The Drama of Disillusionment 21gauze, staring at me expectantly. I was speechless at first, but then I went
instinctively to a piano, as if it were the only being in the group with a
soul, and struck several chords. They broke the spell and I hurried out-
side../" (Janz 1,137).'
Music, even when limited to a few improvised chords, triumphed
over lust. In 1877, Nietzsche devised a hierarchy of things according to
the degree of pleasure they afforded. Musical improvisation was placed
at the pinnacle, followed by Wagnerian music Lust was placed two rungs
lower (8,423). In the bordello in Cologne, two chords were all he needed
to transport him to another realm. They ushered in what he hoped
would be a never-ending flow of improvisation in which to drift.
Nietzsche treasured Wagner's unending melodies for the same reason.
They keep unfolding like an improvisation and begin as though they had
long since begun, and when they stop, they are still not truly finished.
<€The unending melody—you lose the shore and surrender to the
waves" (8,379). Waves, which spill ceaselessly onto the shore, carrying
you and pulling you along, and perhaps even pulling you under and sub-
merging you, were Nietzsche's symbol of the depths of the world. 'This
is how the waves live—just as we live, the desirers! I will say no more ...
how could I ever betray you! Because—heed my words!—I know you
and your secret, I know your type! You and I are of one and the same
type!—You and I, we have one and the same secret!" (3,546; GS§ 310).
One of these secrets is the intimate relationship of wave, music, and the
great game of life that Goethe called "expire and expand." It is a game
of grow and fade, rule and be overruled Music transports you into the
heart of the world, but in such a way that you do not die in it. In The Birth
of Tragedy, Nietzsche called this ecstatic life in music the "rapture of the
Dionysian state, which eradicates the ordinary bounds and limits of
existence" (1,56; BT§ 7). As long as the rapture persists, the everyday
world is carried off, only to be regarded with disgust when it returns to
(^1) Parenthetical references within the text that are not keyed to works by
Nietzsche can be found in the Bibliography. —Translator