Chapter 30 nineteen

To explain the essence of this Socratic culture to the point, Mo Ruo calls it opera culture.For it is in this sphere that the culture expresses its will and its views with exceptional naivety.We will be amazed if we compare the fact of the birth and development of opera with the eternal truth of Apollo and Dionysus.I am first reminded of the stilo rappresentativo (lyric tone) and the birth of the recitative tone.Such a superficial and ignorant operatic music should be embraced and cherished by an age, as if it were the resurrection of all true music, which had just begun to arose the sublime and sacred music of Palestri. Indescribable music, can this be believed?Who, on the other hand, would have blamed the mere pleasure of those Florentine salons and the vanity of their singers for the operatic inclination so rapidly spreading?At the same time, and even in the same people, beside the arched building of the Palestrina's harmony, which was trusted throughout the Christian Middle Ages, there was an enthusiasm for semi-musical speech, a phenomenon which I can only describe by chanting. To illustrate the non-artistic tendencies contained in the essence of tone.

The singer speaks rather than sings, and he uses half-singing to intensify the emotional color of the words, and by these means he caters to an audience who wants to hear the words clearly.By emphasizing the emotional color, he made the meaning of the words easy to understand, and overcame the remaining half of the music.The real danger now threatening him was that, if he gave an untimely emphasis on music, he would lose the emotion and clarity of his speech.However, on the other hand, he felt an impulse from time to time to vent his love for music and show off his singing voice.So the "poet" comes to his aid, and the "poet" knows how to provide him with enough opportunities to use lyrical interjections, repeat certain words and epigrams, and so on.On these occasions the singer is now in the purely musical element, without having to recall the meaning of words, and can rest easy.The impassioned half-sung speech alternates with the full-sung exclamation that is characteristic of the lyrical tone, sometimes appealing to the audience's understanding and imagination, and sometimes appealing to the audience's musical instincts. Such rapid changes are laborious and completely unnatural. It is also fundamentally in conflict with the Dionysian and Apollonian artistic impulses, so that the origin of the recitative must be inferred to lie outside all artistic instincts.According to this account, recitative can be defined as a mixture of epic and lyric recitation, certainly not an inner stable mixture, as this is impossible for so different things, but the outermost There is no similar example of mosaic bonding in nature and experience.However, this is not the opinion of the inventors of the recitative, who, and their time, preferred to believe that the lyrical tune solved the mystery of ancient music, and that the great influence of Orpheus, Amphion, and even Greek tragedy can only be explained from it.The new style is seen as the most moving music, the revival of ancient Greek music.According to folklore, Homer's world is a primitive world, from which it is true that people can dream that they are now re-entering the paradise of human origin, where music must also be incomparably pure, powerful and chaste. Life there is described so eloquently inHere, we see the deepest cause of opera, a truly modern art variety, a strong need to seek an art, but this is a non-aesthetic need, that is, the yearning for pastoral life, the beauty and beauty of primitive art. lifestyle beliefs.Arias was seen as the language of primitive men rediscovered; opera was seen as the rediscovered homeland of pastoral or epic beings who obeyed their natural artistic impulse in every move, and whose every word demanded at least Sing something so that at the slightest emotion you can immediately start singing.We are now quite indifferent to the fact that the humanists of that time used this newly created figure of the artist of the Promised Land to oppose the old church notion that man was inherently depraved and useless.Opera may thus be understood as the anti-creed of good people, but at the same time it offers a consolation against the pessimism to which serious thinkers gravitated at a time when Vientiane faltered.It is enough for us to know that the true charm and origin of this new form of art lies in the satisfaction of an entirely non-aesthetic need, in the celebration of the optimism of man himself, in the art which regards primitive man as an inherently good type of person.This principle of opera has gradually been transformed into an aggressive demand that we can no longer remain deaf to in the face of contemporary socialist movements. The "beautiful savage" claims his rights: what a prospect of a Promised Land!

