Schopenhauer takes an overall positive approach to opera and notes Rossini as representative of the medium’s success. At the other end of the spectrum lies Nietzsche, who takes opera to be a destructive force, by its insidious nature positioned to abort the re-birth of tragedy in the modern age.
Both thinkers treat opera as a historically important phenomenon and allow their ruminations on opera to permeate, match up and play a vital role in their aesthetic theories: which both center in large measure around the status of music. Nietzsche accepts Schopenhauer’s theory of music as the supreme expression of Will, yet doesn’t share his philosophical forbearer’s rosy attitude towards opera: a genre wherein he finds the thorough debasement of opera by means of music’s enslavement to the word.
In § 52 of World as Will and Representation (Vol. I), Schopenhauer presents his mystical metaphysics of music. While he doesn’t necessarily privilege music over the other arts, he certainly ascribes enormous power to it and underscores the unique position it holds in the system of the arts. Central to Schopenhauer’s thought about music is the idea of the Will being expressed in its purest form through the abstract medium of music. He writes that, “music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 257)
It is characteristic of music to only express generalities and never particulars. Music can never treat of a particular pleasure or displeasure, but rather of feeling itself. In our desire to bring the will down to earth, we attach words and plot to music. The origin of opera, according to Schopenhauer, is our desire to relate the fundamentally eternal emotions of music to a particular sensation: “it arises that our imagination is so easily stirred by music, and tries to shape that invisible, yet vividly aroused, spirit-world that speaks to us directly, to clothe it with flesh and bone, and thus embody it in an analogous example.” (ibid, p. 261)
Yet, even in the newly-formed constellation of text and music that is born in opera, the libretti “should never forsake that subordinate position in order to make themselves the chief thing, and the music a mere means of expressing the song.” (ibid) Due to its transcendent and deeply metaphysical status, music always remains supremacy over the spoken – or sung – word.
Schopenhauer warns against music that follows after words too closely. Since music everywhere only ever expresses the “quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves,” music should steer free of the influence of particular circumstances and events. The “universality” and “precise distinctness” of music is precisely what allows it to become the “panacea of all our sorrows.” He writes that “if music tries to stick too closely to the words, and to mould itself according to the events, it is endeavouring to speak a language not its own.” (ibid)
It appears to be a real danger for Schopenhauer that music can get bogged down by trying merely to accompany plot. There is, however, at least one composer who has steered clear of this “mistake:” Rossini. Somewhat opaquely, Schopenhauer claims that Rossini’s music “speaks its own language so distinctly and purely that it requires no words at all, and therefore produces its full effect even when rendered by instruments alone.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, pp. 261-262)
Music’s power to illustrate plot effectively is part and parcel with its power to express “the metaphysical to everything physical in the world.” What Schopenhauer has in mind by such a statement is a conception of music as infinitely more than mere accompaniment or background music. He even suggests we could call the world “embodied music” as easily as we call it “embodied will.” Music so appropriately reflects and comments on being in the world that it adds heightened dimensions of clarity to existence. As he writes: “music makes every picture, indeed every scene from real life and the world, at once appear in enhanced significance.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, pp. 262 – 263).
