The Birth of Tragedy Chap. 6 by Friedrich Nietzsche Lyrics
With respect to Archilochus, learned scholarship has revealed that he introduced the folk song into literature and that, because of this achievement, he earned that individual place next to Homer in the universal estimation of the Greeks. But what is the folk song in comparison to the completely Apollonian epic poem? What else but the perpetuum vestigum [the eternal mark] of a union between the Apollonian and the Dionysian; its tremendous expansion, extending to all peoples and constantly increasing with new births, testifies to us how strong that artistic double drive of nature is, which leaves its trace behind in the folk song, just as, in an analogous manner, the orgiastic movements of a people leave their mark in its music. In fact, there must also have been historical evidence to show how every period richly productive of folk songs at the same time has been stirred in the most powerful manner by Dionysian currents, something which we have to recognize always as the foundation and precondition of folk song.
But to begin with, we must view the folk song as the musical mirror of the world, as the primordial melody, which now seeks for a parallel dream image of itself and expresses this in poetry. The melody is thus the primary and universal fact , for which reason it can in itself undergo many objectifications, in several texts. It is also far more important and more essential in the naive evaluations of the people. Melody gives birth to poetry from itself, over and over again. That is what the strophic form of the folk song indicates to us. I always observed this phenomenon with astonishment, until I finally came up with this explanation. Whoever looks at a collection of folk songs, for example, Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The Boy’s Magic Horn] with this theory in mind will find countless examples of how the continually fecund melody emits fiery showers of images around itself. These images, with their bright colours, their sudden alteration, indeed, their wild momentum, reveal a power completely foreign to the epic illusion and its calm forward progress. From the standpoint of epic this uneven and irregular world of images in the lyric is easy to condemn — something no doubt the solemn epic rhapsodists of the Apollonian celebrations did in the age of Terpander.1
Thus, in the poetry of the folk song we see language most strongly pressured to imitate music. Hence, with Archilochus a new world of poetry begins, something which conflicts in the most profound and fundamental way with the Homeric world. Here we have demonstrated the one possible relationship between poetry and music, word, and tone: the word, the image, the idea look for an analogous expression in music and now experience the inherent power of music. In this sense we can distinguish two main streams in the history of the language of the Greek people, corresponding to language which imitates appearance and images or language which imitates the world of music.
Now, let’s think for a moment more deeply about the linguistic difference in colour, syntactic structure, and vocabulary between Homer and Pindar in order to grasp the significance of this contrast.1 Indeed, in this way it will become crystal clear to us that between Homer and Pindar the orgiastic flute melodies of Olympus must have rung out, which even in the time of Aristotle, in the midst of an infinitely more sophisticated music, drove people into raptures of drunken enthusiasm and with their primordial effect certainly stimulated all the poetical forms of expression of contemporaries to imitate them.2
I recall here a well-known phenomenon of our own times, something which strikes our aestheticians as merely objectionable. Again and again we experience how a Beethoven symphony makes it necessary for the individual listener to talk in images, even if it’s also true that the collection of different worlds of imagery created by a musical piece really looks fantastically confused, indeed, contradictory. In the art of those aestheticians the proper thing to do is to exercise their poor wits on such collections and yet to overlook the phenomenon which is really worth explaining. In fact, even when the tone poet has spoken in images about a composition, for example, when he describes a symphony as a pastoral and one movement as “A Scene by the Brook,” another as “A Frolicking Gathering of Peasants,” these expressions are similarly only metaphors, images born out of the music — and not some objective condition imitated by the music — ideas which cannot teach us anything at all about the Dionysian content of the music and which, in fact, have no exclusive value alongside other pictures. Now, we have only to transfer this process of unloading music into pictures to a youthful, linguistically creative crowd of people in order to sense how the strophic folk song arises and how the entire linguistic capability is stimulated by the new principle of imitating music.
