Blogging Shostakovich and Stalin turned out to be a non-starter. There’s not much there for the music listener; mostly footnoted spats with other historians. Pure minutia.
So we turn from a music book to the music book: The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, by Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy was first published in 1872; the author was still quite young, and had yet to descend into his much-documented madness. At the time Nietzsche held a coveted professor gig at the University of Basel, remarkable for someone his age.
The book was odd, even for the time. Nietzsche subdivides art into two forms, the Apolline — or visual — arts, and the Dionysiac — or non-visual — arts. (By non-visual arts, he simply means music.) Apolline art, the realm of the Greek god Apollo, individuates us, and most notably reminds us of our mortality. Dionysiac art, the realm of Dionysus, gnaws away at the self, and reminds us that we are a part of something much bigger.
He also sets aside a disproportionate number of pages for friend and composer Richard Wagner. A modern day equivalent would be a university textbook written by a personal friend of Thom Yorke, in which the author not only dedicates the textbook to Thom Yorke and spends half of the book’s pages discussing Radiohead, but neglects all other contemporary artists at the same time.
The book was not received well, and it is clear that Nietzsche grew tired of defending it. In 1886 he appended a foreward to the book, “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” in which he refers to The Birth of Tragedy as “questionable,” even “impossible.” Yet large segments of the book attempt to explain the allure of this most peculiar of art forms, and our bewildering, yet human response to it. You may one day lose your hearing from too much music appreciation. You know this and accept the risks. Would you similarly risk losing your sight by staring at Van Gogh paintings?
This book should prove to be much more rich with quotables. And to that end, here is our first:
Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances. The enchantment speaks out in his gestures. Just as the animals now speak and the earth gives milk and honey, so something supernatural also echoes out of him: he feels himself a god; he himself now moves in as lofty and ecstatic a way as he saw the gods move in his dream. The man is no longer an artist; he has become a work of art.
And here is some Wagner you might have heard:
