Do I love music? I don't know: I also hate them too often. But music loves me, and as soon as someone leaves me, it jumps over and wants to be loved.

(Subsequent fragments 1882)

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“I am thirsty for a master of music, said an innovator to his disciple that he would learn my thoughts from me and speak them in his language from now on: that way I will better reach people's ears and hearts. With sounds, you can seduce people into every fallacy and every truth: Who can make a sound refute? ”

(The happy science, Aph 106)

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I. From art to life

One of Nietzsche's most famous sentences is: “Without music, life would be a mistake.”¹. The sentence sounds nice for now and is suitable for calendar sayings, memes and concert announcements. It seems like a pathetic commitment to music, almost a bit cheesy; at least philosophically a bit deep. Who wouldn't want to agree with him?

But as is so often the case, it is important to consider the context in which Nietzsche expresses it. In fact, the complete sentence is: “How little goes into happiness! The sound of bagpipes. — Without music, life would be a mistake. The German thinks of himself singing God songs.” The relatively shallow statement at first glance thus gains in complexity and ambiguity: The “sound of a bagpipe” is, after all, the most trivial form of musical expression, far removed from the complex sound structures of the compositions of Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner or Bizet, for which Nietzsche is otherwise enthusiastic. For Nietzsche, “happiness” is especially a highly ambiguous goal in life. “We invented happiness”², say the “last people” in So Zarathustra spoke and thus represent a complacent hedonism that Nietzsche is a horror. Preferably a heroic, “dangerous”³ Live as a happy person — that is his motto. When you also consider how unflattering he is, especially in the Götzen-Dämmerung, about the Germans and their narrow-mindedness, this suggests an almost opposite interpretation of this aphorism than you would expect at first glance: Nietzsche may want to make fun of exactly this sentimental view and the “song-singing” god of the Germans. He would like to plead for a “Dionysian” worldview that knows how to affirm life without the sheer comfort of music and other narcotics.⁴

In this spirit, in the preface to the new edition of his first work, he takes The birth of tragedy From the spirit of music⁵ They also returned their musical emphasis, which in retrospect appears too pessimistic to him, as a bad heirloom from his former idols Wagner and Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, music is the highest form of art, the almost immediate revelation of the will of the world — Wagner eagerly followed up on this point of view and early Nietzsche followed them in it. “Without music, life would be a mistake” is, in itself, a Schopenhaurian sentence rather than a Nietzsche sentence. Nietzsche breaks with this aestheticism after writing in the rather embarrassing propaganda book that was completely neglected in the history of impact Richard Wagner in Bayreuth flared up one last time, from Human, all-too-human systematically. “Art,” “genius,” “comfort,” even the “Dionysian” and the “Apollinian” — all of this is never completely abandoned, but is repeatedly reconfigured to distance oneself from romanticism as far as possible. Contrary to persistent prejudice, Nietzsche is not an aestheticist in his middle and late periods of work, but on the contrary a very skeptical observer of the artists' hustle and bustle. “[N] ur as aesthetic phenomenon Is existence and the world perpetual warranted”⁶ It's still called in his debut work — the late Nietzsche already rejects the question of such a “grand justification of the world” as metaphysical. It was only as such a critic of art and of traditional understanding of art that he was able to become one of the most important philosophical pioneers of aesthetic modernism, whose protagonists are precisely united in that they no longer regard art as a comforting power outside of life, but as part of life itself. When it claims a deeper truth, avant-garde art no longer wants to comfort or edify, but rather to disturb and shock. It tends towards anti- and non-art. You may still be able to apply the concept of music as a consolation to Bizet and Wagner — from the Vienna School at the latest, the advanced music systematically creates disturbing soundscapes that are more likely to scream out “Life is a mistake” as the opposite. With composers such as John Cage, “new music” after the Second World War tended more and more towards noise and silence. A great trend that even the more radical trends of pop music (punk, metal, certain forms of rap and techno...) are unable to escape.⁷

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II. Distracting comfort, sincere appearance

So does the enthusiastic Wagner enthusiast and amateur composer Nietzsche become a music despiser? Here we again encounter the problem that Nietzsche is Human, all-too-human systematically refuses to be a systematist, and this applies in particular both to his statements about art in general and about music in particular. A veritable 'aesthetic' or 'philosophy of music, 'as described in Birth of Tragedy There is hardly any more to deduce from these heterogeneous statements apart from the above-mentioned great tendency towards art skepticism, which robs art of its elevated position and brings it back into the larger tendencies of life that the “art of works of art.”⁸ wants to replace with “that higher art, the art of festivals” (ibid.).

But let's stick with the music. In the Birth of Tragedy It still appears as a primal force that tears the subject out of normality and brings it into a pre-subjective state, as a force of liberation. For Nietzsche, listening to music allows you to experience the purity between humans and humans, animals and humans, humans and nature.⁹ That even sounds a bit socialist; but the early Nietzsche is a strict aestheticist, inasmuch as he desperately wants to see this experience banished to the realm of art. you shalt Even act out there so as not to jeopardize normality. The temporary liberation experienced in music thus virtually enables social enslavement and alienation. So you can “let yourself go” here in order to be able to function in everyday life again — and the early Nietzsche has nothing wrong with that, but that is the reason for his hopes in Wagner's Bayreuth project. The hollowed out “optimistic” ideologies of the 18th and previous 19th century, which all failed to really solve social problems, is to be replaced by a new “pessimistic” culture that no longer justifies itself rationally but aesthetically. Great tragic music in the style of Wagner as a means of defense against the proletariat and women's emancipation — UFA, Hollywood and today's club culture send greetings... The music is particularly suitable for this reactionary program because it fascinates without language, yes, without images. It can immediately seize the masses and therefore manipulate them more successfully than the other arts.

From the point of view of free-spirited Nietzsche, the situation is now very different. In addition to philosophy and religion, art now appears to him — just think of the motto of this blog — as a falsifying force, no longer as revealing a deeper truth of being. It is a way in which humans prepare the world so that they can even find meaning in it.¹⁰ In this respect, it is no closer to truth than the other modes of falsification, even though, for Nietzsche, the falsification practice of art differs in that it is deliberate and is therefore more sincere than that of religion and philosophy, which claim to express a higher truth. The artist lies without shame and the art viewer consciously enjoys the appearance of art. In this sense, art is more truthful than religion and philosophy, but its works are therefore no more true.¹¹

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III. Carmen versus Isolde

Even at this stage, however, music continues to have special significance for Nietzsche, as it is closest to the physicality of the human being. It serves to express direct bodily affects and can especially cause and intensify them. In particular in Zarathustra He therefore depreciates music in relation to language and imagination: According to him, sounds can express the physical dimension of a person better than words and images. His hero Zarathustra appears again and again as a dancer or singer¹² — and the book itself, with its three or four books, is clearly designed as a kind of symphony.

The assessment criterion for music therefore remains what kind of affects it expresses and which reinforces or even evokes it: Are they world-denying affects that comfort us and distract us from the reality of life (grief, crippling memories, resentment) — or life-affirming ones that connect us with reality and cheer us on to activity (joy, exuberance, laughter, happy forgetting)?¹³ In his last writings, Wagner appears as a representative of the first form of music. His complex harmony, which explores the limits of tonality, now appears to Nietzsche as music of beguiling and bewitching, which sets us apart imaginarily about life and provides a bland comfort. Against this background, Wagner's late turn to Christianity only appears consistent. It is music that makes us forget suffering, but doesn't really let us get beyond it. Its effect is fascination, not liberation.¹⁴

On the other hand, Bizet's harmoniously comparatively simpler, more accessible music, which today's music connoisseurs regard as almost “popular.” His easy opera carmen confronts Nietzsche polemically with Wagner's sultry “stage dedication play” Parsifal. According to him, in contrast to the decadent comforter Wagner, Bizet is “the last genius who saw a new beauty and seduction.”¹⁵ has; he wrote music for “good Europeans” (ibid.), discovered “a piece South of music“(ibid.).

What he sees in this opera could perhaps best be described as the 'cheerful realism of great passions. ' Here, life is not denied as an “error,” but rather life in all its suffering as a mistake Affirmative and life-affirming affects such as pride, joy, jealousy and love heightened to insanity are presented.¹⁶ The action is not set in a mythological parallel world, but in the reality of the 19th century; it is not Nordic heroes, but workers of a cigar factory, prostitutes, soldiers, smugglers, bullfighters who appear on stage. Carmen is a self-confident woman who consciously manipulates men and follows her passion. Compared to Wagner's “Maiden,” she's almost a feminist, even though she eventually falls victim to a “femicide.” And last but not least, it represents a southern, non-European type that the “good European” should approach in order to “get away from humid North”¹⁷ to redeem: “[I] hers merriment is African” (ibid.). It is those not numbing, but invigorating, not fascinating, i.e. desubjectizing, but inspiring, empowering music which, according to late Nietzsche, has a liberating effect and which Bassline is able to pretend to philosophy, it conflates, animates, realizes:

Have you noticed that music frees the mind? Gives the thought wings? That the more you become a musician, the more you become a philosopher? — The gray sky of abstraction as if struck by lightning; the light strong enough for all the delicate things; the big problems close at hand; looking over the world as if from a mountain. — I just defined the philosophical pathos.¹⁸

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IV. Music of Self-Affirmation

With this position, Nietzsche is very far removed from the elitist gesture of avant-gardes and new music in particular. In this sense, Mahler, Schönberg, even Cage, would be regarded as representatives of the “Wagner type”, as creators of life-denying funeral music in which the declining West feels sorry for itself.

The famous ending to Sartre's novel is more likely to correspond to Nietzsche The disgust. The protagonist Antoine Roquentin has decided to leave the small town in which he lives and go to Paris, but the feeling of weariness and world pain, of “disgust,” remains. Speaking with Nietzsche, he is trapped in resentment and nihilism and no longer sees any sense in his existence. When listening to the jazz song Some of These Days He is met with an epiphany: This song is simply there and represents a being that is not alien, that does not coldly reject the desire for meaning, but makes sense of itself — simply because it exists. This epiphany enables Roquentin to overcome his crisis of meaning. He decides to create such a work himself, which stands for itself and defies being absurd:

She sings. These two are saved: the Jew and the Negress. Saved. [...] [S] they have cleansed themselves of the sin of existing. Not completely natural — but as far as a person can. [...] The Negress sings. So you can justify your existence? Just a little bit? [...] Couldn't I try... Of course it wouldn't be a piece of music... but couldn't I, in another genre...? It should be a book [...] But not a history book: The story speaks of what has existed — an existing person can never justify the existence of another existing one. [...] Another type of book. I don't really know which — but behind the printed words, behind the pages, you would have to sense something that didn't exist, that was above existence. A story like there can be none, an adventure, for example. It should be beautiful and hard as steel and make people feel ashamed of its existence.¹⁹

In a very similar way, Nietzsche, tired of the North, hears in Carmen's song “the logic in passion, the shortest line, the hard necessity.”²⁰. It is not about comfort, not about sentimentality, romance and longing; neither finding a deeper meaning in the world nor endless grief over his absence, but his conscious creation in the knowledge that it is a creation that does not correspond to anything in the world. — In Nietzsche's sense: “And how Moorish dance appeals to us in a calming way! How in his lascive melancholy even our insatiability learns satiety! “(ibid.)

In the song, as melancholy as it may be, Roquentin feels a self-affirmation of the active power of humans not simply to come to terms with the absurdity of the world, but To make something out of yourself. This attitude enables him to throw himself back into life.

This attitude has not only an existential but also a political dimension. The affective, inspiring power of music has always served political movements of all kinds to mobilize their followers and create a community between them. A force that is “beyond good and evil,” inasmuch as even the most reprehensible movements captured their lower affects in music. But it should not be forgotten that Wagner was a reactionary and anti-Semite, and Hitler and the Nazis were enthusiastic admirers of the 'Master from Leipzig'. Here too, especially in music, the prevailing mood was a world-negating one, an obsession with death, nothingness, an obsession with obsession in the form of an eternally unsatisfied longing that finally unleashed in the practice of self-destruction. The Second World War as a production of a Wagner opera, including the final world fire.

How different do the heroic battle songs of the revolutionary movements of the same time misunderstood by Nietzsche sound. This is where exactly the affects that he affects are expressed carmen admires. Not gayst, not self-reduction, not fascination, but music of self-empowerment. The “sound” of the black emancipation movement can serve as an example of this. Black music, misinterpreted as “N*** music” even by anti-fascist avant-gardists such as Adorno²¹ always expressed the displeasure with the monotony of being a slave and the longing for freedom — but this in no resentful form, but even in the blues still carried by a deep mood of affirmation of life. Society pushes me around, my girl leaves me, I'm back on the street “like a rolling stone”²², but I still grit my teeth and keep going.

In his song Hurricane (1975) Bob Dylan set a musical memorial to the black boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who in 1967, according to Dylan's account, was wrongly convicted of triple murder by a jury of only whites, simply because it must have been the “crazy n***”. The text simply tells the story soberly. It is not about revenge, it is not whinfully lamented about the wrongs of the world, it is simply said what is the case so that everyone understands: Here someone was convicted of murder simply because of the color of their skin. While his accusers, the real criminals, drink martinis on the beach, he, who almost became world champion, has to sit in a jail cell. But there is no reason for resignation, for sentimentality, for romance. The fast-moving sound of the song makes it clear: We won't forget this injustice, but we won't sink into grief for it — because then the accusers would have won. We'll just keep fighting the racist “idiots” wherever we can. “One time he coulda been/The champion of the world” Dylan sings, “One day he could have been world champion”, but it almost sounds like “One time he's gonna be/The champion of the world” — “One day he will be world champion.” There is no time to grieve over missed opportunities.

At about the same time, 1976, it was the black singer James Brown who gave this' Nietzschean 'attitude even more clearly when he met his audience in the song with the same title asked: “Get up offa that thing/And dance 'till you feel better” — “Get up from that thing/And dance until you feel better.” With Nietzsche, we would have to move from a call for “active forgetfulness.”²³ and to “overcome yourself”²⁴ Speak: Get your A*** up again and again and despite the negative experiences you have, don't settle into a passive attitude of resentment, but stay active so that you can say over and over again: “I'm black and I'm proud.” — “I'm black and I'm proud.” ”

For Nietzsche, the liberating power of music therefore lies in its potency, us from the “spirit of gravity.”²⁵ to solve and move upwards — in order to gain the strength from this survey to destroy what destroys us: “And yet everything that breaks our truths — may break! Many houses are still to be built! ”²⁶

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The article image is by Leipzig artist Toni Braun (link). The title is Celestial urging Paul Stephan has already written about this work, partly generated with AI, elsewhere on this blog (link). Many thanks to the artist. Photo: Konrad Stöhr (detail)

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sources

Sartre, Jean-Paul: The disgust. novel. Reinbek near Hamburg 2004.

Sloterdijk, Peter: The thinker on stage. Nietzsche's materialism. Frankfurt am Main 1986.

Stephen, Paul: Boredom in perpetual excess. Nietzsche, Intoxication and Contemporary Culture. In: Dominik Becher (ed.): Controversial thinking. Friedrich Nietzsche in philosophy and pop culture. Leipzig 2019, pp. 217—250.

Ders. : Nietzsche's non-aesthetics. Nietzsche as a critic of the separation of life and art. Online.

Vogt, Jürgen: “Without music, life would be a mistake.” On a sentence by Nietzsche for music education. In: Journal of Critical Music Education, online.

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footnotes

1: Götzen-Dämmerung, Sayings and arrows, 33.

2: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 5.

3: Cf. The happy science, Aph 283.

4: For an appropriate interpretation of this sentence, see also Vogt, “Without music, life would be a mistake”.

5: Cf. Birth of Tragedy, An attempt at self-criticism.

6: Birth of Tragedy, 5.

7: On Nietzsche's transformation from aestheticist to “non-aesthetician,” see also Stephan, Nietzsche's Non-Aesthetics. On Nietzsche and techno, see Stephan in particular, Boredom in perpetual excess.

8: The happy science, Aph 89.

9: See in particular the end of the first section of the tragedy book (link), whose “socialist” appeal, for example, Sloterdijk in The thinker on stage emphasizes.

10: See e.g. So Zarathustra spoke, On the blissful islands.

11: See e.g. The happy science, Preface 4 & Aph 361.

12: “Are all words not made for the difficult? Don't all words lie to the easy! Sing! Don't talk anymore! “, it says in a prominent place (cf. The seven seals, 7).

13: See. The happy science, Aph 370.

14: See in particular Nietzsche's last major polemic against Wagner, The Wagner Case as well as my article Menke facinirt on this blog (link).

15: Beyond good and evil, Aph 254.

16: “At last the love that goes into the nature back-translated love! Not the love of a 'higher virgin'! No Senta sentimentality! But love as fate, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel — and in that nature! Love, which in its means war, at its root is Todhass The sexes are! “(The Wagner Case, Letter to Turin, 1)

17: The Wagner Case, Letter to Turin, 2.

18: The Wagner Case, Letter to Turin, 1.

19: Sartre, The disgust, p. 277 f.

20: The Wagner Case, Letter to Turin, 2.

21: Although this is not about the skin color of the musicians, as will soon become clear, but a specific musical style.

22: Cf. Bob Dylan's famous song.

23: On the genealogy of morality, II, 1.

24: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, About overcoming yourself.

25: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, The spirit of gravity.

26: So Zarathustra spoke, About overcoming yourself.