[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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We have a great show for you today on the topic of Nietzsche and Wagner.
And I have a very special guest with me, the famous British philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Mr. Russell, would you care to share some thoughts with us about the Nietzsche Wagner relationship?
Nietzsche, the lower professor, was a literary rather than an academic philosopher.
His general outlook remained very similar to that of Wagner in the ring.
Nietzsche's Superman is very like secret, except that he knows Greek.
This may seem odd, but that is not my fault.
He condemns Christian love because he thinks it is an outcome of fear.
It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love.
Obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would feign disguise as
"Lordly indifference."
His noble man, who is himself in his daydreams, is a being wholly devoid of sympathy.
Ruthless, cunning, cruel, can ascend only with his own power.
Mr. Russell, you cannot be serious, you really cannot be serious.
Get him out of here.
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Nietzsche, no a professor, no, no, and no.
In title opinions is not the place for what Nietzsche called "Consument Kant."
We have standards upholed here, so we have sent Mr. analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell away
and called in a more worthy guest to share his thoughts with us.
Professor Stephen Hinton comes to our rescue.
Stephen, welcome to the program.
Thank you very much Robert.
It's great to be back on the show.
Good.
And remind our listeners that you've been a frequent guest on this show before.
We did a show on Beethoven, and prior to that we did a show on the composer Kurt Vile.
And that was a few years ago.
And in the meantime, you have finished a book on Kurt Vile, called Vile's Musical Theatre,
stages of reform.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
Let me also mention that the last time you were on the show, you were the Dean of Humanities
here at Stanford in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
And no longer serving as Dean, but you recently took up the position of Denning, Family Director
of the Arts Initiative, and the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts.
So first I'd like to ask you a little bit about what this new charge you have is all about.
Well, the Arts Initiative is something that's been going on for a while at Stanford now for about five years.
It really grew out of a multidisciplinary campaign in various areas.
And in the case of the Arts, it really is what you might call a concerted effort to strengthen and also enhance the Arts at Stanford.
In various ways, we're building a new concert hall and other facilities.
We're raising money for new faculty appointments.
We've added some grants for master students in studio practice.
And we're also trying to integrate the arts more fully into the curriculum.
And so to this end, the Arts Initiative has created a new institute called the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts,
which serves as a kind of hub to help the arts at Stanford work together.
That's great. I'm especially looking forward to that concert hall and that opening.
I'm sure there can be a lot of very interesting things taking place in that space.
Yeah, the opening date is January 2013. So it's just over a year away.
Steven, your interest in Curt Vile has now come to fruition with this new book on, let's call Vile's musical theater stages of reform.
And I was reading on the Amazon page. It's not actually available yet, but will soon be available from the University of California Press.
And there it writes that it's the first musical, logical study of Curt Vile's complete stage works.
And that you chart the full range of theatrical achievements by this Curt Vile in the 20th century musical theater key figures.
And you show how he experiments with the range of genres and first from one act operas and plays with music to Broadway musicals and film opera.
I think our listeners who heard that show will know exactly where this is coming from.
But congratulations on getting that book done.
Well, thank you very much Robert. I took a year off after being in the Dean's office and before taking up the new job.
So I had some time to finish this particular project.
Good. We're going to turn out at the topic of Nietzsche and Wagner.
And I played that clip at the beginning of Bertrand Russell being very British about the two Germans, as it were.
Little tongue in cheek. Do you want to say anything about Bertrand Russell's clip before we go on to the substance?
Well, he says that it's not his fault and in a way it is his fault because he falls very much in what he calls the camp of academic philosophy as opposed to literary philosophy.
Nowadays we might talk about analytical versus continental philosophy and clearly Nietzsche is very much in that other camp in the continental philosophy camp.
In that sense, it's Russell's fault that he can't really grasp that tradition he doesn't want to and
classily simplifies Nietzsche's polemic against Christianity and translates that into what he calls universal hatred and fear, which simply isn't the case.
