Keep A Song In Your Heart

How does someone know when a song is good? Worth humming or whistling after hearing it?

Die Walküre: Ride of the Valkyries (RealAudio)

When I hear Wagner's Die Walküre: Ride of the Valkyries, I immediately think of Robert Duvall (Lt. Col. William "Bill" Kilgore) in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Both Coppola and Stanley Kubrick—the greatest filmmakers of the late 20th century—used music to great effect in their films. Music is key to understanding life. If this be (fair & balanced) rhapsodizing, so be it.

[x Wall Street Journal]
That Sound You Hear Is the Soul Forming
By CARSON HOLLOWAY

Some of the most influential thinkers in history -- such as Plato, Aristotle and Rousseau -- have regarded music as essential to the good life, and not surprisingly. Music moves the passions and, as a philosopher might put it, helps to form the soul. The writing about such thinkers, though, says little about their musical teachings. Most welcome, then, is Georges Liebert's Nietzsche and Music (Chicago, 291 pages, $38).

It was Nietzsche, after all, who once remarked that "without music, life would be an error." Mr. Liebert assigns two possible meanings to this remark: Music is a way of making life bearable -- a beautiful refuge in a world otherwise ugly and hostile to human happiness. Or it is, in itself, a powerful affirmation of life, in all its joy and sorrow. Nietzsche shifted between these two understandings, as Mr. Liebert shows.

The core of "Nietzsche and Music," naturally, concerns the philosopher's infatuation with the music of Richard Wagner and his later disenchantment. For a time, Wagner seemed to restore, for Nietzsche, an ancient ideal that had fallen into neglect, if not oblivion.

Ancient Greek tragedy, in Nietzsche's view, attained artistic perfection by combining the Dionysian and Apollonian "art impulses of nature." According to Nietzsche, Dionysian art -- exemplified by music -- conveys an experience of passionate intoxication. Apollonian art -- exemplified by sculpture -- conveys a serene enjoyment of the beautiful. Greek tragedy's genius, Nietzsche believed, was to combine these impulses in such a way as to subordinate the Apollonian to the Dionysian.

"Without music," the philosopher wrote, "life would be an error."

Nietzsche understood the universe to be fundamentally Dionysian and thus musical, characterized by passionate longing and suffering. Greek tragedy fostered nobility because it confronted its audience with this problematic truth about life, in the face of which only the most courageous could flourish. Unfortunately, Dionysian music was expelled from tragedy by the rise, in the West, of a rationalistic worldview, which saw the universe as intelligible and happiness as attainable.

For Nietzsche such a view represented a cowardly refusal to face the truth of life, and the history of culture since its triumph (in Socratic philosophy and Christianity) was one of decadence. But then came Richard Wagner, from whose pen Dionysian music flowed once again. His music dramas, especially "Tristan and Isolde," promised to restore the spirit of tragedy and renew German culture. Nietzsche befriended the composer and in his writings seemed almost to worship him.

Nietzsche's bitter break with Wagner arose from his disappointment with "The Ring of the Nibelung" and his outrage at "Parsifal," which concerns the knights of the Holy Grail. Nietzsche thought that the "Ring" subordinated music to drama, allowing the Apollonian to dominate. And it concluded with a Gotterdammerung -- the apparent end of the world -- thus seeming to convey a decadent longing for nothingness. These sins, however, paled in comparison with Wagner's affirmation of Christian asceticism and compassion in "Parsifal." That opera Nietzsche regarded as an unpardonable apostasy from his hoped-for new German paganism of instinctive self-assertion.

Disenchanted, Nietzsche for a time turned away from music and its emotionalism, presenting himself as a defender of enlightenment science. Given his distrust of reason, however, and his deep love of music -- he was even an amateur composer -- he soon embraced again both music and the celebration of instinct over thought. Now, however, he emphasized the Apollonian element, the refuge of formal beauty, and sought a music of gaiety far removed from Wagner's "German heaviness."

Mr. Liebert captures these arguments in all their complexity, but not uncritically. Those inclined, for instance, to view Nietzsche as the theoretician of art and Wagner merely as the inspired but unreflective artist -- like the poets examined by Socrates who could not even explain the meaning of their own works -- will be disabused by Mr. Liebert's shrewd judgments. Sometimes, though, he stoops to argument by psychoanalysis. When Nietzsche denies Wagner's ability to organize his works on a grand scale, Mr. Liebert casts this criticism as a mere projection of Nietzsche's own humiliated sense of artistic inadequacy. Similarly, he sees sexual repression behind Nietzsche's disapproval of the "repugnant sexuality" of Wagner's music. Surely Nietzsche's ideas are profound enough to be taken on their own terms, whatever his personal ordeals.

Still, Nietzsche invited such readings. He said, for example, that his connection to music was "something of inestimable value, considering the psychological problem which I am; and now it will make people think." Future writers should, like Mr. Liebert, follow this clue, to understand both music itself and the enigmatic teachings of a profoundly enigmatic mind.

Mr. Holloway, who teaches political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, is the author of All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics.

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