In 1868 Nietzsche, now a professor at Basel University, began writing what would become his first book, The Birth of Tragedy — a meditation on the origins of Greek tragedy out of what Nietzsche called ‘The Spirit of Music’. Nietzsche had by this point become quite a close personal friend of Wagner, and a firm believer in the composer’s propaganda. Wagner, in turn, was enormously impressed by the young professor. After reading the manuscript of The Birth of Tragedy, Wagner declared it to be the finest thing he’d ever read. But then, he would say that — Nietzsche had devoted the last quarter of his treatise on Greek drama and music to building a case for Wagnerian opera as the true revival of tragedy in the modern world and the future of music for Germany. This cost him his career — and in the long run, his sanity. After The Birth of Tragedy was published in 1872, Nietzsche was more or less laughed out of the academic world for good. Despite (or perhaps because of) his enormous popularity, Wagner was not considered cool in the Philology Department of the University of Basel, and Nietzsche misjudged the mood of his colleagues entirely by spending the last four chapters of his book mounting a vigorous argument in favour of a composer who catered to the tastes of emotional young girls and girlish, emotional young men.6
Nietzsche himself later disowned The Birth of Tragedy completely. He came to regard it as a ridiculous book, in which he’d tried to do something impossible — to reconcile the three things he happened to be into at the time — Schopenhauer, Wagner and Greek Tragedy — into a single system. The young professor jumps through hoops to make Schopenhauer more Greek and the Greeks more Wagnerian, and ends up falling on his face.7 But while The Birth of Tragedy is a deeply strange book, it’s crucial to understanding Nietzsche’s mature philosophy, (in which, as Colin Wilson has noted, he eventually came back around to the position he’d staked out in The Birth of Tragedy),8 and contains many striking insights in its own right, particularly as regards its central subject — tragedy. How are we redeemed by tragedy? asks Nietzsche, and what is the role of the tragic hero in relation to music? His answers have as much to teach us about Wagnerian rock as they do about Wagner himself.
Freddie Mercury: Not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.
A Night at the Opera
‘COME ONE, COME all to this tragic affair.’1 Gerard Way’s opening words on The Black Parade let us know what we’re in for immediately. A man will be wheeled out on stage, and we will be told the story of his life. He’ll grow up, fall in love, fall out of love, face terrible obstacles and painful decisions. He’ll come to understand, at the end of the show, the meaning of life — which is that life is a joke with a terrible punch line. And this knowledge won’t help him a bit, because this is a tragedy, and the rules of tragedy say the hero must die. How can we stand it?
The hero’s theme song, ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’, is a multipart epic, which draws on a number of different musical styles. The first part is a stately ballad in the vein of ‘My Way’, the second act sounds a bit like Green Day, and the final section is pure Wall of Sound — the noise of teen angst inflated to epic proportions. But the single biggest influence on the song — and the album as a whole — is, as many fans and critics have noted, the operatic bombast of mid ’70s Queen. In fact, the whole pocket epic form of ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ is virtually unthinkable without the precedent of Queen’s own rock opera classic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. In 1977 Queen found themselves recording in the same studio as the Sex Pistols, and Sid Vicious decided to drop in and meet the neighbours. ‘Hullo Fred,’ said Sid Vicious. ‘So you’ve really brought ballet to the masses then?’ ‘Ah, Mr Ferocious!’ replied the flamboyant frontman. ‘Well, we’re trying our best, dear!’2Welcome to the Black Parade’s Queen-meets-punk arrangement imagines a parallel universe where Mercury had invited Mr Ferocious in for a cup of tea, and the two bands had ended up writing a song together.
