcoming the “spirit of gravity” (nihilism) that he thinks has so infected
the contemporary world, Zarathustra
could perhaps be understood as a “symphony” along these lines in its attempt to
express what is for him the truth of not just “a city, a state, or [even] the
whole of humanity,” but of all life:
will to power, which, in its positive formulation, is revealed to lead
inevitably to the willing of eternal return. “To redeem those who lived in the
past and to recreate all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’—that alone should I
call redemption” (II, 20). Lampert echoes this view writing that
The conclusion
implied, but not named, in Zarathustra’s formulation of the problem of
redemption is that the will to power that wills the past, and hence wills what
is higher than all reconciliation, wills eternal return. The final naming of
“will to power” is the first intimation of eternal return, not because the latter
supersedes the former, but because eternal return arises out of will to power
as its consequence. The will to power as redeemer overcomes and replaces the
will to power as revenge when it wills the eternal return of beings as they
are…As the agent of redemption, the will to power learns the most affirmative
willing of itself and all that is and has been, an “unbounded Yes to everything
that was and is.”[viii]
The likening of Zarathustra to a symphony is supported by the similarity that can
be drawn between it and the implicit, and sometimes explicit, “messages” of
three of the most foremost exemplars of the form that Nietzsche, again, would
have been well aware of: Beethoven’s Third, Fifth and Ninth symphonies. The
Third’s relation can be gleaned from the very title given to it by Beethoven as
the Eroica (“Heroic”) symphony,[ix]
a characterization Nietzsche surely intends for Zarathustra as he who first wills
“beyond good and evil.” But in its being the first working out of Beethoven’s
formulation of a new “symphonic ideal” that is in many ways similar to what is
expressed throughout the course of Zarathustra.
The substance of this new ideal, exemplified by all these works of Beethoven,
is that “they all contrive to create the impression of a psychological journey
or growth process. In the course of this, something seems to arrive or triumph
or transcend.”[x]
Specifically, this is brought about in the Third by the
similarity in
the opening themes of the two outer movements [which] is scarcely coincidental
and contributes to a broader sense of a dramatic psychological trajectory in
which the finale does not merely succeed the previous movements but effectively
represents a culmination of all that has gone before. Critics have necessarily
resorted to metaphor in describing this emotional trajectory, and although
these metaphors have varied widely in their level of detail they have almost
invariably been associated with the idea of struggle followed by death and
culminating in rebirth or rejuvenation.[xi]
The narrative of the book itself recounts a
similar “psychological trajectory” in leading up to Zarathustra’s willing of
eternal return in the final chapter of Part III, “The Seven Seals (or: The Yes
and Amen Song), where he is finally able to declare “For I love you, O eternity!“—and
the fourth part’s possible interpretation as the recapitulation and reworking
of the themes and ideas introduced in the first three parts into a climactic
whole.
This
overcoming of death is metaphorically enacted in Beethoven’s Third symphony where
after the overall triumphant mood of the First movement, the Second is
literally a funeral march—entitled Marcia
funebre (Adagio assai)—for the
fallen hero. This might be seen to parallel the role of Part II in the overall
narrative, as it begins with Zarathustra returning to his mountain home having
left his disciples in the hope that they would “seek themselves” and thereby
live out his teachings in preparing the way for the overman, but after “months
and years” in solitude he is startled by a dream in which he realizes that his
teaching is in danger;
weeds pose as wheat. My enemies have grown powerful and have distorted my
teaching till those dearest to me must be ashamed of the gifts I gave them. I
have lost my friends; the hour has come to seek my lost ones (II, 1).
He has “died” to those he came to bring the
teaching of Life (that of the overman who would create new values) to as they
have made of him a “god” who has not been overcome, but has instead been
idolized as declarer of the “Truth.” In a curious, and no doubt deliberately
ironic, reversal of the Gospels account of Christ’s death, resurrection and
subsequent appearance to his disciples as the confirmation of his divine
nature, Zarathustra must go “live again” among his disciples in order to
disabuse them of their error in seeing him as
a new god.
That “The Tomb
Song” is the literal central chapter of Part II (the eleventh of twenty-two)
seems to validate this reading. Lamenting the death of all he had valued most
highly, that through its “strangulation” by his enemies has brought about his
own metaphorical death, Zarathustra curses those who “have taken from [him] the
irretrievable” by “murder[ing] the visions and dearest wonders of [his] youth”
(II,11). These are, presumably, his idealistic hopes and aspirations expressed
in his declarations in the Prologue concerning his love of man (I,2) and need
for “hands outstretched to receive” his overflowing honeyed wisdom now revealed
as vain and foolish (I,1). In fact, his first mention of that honey since his
initial address to the sun before he “began to go under” (I, 1) occurs here,
but in terms of his cursing those who “galled my best honey and the industry of
my best bees” (II, 11). Whereas he had initially hoped to bring to all men the
teaching of the Overman, his experience with the people in the first town he
comes to after his coming down off the mountain—laughing and jeering at what he
has to say—reveals to him the folly of addressing the masses.
Zarathustra
realizes instead that he must be much more selective by seeking out those who
are ready to hear his teaching; “living companions I need, who follow me
because they want to follow themselves.” However, the immediately following
qualifier reveals the contradiction in his own position: “wherever I want” (I,
9). The rest of Part I recounts his finding those who would indeed follow him
wherever he wants, but his realization at the beginning of Part II that, having
continued to follow in his now absent footsteps, they have remained as but disciples
and not the “fellow creators” he intends them to be fills him with despair.
Part II as a whole is therefore concerned with the overcoming of this despair,
a goal he does not manage to attain until his willing of eternal return at the
end of Part III. Until then he must face the consequences of the
misunderstanding of his teachings.
In the chapter
“The Soothsayer” (II, 19), Zarathustra faces this misunderstanding head on when
he “denies” (shakes his head) at “the disciple whom he loved most” in yet another
reversal of the Gospel stories. According to widespread Christian tradition, John,
the most beloved disciple of Jesus, was the revelator
and authored both the Gospel of John and the book of Revelations.[xii]
Although Biblical scholars now find this possibility unlikely, Nietzsche may
well have believed it or at least assumed its truth in writing Zarathustra.[xiii]
This disciple has just attempted to interpret (reveal) Zarathustra’s dream
resulting from his hearing the Soothsayer’s nihilistic declarations: “All is
empty, all is the same, all has been!” Zarathustra realizes that to grant his
approbation would be to perpetuate their status as his disciples, a role he has
become ever more unsure of throughout Part II. This attitude of caution and
skepticism continues into the next chapter “On Redemption” (II, 20) where he is
surrounded by “cripples and beggars” whose healing is to be proof not only to
the cripples and beggars themselves as to the truth of his “doctrine,” and
therefore to a Christ-like divine status for Zarathustra, but to “the people”
as well whose judgment is revealed to depend upon the belief of the lowest
among them.
It is
Zarathustra’s realization of the inevitable inadequacy of not only the people
to the task that must be undertaken—the overcoming of the spirit of
revenge/gravity—for whom this was made evident long before, but of his
disciples as well. Content as they are on the “blessed isles,” they have
forgotten the truth of the will to power and in so doing brought about his own
“death.” To realize his own resurrection he therefore must climb out of the
underworld where he had formerly placed his hopes on the coming of the Overman.
He can no longer rely on anyone else to say what he knows must be said but
instead must find within himself the necessary will to do so.
This journey is
recounted in chapter two of Book III, “On the Vision and the Riddle.”
Zarathustra tells how he
ascended
defiantly through stones, malicious, lonely, not cheered by herb or shrub—a
mountain path crunched under the defiance of my foot. Striding silently over
the mocking clatter of pebbles, crushing the rock that made it slip, my foot
forced its way upward. Upward—defying the spirit that drew it downward toward
the abyss, the spirit of gravity, my devil and archenemy. Upward—though he sat
on me, half dwarf, half mole, lame, making lame, dripping lead into my ear,
leaden thoughts into my brain (III, 2).
