250 music, philosophy, and modernity
philosophical Gustav Mahler, who constantly challenges us to judge how
seriously each element is to be taken. Let us, then, take a few examples
of Nietzsche’s contradictory approaches to music, Wagner, and philos-
ophy to see how this might be the case.^8
Martha Nussbaum (in Janaway 1999 ) has pointed out that, even
thoughThe Birth of Tragedyof 1872 relies on the Schopenhauerian
schema of Will and representation being echoed in the contrast
between Dionysus and Apollo, Nietzsche already begins to depart from
Schopenhauer in this text. He does so because art is seen not as what
enables resigned, Will-free contemplation of an irredeemable exis-
tence, but as the manifestation of a creativity that can make life worth
living, even if existence has no inherent meaning. Nietzsche’s modifi-
cation has the advantage of making sense of music’s capacity to give
pleasure and make us engage with the world, rather than just withdraw
from it, even though music evokes transience, longing, pain, and so
on. However, his view of language and music returns us to some famil-
iar problems. He talks of the emergence of opera, where ‘the music is
regarded as servant, the word of the text as master’ and where the ‘music
is completely alienated from its true dignity of being the Dionysian mir-
ror of the world, so that it is only left to it, as slave of appearance, to imi-
tate the essence of the form of appearance’ (Nietzsche 2000 : 1 , 108 – 9 ).
As the ‘Dionysian mirror’ music gives access to the ground of appear-
ances, as ‘the real idea of the world’ (ibid.: 119 ); the text, which refers to
the world of transient, particular appearances, therefore does not have
metaphysical significance.Tristan, above all, conveys a metaphysical
message about the ground of being, a message which is, though, essen-
tially that of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the Will. InRichard Wagner in
BayreuthNietzsche gives a further reason, which echoes Wagner’s theo-
retical texts, for this privileging of music over the word. He talks of the
‘pain ofconvention, that is agreement in words and actions without agree-
ment of feeling’ (ibid.: 388 ). The music of the ‘German masters’ allows
‘true feeling, the enemy of all convention, of all artificial alienation and
incomprehensibility between people’ (ibid.) to be manifest in sound.
Music is ‘nature transformed into love’ (ibid.). The idea comes squarely
into what Nietzsche will later condemn as ‘Romanticism’, which tries to
conjure away the agonistic nature of human existence into an illusory
harmony.
8 I have given a more detailed account of the various stages of Nietzsche’s writing about
music in Bowie 2003 a.