Furthermore, I would like to present an equally obvious evidence for my point: Opera and modern Alexandrian culture are founded on the same principles.Opera is the offspring of the theorist, the lay critic, not the artist.This is one of the most astonishing events in all the history of art.The listener, who is absolutely unmusical, demands first of all to understand the words, so, it is said, only after discovering any singing style in which the words dominate the counterpoint, as the master dominates the servant, can a revival of the art of sound be expected.For it is said that the words are as nobler than the harmonies of the accompaniment, as the soul is nobler than the body.When opera came into being, it followed this rough layman's opinion who didn't understand music, and cooked music, image and language in one pot.In the spirit of this aesthetic, the first experiments were begun in the lay circles of Florence's upper class, by the poets and singers patronized there.The artistic imbecile makes an art for himself precisely because he is not born artistic.Because he could not comprehend the Dionysian depth of music, his taste in music was transformed into a lyrical tone dominated by rationality and exaggerated passion, and a hobby for singing skills.Since he was incapable of seeing visions, he forced mechanics and set painters to work for him.Since he could not grasp the true nature of the artist, he fancied according to his taste the "artistic primitive," that is, the man who sings and utters rhymes when he is excited.He dreamed that he lived in an age when passions were enough to produce songs and poems, as if passions had really created works of art.The premise of opera is a false belief about the artistic process, and an idyllic one at that, that everyone who feels is in fact the artist.In this belief, opera is the expression of a lay taste in art that dictates to art with the hilarious optimism of the theoretician.

If we want to use one concept to unify the above two concepts that have played an important role in the production of opera, then we only need to talk about the pastoral tendency of opera.In this regard, we may wish to use only Schiller's formulation and illustration.Schiller said: "Nature and the ideal are either objects of sorrow, if the former is described as lost, and the latter as not yet attained; or objects of joy, if they are presented as real things. The first case provides an elegy in the narrow sense, the second an idyll in the broad sense." Here one can immediately notice the common feature of the two conceptions at the time of opera's creation, that in them ideals are not felt as unattained. nature is not felt as lost.According to this feeling, human beings had a primitive age, when they were close to the soul of nature, and at the same time achieved the ideal of human beings in this natural state, enjoying family happiness and artistic life.We are all, it is said, descended from these perfect primitives, even we are their faithful likenesses, and we only have to throw something out of ourselves to re-recognize ourselves as these primitives, and it all depends on voluntarily giving up too much knowledge and a plethora of cultures.The educated people of the Renaissance used opera to imitate Greek tragedy, and thereby led themselves back to such a harmony between nature and ideal, to pastoral reality.He makes use of Greek tragedy, as Dante used Virgil to guide him to the gates of heaven, and from there he proceeds alone; .In the arms of a theoretical culture, what confident goodwill this bold pursuit has! —This situation can only be explained by the consoling belief that "man himself" is the always virtuous opera hero, the ever-playing shepherd boy who must at last regain his own nature, if he occasionally It is only the result of that optimism that rises like a sweet, seductive mist from the abyss of Socrates' worldview.

Therefore, on the face of opera, there is absolutely no elegiac sorrow of eternal hatred, but the joy of eternal regaining, the leisurely contentment of pastoral life, which can be imagined as real at least every moment.You may sometimes realize that this imaginary reality is nothing but a meaningless game of fantasy. If you can measure it with the terrible seriousness of real nature and compare it with the original face of primitive human beings, everyone must shout in disgust: Get out of here. ,phantom!Even so, it would be a mistake to think that a yell can drive away operas like phantoms.Whoever wishes to destroy opera must contend with the Alexandrian optimism in which it speaks so naively of its favored ideas that it is an inherent art-form.But what can we expect from an art form whose origins are not at all in the sphere of aesthetics, but which has crept into art from a semi-moral sphere, and which only conceals its hybrid origin here and there? What is the effect?How can this parasitic opera survive if it does not feed on true art?Is it not to be inferred that, in its idyllic seduction, in its Alexandrian flattery, art's highest mission, which can be pointed out with real seriousness, is to divert the eye from the terror of the night, to save by the elixir of appearance? The spasm of the subject's volitional impulse—is it about to degenerate into an empty and lax entertainment tendency?In such a mixture of styles, is there anything derived from the eternal truth of Dionysus and Apollo?I have already described this mixture of styles in my analysis of the essence of the lyric: in the lyric, the music is considered a slave, the words are the master, the music is compared to the body, the words to the soul; at best but the sound-picture as its highest purpose, as in the former Neo-Attic ode; Arouses shallow pleasure.Careful observation shows that this catastrophic influence of opera on music directly accompanies the whole development of modern music.The optimism latent in the origins of opera and in the culture it embodied dismantled music and its Dionysian world mission with frightening speed, imposing upon it the nature of form-play and entertainment.Perhaps only the transformation of the tragic hero of Aeschylus into the cheerful figure of Alexandria is comparable to this transformation.