As he strives to rise above his “death” of
despair, the spirit of gravity weighs him down, taunting him with its Schopenhauerian
pessimism: “You threw yourself up so high; but every stone that is thrown must
fall. Sentenced to yourself and to your own stoning—O Zarathustra, far indeed
have you thrown the stone, but it will fall back on yourself” (III,2). Such despair
of life is the living death that Nietzsche sees as the consequence facing
European civilization after two thousand years of living Plato’s “noble” lie
(exemplified by Christianity) of the good in-itself. Socrates’ argument before
those who condemned him to death that “there is good hope that death is a
blessing”[xiv] has
degenerated to the point of Schopenhauer’s argument that “life is a dream.” Suicide
should therefore by no means be objected to “when the moment of greatest horror
compels us to break it off.”[xv]
Against this despair, Nietzsche advocates a “courage which attacks: which slays
even death itself, and thus brings about his own “resurrection,” for it says,
‘Was that life? Well then! Once
more!” (III, 2).
Though he is
able to banish the spirit of gravity with the thought of its own eternal
recurrence, Zarathustra is still unable to bring himself to will it until the
end of Part III as he who has finally overcome his “great disgust with man”
(III, 13). Returning to the analogy of Zarathustra
as a symphony, Part III’s involving new developments as Zarathustra has
overcome his state of “death” in Part II, but is, as of yet, not able to
reconcile the consequences of what he has realized so far, could be seen to
mirror the usual third movement of a symphony’s use of an explicit dance form
in a triple meter time signature (such as 3/4, 3/8, 6/8) that contrasts with
the usual duple meters (such as 2/2, 2/4, 4/4) of the other movements. This
indeed seems to find itself reflected in the penultimate chapter of Part III
that is, in fact, named “The Other Dancing Song” and narrates Zarathustra’s
overcoming of his inability to will eternal return through his dance of love
with all the manifestations of life itself.
To complete this
symphonic analogy, however, we must find a way to understand Part IV in terms
of what has been said so far. This might be considered difficult given that the
book seems to find its effectual end with Zarathustra’s absolute affirmation
and love of life realized through the willing of eternal return at the end of
Part III, and the apocalyptic breaking of the seven seals that, like those in
the Book of Revelations, herald the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth.
There is a great
deal of evidence to show that Nietzsche himself considered the fourth part to
be an addendum to the rest of the book; not necessary to the comprehension of
the whole that is parts I-III, but rather an elaboration or interlude of sorts
to the rest.[xvi] He in
fact had only forty copes printed for the purpose of giving them away, but only
to “those who had proved themselves worthy of it.”[xvii]
This therefore
might be where the reading of Zarathustra
as a “symphony” falls apart. A symphony, at least of the Romantic kind with
which Nietzsche was undoubtedly most familiar, without its final movement can
in no way be considered complete. For it is in the final movement in which the summation
of all the elements introduced up till that point are optimally synthesized
into an emphatic and categorical whole.[xviii]
So while this symphonic analogy has proved enlightening, it is limited in its
application and needs to be supplemented with other ways of understanding this
book as music.
For this purpose
it is important to remind oneself of Nietzsche’s conflicted relationship with
the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche was impressed by Schopenhauer’s
forthright atheism, but, as has been already discussed, saw his pessimism
towards life as exemplifying the extreme suicidal decadence—the nihilism—that
Platonism had degenerated into by the nineteenth-century. Schopenhauer’s view
of music, however, found an always-sympathetic ear in the very musical
Nietzsche.
