music, freedom, and metaphysics 189towards a redemptive culmination that is meant to bind together the
increasingly diverse patterns of expectation and fulfilment, and changes
of mood and feeling, which form their material. This sort of control of
a symbolic totality seems, however, then to founder on the fact that the
culmination is contradicted by a real world whose ‘endings’ become
more and more disastrous. The analogy to the Dionysian conception
of the destruction of human order outlined above should be appar-
ent. The disparity between the anything but triumphant conclusions of
Mahler’s Sixth and Ninth Symphonies, and the conclusions of some of
his other symphonies, like the Seventh and Eighth, illustrates the basic
point. The consequence is that the Sixth and Ninth take on an iconic
status in relation to the disasters of the twentieth century for thinkers
like Adorno, who reject triumphant tonal apotheoses from this period
as ideology which feigns reconciliation where there is none. As we shall
see in later chapters, it is in this sense that certain kinds of music can
come to be seen as ‘critical’ of reality.
The First World War is a watershed in this context, because it brings
home what is seen as the inherently tragic aspect of Western music
suggested by its links to Dionysus. Much depends here, of course, on
how the tragic is understood. The interpretations of Schopenhauer
and of the early Nietzsche, who hold in certain respects to a traditional
metaphysical view of a timeless world that is accessible through art,
contrast vividly with those of the later Nietzsche. The latter says, in
the notes of the 1880 s, opposing Dionysus to ‘the Crucified’ as the
manifestation of ‘a curse on life’ (i.e. Christianity), that ‘Dionysus who
is cut into pieces is apromise(‘Verheissung’) of life: it will eternally be born
again and come home from destruction’ (Nietzsche 2000 : 3 , 774 ).^16
The question is, he maintains, whether the meaning of suffering should
be regarded in a ‘Christian’ or in a ‘tragic’ manner, the former seeking
an answer beyond life, the latter seeing meaning in this life, there being
no other. InTwilight of the Idols, Nietzsche talks of the ‘Positivebeliefthat
only the particular is reprehensible, that within the whole everything
redeems and asserts itself... But such a belief is the highest of all
possible beliefs: I baptised it with the nameDionysos’ (ibid.: 2 , 1025 ). In
the later Nietzsche the destruction of the transient particularity in which
human lives consist can be ‘redeemed’ by affirmation of the inevitable16 References to Nietzsche are to the Schlechta edition because this is now available on
a very reasonably priced and easily searchablecd-rom(Digitale Bibliothek 31 Berlin:
Directmedia 2000 ).