And he also mentions the connection of Wagner to Nietzsche or Nietzsche to Wagner without really acknowledging that this wasn't a
perfect union by any means but a very fraught relationship ultimately.
And that's really what I'm here to talk about with you today about the dynamics of that relationship which a completely misrepresented in Russell's
I agree with you there account. Very complex. Why don't we begin with their personal friendship together? How did that begin?
Well, it began in around 1868, so Nietzsche was 24 at the time Wagner was 55, so old enough literally to be his father.
That would have been the age of Nietzsche's father who had died much earlier.
And I suppose the go-between here was Nietzsche's, sorry, it was Wagner's sister who knew an orientalist called Herman Braque House.
So an East Asian studies scholar who was a friend of Nietzsche's and so there was a bit of a family connection there and Wagner's sister arranged for them to meet.
And they clearly got on very well that Nietzsche already knew some of Wagner's music but they had a lot of intellectual topics in common above all Greek drama.
Nietzsche was a classical philologist and just at the time that he got to no Wagner he was appointed to a position in classics at Basel.
Again at the age of 24 without even having finished his dissertation he was clearly slated to have a very illustrious career recognized as a formidable scholar.
Also they had in common an interest in the philosophy of Schopenhauer.
Wagner had discovered Schopenhauer while he was working on his ring cycle and Nietzsche had come across Schopenhauer's work in a bookstore and fell in love with it immediately and he would later say that Wagner and Nietzsche were the two most important figures in his life.
And last but not least of course they had music in common not only was Wagner one of the most celebrated composers of that era but Nietzsche himself was a pianist and he wrote about music but he also composed.
And so here was this young classics scholar getting to know a great composer and coming completely under his spell as he got to know him and was invited to Wagner's house in Switzerland.
Nietzsche was in Basel for his appointment so they lived pretty close by and he would continually visit there.
And their relationship kept going until well about 1876 we can talk about the reasons for its sowering later on but until the opening of the biorite festival where the ring cycle was performed in 1876 this was a very intense and productive relationship between the two of them.
So Nietzsche gets appointed as full professor of all things at age 24.
That's right extraordinary I mean even for those days.
That's right without a dissertation in hand or still less a second dissertation the Habbily Tatsilon which you need in Germany normally to get a professorship.
And then the birth of tragedy Nietzsche's first book appears I guess four years after he meets Wagner in 1872 and this book is called the Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music.
And the first part is all about Greek theater you mentioned that Wagner had an intense interest in Greek theater and Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy in the latter half of the book claims that we're seeing a rebirth of the spirit of Greek tragedy in the music of Wagner.
What Nietzsche have written this book as such leaving aside just the incommium to Wagner but would he have written such a book had he not become the personal friend and devotee of Wagner a few years earlier?
Well he probably would have written it but he wouldn't have written it in the way that he wrote it I think he was giving lectures early on in his career and I could just mention a few of the titles that give you a flavor of what he was talking about one was called
in 1870, diskritya shermaziktraama.
So the Greek musical drama.
Another one called Socrates and Tragedy.
Another one called The Dionysian World View.
Another one called the birth of The Tragic Thought.
Another one, The Origen and Gold of Tragedy.
Another music and Tragedy.
So there were all these lectures that he was giving at the time.
And I think they all fed into what ultimately became
the birth of Tragedy out of the spirit of music.
And the spirit of music in this particular case, of course,
is Schopenhauer's spirit of music that
was very much part of Wagner's underpinning
of his own music drama.
But Wagner's view was that his own musical theater
was a rebirth of Greek music drama.
And in this, he was very much sharing Nietzsche's view
that Greek drama had had this strong musical element
that had become eviscerated over time.
And like Wagner, Nietzsche was calling
for a rebirth of that theater in this particular case
through the music of Richard Wagner's music dramas,
which Wagner himself saw as a conflation, if you like,
of Greek drama on the one hand and Baitovinian symphony
on the other.
I think this comes out in Nietzsche's birth of Tragedy
very clearly where he introduces the whole idea
of the Dionysium, which he associates
with the power of music.