Music is
distinguished from the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the
phenomenon, or, more accurately, the adequate objectification of the will, but
is the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore exhibits itself as the
metaphysical to everything physical in the world, and as the thing-in-itself to
every phenomenon. We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music
as embodied will; and this is the reason why music makes every picture, and
indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher
significance, certainly all the more as the melody is analogous to the inner
spirit of the given phenomenon.[xix]
Recalling Nietzsche’s statement concerning Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Ecce Homo that the idea of eternal
recurrence (return) is the fundamental conception of the work and that, as has
been shown, this “highest principle of affirmation” arises out of the will to
power—being for Nietzsche the metaphysical basis of all life—a Schopenhauerian
understanding of music as directly expressing this “truth” (quotation marks
here given Nietzsche’s extreme suspicion of all supposed truths) would
seemingly help to explain his positing the possibility of the whole text being
“reckoned as music.”
To
make sense of this idea one must necessarily involve Nietzsche’s first major
work, the already mentioned The Birth of
Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, as it most obviously bears
Schopenhauer’s influence, though, as Nietzsche himself says in his “Attempt at
a Self-Criticism” written concerning it in 1886 fourteen years after it was
published, more “by means of Schopenhauerian and
Kantian formulas strange and new valuations which were basically at odds with
Kant's and Schopenhauer's spirit and taste” (6). For above all it is a book
that point to and celebrates (one must understand the positive connotation of
his use of the word “tragic”) the role of music in the remarkable artistic
flowering that occurred in Greece during the 5th and 6th
centuries BC that Nietzsche argues was killed by the rationalism of Socrates.
He characterizes music as the Dionysian
art par excellence in its capacity for enchantment and inducement of ecstasy
through its penetration beyond the rational ego. He contrasts this with the Apollonian arts of poetry and sculpture
that are so defined by their rational order.
Apollo is the deity of light personifying order, measure,
number and the subjugation of undisciplined instinct. He is the ruler of the
inner world of phantasy and dream. Dionysus, on the other hand, is the complete
opposite, exhibiting liberation, drunkenness, unbridled license, intoxication
and orgiastic celebration. In The Birth
of Tragedy Dionysus stands for the emotional element in art - the Dionysian
art par excellence being music, whereas Apollo for the form creating force
representing the representational arts and especially sculpture. In other
words, the rational versus the irrational, form versus content.[xx]
Nietzsche argues that
it was the general balance of these two artistic impulses, but with the
Dionysian always somewhat dominant, that made pre-Socratic Greece as great as
it was.
Writing in the aforementioned “Attempt at a
Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche is highly critical of the book,[xxi]
but does not dismiss it completely arguing that its essential task, “to look
at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life...”
[His italics] (2), is still worthwhile and that the questions it asks are still
deserving of answers.[xxii]
For the purpose of this essay, however, what is most interesting about this
retrospective critique of his youthful book is its ending. After critiquing his
own present critique of the book as unsuitably romantic through the adoption of
a second person voice, Nietzsche counters by using “the language of that
Dionysian monster who bears the name of Zarathustra,” thus revealing a relation between
his earliest book that he has so far for the most part disparaged and the book
of his that he thought most highly of, by quoting five passages from the last
three sections of the chapter “On the Higher Man” from the, at that point,
still secret fourth part of Zarathustra.
Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not
forget your legs either! Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better
yet, stand on your heads!
This crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: I
myself have put on this crown, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy.
Nobody else have I found strong enough for this today.
Zarathustra, the dancer, Zarathustra, the light one who
beckons with his wings, preparing for a flight, beckoning to all birds, ready
and heady, blissfully lightheaded;
Zarathustra, the soothsayer; Zarathustra, the
sooth-laugher; not impatient; not unconditional; one who loves leaps and
side-leaps: I myself have put on this crown!
This crown of the laugher, this rose-wreath crown: to you,
my brothers, I throw this crown. Laughter I have pronounced holy: you higher
men, learn—to laugh!
That they do not appear
in the same order in the text may be seen as significant,[xxiii]
though it seems more likely to simply reflect Nietzsche’s poetic license to
re-order what has otherwise appeared in a different context in order to make of
the five a more sensible whole for his present purpose. But introduced as they
are by his explicit characterization of Zarathustra as a “Dionysian monster,”
the passages cannot help but evoke an understanding of Zarathustra in terms of the spirit of Dionysus, and music as the Dionysian art, as first presented in
The Birth of Tragedy.
