Bizet and the Problem of Redemption (Preface and Sections 1–6)

Preface

I am granting myself a little relief. It is not merely malice when in this essay I praise Bizet at Wagner's expense. Under cover of many jokes I am putting forward something that is no joking matter. To turn my back on Wagner was for me a fate; to like anything again after that was a victory. Perhaps nobody was more dangerously entangled with Wagnerism than I; nobody defended himself harder against it; nobody was gladder to be rid of it. A long story! Does anyone want a word for it? If I were a moralist, who knows what I would call it? Perhaps self-overcoming.

What does a philosopher demand of himself first and last? To overcome his age in himself, to become "timeless." With what, then, must he wage his hardest fight? With whatever makes him a child of his time. Well, then! I am, no less than Wagner, a child of this age: that is, a decadent. Only I understood it; only I resisted it. The philosopher in me resisted.

Nothing has occupied me more deeply than the problem of decadence; I had my reasons. "Good and evil" is only a variant of that problem. Once one has a sharp eye for the signs of decline, one understands morality too — one understands what hides beneath its holiest names and formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Morality says No to life. For such a task I needed a special discipline: to take sides against everything sick in myself, including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including the whole of modern "humanity." A deep estrangement, cooling, sobering toward everything that is of the time; and as the highest wish, the eye of Zarathustra, an eye that looks down on the whole fact of man from an immense distance — beneath itself.

For such a goal, what sacrifice would not be fitting? What "self-overcoming"? What "self-denial"? My greatest experience was a recovery. Wagner is merely one of my sicknesses.

Not that I want to be ungrateful to this sickness. If in this essay I insist that Wagner is harmful, I wish no less to insist to whom, in spite of all, he is indispensable — to the philosopher. Others may manage without Wagner; the philosopher is not free to do without him. He has to be the bad conscience of his age, and for that he must understand it best. And where could he find a guide to the labyrinth of the modern soul more initiated, a more eloquent expert in that soul, than Wagner? Modernity speaks its most intimate language through Wagner: it hides neither its good nor its evil; it has forgotten all shame. And, the other way round: once one is clear about what is good and bad in Wagner, one has nearly finished reckoning up the value of the modern. I understand perfectly when a musician says today: "I hate Wagner, but I can no longer stand any other music." But I should also understand a philosopher who declared: "Wagner sums up modernity. There is no help for it: one must first be a Wagnerian."

1

Yesterday — would you believe it? — I heard Bizet's masterpiece for the twentieth time. Again I sat it out with gentle devotion; again I did not run away. This victory over my impatience surprises me. How such a work perfects one! One becomes a "masterpiece" oneself.

And really, every time I heard Carmen I seemed to myself more of a philosopher, a better philosopher, than at other times: so patient, so happy, so Indian, so settled. To sit five hours: the first stage of holiness! — May I say that Bizet's orchestral sound is almost the only one I can still endure? That other orchestral sound, now so much in fashion, the Wagnerian — brutal, artificial and "innocent" at once, so that it speaks to all three senses of the modern soul together — how harmful I find it! I call it the sirocco. A disagreeable sweat breaks out on me. My good weather is gone.

This music seems to me perfect. It comes lightly, supply, with politeness. It is amiable; it does not sweat. "What is good is light; everything divine runs on delicate feet": that is the first proposition of my aesthetics. This music is wicked, refined, fatalistic, and still it remains popular — it has the refinement of a race, not of an individual. It is rich. It is precise. It builds, organises, finishes: in this it is the opposite of the polyp in music, the "endless melody." Have more painful, tragic accents ever been heard on the stage? And how they are achieved! Without grimaces! Without counterfeit! Without the lie of the grand style!

Finally, this music treats the listener as intelligent, even as a musician — and in that, too, it is the opposite of Wagner, who, whatever else he was, was the most impolite genius in the world. Wagner treats us as if we could not take a hint: he says a thing again and again, until one despairs — until one believes it.

2

And once more: I become a better man when this Bizet speaks to me. Also a better musician, a better listener. Is it possible to listen better still? I bury my ears beneath this music; I hear its very cause. It seems to me that I am present at its birth. I tremble before dangers that accompany some daring venture; I am enchanted by strokes of luck for which Bizet is innocent. And, strangely, at bottom I do not think of it, or do not know how much I think of it. For entirely different thoughts are running through my head meanwhile.