If we are thus entitled to consider the lyrical poem as the mimetic efflorescence of music in pictures and ideas, then we can now ask the following question: “What does music look like in the mirror of imagery and ideas?” It appears as the will , taking that word in Schopenhauer’s sense, that is, as the opposite to the aesthetic, purely contemplative, will-less state. Here we must now differentiate as sharply as possible the idea of being from the idea of appearance: it is impossible for music, given its nature, to be the will, because if that were the case we would have to ban music entirely from the realm of art — for the will consists of what is inherently unaesthetic — but music appears as the will.
For in order to express that appearance in images, the lyric poet needs all the excitements of passion, from the whispers of affection right up to the ravings of lunacy. Under the impulse to speak of music in Apollonian metaphors, he understands all nature and himself in nature only as eternal willing, desiring, yearning. However, insofar as he interprets music in images, he himself is resting in the still tranquillity of the sea of Apollonian observation, no matter how much everything which he contemplates through that medium of music is moving around him, pushing and driving. Indeed, if he looks at himself through that same medium, his own image reveals itself to him in a state of emotional dissatisfaction: his own willing, yearning, groaning, cheering are for him a metaphor with which he interprets the music for himself. This is the phenomenon of the lyric poet: as an Apollonian genius, he interprets the music through the image of the will, while he himself, fully released from the greed of the will, is a pure, untroubled eye of the sun.
This entire discussion firmly maintains that the lyric is just as dependent on the spirit of music as is music itself. In its fully absolute power, music does not need image and idea, but only tolerates them as something additional to itself. The poetry of the lyricist can express nothing which was not already latent in the most immense universality and validity of the music, which forces him to speak in images. The world symbolism of music for this very reason cannot in any way be exhausted by or reduced to language, because music addresses itself symbolically to the primordial contradiction and pain in the heart of the original oneness, and thus presents in symbolic form a sphere which is above all appearances and prior to them. In comparison with music, each appearance is far more a mere metaphor: hence, language, as voice and symbol of appearances, can never ever convert the deepest core of music to something external, but always remains, as long as it involves itself with the imitation of music, only in superficial contact with the music. The full eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring us one step closer to the deepest meaning of music.
Footnotes:
1Terpander: Greek poet in the first half of seventh century BC.
1Pindar: (c. 522 BC to 443 BC), Greek lyric poet.
2Aristotle: (384 BC to 322 BC), major Greek philosopher.
But to begin with, we must view the folk song as the musical mirror of the world, as the primordial melody, which now seeks for a parallel dream image of itself and expresses this in poetry. The melody is thus the primary and universal fact , for which reason it can in itself undergo many objectifications, in several texts. It is also far more important and more essential in the naive evaluations of the people. Melody gives birth to poetry from itself, over and over again. That is what the strophic form of the folk song indicates to us. I always observed this phenomenon with astonishment, until I finally came up with this explanation. Whoever looks at a collection of folk songs, for example, Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The Boy’s Magic Horn] with this theory in mind will find countless examples of how the continually fecund melody emits fiery showers of images around itself. These images, with their bright colours, their sudden alteration, indeed, their wild momentum, reveal a power completely foreign to the epic illusion and its calm forward progress. From the standpoint of epic this uneven and irregular world of images in the lyric is easy to condemn — something no doubt the solemn epic rhapsodists of the Apollonian celebrations did in the age of Terpander.1
Thus, in the poetry of the folk song we see language most strongly pressured to imitate music. Hence, with Archilochus a new world of poetry begins, something which conflicts in the most profound and fundamental way with the Homeric world. Here we have demonstrated the one possible relationship between poetry and music, word, and tone: the word, the image, the idea look for an analogous expression in music and now experience the inherent power of music. In this sense we can distinguish two main streams in the history of the language of the Greek people, corresponding to language which imitates appearance and images or language which imitates the world of music.