Two years earlier, in 1975, Queen’s producer Roy Thomas Baker had dropped by Freddie Mercury’s apartment in Kensington. The singer sat down at his piano and told Baker that he’d like to play him something new he’d been working on: ‘So he played the first part and said “this is the chord sequence”… He played a bit further through the song and then stopped suddenly, saying, “This is where the opera section comes in”. We both just burst out laughing.’3
It took weeks of painstaking work in the studio for Baker and the members of Queen to get Mercury’s ambitious new song into shape. In the process, the ‘opera section’ grew and grew — ‘just one more Galileo!’ Mercury would insist, while Baker watched the master tape wear away to nothing.4 When it was finished, the band liked it so much they decided it would be their next single, an idea which was met with hoots of derision from their record company. A six-minute single with an opera in the middle of it? Are you mad? In the end, however, EMI’s hand was forced by Capitol Radio presenter Kenny Everett, who broke the song on his show. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was rushed into stores, and spent eight weeks at the top of the British charts.5
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ begins with the singer pondering the eternal romantic dilemma. His life is awful, but his dreams are beautiful — is it possible he has been deceived? Are his dreams real, and ‘reality’ simply a sham? ‘Do I wake or sleep?’ He tries, like Tristan, to wave these morgentraume away only to find that he cannot quit his prison so easily. The only escape route lies in death. Our hero is not quite ready to commit suicide, but now that the world has been exposed as a cruel deception, he can’t really be bothered doing anything with his life either. What’s the point? ‘Anyway the wind blows’, he sings, ‘doesn’t really matter’.6 The tragic hero has been afforded a glimpse behind the screen of bourgeois life and has seen the eternal chaos and flux of Schopenhauer’s world as will — how can he be expected to show up to his classes or clean his room now?
Here, the opera section kicks in, and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ turns from a lyrical poem into a mythic drama, in which Beelzebub and a chorus of angels battle it out for the hero’s soul. This metaphysical argy-bargy recalls many similar scenes in Goethe’s Faust. Faust, like the hero of Queen’s epic, believes that life can show him nothing, and thus becomes the subject of a wager between God and Mephisto. God believes Faust’s disillusionment with earthly pursuits will eventually lead him to religion. The Devil is certain he can get Faust interested in something. It was these alarmingly casual chats between God and Mephisto that led early British critics to condemn Goethe’s drama for its ‘blasphemous levity’.7 The light-hearted tone of Faust suggests that human life might be no more than a joke — and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (which was funny long before it appeared in Wayne’s World) leaves us with much the same feeling.
In any case, the hero eventually storms out of his own scene of heavenly judgement, insisting that he can beat anything the Devil throws his way. He’s gone from being a hopelessly static whinger, like the Byron of Childe Harold, to a proper romantic hero, the later Byron so admired by Goethe for his determination to push against all natural laws. ‘So you think you can stop me and spit in my eye!,’ he snarls.8 But he quickly runs out of steam. Reality, it seems, is a stone wall. Our hero falls back, exhausted, and makes ready to die — his tragedy has run its course.