And it's this Dionysian element that
is being, as it were, re-injected into drama.
Maybe I could just quickly read you this where he says,
"This primordial phenomenon of Dionysian art
is difficult to grasp, and there is only one direct way
to make it intelligible and grasp it immediately
through the wonderful significance of musical dissonance."
Quite generally, only music placed beside the world
can give us an idea of what is meant by the justification
of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.
The joy aroused by the tragic myth
has the same origin as the joyous sensation of dissonance
in music, the Dionysian with its primordial joy
experienced even in pain is the common source of music
and tragic myth.
The birth of tragedy, it is a theory of Greek tragedy
as a contention and attention between the two principles
that he calls the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
You've just read a passage that tells us
how Nietzsche associates the Dionysian with something
primordial, something that would be associated with
showpanhowers theory of the will rather than representation,
and therefore a kind of blind, vital impulse.
And it sounds like Nietzsche thought
that the musical expression of this Dionysian principle
was primarily in its dissonant effects, whereas
Apollonianism would be what Chopinauer might
associate with the world of representation.
He speaks of it does Nietzsche as individuation,
the benevolent illusions of identity and form, beauty,
everything which is characterized by a certain degree
of restraint as opposed to the excess of Dionysian
and the Dionysianism.
And that Greek tragedy brings these two principles together,
but it is the Dionysian which is the musical primordiality
of pain, suffering, life, and so forth now.
That's exactly right.
It's that essential layer of music, which
is the embodiment of the will according to Chopinauer,
as opposed to language and the visual,
which merely representations mediated representations
of that essence.
And Nietzsche sees in Wagner's music of the time,
at least a strong repress of this Dionysian element
in its Chopinauer version.
So the question that we should probably ask sooner rather
than later, Stephen, is Nietzsche later
says that he misunderstood Wagner.
And he even mistook Chopinauer because he saw originally
in Greek drama a tremendous affirmation of life,
despite his pain and its suffering
and its fundamental absurdities.
Whereas after writing the birth of tragedy,
he starts suspecting that both Chopinauer and Wagner
were actually life deniers, deniers of life,
not a firm or of life, and that therefore
the spirit of music in Wagner's opera,
he later comes to believe was not in the service of life,
but actually was a symptom of what he called decadence.
What was that all about?
Well, I think there are several ways of approaching this.
One is that whereas in his work, Nietzsche
was increasingly moving away from Chopinauer,
Wagner was moving toward Chopinauer.
He had conceived of the Ring cycle very much
under the influence of Feuerbach and was somebody
who was tapping into the revolutionary ethos of that period.
In fact, he had to leave Dresden because of his association
with the 1848 revolution.
But increasingly in his work, he embraced Chopinauer.
This caused him actually to revise the Ring cycle
in various places to make it accord with what he was doing.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, I think increasingly
saw this kind of denial of the will, which
is the ultimate point of Chopinauer's philosophy
as life negating.
And if you put this move away from Chopinauer
with the increasing tension in his relationship with Wagner,
you have a recipe for him also to turn on Wagner for various reasons.
Maybe we could just hear something
from the Ring cycle to give you a flavor of what Wagner
was writing at the time he got to know Nietzsche.
And what will be Bielissengt of here?
Well, I've chosen an excerpt from Zeke Fried,
which was the third part of the four-part Ring cycle,
the Tetralogy De Rindes-Nebelungen.
This part is called Zeke Fried, and I'm going to play
the prelude to Act III.
So this is a part that Wagner wrote some 12 years after abandoning
the project, because partly because of this crisis,
of discovering Chopinauer and realizing
that he was going down the wrong path, so to speak.
And he takes this up again in the late 1860s
to try and finish the whole thing.
And we get a kind of summary here of the story so far presented
in terms of the various musical motives.
So this is a piece of purely instrumental music,
and a piece of the prelude to Act III of Zeke Fried.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I faded it out at your command.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I faded it out at your command.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Well, it's hard because of the way that the music goes from one section to another,
seemingly seamlessly, and Wagner himself called the art of transition,
his finest art.
