TRAGEDY RECITED: NIETZSCHE'S BEYOND-REASON/BACH'S RECITATIVE AND THE CONTOURS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Now I am going to compare the glory of passivity with the glory of activity which illuminates Aeschylus’s Prometheus. What Aeschylus the thinker had to say to us here, but what Aeschylus as a poet could only hint to us through a metaphorical picture—that’s something young Goethe knew how to reveal to us in the bold words of his Prometheus:

“Here I sit—I make men
in my own image,
a race like me,
to suffer, to weep,
to enjoy life and rejoice,
and to ignore you,
as I do.”

As I pored through the Birth of Tragedy, I sank into the interstices of Nietzsche's reasoning, and his beyond-Reason: I find a similar dynamic in Bach..

There seems to be a substream to thought and feeling, an undifferentiated thought-feeling that defies our logic.. An urlicht light, as we see and 'hear' in Mahler. (The sustained A in the opening to Mahler Symphony 1 is a haunting archetype. And also, the sharpened conscious tone of the flute in the conclusion to Mvt 1 of Symphony 9).

In Bach, his cantas and especially the Matthew Passion, we endure the overflowing epic, which yet does not overreach. The Eternal Onward presence. I call it Absolute Presence.

Nonetheless, to reduce the ineffable to the meaningful - the bearable - Bach interpellates the ongoing-conscious with momentary meaning: the recitative.

*Incidentally, Nietzsche discerns like traits - if not sustained by the same intensity, arguably - in opera. The Paradigm for opera would likely be Tosca, in my view.

And now to travel beyond William James's 'fringe' of consciouness.

Dear Reader, you've lasted this far! I will lay out the passage from BT, and maybe all will become clear - for us all(?):

19

We can designate the innermost meaning of this Socratic culture no more precisely than when we call it the culture of opera, for in this area this Socratic culture, with characteristic naivete, has expressed its wishes and perceptions, something astonishing to us, if we bring the genesis of opera and the facts of the development of opera together with the eternal truths of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. First, I bring to mind the emergence of the stilo rappresentativo [the representational style] and of recitative. Is it credible that this entirely externalized opera music, something incapable of worship, could be accepted and preserved with wildly enthusiastic favour, as if it were the rebirth of all true music, during an age in which Palestrina’s inexpressibly awe-inspiring and sacred music had just arisen?* On the other hand, who would make the diversion-loving voluptuousness of those Florentine circles or the vanity of its dramatic singers responsible for such an impetuously spreading love of opera? The fact that in the same age—indeed, in the same peoples—alongside the vaulted structure of Palestrina’s harmonies, which the entire Christian Middle Ages had developed, there awoke that passion for a half-musical way of speaking —that I can explain only by some tendency beyond art at work in the very nature of recitative.

To the listener who wishes to hear clearly the word under the singing, there corresponds the singer who speaks more than he sings and who intensifies the expressions of pathos in this half-singing. Through this intensification of pathos he makes the words easier to understand and overpowers that part of the music which remains. The real danger now threatening him is that at an inopportune moment he may give the music the major emphasis, so that the pathos in the speech and the clarity of the words necessarily disappear at once. On the other hand, he always feels the urge for musical release and a virtuoso presentation of his voice. Here the “poet” comes to his assistance, the man who knows how to provide him sufficient opportunities for lyrical interjections, repetitions of words and sentences, and so on, places where the singer can now rest in the purely musical element, without considering the words. This alternation of urgently emotional speech which is only half sung and interjections which are all singing, which lies at the heart of the stilo rappresentativo, this rapidly changing effort at one moment to affect the understanding and imagination of the listener and, at another, to work on his musical sensibility, is something so completely unnatural and similarly so inwardly contradictory to the Dionysian and Apollonian artistic drives that we must infer an origin of recitative which lies outside all artistic instincts. According to this account, we can define recitative as the mixing of epic and lyric performing, and, to be precise, not at all in an inwardly consistent blending, which could not have been attained with such entirely disparate things, but in the most external conglutination, in the style of a mosaic, something the like of which has no model whatsoever in the realm of nature and experience. But this was not the opinion of those inventors of recitative. By contrast, they themselves, along with their age, believed that through that stilo rappresentativo the secret of ancient music had been resolved, that only through it could one explain the tremendous effect of an Orpheus, Amphion, indeed, even of Greek tragedy.* The new style was valued as the reawakening of the most effective music, the music of the ancient Greeks; in fact, under the universal and totally popular conception of the Homeric world as the primitive world, people could abandon themselves to the dream that they had now climbed down once more into the paradisal beginnings of humankind, in which music must necessarily have had that superb purity, power, and innocence which the poets knew how to talk about so movingly in their pastoral plays. Here we see into the innermost development of this truly genuine modern style of art, the opera: a powerful need forcibly creates an art, but it is a need of an unaesthetic sort, the yearning for the idyllic, the belief in a primordial existence of the artistic and good man. Recitative served as the rediscovered language of that primordial man, and opera as the rediscovered land of that idyllic or heroically good being, who at the same time follows a natural artistic drive in all his actions, who sings at least something in everything he has to say, so that, given the slightest emotional arousal, he immediately sings out in full voice. For us now it is unimportant that contemporary humanists used this newly created picture of the paradisal artist to fight against the old church idea of human beings as inherently corrupt and lost, so that opera is to be understood as the opposing dogma of good people, something with which they simultaneously discovered a way of consoling themselves against that pessimism to which the serious-minded people of that time, given the horrifying uncertainties of all social conditions, were attracted most strongly. It’s enough for us to recognize how the real magic and thus the origin of this new artistic form lies in the satisfaction of an entirely unaesthetic need, in the optimistic glorification of man as such, in its view of primitive man as a naturally good and artistic man. This operatic principle has gradually transformed itself into a threatening and terrible demand, which we, faced with the socialist movement of the present day, can no longer fail to hear. The “good primitive man” wants his rights: what paradisal prospects! 

[According to Daniel Barenboim, for example in his Reith Lectures, we hear the sound of primal music from birth, and the more sensitive we are, the more attuned to the ineffable/the sublime, the stronger our perception and the larger our perceptual sphere. 

For Barenboim, we hear sound akin to this Original Form in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. I will add a post about Tristan soon].