And yet, if, in the above instance, we justly connect the disappearance of the Dionysian spirit with the most startling and hitherto unexplained transformation and degeneration of the Greeks, if the surest signs assure us of the opposite process, assure us that in our The spirit of Dionysus is gradually awakening in the contemporary world, what kind of hope will arise in our hearts!The divine power of Hercules could not be willing to serve Queen Wengfari forever and be consumed in her comfort zone.From the Dionysian roots of the German spirit had arisen a force which had nothing in common with the original premises of Socratic culture, could neither be explained nor justified by it, but was regarded by it as a scourge and Heretic monster, this is German music, we mainly mean its great glorious journey from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner.How can the epistemic Socrates of today, even in the best of circumstances, deal with this devil rising from the abyss?Neither in the gaudy score of the opera nor in the calculations of fugue and counterpoint could one find a single incantation which, repeated three times, would bring the devil to his knees.What kind of a scene is this: today's aesthetes, holding their special "beauty" nets, slap and catch those musical geniuses swimming with incredible vitality. Nor can it be judged by sublime.When these guardians of music babble "Beautiful! Beautiful!", let's see for ourselves whether they are like nature's darlings raised in the arms of beauty, or whether they are just for their own. Vulgarity seeks a deceitful cloak, an aesthetic excuse for its own emotional poverty.Here I think of Otto Jahn as an example.But this hypocritical charlatan had better be careful with German music, for in all our culture music is the only pure fire of spiritual purification, and according to the great Heraclitus of Ephesus, all things are equal. Produced by fire and return to fire in a reciprocating cycle.All that we call culture, education, civilization today will one day be brought before the just judge Dionysus.

Let us recall again how the spirit of German philosophy, from the same source, by means of Kant and Schopenhauer, made it possible to destroy its self-satisfied joie de vivre by proving the limits of scientific Socratism; This proof leads to an infinitely profound and serious ethical and artistic outlook, which can be directly named Dionysian wisdom.What does the mystery of the unity of German music and German philosophy point to, except to point us to a new way of life, whose content can only be gleaned from Greek precedents?For to us, standing on the boundary line between two different ways of life, the Greek model remains inestimable in value, in which all transitions and struggles appear in classic and revelatory form.However, we seem to be going through the major ages similar to the Greeks in reverse order, for example, we seem to be going backwards from the age of Alexandria to the age of tragedy.At the same time, we also feel that the birth of the tragic age, after the invading powers have forced the German spirit to exist for a long time in a hopeless form of barbarism, to suffer the enslavement of their forms, seems to mean only that the German spirit returns to itself, and fortunately rediscovers itself .Now, after it has returned to its hometown, it can finally strut forward in front of all nations, and walk towards the source of its life without the guidance of Roman civilization.It has only to be good at learning firmly from one people, the Greeks, and generally speaking, being able to learn from the Greeks is in itself a high honor and a great superiority.When were we more in need of these supreme teachers than today when we are living through a tragic rebirth, with the danger of knowing neither whence it came from nor where it was going?