At that time, in the late 1860s,
he was still very much on board, and he would work with Wagner on the finishing of the ring cycle,
as it was getting finished.
The bi-right festival was being started up, and it was around 1876 at the time of the festival that
Nietzsche wrote, something that was still very much an apologetic writing for Wagner,
creeping into it were sentiments that sounded as though he was distancing himself.
For example, when he criticized Wagner's own writings in terms of somebody who was a phyto,
it had his right arm cut off, and bravely fought on with his left.
He was acknowledging still what a great composer he was, but he was beginning to introduce these
barbs into his statements about Wagner.
This would eventually, after a very, very big falling out, give rise to a foreblown criticism of the ring cycle.
I could give you maybe a flavor of where this all ends up in the case of Wagner from the 1880s,
where he writes about the shift in the ring cycle from something that's focused on the revolutionary character of
Zeigfried to focusing much more on the God, the sad God, Voltan, who is full of resignation and is willing the end in a kind of
Chopin-Haurium way. This is how Nietzsche describes this in the case of Wagner.
So he's describing, first of all, the original plan, but his main enterprise aims to emancipate woman to redeem
Blun Hilda. Zeigfried and Brinn Hilda, the sacrament of free love, the rise of the Golden Age, the twilight of the Gods for the old morality,
all ill has been abolished.
Then he continues, "For a long time Wagner's shift followed this coarse gaily. No doubt this was where Wagner sought his highest goal.
What happened?"
"A misfortune. The ship struck a reef. Wagner was stuck. The reef was sharpened house philosophy. Wagner was stranded on a contrary world view.
What had he transposed into music? Optimism. Wagner was ashamed.
Even an optimism for which Chopin Haur had coined an evil epithet, infamous optimism. He was ashamed a second time.
He reflected for a long while his situation seemed desperately desperate. Finally, a way out dawned on him, the reef on which he was shipwrecked.
What if he interpreted as the goal, as the secret intent, as the true significance of his voyage, to be shipwrecked here?"
That was a goal too.
There's a lot to unpack in that passage that you read.
The first thing I'm curious about is the falling out between Nietzsche and Wagner, not all along ideological lines,
which is what gets most of the attention from Nietzsche later, but the personal.
There were a few years of Nietzsche's life where the happiest years of his life, where he was in the Wagner household,
and close with Wagner and his wife and another set of friends there.
Certainly, it's not just for ideological reasons that his relationship with Wagner started souring, no?
No, I think that's right. I think that they were falling apart in several respects probably,
but there was a personal dimension to it which I think really created a particular tension and really adds to the intensity of Nietzsche's later critique.
It's very much on a personal level. It's well known that Nietzsche suffered from headaches and bad migraines for much of his life,
and he read up on ways of treating his ailments.
He eventually got in touch with a doctor, Otto Aisar, his name,
and this was around the time of the opening of the Birot Festival,
which I think is no coincidence.
Aisar himself was an avid Wagnerian and founded a Wagner society in Frankfurt,
and he discussed his opinions of Nietzsche's ailments with Nietzsche,
but he also discussed them with Richard Wagner.
And so there's this extremely unprofessional thing happening that Wagner's getting a little too interested in Nietzsche's health,
and his offering opinions,
and Aisar is actually sharing his discussions with Nietzsche.
Eventually, Wagner writes to Aisler, to Aisar with his own opinion of what's going on in Nietzsche's case,
and this is what he writes.
"I think strongly about Nietzsche's present state and compare it to the identical or similar experiences that I've made of young men with great intellectual promise.
I saw them decay from similar symptoms and learn to readily that these were the results of ownonism."
In other words, masturbation.
"As I have closely observed Nietzsche through such experience, all of his modes of feeling and characteristic practices have turned my fears into certainties.
I do not have to tell a friendly physician any more details,
one can only say that the ophthalmologist that Nietzsche consulted in Naples a while ago recommend that above all he marry."
