Nietzsche on Music

Music and thoughts on music can be found in most places, but one of the most interesting to me is how music is seen in the eyes of philosophers. Anyone who has read a book by Friedrich Nietzsche can see his love for the arts, especially for music, in his writing. His views on it can be a powerful read for musicians, composers, or anyone who has a love of music.

From first glance at Nietzsche’s views on music, one must realize that his ideals are conflicted. In his book “The Use and Abuse of History”, he speaks of artists as the only ones who can learn from history and use it as a lesson in living. This is because the art of the contemporary world is built upon the blocks of past civilizations. Despite this, artists and creators are at a distinct disadvantage than the consumers of the art for these onlookers “…dance round the half-understood monument of a great past.” and have the luxury of thinking they have a monopoly on these great monuments.

“In their eyes there is no need nor inclination nor historical authority for the art which is               not yet “monumental” because it is contemporary. Their instinct tells them that art can be slain by art: the monumental will never be reproduced, and the weight of its authority is invoked from the past to make it sure. They are connoisseurs of art primarily because they wish to kill art; they pretend to be physicians when their real idea is to dabble in poisons. They develop their tastes to a point of perversion that they may be able to show a reason for continually rejecting all the nourishing artistic fare that is offered them. For they do not want greatness to arise; their method is to say, “See, the great thing is already here!”…Monumental history is the cloak under which their hatred of present power and greatness masquerades as an extreme admiration of the past…. whether they wish it or no, they are acting as though their motto were: “Let the dead bury the-living.”

This passage from “the Use and Abuse of History” is a very interesting, and rather damning, way of viewing those who claim all the genius’s are dead.

However perhaps one of the most interesting of developments in Nietzche’s views on music was in his love of Wagner that then turned to disillusionment as he claimed, “Wagner belongs only to my diseases.” He later clarifies that he is actually grateful for this Wagnerian disease and also claims that “There is no help for it, we must first be Wagnerites…”

Why such bitterness towards Wagner, a man he considered an idol as well as a friend? Certainly a great deal of this disillusionment stemmed from his own personal connection with Wagner and these bitter feelings couldn’t have manifested without him first loving Wagner; however by converting to Christianity and then his nationalist German feelings and anti-semitist views, Wagner had sealed his friend’s descent into disappointment. Nietzsche wrote in his essay, “Nietzsche contra Wagner” expressing that though he admires Wagner’s ability to express suffering and misery, his decadence and overly dramatic effect, especially in using an “unending melody” is dangerous and chaotic to the rhythm. This kind of music is suffocating and according to him, music should make one feel the need to dance! Nietzsche also raises issues with the subject matters Wagner chooses to portray, “The problems he sets on the stage are all concerned with hysteria…All that the world most needs to-day, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art,—the three great stimulants of exhausted people: Brutality, artificiality, and innocence (idiocy).”

Perhaps he would not feel so strongly about Wagner if he did not feel as if the music was attempting to trick and lie to him, but to Nietzsche if you attempt to manipulate a person with music then you are destroying the very essence of music. As he states later in the essay, “That the stage should not become master of the arts. That the actor should not become the corrupter of the genuine. That music should not become an art of lying.” I believe Gilles Deleuze in his book “Nietzsche and Philosophy” understood him best when he states, “In Nietzsche, “we the artists” = “we the seekers after knowledge or truth” = “we the inventors of new possibilities of life”.”

In an earlier book by Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy”, he is more greatly influenced by Wagner and sees him as superior to other opera composers who are concerned with the smallness of the modern mind; in contrast, Wagner expresses the deepest urges of the human will. He writes that we must return to a time before Socrates who was responsible for the death of tragedy as he brought in an age of rationality. This brought upon an imbalance in art, which he believed to be at it’s finest when it sat between the edge of being Apollonian (concerned with light and reason and more associated with a sense of one’s self) and Dionysian (more concerned with a primal unity whereas the individual is at peace with other’s and nature). The Apollonian nature of art is giving form, structure and coherency, whereas the Dionysian aspect brings life and passion, breathing a soul into the piece.

Although this book was criticized heavily by scholars of Greek literature, and Nietzsche himself held some reservations about it later in life, he remained steadfast about his views on Apollonian and Dionysian role in art and it certainly is an interesting way to perceive art as a whole.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy (Trans. Douglas Smith), Oxford University Press, 2008: pp. xxxii, 28, 109, 140.

Nietzsche, F. (1957). The use and abuse of history (Revised/Expanded ed.). New York: Liberal Arts Press.

Deleuze, G., & Tomlinson, H. (1983). Nietzsche and Philosophy (Reprint ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.