Has it been noticed that music makes the spirit free? gives wings to thought? that one becomes more of a philosopher the more one becomes a musician? The grey sky of abstraction seems cut through by lightning; the light is strong enough for all the filigree of things; the great problems are near enough to grasp; one surveys the world as from a mountain.

This music has the sensibility of the South: dry, clear light, a different sunlight. Its cheerfulness is not French or German; it is African. Fate hangs over it; its happiness is short, sudden, without forgiveness. I envy Bizet for having had the courage for this sensibility, which until now had no language in the cultivated music of Europe — this more southern, browner, more sunburnt sensibility.

And, above all, love — love translated back into nature! Not the love of a "higher virgin"! No Senta-sentimentality! But love as fate, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel — and precisely in that, nature. Love which in its means is war, and at its root the deadly hatred of the sexes! I know of no case in which the tragic joke that is the essence of love is expressed so strictly, so terribly, as in Don José's last cry, with which the work ends:

"Yes! I have killed her, I — my adored Carmen!"

Such a conception of love, the only one worthy of a philosopher, is rare: it lifts a work of art out of thousands. For on the average, artists do as all the world does, or even worse — they misunderstand love. Wagner too misunderstood it. They believe they are unselfish in love because they want the advantage of another being, often against their own advantage. But in return they want to possess that other being.

3

You see already how much this music improves me. — Il faut méditerraniser la musique: we must Mediterraneanise music. I have my reasons for this formula. The return to nature, health, cheerfulness, youth, virtue!

And yet I was one of the most corrupted Wagnerians. I was capable of taking Wagner seriously. Ah, this old magician — how much he imposed on us! The first thing his art offers us is a magnifying glass: one looks through it, and one does not trust one's own eyes — everything looks big, even Wagner.

Wagner has thought about nothing so deeply as about redemption: his opera is the opera of redemption. Somebody or other always wants to be redeemed in his works: now a little man, now a little woman — this is his problem. And how richly he varies his leitmotif! What rare and profound twists! Who but Wagner taught us that innocence has a preference for redeeming interesting sinners (the case in Tannhäuser)? Or that even the Wandering Jew is redeemed and settles down when he marries (the case in The Flying Dutchman)? Or that corrupted old women prefer to be redeemed by chaste young men (the case of Kundry in Parsifal)? Or that beautiful maidens like best to be redeemed by a knight who is a Wagnerian (the case in The Mastersingers)? Or that married women, too, enjoy being redeemed by a knight (the case of Isolde)? Or that "the old God," after compromising himself morally in every respect, is finally redeemed by a free spirit and immoralist (the case in the Ring)? Admire especially this last profundity! Do you understand it? I — take care not to understand it.

That one can draw yet other lessons from the works I have named I would sooner prove than dispute. That one can be driven to despair by a Wagnerian ballet — and to virtue! (Again Tannhäuser.) That not going to bed at the right time may have the worst consequences (again Lohengrin). That one should never know too exactly whom one is marrying (for the third time, Lohengrin: the hero forbids his bride to ask his name).

Nietzsche goes on, in the same mocking vein, to say that the Flying Dutchman preaches the sublime doctrine that woman makes even the most restless wanderer settle down — "makes him sedentary" — and that "the Eternal Feminine" in Wagner always means the self-sacrificing woman who rescues a man by loving him.

4

I shall tell the story of the Ring. It belongs here. It, too, is a story of redemption — only this time it is Wagner who is redeemed.

Half his life, Wagner believed in the Revolution as only a Frenchman ever believed in it. He searched for it in the runic writing of myth; he believed he had found in Siegfried the typical revolutionary. "Where does all the misfortune in the world come from?" Wagner asked himself. From "old contracts," he answered, like all revolutionary ideologists: in plain words, from customs, laws, morals, institutions — from everything on which the old world, the old society, rests. "How does one rid the world of misfortune? How does one abolish the old society?" Only by declaring war on "contracts" — on tradition, on morality. That is what Siegfried does. He starts early, very early: his very origin is already a declaration of war against morality — he is born of adultery, of incest. He overturns everything traditional, everything respected; whatever displeases him, he strikes down. He has no respect for the old divinities; above all he goes after woman — "to redeem Brünnhilde."