And Aisar concurred eventually with this diagnosis.
He was inclined to agree, and later one of Nietzsche's,
and there was, it's possible that the gossip was spreading around by Royce,
so Nietzsche would later confide with a friend,
and the friend, a character called Kretzer, who worked in the Nietzsche archives,
"I now come to Aisar's relationship to Friedrich Nietzsche. Why did Nietzsche break with Wagner?"
And Aisar stated, "I alone know because it took place in my house in my examining room when I gave Nietzsche the letter from Wagner with the best intentions,
and outbreak of anger was the result. Nietzsche was beyond himself. When cannot repeat the words he applied to Wagner, at that moment, the breach was sealed."
"Yeah, well I don't blame Nietzsche one bit for that."
Yeah, but I think you can then, it's hard once you know about this biographical constellation there between the two,
it's hard to read those late writings and ignore the venom in relation to what Nietzsche is saying about Wagner,
because in a sense, Wagner was suggesting that Nietzsche should have, by saying he should have got married and should stop masturbating is really impugning his character,
and I think there's a sense in which Nietzsche is then striking back in impugning Wagner's character,
and maybe if that episode hadn't have happened, the vehemence wouldn't have been so great, and the barbs wouldn't have been so vicious.
There are certainly a vehemence there. The venom perhaps also, although Nietzsche to the end insisted that even though Wagner was his antipode, as he called him, he was a great genius and a great artist,
he might have been a decadent artist, but a great decadent artist, and I also believe that had this incident not a cure,
the scene at the byrothe festival was one that someone like Nietzsche could not have handled with great sort of equanimity because it was full of theatricality and posing, and Wagner's whole kind of kissing up to power and so forth.
I think that's right. I think in a way this kind of speculation about human ailments and all the various cultural metaphors that go with it was widespread at the time, and so Wagner was engaging in that.
Nietzsche for his part was not only hearing this from Wagner, but in talking about Wagner as a sickness, he wasn't just responding to what Wagner was saying, he was using the cultural metaphors of the age as well.
There was an article in 2008 by Sandra Gilman where I think he was analyzing this and really testing the extent to which one, how far one can go too far if you like in analyzing this very potent mix.
There were other aspects to be sure, so it wasn't just about the medical issues, it was about the way in which Wagner in a sense had given up his earlier revolutionary standpoint, become a member of the establishment was being under written by King Ludwig, of Bavaria, and was forming toward all of these patrons of the byrothe festival.
It was also a critique of the kind of hysteria that was surrounding the reception of Wagner's music which really turned Nietzsche off.
And as a musicologist yourself, Stephen, what do you think of Nietzsche's substance of Nietzsche's criticism of Wagner's aesthetics in the sense of music put to the service of transport, a letting oneself go in this infinite melody where you lose your bearings, and there's a general loss of orientation, and just being a drift in this sense of the kind of
swimming in the sea as he calls it rather than dancing on hard ground.
It's true that Nietzsche associates with metaphors of sickness, decadence in other words, but apart from that did he perceive something in an lucid way about Wagner's music?
Well, I think he did, I think he to the last recognize that Wagner was a supreme artist, so he heard Parciphar, one of the late works and said in response, did Wagner ever write anything better, and heard the prelude and was just bold over, but he also then criticized the piece in terms of Wagner's sinking.
Helpless and broken before the Christian cross.
A site exaggeration because there's something fairly pantheistic about the way in which the religious symbols are used in Parciphar, but nonetheless he really felt that Wagner was going in the wrong direction at the same time as he was appreciating what an amazing composer.
The key work I think in all of this was Tristan and his older, which he defined as the real opus metaphusicum of all art.
I mean, that's a pretty strong thing to say, and as long as he was in thrall to Schopenhauer, it was probably the highest thing he could say with Schopenhauer's metaphysics at the will in mind.
But he could also at the same time then use that in terms of a bit of polemic against Wagner's style.
Maybe we could just hear a little bit of the prelude to Tristan and his older, which I think also provides a wonderful illustration of what we were talking about earlier in relation to dissonance in music.
