192 music, philosophy, and modernity
before Goethe, or Beethoven, or Shakespeare, or Raphael: and sud-
denly we feel our best things and momentsjudged[in the sense that
they do not live up to what Dionysus signified for Greek culture]’
(Nietzsche 2000 : 3 , 463 ). His assertion is part of a questionable verdict
on music in modernity which will be considered in thenext chapter.
The objection to the verdict is that his predictions that Beethoven’s
music, let alone that of Wagner, would soon cease to be culturally
significant are simply mistaken. The reasons why can be briefly sug-
gested by the following. InTwilight of the IdolsNietzsche claims that
modern music is ‘the remainder of a much more complete expression-
world of affect, a mereresidueof Dionysian histrionics. In order to
make music possible as a particular art, a number of senses, above all
the muscle-sense, were rendered immobile’ (ibid.: 2 , 997 ). We are here
returned to an idea which we encountered in Herder, namely that the
development of modernity depends on the loss of immediacy. Instead
of the Greeks’ supposedly immediate somatic reactions to the affec-
tive stimuli of life, reflective, rationalised articulation now dominates,
and music becomes an autonomous art. An obvious problem for this
argument is apparent in a complexly ‘mediated’ work like Wagner’s
Tristan.Tristanis both an astounding ‘complete expression-world of
affect’ and relies on the most extended deferral of tonal resolution
and a final tonal culmination, without involving the kind of structural
integration present in Beethoven’s employment of sonata and other
forms. There is no obvious reason to regardTristanas inferior to Greek
Dionysian art, unless one adduces a series of cultural and philosoph-
ical evaluations that may fail in important ways to do justice to the
music.
What is at stake, then, in such evaluation of music? In the case of
Nietzsche the question is hard to answer. At the beginning of the sec-
tion ofEcce HomoonThe Case of Wagner, for example, Nietzsche makes
another link between Dionysus and music: ‘From whatdo I suffer if I suf-
fer from the fate of music? From the fact that music has been deprived
of its world-transfiguring, yea-saying character, that it isd ́ecadence- music
and no longer the flute of Dionysos’ (ibid.: 2 , 1146 ). The affirmative
aspect of music consists here in the involvement of the whole somatic
and affective being of the person, but this conception relies on the ques-
tionable version of immediacy we have just encountered. Elsewhere in
Ecce Homo, looking back onThe Birth of Tragedy,headmits, while criti-
cising it, that ‘A great hope speaks from this book. In the last analysis
there is no reason for me to take back the hope for a Dionysian future