For a long time Wagner's ship ran gaily along this course. No doubt Wagner sought his highest goal on it. What happened? An accident. The ship ran onto a reef; Wagner was stranded. The reef was Schopenhauer's philosophy; Wagner was stranded on a contrary world-view. What had he set to music? Optimism. Wagner was ashamed. What was worse, an optimism for which Schopenhauer had coined a wicked epithet: infamous optimism. He was ashamed once more. He reflected a long time; his situation seemed desperate. At last a way out dawned on him: the reef on which he had come to grief — what if he interpreted it as the goal, the hidden intention, the true meaning of his voyage? To be shipwrecked here — that was a goal too. Bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci — "I made a good voyage when I was shipwrecked."

And he translated the Ring into Schopenhauer. Everything goes wrong, everything perishes, the new world is as bad as the old: nothingness, the Indian Circe, beckons. Brünnhilde, who according to the earlier intention was to take leave with a song in honour of free love, putting the world off with the hope of a socialist utopia in which "all will be well," now has something else to do. She must first study Schopenhauer; she must put the fourth book of The World as Will and Representation into verse. Wagner was redeemed. In all seriousness, this was a redemption. The benefit Wagner owes to Schopenhauer is immeasurable. Only the philosopher of decadence gave the artist of decadence — himself.

5

The artist of decadence — that is the word. And here my seriousness begins. I am far from looking on quietly while this decadent spoils our health — and music as well! Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a sickness? He makes sick whatever he touches — he has made music sick.

A typical decadent who feels necessary in his corrupted taste, who claims it as a higher taste, who knows how to make his corruption count as a law, as progress, as fulfilment. And people do not defend themselves. His power of seduction becomes monstrous; incense smokes around him; the misunderstanding about him is called the "gospel" — and it is by no means only the poor in spirit whom he has won over.

Wagner est une névrose. Wagner is a neurosis. Nothing is perhaps better known today, at any rate nothing is better studied, than the Protean character of degeneration that is here concentrated into an art and an artist. Our physicians and physiologists have in Wagner their most interesting case, at least a very complete one. Precisely because nothing is more modern than this total sickness, this lateness and over-excitement of the nervous mechanism, Wagner is the modern artist par excellence, the Cagliostro of modernity. In his art the three great stimulants of the exhausted — the brutal, the artificial and the innocent (the idiotic) — are mixed in the most seductive manner.

Wagner's problems are all problems of hysterics: the convulsive nature of his emotions, his over-excited sensibility, his taste that always demanded stronger spices, his instability, which he disguised as principles, and not least the choice of his heroes and heroines — consider them as physiological types (a gallery of the sick!). Taken all together, this forms a picture of sickness that leaves no doubt. Wagner is a great corrupter of music. He has found in it the means to stimulate tired nerves — and so he has made music sick.

And yet he is a master at one thing: he is our greatest miniaturist in music, who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of meaning and sweetness. His wealth of colours, of half-shadows, of the secrecies of dying light, spoils us so that afterwards almost all other musicians seem too robust. But this is not what he wanted to be; his ambition was for the great wall-painting, the bold fresco. He did not notice that his own true talent lay elsewhere.

6

Section 6 is a parody: Nietzsche imagines a disciple explaining "the secret of Wagner's success" — how a clever musician of today should compose. In condensed form:

"Above all, no thought! Nothing is more compromising than a thought. Let us never admit that music 'is for recreation'; that it 'cheers'; that it 'gives pleasure.' Let us never give pleasure! We are lost if art is thought of hedonistically again. That is bad eighteenth century. We must be sublime; and we must above all be deep. Let us be idealists! The sublime has meaning — it means something. Let us not bother with melody, which is immoral; melody dulls, it is light-footed. Let us make it mean! What the people want, what the masses want, is to be overwhelmed, to be swept off their feet. The beautiful is for the few, and the few do not pay; the sublime, the vague, the misty — that can be sold. Let us drive the 'beautiful' out of music! Beethoven we will leave alone, but we must be more than Beethoven — we must mean more. Let us talk of 'the Infinite' and of 'Redemption'; let us bring in the gods, and Christianity, and the 'German'; and if anyone yawns, let us tell him he lacks reverence."