Perhaps you could play some, and then we can talk about it afterwards and maybe hear a little bit more.
Okay, so I'll play a little and then I'll pause.
Yes.
Okay, these are the opening measures of the prelude to Tristan and his older. It's a passage that comes back later in the opera at the point where Tristan and his older drink a potion.
They think it's a deaf potion, but it's actually a love potion.
And with the first three notes, Wagner was very much into my thesis, and you could imagine that this would accompany the raising of the chalice, the first three notes, and then when the love potion, as it well goes down the hatch, that is the moment where you hear that first sonority, which is referred to in music theory as the Tristan chord.
Has a special name because it's very difficult to label it in conventional terms. It is a dissonance. It resolves to something that's still a dissonance.
But it never resolves into the sonority that one might expect the tonic. Instead, the whole passage is repeated a little bit higher.
That's called a sequence in music and then there's another sequence. And then as the music becomes more intense, it becomes louder.
It keeps evading resolution. So the dissonance is set up suggesting some kind of resolution, but the cadence is then an evaded one or an interrupted one.
We can hear this maybe a little bit more in the Tristan Prelude.
[Music]
Well, he did. And he would say until the end that Tristan is a central work, one of fascination that has no parallel on the same way that he found something fascinating in the way that passafel has written the antidote that he set up, not only to Tristan, but also to Wagner, as it were, in his political writings was Bisei.
He also in privately, although he held Bisei up as the antidote in the sense of something southern going against the north, something refreshing, something dancing rather than swimming.
Something that danced rather than was swimming rather than the sort of sweaty nature of Wagner's music.
He said that it shouldn't really be taken that seriously. He says the way I am, Bisei does not matter to me at all, but as an ironic antithesis to Wagner, it has a strong effect.
And then after, so there's a sense in which he needed something as an antithesis and Bisei wasn't necessarily saying that Bisei was a greater composer.
And then after that he says it would have been inordinately bad taste if I had used as an incommian on Beethoven as my starting point.
So he could have used actually something German, but he chose to go the whole hog with the southern metaphor.
I think he says somewhere in the case of Wagner or Nietzsche, Kantar Wagner, that he says it in French, for Meditez and Azilamuzik, the Mediterranean-ized music, and therefore to choose a German would not have served as purposes.
He could have chosen any number of other Italians, for example. However, on the philosophical level now we talked about Dionysianism and the birth of tragedy, Wagner's music.
When Nietzsche starts proposing someone like Bisei as an example of a counter style, of a lighter touch of dancing rather than swimming, and the south against the north, do you think that he's taken a turn later?
To more towards Apollo rather than Dionysus in that original sort of dynamic between the Apollonian and the Dionysian and the birth of tragedy, where now Nietzsche wants to affirm the principle of form,
the form, the individual, and the lucid contours of form and so forth against the Dionysian dissolution of all things into an amorphous primordial chaos.
I think it's certainly there, and I think it's something that can be extracted from his later writings.
If you think about the period around 1910, just after Richard Strauss's lecture was given its first performance, this is a work that very much goes against the whole tradition of the noble simplicity of German Hellenism and is brutal, is psychological, violent, it's full of dissonance, that it's almost atonal in places.
Nietzsche was used as the sort of patron saint of that particular piece, and the person that had originally criticized the birth of tragedy as the philology of the future, Villa Morvitz, and in some ways had done a lot to damage Nietzsche's reputation.
He was held up as the paragon of the lighter Hellenism, as opposed to the Nietzsche inversion of it.
Shortly after that, however, there was what's called a classicist turn, and Strauss himself started composing pieces like Horsenkavalier.
There were writings about music, Jean-Cocco, Pelemosized against Wagner, and used Nietzsche as the paradigm of what he calls a new small classicism, and people like Brecht used, and we're getting back to Quat-Vile as well.
These characters all used Wagner and his critique of the narcotic power.
Nietzsche used Nietzsche.