The Dionysus of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not the same
as the one that appears in the earlier work, however. No longer contrasted with
his Apollonian antipode (a dualism for which Nietzsche castigated himself as
unnecessarily Hegelian), this Dionysus is
the Overman, “the meaning of the earth” (1, 3), that Zarathustra, when he
first came down off his mountain in Part I, tries to teach first to the people in
general and then to those whom he wished to be his companions, but instead
remained only his disciples. Nietzsche’s explicit reference to Zarathustra as Dionysus in his “Attempt at a
Self-Criticism,” as well as in Ecce Homo,
therefore reveals the overall
trajectory of the work as the gradual realization by Zarathustra (Nietzsche?)
that he cannot teach the overman—as even those who are seemingly ready to hear
the message (his disciples) are liable to not truly understand it—but must
instead become the overman himself.
This is revealed most clearly in “The Stillest Hour,” the
final chapter of Part II (that to some degree parallels Christ’s night spent
suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane before his capture, trial and crucifixion
by the Romans), where confronted by the realization of eternal return
Zarathustra cannot bring himself to say it; “Alas, I would like to, but how can
I? Let me off from this! It is beyond my strength!” (II, 22). He knows that the
willing of eternal return is the only way to overcome the “spirit of revenge,”
which he has only recently told his disciples is “the will’s ill will against
time and its ‘it was,’” by “recreat[ing] all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed
it’—that alone should I call redemption” (II,20). But the task seems too great
for him: “I await the worthier one; I am not worthy even of being broken by it”
(II, 22). He is but the teacher of the overman not the overman himself. Despite
his protestations, however, he cannot pretend to have not heard the call that
has been made to him. He therefore must leave the comfort of those he now calls
his friends in order to begin his “loneliest walk,” the climbing of the
“ultimate peak,” to thereby overcome his own spirit of revenge that prevents
him from loving life unconditionally (III, 1).
Zarathustra’s realization of himself as the
personification of the Dionysian spirit who has overcome all pessimisms and
feelings of revenge through the love of his highest hope—life itself—again
points to book’s musical character. Nietzsche expresses this in Ecce Homo, that
Zarathustra is a dancer—; how he that has the hardest, most
terrible insight into reality, that has thought the "most abysmal
idea," nevertheless does not consider it an objection to existence, not
even to its eternal recurrence,—but rather one reason more for being himself
the eternal Yes to all things, "the tremendous, unbounded saying Yes and
Amen" ... "Into all abysses I still carry the blessings of my saying
Yes" ... But this is the concept of Dionysus once again.[xxiv]
Zarathustra as Dionysus is therefore
Zarathustra as music understood as
the “highest formula of affirmation [of life] that can possibly be attained.”
Nietzsche’s
seemingly hyperbolic comments concerning Thus
Spoke Zarathustra—that “this work stands altogether
apart … perhaps nothing has ever been done from an equal excess of strength”[xxv]—can
thus be seen to be in fact somewhat justified for it is a narrative that is
conceived and realized in terms of the absolute love of life in all of its manifestations: health and
sickness, joy and sorrow, love and hatred and so on. To will such a thing for
oneself would indeed demand a strength that few if any possess.
It must be wondered, however, what the result of such a
willing would be. Though Nietzsche’s descent into madness has traditionally
been explained as the result of his having contracted syphilis in the early
1870s (possibly during his time as an orderly during the Franco-Prussian War),
recent investigations have shown the available evidence to be incompatible with
such a diagnosis.[xxvi]
Other diseases have been proposed as the likely cause, but one might wonder,
given the example of what happened to Nietzsche, whether the strength needed to
will such an absolute affirmation might in fact simply be beyond the capacities
of the sane human mind.
Bibliography
Laurence, Lampert. Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Compiled from translations by
Walter Kaufmann, R. J.
Hollingdale, and Anthony M. Ludovici; amended in part by
The Nietzsche Channel. The Nietzsche
Channel, http://www.geocities.com/ thenietzschechannel/bt.htm.
———. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of
Music (the title of the first two editions);
The Birth of Tragedy Or: Hellenism
and Pessimism (the title of the
third edition published in 1886 that contained the “Attempt at a
Self-Criticism”) Compiled from translations by Francis Golffing and Walter
Kaufmann; text amended in part by The Nietzsche Channel. The Nietzsche Channel, http://www.geocities.com/ thenietzschechannel/bt.htm.
———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter
Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche.
New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1954.
[i] Also quoted in Tali Makell, “The Aesthetic Nietzsche: Philosophy
from the Spirit of Music,” http://nietzschemusicproject.org/aesthpg1.html
(accessed December 15, 2004).
[ii] “Ecce homo” is the phrase in the Vulgate translation of the New
Testament that Pontius Pilate uses to present a bound, crowned-with-thorns
Jesus Christ to an angry, watching crowd. The suggestion of similarities
between Nietzsche and Christ are certainly intentional.
[iii] Perhaps as James Chester says, “Zarathustra is a dithyrambic
tragedy, the first in more than two thousand years”; “Introduction to the
Exegesis of Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Public
Appeal (http://www.publicappeal. org/node/view/121).
[iv] Addressing himself to Wagner, Nietzsche writes: “Let such ‘serious’ readers learn something from the fact
that I am convinced that art represents the highest task and the truly
metaphysical activity of this life, in the sense of that man to whom, as my
sublime predecessor on this path, I wish to dedicate this essay.”
[v] His “Das Fragment an sich” is particularly notable in this regard.
See http://nietzschemusicproject.org/ fragpg.html (accessed December 15, 2004)
for a discussion and recording of this piece. The only other modern philosopher
with a comparable knowledge of music and who also composed in his early years
is Theodor W. Adorno who was himself influenced by Nietzsche. See Karin Bauer, Adorno’s Nietzschean Narratives: Critiques
of Ideology, Readings of Wagner, Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1999.
[vi] Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral,” and Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique—which bears many
indications of Berlioz conceiving it explicitly as an “anti-Pastoral”—in being
two of the most famous examples that disregard this convention in their use of
five movements.
[vii] “Performed by a large number of players on a diverse range of
instruments and projected to a large gathering of listeners, the symphony came
to be seen as the most monumental of all instrumental genres. The all-embracing
tone of the symphony was understood to represent the emotions or ideas not
merely of the individual composer but of an entire community, be it a city, a
state, or the whole of humanity. As reflected in the writings of such critics
as Paul Bekker, Arnold Schering and Theodor Adorno, this perspective continued
into the 20th century, yet by the end of the century it was all but lost. It
nevertheless constitutes one of the essential elements in perceptions of the
symphony throughout the 19th century.” “Symphony,” Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed [December 15, 2004]), http://www.grovemusic.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca.
[viii] Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s
Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1986) 147; quotation from Leo Strauss, “Note on the Plan of
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” in
Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic
Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 189.
[ix] The title was originally intended to be the “Bonaparte Symphony” in
dedication to the reforms introduced by Napoleon as First Consul of France in
parts of Europe conquered by the post-revolutionary republican army that he
led, but upon hearing that he had crowned himself emperor in 1804 (instead of
having the then Pope Pius VII, who was at the coronation and had carried the
crown to him, do the deed, thus symbolically representing his non-subservience
to papal authority) Beethoven apocryphally tore up the title page, in rage at
Napoleon having become simply another tyrant.
[x] “Beethoven; the symphonic ideal,” Grove Music Online.
[xi] “Symphony; Beethoven,” Grove
Music Online.
[xii] D. A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo, An
Introduction to the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005), 700-02.
[xiii] See, for example, ibid, 702-707; and R.H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the
Revelation of St. John, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1920),
xxix-xxxvii.
[xiv] Apology, 41
[xv] Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Suicide,” http://comp.uark.edu/~mpianal/schopenhauer.htm
(Accessed December 15, 2004).
