Between Performance Practice and the “Becoming Human of Dissonance”

Nietzsche’s philological and phenomenological investigations of the spirit of music in antiquity began with his explorations of the musical character of the Greek language as spoken/sung, beginning with his reflections on Greek music drama and dance, all replete with little illustrations, arsis/thesis.^[1] Nietzsche’s exploration turns out to be all about dance, drama, but above all about the literal music of the poem itself, which phenomenological hermeneutic in turn was dependent upon Nietzsche’s discovery of the musical resonances of ancient Greek.

And because kd lang walks the music as she does it struck me that we might learn something hear something, guess at something, for, as Nietzsche also always reminds us, we need to guess where we do not, cannot know. What might this tell us about the chorus, about its movement in ancient Greek tragedy, and about the tragedian, qua lyric artist, as Nietzsche posed this question, but also and indeed in terms of the song itself?

Nietzsche argued that the artistic role of his own science, namely of classical philology as science, corresponded neither to that of the artist nor that of the composer but and much rather to the performer. As such, the scholar’s work would amount to a virtual making present, that is in its German and phenomenological articulation, a Vergegenwärtigung of the kind one can perform by articulating, that is speaking/singing “sight-reading” ancient Greek within the constraints, that is also to say the “chains” of rhythm and time — that is to say, now as Nietzsche meant his original subtitle: out of the spirit of music.

Nietzsche alludes to Beethoven’s music as artist and not less theoretically by way of Beethoven’s own early 19th century Harmonienlehre of dissonance and consonance^[2] and Beethoven’s reflections on dissonance are of interest to Nietzsche’s own writings on dissonance but also on harmony and not less on the differences between Greek musical forms and lyric convention, as Beethoven rather didactically explains:

Keine Dissonanz soll eher resolvieren, als bis der Sinn der Worte völlig geendet ist — Wo man sich verweilet: lange Noten; wo man wegeilet: kurze Noten.^[3]

We note that Nietzsche emphasized a similar precision at the heart of poetry in a religious if demystifying context in his own writings: rhythm and rhyme are used to influence the deity. If Beethoven’s significance cannot be overstated in the context of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy even if we were only to note the relevance of the woodcut he commissions for the title page of his first book, illustrating Prometheus freed from his chains and which same Prometheus Nietzsche thematizes as formative for humanity but, unlike the Western parallel of a creator God, as Prometheus assumes the responsibility for, that is the guilt of human transgression upon himself as Nietzsche discusses the different conceptions of sin, the Greek blames the gods and the titans for his shortcomings and the Judeao-Christian finds humanity guilty of its own sins. The allusion — via Goethe to be sure — is to Beethoven’s ballet: Creatures of Prometheus [Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, Op. 43].

I argue that it is the Beethoven context as such, including Wagner's then absorption with Beethoven (but also quite independently of that as Nietzsche's interest in Beethoven predates his aquaintance with Wagner) that is relevant to Nietzsche’s project in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, as indeed in other related studies. Thus: Nietzsche, who also had ambitions as a composer, undertakes to clarify the particular kind of performance context as lived in terms not as we ourselves might experience it but in term of what he speaks of as the origin of the tragic work of art (out of the folk song and in the context of religious ritual and specifically vernal or fertility cults) together with the importance of dance to song in the lyric poetic and musical context of the ancient Greek tragic art work.

Notes

^[1] See, again, Babich, “Wort und Musik in der Antiken Tragödie. Nietzsches ,fröhliche’ Wissenschaft.” Nietzsche-Studien 37 (2007): 230-257, here p. 235 in addition to Babich, “The Science of Words or Philology” and Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers, first chapters and throughout.

^[2] See Henry Hugo Pierson’s edited compilation of Beethoven’s studies and theory of composition: Ludwig van Beethovens Studien im Generalbass, Contrapunkt und in der Compositionslehre aus dessen Handschriftlichen Nachlass gesammelt und herausgegeben von Ignaz Xaver von Seyfried (Leipzig: Schuberth & Comp, 1853 [1830, 1832]), references throughout.
^[3] Don’t resolve any dissonance until the significance of the word has come fully to an end — where one lingers, long notes; where one hastens away, short notes.