Among the characteristic artistic effects of musical tragedy we had to stress an Apollonian illusion through which we are to be rescued from immediate unity of being with the Dionysian music, while our musical excitement can discharge itself in an Apollonian sphere and in a visible middle world which interposed itself. By doing this we thought we had noticed how, simply through this discharge, that middle world of the scenic action, the drama in general, to a certain degree became visible and comprehensible from within, in a way which is unattainable in all other Apollonian art, so that here, where the Apollonian is energized and raised aloft, as it were, through the spirit of the music, we had to acknowledge the highest intensification of its power and, therefore, in that fraternal bond of Apollo and Dionysus the peak of both the Apollonian and the Dionysian artistic aims.

Of course, the projected Apollonian image with this particular inner illumination through the music does not achieve the effect characteristic of the weaker degrees of Apollonian art, what epic or animated stone is capable of, compelling the contemplating eye to that calm delight in the world of the individual — in spite of a higher animation and clarity, that effect will not permit itself to be attained here.

We looked at drama and with a penetrating gaze forced our way into the inner moving world of its motives — and nonetheless for us it was as if only an allegorical picture passed before us, whose most profound meaning we thought we could almost guess and which we wanted to pull aside, like a curtain, in order to look at the primordial image behind it. The brightest clarity of the image did not satisfy us, for this seemed to hide just as much as it revealed. And while, with its allegorical-like revelation, it seemed to promise to rip aside the veil, to disclose the mysterious background, once again it was precisely that penetrating light illuminating everything which held the eye in its spell and prevented it from probing more deeply.

Anyone who has not had this experience of having to watch and, at the same time, of yearning to go above and beyond watching will have difficulty imagining how definitely and clearly these two processes exist together and are felt alongside each other, as one observes the tragic myth. However, the truly aesthetic spectators will confirm for me that among the peculiar effects of tragedy that co-existence may be the most remarkable.

If we now translate this phenomenon taking place in the aesthetic spectator into an analogous process in the tragic artist, we will have understood the genesis of the tragic myth. He shares with the Apollonian sphere of art the full joy in appearances and in watching — at the same time he denies this joy and has an even higher satisfaction in the destruction of the visible world of appearances. The content of the tragic myth is at first an epic event with the glorification of the struggling hero. But what is the origin of that inherently mysterious feature, the fact that the suffering in the fate of the hero, the most painful victories, the most agonizing opposition of motives, in short, the exemplification of that wisdom of Silenus, or, expressing it aesthetically, of the ugly and dissonant, in so many countless forms, is presented with such fondness, always renewed, and precisely in the richest and most youthful age of a people, unless we recognize in all this a higher pleasure?

For the fact that in life things are really so tragic would not in the least account for the development of an art form, if art is not only an imitation of natural reality but a metaphysical supplement to that reality, set beside it in order to overcome it. The tragic myth, insofar as it belongs to art at all, also participates fully in this general purpose of art to provide metaphysical transfiguration. But what does it transfigure, when it leads out the world of appearance in the image of the suffering hero? Least of all the “Reality” of this world of appearances, for it says directly to us: “Look here! Look right here! This is your life! This is the hour hand on the clock of your existence!”

And did the myth show us this life in order to transfigure it in front of us? If not, in what does the aesthetic joy consist with which we allow those images to pass in front of us? I ask about aesthetic delight and know full well that many of these images can in addition now and then still produce a moral pleasure, for example, in the form of pity or a moral triumph. But whoever wants to derive the effect of the tragic merely from these moral origins, as, of course, has been customary in aesthetics for far too long, should not think that, in so doing, he has then done anything for art, which above all must demand purity in its realm. For an explanation of the tragic myth the very first demand is that he seek that joy characteristic of it in the purely aesthetic sphere, without reaching over into the territory of pity, fear, and the morally sublime. How can the ugly and dissonant, the content of the tragic myth, excite an aesthetic delight?

Here it is necessary for us to vault with a bold leap into a metaphysics of art, when I repeat an earlier sentence — that existence and the world appear justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. It’s in this sense that the tragic myth has to convince us that even the ugly and dissonant are an artistic game, which the will, in the eternal abundance of its joy, plays with itself. But there’s a direct way to make this primordial phenomenon of Dionysian art, which is so difficult to comprehend, completely understandable and to enable one to grasp it immediately, through the miraculous meaning of musical dissonance, the way the music in general, set next to the world, is the only thing that can give an idea of what it means to understand a justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. The joy which the tragic myth produces has the same homeland as the delightful sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, together with its primordial joy felt even in pain, is the common birth womb of music and the tragic myth.

Thus, is it not possible that we have made that difficult problem of the tragic effect really much easier now that we have called on the relation of musical dissonance to help us? For now we understand what it means in tragedy to want to keep looking and at the same time to yearn for something beyond what we see. We would have to characterize this condition in relation to the artistic use of dissonance simply as the fact that we want to keep listening and at the same time yearn to get beyond what we hear. That striving for the infinite, the wing beat of longing, associated with the highest delight in clearly perceived reality, reminds us that in both states we must recognize a Dionysian phenomenon, which always reveals to us all over again the playful cracking apart and destruction of the world of the individual as the discharge of primordial delight, in a manner similar to the one in which gloomy Heraclitus compares the force constructing the world to a child who playfully sets stones here and there, builds sand piles, and then knocks them down again.

And thus in order to assess the Dionysian capability of a people correctly, we have to think not just about their music; we must also think about their tragic myth as the second feature of that capacity. Given this closest of relationships between music and myth, now we can in a similar way assume that a degeneration and deprivation of one of them will be linked to a decline in the other, if in a weakening of myth generally a waning of the Dionysian capability really does manifest itself. But concerning both of these, a look at the development of the German being should leave us in no doubt: in the opera, as well as in the abstract character of our myth-deprived existence, in an art which has sunk down to entertainment, as well as in a life guided by concepts, that inartistic and equally life-draining nature of Socratic optimism stands revealed.

For our consolation, however, there were indications that, in spite of everything, the German spirit rests and dreams in magnificent health, profundity, and Dionysian power, undamaged, like a knight sunk down in slumber in an inaccessible abyss. And from this abyss, the Dionysian song rises up to us in order to make us understand that this German knight is also still dreaming his age-old Dionysian myth in solemn, blissful visions. Let no one believe that the German spirit has lost for ever its mythic homeland, when it still understands so clearly the voices of the birds which tell of that homeland. One day it will find itself awake in all the morning freshness of an immense sleep. Then it will kill dragons, destroy the crafty dwarf, and awake Brunnhilde — and even Wotan’s spear itself will not be able to block its way!1

My friends, you who have faith in Dionysian music, you also know what tragedy means to us. In it we have the tragic myth, reborn from music — and in it you can hope for everything and forget what is most distressing! The most painful thing, however, for all of us is this — the long degradation under which the German genius, alienated from house and home, has lived in service to that crafty dwarf. You understand my words — as you will also understand my hopes as I conclude.

Footnotes:
1Wotan and his daughter, Brunnhilde are characters in Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelungen. The crafty dwarf, also a character in the work, is Alberich who guards the Rhinegold treasure.