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A complex nineteenth century: the awakening of nationalities in music 0:00 Yes, hello everyone, Musicosophy is back. Hello, Aymeric. Yes, so today, I know the theme, you just told me, it's Nietzsche and Wagner, of course, musical relations par excellence, but not only that, musico-sophistic, no not sophistic, but musico-philosophical. If that were all, if it were only musical. Even geopolitical. That would be a good introduction, I hadn't thought of it, but does he hold his music against him, the man, his ideology?
0:37 That's all been studied. Well, let's tackle this main course. Exactly, yes, absolutely, yes. I don't know if I'll be up to such a massif, to continue the altitude metaphors. Yes, Nietzsche, Wagner, well, not only are we not moving on to a new subject after last time's session, but on the contrary, it's in full continuity, let me explain.
1:07 Last time, I allowed myself to recall that there is perhaps no era as complex, as difficult to reduce to modeling, to analysis, to clarity and distinctness, as one would have said at the beginning of the great century, when it wasn't yet the great century, when it was still the baroque and not yet classicism. Descartes, that's it.
1:38 It's closer to Corneille than to Racine, it's closer to the... We say baroque and classical, not in the sense of the history of music. Yes, but we'll come back to that another time, because that too is a great divide. This 17th century which from afar seems extraordinarily homogeneous, the century of Louis XIV, the century of classicism, the longest reign in the history of France—when you look closely, it's completely split in two. There's the Louis XIII period and the Louis XIV period, that is, the Corneille period, the Racine period, that is, the Descartes period, the Pascal period.
2:08 You can't get more antithetical than that. We'll come back to that another time. But here, then, yes, what complexity, this 19th century where suddenly geography, like the history of music, seems to go off in every direction. And even, almost, spilled beyond the borders of Europe. We've seen that, so I won't go back over it. The awakening of nationalities, that's for the historians. Even those who don't concern themselves with music know well that this is the period of the awakening of nationalities in Europe.
2:38 Hungary starts shaking things up, Hungarian nationalists shake off the yoke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Scandinavian countries, Russia starts banging on the table artistically. The Russian school appears in music with Glinka from the middle of the century on. I'll make a little musical aside. If we look at the admirable series of reports on Sviatoslav Richter, the immense Soviet pianist.
3:10 I'm not saying he's the greatest pianist of the 20th century, that doesn't mean anything. But still, he's among the greatest contenders for the title, alongside a few others. At one point, we see Richter himself telling how, when he was young, not yet very well known, he trained his hand as an opera rehearsal pianist. To save the cost of an orchestra during rehearsals, they take a pianist, they took young Sviatoslav. What good training, playing things that weren't written for piano. Or with your fingers you have to make a horn, a flute, a soprano, a tenor.
3:43 Just by the way. And he says, I was asked to play a role in a film, to play the part of Liszt. Yes, that's it, that's exactly what Liszt used to do. And we see Glinka arriving with his wife by sleigh because someone sent him a message that Liszt was giving a concert. So Glinka arrives and of course Richter tells all this. He gets up from his piano, takes his hand and says, Franz Liszt.
4:17 And the other replies, Mikhail Glinka. The birth of Russian music, the appearance of Russian music in the sonic concert of nations, in the concert in the auditory sense. An era of incredible complexity. The awakening of nationalities. Enescu's Romanian rhapsodies, right? Grieg's Norwegian melodies, Bartók, Kodály for Hungary.
Two paths of renewal: Russian archaism and the school of Vienna 4:48 Poland seems to have given so much earlier with Chopin that it's a bit more absent at this point. It will come back in the 20th century with people like Penderecki. But the most important thing above all is that this is the era when music arrives at this paradox. That's my general introduction before getting to the Nietzsche-Wagner dossier. I'm looking at against what background this Nietzsche-Wagner pairing appears.
5:21 and this background is that apparent chaos I spoke of, which is not a chaos, which is the culmination of a whole logic. Now, precisely, there are two contradictory logics that partly explain the difficulty of this era. On one hand, there's creativity like never before. New paths are explored like never before. And why? Because—and here's the antithesis—there's a sort of exhaustion. We're coming out of a sequence that runs from Bach to Wagner.
5:52 Well, I mean, passing through Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, no less. I mean, and it seems one can't go any further beyond that. In some sense. Or else—I'm getting to this, we've already discussed it a lot, so I won't dwell on it too much, but I'll recall it with another angle. It seems a renewal is necessary and that this renewal is going to be two-headed. This is a reminder I'm giving. On one hand, there's the renewal via the Russian school.
6:24 That is, it's not an absolute novelty. It's not a matter of making man's ear hear something that has never been heard in the history of music. That will be the business of the Viennese school, Schoenberg. No, on the contrary, it's about returning to quasi pre-European archaisms. Yes, that's going to give us Stravinsky, actually. There, there. Happy that word left your mouth, right? To paraphrase. What word crossed the barrier of your lips?