[xvi] “When it appeared in public, it bore the title ‘Fourth and Final
Part.’ This is a title Nietzsche gave it, and it is in fact final in that it is
the last part he wrote. But judged by its content, its being entitled ‘final’
is not as nearly as appropriate as another title Nietzsche gave it. ‘The
Temptation of Zarathustra: an Interlude,’ a title that he called ‘more exact,’
‘ more descriptive,’ ‘its proper title in view of what already transpired and
what follows’ (letters to Fuchs, 29 July 1888, ‘An Entr’acte’; to Brandes, 8
January 1888, ‘Ein Zwischenspiel’)”; Lampert, 288.
[xvii] From an introduction to Thus
Spoke Zarathustra written by his sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche
(Nietzsche Archives, Weimar, 1905), http://www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Nietzsche/Zarathustra/
Zarathustra1.html (accessed December 17, 2004). She goes on to state that only
seven copies were in fact given away. Concerning Nietzsche’s attitude towards
it, Lampert quotes from his last known reference to it, part of a letter to Köselitz
on December 9, 1888: “Dear friend, I want to have all the copies of Zarathustra four
back, in order to secure this unpublished work against all the accidents of
life and death….If after a few decades of world historical crises—wars!—I publish it, then that will be
the proper time” (287-8). A
realization that this was written less than a month before his first
(incontrovertible) signs of madness might help us to understand Nietzsche’s
seeming urgency, but what it is about Part IV in particular that demands such
special treatment is a fascinating question for any reader of Zarathustra.
[xviii] Beethoven’s Fifth symphony expresses this tendency perhaps better
any other “as a work of unusual historical importance, particularly as regards
the question of cyclical coherence. With its overt manipulation of a single
motive across multiple movements, its blurring of boundaries between the two
final movements, and the extended return to an earlier movement (the third)
within the course of its finale, the Fifth brings to the surface strategies of
cyclical coherence that had long been present but rarely made so obvious. The
Fifth is also significant for the emotional weight of its finale, which
reintroduces and resolves issues and ideas left open in earlier movements. Beethoven
thereby placed unprecedented weight on a symphonic finale in a manner that was
immediately palpable.” “Symphony; Beethoven,” New Grove Online.
[xix] Arthur Schopenhauer, The
World as Will and Idea, quoted in Harlow Gale, “Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics
of Music” (http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/articles/ney48218.htm,
accessed December 16, 2004). This valuation of music above all other arts
should be understood in the context of coming after Immanuel Kant’s judgment
that “if … one estimates the value of the beautiful arts in terms of the
culture that they provide for the mind and takes as one’s standard the
enlargement of the faculties that must join together in the power of judgment
for the sake of cognition, then to that extant music occupies the lowest place
among the beautiful arts … because it merely plays with sensations. The Critique of the Power of Judgment
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 206.
[xx] Spiros Doikas, “Metaphysics
of Art - Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's Theories of Art,” http://www.translatum.gr/etexts/moart.htm
(accessed December 16, 2004).
[xxi] “To say it once more: today I find it an
impossible book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing,
image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of
effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very
convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety
of proof, a book for initiates, ‘music’ for those dedicated to music, those who
are closely related to begin with on the basis of common and rare aesthetic
experiences, ‘music’ meant as a sign of recognition for close relatives in
arbitus [in the arts]—an arrogant
and rhapsodic book that ought to exclude right from the beginning the profanum
vulgus [profane crowd] of ‘the
educated’ even more than ‘the mass’ or ‘folk’” (3).
[xxii] Two of these being ““what is Dionysian?”
and “What, seen in the perspective [Optik] of life,
is the significance of morality?”
[xxiii] The first being from the first paragraph
of the nineteenth section of the chapter, the middle three making up, in the
same order, section eighteen, while the last makes up the final two sentences
from section twenty, the last of the chapter.
[xxiv] Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke
Zarathustra,” 6.
[xxv] Ibid, 6.
[xxvi] See Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D., "What Was the Cause of Nietzsche's Dementia?" by Journal of Medical Biography,
Royal Medical Society, London, February 2003, 11: 47-54.