They used Nietzsche and his critique of the narcotic power of music as a way of theoretically justifying their own new approach.
So from a point of view of musical history, and I'm asking this naively because I don't really know, does Wagner have really important heirs in the 20th century, or does the 20th century see more sympathetic to Nietzsche's critique of Wagner in its major moments of expression?
I would say that the first half of the 20th century is emphatically anti-Vagnerian.
But remember that all of these people like Brecht and Vile and Stravinsky and Schoenberg and others had all been absolutely enthralled to Wagner when they were younger.
Schoenberg in many ways still stuck with Wagner and recognized his influence, but it's this younger generation born around 1900.
The development of epic theater is seen as something that is a specific negation of the Wagnerian model.
So I would say that the anti-Vagnerian impulse has the upper hand.
We talked in our Schoenberg's Kurt Vile about the epic theater and its deliberate aesthetics of alienation or defamiliarization.
Was that a conscious effort to break the spell that Nietzsche had accused Wagner of casting on his audience through the histrionics of his music?
Yes, I think it very much was. At the same time, there's no denying that Wagner is still one of the most beloved composers in our own day and age by those who go to symphonies and operas and so forth.
There's something still irresistible to a great many music go. Would you agree with that?
I think there is that the Wagner reception is alive and well. People travel across continents and from one continent to another to go and see the ring cycle.
I think even the detractors have a lot to learn there, somebody like Debussy who palemphasized against Wagner was also at the same time very much enthralled to Wagner, learnt a lot about orchestration,
a lot about how to deploy different kinds of orchestral timbras.
Even though people might be anti-Vagnerian, they're still learning a lot from him.
A lot of people don't see any contradiction there that they can go to Wagner and they can also go to Stravinsky and see them as complementary.
Yeah, that raises issues that we could talk about even in terms of Nietzsche's own output.
For example, he writes human all to human in 1878 and sends it to Wagner and he later says that that was the cross.
That work is written in the form of aphorisms.
It's dedicated to Voltaire, it has an epigraph from Descartes.
Wagner was notoriously anti-French.
I think Nietzsche knew exactly what he was doing when he invoked these two French figures at the start of his book.
This aphoristic style of lucidity, condensation and compactness seems to be a French deliberate,
and the other hand, he writes a rather anomalous book like Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is Dionysian,
which is in some senses, Wagnerian, if you think of the way that work is intoxicated with its own rhythms and figures and its music.
I think that's right. Wagner said of human-autly human that he had done Nietzsche the kindness of not reading it,
and his greatest wish and hope was that Nietzsche would thank him for. He clearly had read it and took exception to it.
I think you're also right that in Zarathustra Nietzsche says later on in actually Homer that the whole of Zarathustra could be reckoned as music.
There is a sense in which he is trying to transcend language, transcend metaphor, and get that kind of immediacy of musical communication in his own writing.
It may be something of an irony that one of the greatest prose stylists in German should be somebody who ultimately was aware of the limitations of the medium and had music as his ultimate model.
And maybe that's also where some of his...
This is a very complicated relationship clearly, and he's polemicising against Wagner at the same time as he's acknowledging that Wagner is one of the truly great components.
And one he, for example, in the case of Wagner, palemisises, rather viciously against Wagner.
Somebody would written a four-day cycle, 16 hours of continuous music, and then had dubbed him perhaps our greatest miniaturist.
He was getting the ocean that somehow it was all bitty. Nietzsche was almost always a miniaturist. He composed nothing, but miniatures.
So you always have to look at this personal side to this, the possibility in his own writings of some kind of transference as well.
We could hear maybe a little bit of nature because the fact that he wrote music isn't very well known, and the music itself is even less well known.
I've brought along a little snippet from which is called "Monnadi Adure".
So a bit of a contradiction in terms there because Monnadi is a solo piece, but here it's a solo piece for two.
And then the subtitle is called "Lorbed Air Barme Hatsishkite, in praise of mercy or compassion."