Since he ascribes such profound metaphysical significance to music, Schopenhauer rejects out of hand all music that merely tries to imitate observable phenomena and to stir up the appetite. “All this is to be entirely rejected,” he writes in a discussion that parallels his earlier musings on Dutch paintings that merely make the mouth water with their depictions of prepared food. (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 264)
Opera can be “expressive” only in those cases “when the composer has known how to express in the universal language of music the stirrings of will that constitute the kernel of an event.” Since both the perceptive expression (representation) and music (will) express the same “inner nature of the world,” the two can be linked elegantly in opera. (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 263) Still, music remains supreme for Schopenhauer, an “independent art” and “far from being a mere aid to poetry.” It is capable of achieving its ends “entirely from its own resources” and without needing recourse to verbal and dramatic effects. (Schopenhauer, vol. 2, p. 448) Indeed, Schopenhauer admits that lyrics are often little more that the expression of “silly and insipid verses.” But even when serious, words remain for music “a foreign extra of secondary value” (Schopenhauer, vol. 2, p. 448)
Something different is at work in an opera that is composed for a specific libretto. In these cases where the music is custom tailored, as it were, to a specific libretto, the music can provide, “the most profound, ultimate, and secret information on the feeling expressed in the words, or the action presented in the opera.” This discussion relates back to an earlier one about the metaphysical capability of music to provide “the thing in itself to every phenomenon.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 262 -263 and vol. II, p. 448-449)
Schopenhauer talks about the genesis of operas and the value accrued to music by the addition of libretti, which usually precede the music and act as “as a means for exciting [the composer’s] musical imagination.” While music expresses general sentiments, words can identify their objects, namely “the motives that give rise to that feeling.” (Schopenhauer, vol. II, p. 449)
Nevertheless, “the music of an opera” can be ”completely effective even without the text.” When, however, music is composed “with respect to the drama,” the music becomes the “soul” of the drama, “since, in its connexion with the incidents, characters and word, it becomes the inner significance of those incidents, and of their ultimate and secret necessity that rests on this significance.” (ibid)
At the end of the day, however, Schopenhauer still holds strong to the indomitable and irrepressible free force of music. Schopenhauer recognizes the “heterogeneous nature” of music and its “complete indifference to everything material in the incidents,” (which inspired man to create opera in the first place and places its value above that of the libretto) since the same music can be used to good effect in expressing varied and different situations. This consideration leads him to conclude that opera “never assimilates the material, and therefore, when it accompanies even the most ludicrous and extravagant farces of comic opera, it still preserves its essential beauty, purity and sublimity; and its fusion with those incidents cannot drag it down from its heights to which everything ludicrous is really foreign.” Thus, even the tritest and most banal of operatic subjects poses no threat to music, which is and shall always remain was it is most basically and metaphysically: a pure copy of will. (ibid)
Against this optimistic and non-threatening view, Nietzsche diagnoses opera as nothing less than a cardinal danger to the spirit of music out of which tragedy struggles to be reborn! In chapter nineteen of the “Birth of Tragedy,” Nietzsche disparages the “culture of the opera.” (The object of his critique is most probably the French Grand Opéra as it was for Wagner). The public enthusiasm for opera symbolizes the “innermost substance” of Socratic culture, whose rationalizing and enlightened attitude he sees as in direct opposition to the tragic condition that was borne out of the spirit of music. (Nietzsche, p. 89)
Turning briefly from condemning the modern age, Nietzsche speculates on the origins of opera in late Renaissance Italy. He is shocked that the same age that produced the “sublime and sacred” music of Palestrina produced the recitative style of stile rappresentativo, an “extra-artistic tendency” which he sees as the true origin of opera. The recitative is “extra-artistic” since it is intended for the listener who desires to hear the words amidst the singing: the singer “intensifies the aesthetics expression of the words” by “half-singing.” He calls it “unnatural” and “inwardly at odds” with the Appoline and the Dionyiac drives and say that one is “bound to conclude that the origin of recitative lies outside all artistic instincts.” (ibid, pp. 89-90)
Nietzsche claims that opera is an attempt to rediscover of the music of Ancient Greece and that the culture of opera perpetrates a myth of the rediscovery primordial human music: “Recitative was thought to be the rediscovered language of those original humans.” In fact, however, opera merely arose to satisfy an “extra-artistic need.” (ibid, p. 90)
This critique of opera (the representative art form of the late nineteenth century) is bound up with Nietzsche’s critique of the modern age. Opera is not the work of the genuine artist, but rather the Socratic individual: “Opera is born of theoretical man, of the layman as critic, not of the artist.” As such, the culture of opera is symptomatic of the modern world, which is built on predominately optimistic Socratic principles. The desire to make out the words is proof that for “un-artistic listeners,” the rebirth of music could only be expected through music in which “the words of the text governed the counterpoint as a master governs his servant.” For these un-artistic laymen, the “word was supposedly nobler than the accompanying system of harmony.”