In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche repeats Schopenhauer’s assertion that life can only be made bearable by philosophy and art. Nietzsche insists that this is what art is for; to create a space from which we can begin to see suffering on an enormous scale as an aesthetic phenomenon. He then goes on to fuse Schopenhauer’s idea of redemption through non-willing with his understanding of Tragedy, formed during those marathon sessions at his parents’ piano, and further honed by his long walks and talks with Wagner at Tribschen. For Nietzsche, the role of the tragic hero is to confront the world as will head on. He sees behind the veil of illusion, stares into the horror and is crushed by it. By doing this, he effectively takes the whole weight of existence on his back, and relieves us of its burden momentarily.9
By contemplating the
nature of this burden, Nietzsche finds the link between Schopenhauer and the world of the Greeks that forms the foundation of his thoroughly mad, but strangely convincing book. Schopenhauer, bored out of his skull by his dumb clerical job in Frankfurt, had looked around him and realised that the meaning of life was precisely nothing. And given that life is painful, boring and pointless, he concluded that it would be far better in the grand scheme of things if the human race had never existed. The Greeks, Nietzsche insists, were well acquainted with this truth. Not the Greeks as the eighteenth-century classicists liked to imagine them, the white-marble world of clarity and Apolline perfection so admired by the likes of Joshua Reynolds and Gottfried Lessing; but the real Greeks, who knew Apollo as just one of many deities, and not the wisest among them. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes,
According to the old story, King Midas had long hunted wise Silenus, Dionysus’ companion, without catching him. When Silenus had finally fallen into his clutches, the king asked him what was the best and most desirable thing of all for mankind. The daemon stood silent, stiff and motionless, until at last, forced by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and spoke these words: ‘Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you never to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you — is to die soon’.10
This, for Nietzsche, is the burden the tragic hero takes up on our behalf. And this is why he must die — because no-one can go on living knowing what he knows. The wisdom of Silenus condemns the hero to death, because understanding — as Nietzsche says of Hamlet — kills action. That’s why we know, sometime between the moment when the young Bohemian realises that nothing really matters and the bit where he wishes he’d never been born at all, that he will not survive this drama. And if Gerard Way’s spruiking his rock opera as a ‘tragic affair’ wasn’t enough of a giveaway, we should know by the last line of the first verse where things are headed. As the song’s acoustic strum gives way to an avalanche of orchestral noise and Brian May-style multitracked guitars, Gerard screams: ‘When I grow up I want to be NOTHING AT ALL!’.11
This is the wisdom of the woods — or, if you like, the wisdom of the Frankfurt clerical office — which no-one can survive. The tragic hero knows it so that you don’t have to.
The Wisdom of the Woods
IN SEEKING THE roots of tragedy in Greek art and music, Nietzsche discovered that the Greeks knew ‘two worlds of art, utterly different’. On the one hand is the Apolline world of the representational arts, of painting and prose; on the other is the wild abandonment of the Dionysiac, which produces music. Nietzsche, as Colin Wilson points out in The Outsider, understood the Dionysiac instinctively. Listening to Wagner, he felt the pull of the dance, of the passions, of the half-crazy impulses that lurk beneath our civilised exterior.1
It was the spirit of Dionysus, Nietzsche believed, that had inspired the folk dances that swept through Germany in medieval times. Nietzsche writes admiringly of the way the dancers allowed themselves to be pulled along by instinct, leaping, singing, shouting at the top of their lungs; they indulged their senses and lost their minds. It was this spirit, too, that Schiller caught in his ‘Ode To Joy’ — which is why the young German philosophers of the early nineteenth century liked to recite it while getting drunk and dancing around in the fields. But Nietzsche also observed that the spirit of Dionysus is not for everyone:
Some people turn away with pity or contempt from phenomena such as these ‘folk diseases’, bolstered by a sense of their own sanity. These poor creatures have no idea how blighted and ghostly this ‘sanity’ of theirs sounds when the glowing life of the dionysiac revellers thunders past them.2
This is still a problem in nightclubs today, as The Chemical Brothers’ ‘The Salmon Dance’ shows. Typically when poets address small animals in verse no-one really expects the animal to answer back. All this changes in ‘The Salmon Dance’ where the poet, MC Fatlip, actually invites the fish into the studio to trade a few lines. Unfortunately, the fish has not a scrap of romantic sensibility, he talks like a nature documentary produced for school children in the ’70s. ‘My peeps spend part of their lives in fresh water, and part of their lives in salt water,’ he drones. ‘Wow, very interesting,’ says Fatlip unconvincingly.3
Fatlip never promised us poetry; he told us we were going to learn fun facts about salmon, and a brand new dance. But the facts about salmon are less fun than we had been led to expect, and the brand new dance is, at first, a disaster. Fatlip finds that he is the only one in the club doing the salmon, hands pressed to his sides, swaying like a fish swimming upstream. Everyone else just stands there looking at him (bolstered by a sense of their own sanity). ‘What the fuck is that?’ they say to each other.4
But by the end of the song, everyone is dancing like a salmon. What changed? Simple, Nietzsche would say. The people in the club simply surrendered to the Dionysiac urge. They gave up the struggle to maintain a rational attitude to an irrational world, and immersed themselves in the ceaseless flow of life, the same flow that sends a salmon swimming upstream, the very will that pushes the world and everything in it along its purposeless course.
Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk, and is about to fly dancing into the heavens…he gives voice to supernatural sounds: he feels like a god.5
The romantics tended to see all art as an attempt to say things that could not be said any other way. Paintings, poems and symphonies will all, in the end, resist our attempts to analyse and explain them — as though turning art back into ordinary language were like translating a newspaper article from French into English. And of all the arts, music is the hardest to explain because music, unlike painting for example, doesn’t represent the world. Music does not present facts — it is a fact. (Musicians still use this romantic article of faith as a way of not answering interview questions when they say ‘the song speaks for itself’ or ‘it’s all there man…’)
This lead Schopenhauer to the curious (but poetic) idea that music must be made of the same stuff that life is made from. It is, in other words, a pure expression of will. This explains music’s effect on us: in surrendering to the power of music, we feel ourselves transported back to a primitive state, outside custom and convention, pulled along by the same forces that cause the grass to grow and the fish to swim upstream. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, agrees with this theory, and uses it to explain how it is that the lyric poet comes into contact with the world as will, in order to bring back the terrible insights that he later shares with us.
Nietzsche observes that Schiller, when asked how he composed his poems, replied that he never started with a preconceived idea, but rather with a certain ‘musical mood’ that came over him.6 This, Nietzsche notes, squares with the origins of lyric poetry itself, which the Greeks always recited to the accompaniment of music. The conclusion he draws is that the poet, when this musical mood comes over him, is absorbed in the spirit of music — which is a manifestation of will. Thus he confronts the great metaphysical truths hidden from the rest of us, and somehow lives to tell the tale. This all sounds a bit far-fetched, to be sure — but it would explain how it was that Keith Richards accessed the wisdom of the woods in a hotel room in Florida, and how the lyrics that came to him from that musical mood could subsequently go on to change the world.
In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche quotes Wagner as saying: ‘Civilisation is annulled by music as lamplight is annulled by the light of day.’7Lamplight is a symbol of our mastery of nature; scientific man on the move, shining a light into the dark spaces of the world. Music is nature’s revenge. It sneaks up on us, attacking via — what Nietzsche called ‘the organ of fear’ — the ear. Music cracks our civilised veneer, one blast, and we turn back into cave people, standing dumbstruck before a thunderstorm.
&nb
sp; Nietzsche’s view of the world as will is, as you’ve no doubt noticed, slightly different from that of Schopenhauer. Right from the beginning, his descriptions of the flux and chaos of life are shot through with a feeling of excitement that would be entirely abhorrent to the older philosopher. Nietzsche still sees will as irrational — and in some ways he still sees it as evil. But when he contemplates this evil, he finds that it makes him feel good.
In 1865, the same year he discovered Schopenhauer, Nietzsche wrote to his friend von Gersdorff:
Yesterday an oppressive storm hung over the sky, and I hurried to a neighbouring hill called Leutch… At the top I found a hut, where a man was killing two kids while his son watched him. The storm broke with a tremendous crash, discharging thunder and hail, and I had an indescribable feeling of well-being and zest… Lightning and tempest are different worlds, free powers, without morality. Pure Will, without the confusions of intellect — how happy, how free.8
Even as he was being seduced by Schopenhauer’s view of reality, Nietzsche was turning it on its head by treating it as positive, rather than negative. Instead of renouncing life, he would embrace it — all of it. That’s why Nietzsche approves of music and dancing, but also of electricity and bloody violence — all represent will, and will for Nietzsche is sublime.
Dave Gahan: a new sense of power.
Personal Jesus
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 24