Now, let’s think for a moment more deeply about the linguistic difference in colour, syntactic structure, and vocabulary between Homer and Pindar in order to grasp the significance of this contrast.1 Indeed, in this way it will become crystal clear to us that between Homer and Pindar the orgiastic flute melodies of Olympus must have rung out, which even in the time of Aristotle, in the midst of an infinitely more sophisticated music, drove people into raptures of drunken enthusiasm and with their primordial effect certainly stimulated all the poetical forms of expression of contemporaries to imitate them.2
I recall here a well-known phenomenon of our own times, something which strikes our aestheticians as merely objectionable. Again and again we experience how a Beethoven symphony makes it necessary for the individual listener to talk in images, even if it’s also true that the collection of different worlds of imagery created by a musical piece really looks fantastically confused, indeed, contradictory. In the art of those aestheticians the proper thing to do is to exercise their poor wits on such collections and yet to overlook the phenomenon which is really worth explaining. In fact, even when the tone poet has spoken in images about a composition, for example, when he describes a symphony as a pastoral and one movement as “A Scene by the Brook,” another as “A Frolicking Gathering of Peasants,” these expressions are similarly only metaphors, images born out of the music — and not some objective condition imitated by the music — ideas which cannot teach us anything at all about the Dionysian content of the music and which, in fact, have no exclusive value alongside other pictures. Now, we have only to transfer this process of unloading music into pictures to a youthful, linguistically creative crowd of people in order to sense how the strophic folk song arises and how the entire linguistic capability is stimulated by the new principle of imitating music.
If we are thus entitled to consider the lyrical poem as the mimetic efflorescence of music in pictures and ideas, then we can now ask the following question: “What does music look like in the mirror of imagery and ideas?” It appears as the will , taking that word in Schopenhauer’s sense, that is, as the opposite to the aesthetic, purely contemplative, will-less state. Here we must now differentiate as sharply as possible the idea of being from the idea of appearance: it is impossible for music, given its nature, to be the will, because if that were the case we would have to ban music entirely from the realm of art — for the will consists of what is inherently unaesthetic — but music appears as the will.
For in order to express that appearance in images, the lyric poet needs all the excitements of passion, from the whispers of affection right up to the ravings of lunacy. Under the impulse to speak of music in Apollonian metaphors, he understands all nature and himself in nature only as eternal willing, desiring, yearning. However, insofar as he interprets music in images, he himself is resting in the still tranquillity of the sea of Apollonian observation, no matter how much everything which he contemplates through that medium of music is moving around him, pushing and driving. Indeed, if he looks at himself through that same medium, his own image reveals itself to him in a state of emotional dissatisfaction: his own willing, yearning, groaning, cheering are for him a metaphor with which he interprets the music for himself. This is the phenomenon of the lyric poet: as an Apollonian genius, he interprets the music through the image of the will, while he himself, fully released from the greed of the will, is a pure, untroubled eye of the sun.
This entire discussion firmly maintains that the lyric is just as dependent on the spirit of music as is music itself. In its fully absolute power, music does not need image and idea, but only tolerates them as something additional to itself. The poetry of the lyricist can express nothing which was not already latent in the most immense universality and validity of the music, which forces him to speak in images. The world symbolism of music for this very reason cannot in any way be exhausted by or reduced to language, because music addresses itself symbolically to the primordial contradiction and pain in the heart of the original oneness, and thus presents in symbolic form a sphere which is above all appearances and prior to them. In comparison with music, each appearance is far more a mere metaphor: hence, language, as voice and symbol of appearances, can never ever convert the deepest core of music to something external, but always remains, as long as it involves itself with the imitation of music, only in superficial contact with the music. The full eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring us one step closer to the deepest meaning of music.
Footnotes:
1Terpander: Greek poet in the first half of seventh century BC.
1Pindar: (c. 522 BC to 443 BC), Greek lyric poet.
2Aristotle: (384 BC to 322 BC), major Greek philosopher.