music, freedom, and metaphysics 187in relation to the theme of the exclusion by the humanly constituted
city of what is other to it, that is often couched in terms of wild ‘nature’
outside the city. What is ‘outside’ often proves in some way to be inside.
In Euripides’The Bacchae, Dionysus himself is the destructive god who
comes from outside the city, but he is in some sense always already inside
it. The necessity essential to the idea of tragedy lies in the fact that,
whatever form of order human beings seek to establish or maintain,
it will inevitably come up in the end against a reality that transcends
and destroys it. Importantly, there is no dualism here: the forms of
order could not exist without the reality from which they emerge, but
that reality always transcends them. Why, then, does this idea come to
be linked to music? The analogies of the structure here to what we
observed in relation to the question of evil and freedom should make
the answer easier to grasp: in both cases a causally explicable world is
seen also to involve a dimension which is not explicable in causal terms,
and which is sometimes linked to madness.
Dionysus is essential to tragedy because he is associated with the idea
that creation and destruction are inevitably linked. While ‘reality’ can be
regarded as that which can be conceptually fixed, it can also be regarded
as that which never ceases to change, destroying previous ways of fixing it
in concepts and occasioning trauma in those who undergo the changes.
That concern with the idea of Dionysus should re-emerge during the
French Revolution – the Sans-culottes, for example, adopted Dionysian
insignia (and used music that can be characterised as Dionysian) – and
in the subsequent period, when ‘All that is solid melts into air’, seems
not to be wholly fortuitous. Tragedy is connected to times of great social
upheaval: Shakespeare may precede the English Revolution, but the
social conflicts he is concerned with relate to that Revolution. With
the exception of Georg B ̈uchner (whoseWoyzeckwas, of course, turned
with little alteration into the libretto of Berg’sWozzeck), the nineteenth
century does not give rise to great tragedies, although Wagner can be
regarded as an exception precisely because of his addition of music.
This may seem unfair to Ibsen and others, but they arguably do not
attain the universality necessary for tragedy. The association of music
with tragedy comes about because of the particular ways in which the
destruction of forms of order is interpreted in the modern period, there
being no universal consensus on the evaluation of this destruction.
The issue of time is crucial here, because of the erosion of traditional
forms of temporal order associated with modernity. In chapter 3 we
encountered the Romantic questioning of the idea that the task of