And he wrote it as a wedding gift, and the title is a pun on the names of the recipients, the couple, Gabrielle Monnod, hence Monnadi, and Olga Hatsen, hence
who was the adoptive daughter of one of Nietzsche's friends, Mow Vida von Meisenberg.
So this is the Monnadi Adure. We're going to hear the second half.
And musically you can almost imagine the point in the ring cycle where the gods come into Valhalla.
He clearly has an ear for Wagner's music here, and then there are also some very unusual moments of harmonic evasion, less Tristan-esque perhaps than from the Master Singers, which was truly one of his favourite operas as well.
So let's just hear a couple of minutes of Monnadi Adure.
[Music]
Yeah, after the Tristan-ing result it seems a little under-achieved, but that's probably something to do with the fact that you just have a piano.
Well it's partly that I think it's partly though that he wasn't the composer that Wagner was, and he must have recognised this.
He was a philologist who really wanted to be a philosopher, and he saw his work as a philologist as serving some kind of overarching philosophical enterprise as he himself said.
And I don't think he ultimately aspired to be a musician in any kind of professional sense, but music was absolutely central.
It has to be the way he writes, because it's true that as a formal composer he's nowhere the stylist that he is when he writes, but his prose, even when he's writing these kind of terse aphorisms,
the musical sense, it's remarkable. He had an ear, and he always insisted on the knee-dev in the ear.
He really did, and his prose has terrific rhythm.
And I think in looking at this 130 years after the fact of these two antipodes as he called them, that both Nietzsche and Wagner have held their ground in the 20th century and into our own century,
where one has not defeated the other, but their legacies are still sort of with us.
And since we have just a few minutes left, Stephen, I wanted to ask you to go back to your book on Kurt Vile, not the book as such,
but whether you think Kurt Vile is an example of a 20th century composer that is a little more on the, I mean, we've already admitted as much, but he's more on the Nietzsche divide of this polemic than he is on the Wagner side, and this transposition of music into more popular forms.
You know, Broadway, one act plays and so forth. Do you think Nietzsche would have approved of this expanding the frontiers of music and bringing it down into modes that do allow for dance in the literal sense of the word?
Yeah. Well, I think there was something almost programmatic about how the composers in the 1920s composed dance music, if they were realizing Nietzsche's recipe, even Richard Strauss in the pieces that I mentioned earlier in Elektra finishes with a dance as he does in Salome as well.
Certainly, Vile was one of those composers who took off from Nietzsche's critique of Wagner and learned a lot from it. He wrote expressly about it.
Whether Nietzsche would have approved of the interest that Vile had in composing for the masses, I don't know. There was something contemptuous about Nietzsche's writings about the theater.
Ultimately, he became fairly, having started talking about Greek drama, he became somewhat critical of the theater, but he could say of Bisei that his music, Carmen in particular, was subtly fatalistic at the same time that it remained popular.
So I think there was something there that you could see as Nietzsche, you could see Vile and Nietzsche's having in common a work like Street Scene, which is a Broadway opera.
There is a conflation in a way of many strands of music, of Puccini, of Wagner, as of Jitterbug, Jazz, Gershwin, all coming together.
The plot of the whole thing is subtly fatalistic, but it also remains so popular. This may be in some ways his most Nietzsche and work in the late period.
Well, I'm certainly looking forward to that book of yours, which will be a very shortly Vile's musical theater stages of reform.
I'd like to remind our listeners that we've been speaking with professors, Steven Hinton from the Department of Music here at Stanford for entitled opinions. I'm Robert Harrison.
Stay tuned. We'll be with you next week. Steven, thank you very much for coming on.
In reminiscence of Kurt Vile, I'm going to leave us with a song, not a composition of his, but performed by a later musical ensemble called The Doors.
It's the Alabama song.
Oh, yes. Well, it's my pleasure, Robert. This is from originally from the Mahagony Zongspiel, where it was also a kind of dance, a kind of shimmy.
And here we have it by the doors. Wonderful.
Terrific. Thanks again.
Pleasure. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
[MUSIC]