The un-artistic laymen who created opera were “crudely unmusical” in their discussion of artistic terms and were incapable of understanding the “Dionysiac depths of music.” There is more than a little elitism in Nietzsche’s subsequent claims that the precondition of opera is “the idyllic belief that every man of feeling is actually an artist.” He calls this the “cheery optimism of theoretical man.” (ibid, 90-91)
By making every man of feeling into an artist, opera threatens to collapse the distinction between art and entertainment. The “Dionysiac depths of music” are no longer present. Opera becomes “un-tragic,” since there “the ideal is not felt to be unattained and nature is not felt to be lost.” The pleasure derived from opera bears little relation to the “elegiac pain caued by eternal loss” that tragedy evokes. Rather, as a product of pure entertainment, it presents the illusions of “eternal re-discovery” and the “comfortable delight in an idyllic reality.” (ibid, p. 92)
In opera, music – which is fundamentally the pure expression of will - is thus reduced to illusion and artifice. In consequence, Nietzsche is deeply pessimistic about this “art which does not originate in the aesthetic sphere” (since it privileges the word over the tone) and has “stolen into the territory of art from a semi-moral sphere,” and which “can only occasionally disguise the fact of its hybrid origins.” (ibid, p. 93)
Viewed in this light, opera becomes extremely problematic for Nietzsche and threatens even to abort the rebirth of tragedy in the modern age. “What will become of the eternal truths of the Dionysiac and the Apolline,” in the “mixture of styles” that is at the heart of “the stilo rappresentativo? – where music is regarded as the servant and the libretto as master, where music is compared to the body and words to the soul?” (ibid)
Nietzsche talks about the “fateful influence of opera on music.” Opera severs music from its Dionysiac origin and deprives it of its “true dignity, which consists in being a Dionysiac mirror of the world.” Instead, opera makes music into the “slave of the world of appearances.” It can do nothing more than “imitate the forms of the world of appearances and to excite external pleasure in the play of line and proportion.” This “pleasurable play with form” has succeeded in “divesting music with frightening speed of its Dionysiac purpose in the world.” He takes this to be representative of the “optimism” that lurks in the “genesis of opera and at the heart of the culture it represents” (ibid, pp. 93 - 94)
Yet he places hope in the German musical tradition and “the mighty, brilliant course it has run from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner.” The towering figure of Wagner (and Schopenhauer as well) represents the “mysterious unity of German music and German philosophy.” And calls the “birth of a tragic age” nothing less that the “return of the German spirit to itself.” (ibid, pp. 94-95)
The Socratic optimism of the word is betrayed most bluntly by opera. Our modern view of life is without myth and guided by the concepts; art is debased to the level of mere entertainment. “Music and tragic myth both express, in the same way, the Dionysiac capacity of a people, and they cannot be separated from one another. Both originate in an artistic realm which lies beyond the Apolline; both transfigure a region where dissonance and the terrible image of the world fade away in chords of delight.” The music of Wagner in particular attempts to tap into the “primal pleasures” of the Dionysiac, and thus restore the tragic sensibility to music through the use of dissonance. It can be said that Nietzsche here privileges Wagner in a similar way that Schopenhauer privileges Rossini as the supreme of opera composers, albeit for entirely different reasons. (ibid, pp. 114 – 115)
Wagner’s utter rejection of the culture of opera in favor of rediscovered Dionysiac principles puts him at odds with the mainstream critics of his day. Nietzsche berates these “bad critics” who get as afar as “the entrance hall of musical perception” without reaching “the innermost sanctum.” He offers a mystical analysis of Tristan und Isolde to show how Wagner’s music dramas differ so sharply from the opera of his day. Here, the words and images are required to insure that the listeners don’t “suffocate as their soul attempted, convulsively, to spread its winds.” The “thoughts and words” are necessary protection against the “unchecked outpouring of the unconscious will.” With characteristic hyperbole, Nietzsche rhetorically asks in relation to Tristan: “How could anyone fail to be shattered immediately, having once put their ear to the heart of the universal Will?” (ibid, pp. 100-101)
In has been the object of this paper to examine and contrast the role played by opera in the aesthetic theories of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Greatly impressed by the perfect fusion of word and melody that he finds in Rossini, Schopenhauer articulates an enthusiastic and positive account of opera where in which music always reigns supreme over the word. His assessment of the genre falls squarely with his general theory about music as the supreme expression of will. Under the great sway of Wagner, Nietzsche directs his attack against opera at the modern “opera culture’ that treats art as entertainment. He incorporates this attack on modern culture with his parallel project of defining and delineating the origins of Greek tragedy out of the conflicting drives of the Apolline and the Dionysiac: a task of philosophical analysis which is directed at bringing to consciousness the task of the modern artist in re-awaking in birth tragedy in a rational, “Socratic” world and society. In his final, mystical analysis of Tristan, Nietzsche’s philosophical debt to Schopenhauer is supremely evident. And although Schopenhauer would probably be flattered, he’d still prefer the Barber of Seville.
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