102 Nietzscheand concert halls are today's cathedrals. A substantial portion of the pop-
ulation between the ages of thirteen and thirty now lives in the extralin-
guistic and prelinguistic Dionysian spheres of rock and pop. The
inundation of music knows no bounds. It erodes political terrains and
ideologies, as was evident in the upheavals of 1989. Music establishes
new communities, alters our consciousness, and reveals a different form
of being. The acoustic sphere encloses the individual and shuts out the
outside world, yet on another level music also unites all who listen to it.
People may have turned into windowless monads, but they are not iso-
lated if they all partake of the same music. Music provides the means for
profound social coherence in a stratum of our consciousness that used
to be called mythical.
Nietzsche cited Schiller's "audacious convention" (1,29; BT § 1),
which erects boundaries between people and provokes them to animos-
ity, and echoed Schiller's hope that the "beautiful divine spark" could
once again bring about the great project of unity. He considered
Wagner's music drama capable of realizing this project of unity and
removing the "rigid, hostile barriers" in a new "gospel of universal har-
mony" (1,29).
Universal harmony? But surely the myth that Wagner brought to the
stage was a tragic one!
Nietzsche attempted to address the misapprehension that a combi-
nation of tragic consciousness and universal harmony would invariably
clash. Dionysian life, according to Nietzsche, is tragic, because it
unfolds with Goethean "expire and expand," the "rose bursting from
the thorns" (1,36; BT§ 3), the withering of blossoms and the ripening
of fruit. Universal harmony lies in the consciousness of the necessity
of destruction and sacrifice; it is a consciousness on which the
"primeval unity, as the eternally suffering and contradictory" (1,38; BT
§ 4), has dawned and to which "the playful construction and destruc-
tion of the individual world" is shown to be "an emanation of a pri-
mordial pleasure ... in a manner that recalls die dark Heraclitean
comparison of the world-building force to a child that places stones