6:54 There, there. Exactly. So, I didn't do too badly, if I may allow myself this self-praise, with my rough sketch of Stravinsky. You see, you recognized it. It's well known that the Rite of Spring is anything but a Vivaldi-style spring, little birds, man's song. No, no, no, no, no. It's brutality, it's savagery, it's archaism, it's pagan. It's sometimes bloody rituals. After all, it ends with the sacrifice of a young girl, this story, this ballet.
7:24 Who must dance to exhaustion to appease the gods. I begged for death among these cruel peoples who only appease their god with the blood of mortals. So, there's this first attempt at renewal, but at the price—and it's a price I'm the first to agree to pay for my musical pleasure—but at the price of stepping outside the modes, forms, and genres of European classical music of several centuries.
7:59 which had reached exhaustion, or saturation. So there's the opposite. The second Viennese school, compared to the first, which is classicism, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. The second Viennese school, so Schoenberg, Berg, Webern—I remind you, this is the very beginning of the 20th century, roughly, up until the outbreak of the war, practically. Even though there are admirable compositions by Schoenberg right after the war.
8:32 But the break happens before that. And here it's the opposite. We start from what was at the extreme cutting edge of Europe's musical evolution in the period I'm talking about, that is, roughly, everything that comes out of the score of Tristan and Isolde. That is, from the exasperation of chromaticism, which leads—these are the classics of musicology that I'm recalling, but in order this time—this exasperation of chromaticism leading to a threat of dissolution of tonality.
9:11 That's what we talked about last time. Tonality, which had been the substantial unity of music up to that point. We had gone so far as to say that the tonic was to the ear what gravity is to the dancer, what the verticality of down, the relation of up and down, is for the dancer, which imposed a privileged direction. Likewise in music, the tonic—we had seen, for example, that in the melody of Au clair de la lune, the tonic note, the do, comes back five times out of eleven notes.
The Tristan chord: tonality at its limit, like Racine 9:44 That's what dissolves starting with Wagnerian harmonies where you never know, with delayed minor thirteenth chords in appoggiatura. The Tristan chord, what is it? It's this one. How is it described musically? You're testing me. No, I'm not likely to find myself in trouble because it would be pretentious to answer you. There must be 2,000 pages or 10,000 pages written to answer your question.
10:18 Right? But no, come on, I'll still try to be honest and not dodge the question. What's certain is there are several references, but I'm thinking of Chailley, who is surely the musicologist, one of those who worked most on this question. Chailley demonstrated, over the course of a dense and very voluminous study, that there isn't a single Tristan chord, particularly in the prelude, that doesn't ultimately reduce to classical modulations.
10:51 That's somewhat a counterpoint to a Schoenberg who says that from Tristan onward, there's no more tonality. Actually, Wagner threatens tonality. It's tonal music, but perpetually borderline. And a curious comparison, of a hyper post-romantic like Wagner—I compare that to Racine. Ah yes, of course, yes. You're working the net a bit there.
11:22 No, but I've demonstrated elsewhere... Divine constraint, as Valéry would say. I've demonstrated—yes, that's it. I've demonstrated, no, but above all, very precisely, the fact that in Racine, we're always at the limit... That's the connection with what we're saying. Just as we're at the limit of tonal constraint starting with Tristan, with Racine, we're always at the limit of transgressing the rules of classical tragedy. Good grief. Even though we make him the paragon of classical art.
11:52 He's not in the middle. He's at the limit. At the limit, for example, of the unity of place. Ready to receive you, our vessels await you. There are vessels there, you can feel the taut ropes, the rigging there. Soon, they're going to cast off the moorings. And from the foot of the altar you may climb aboard, sovereign of the seas that must bear you, right? Friends, is everything ready? No. Hippolytus in Phèdre is always on the verge of departing. Of course, he won't leave.
12:22 Otherwise, he would break the unity of place. He's always at that limit. And Phèdre: 'Would that I were seated in the shade of the forests.' Ah, good grief! What's this appeal to the periphery? When we're at the center and we're still the husband of the king of Athens. The husband of the king of Athens, no less. There. So, it's a bit like—just as Racine is the emblem of our classical poetry, while... let me commit a barbarism here.
12:53 While always challenging it to its limit—likewise, Wagner does the same thing with tonality. I'll start by answering you that way. But no, if I take the Tristan chord, that is... F, B, D-sharp, G-sharp. There, practically from the very first measure. I don't know if you can hear it there. Can you hear it? Yes, yes. I'll repeat the chord itself, that's it. Yes.
13:23 That's it. What's especially important... in harmony, what needs to be taken into account is the anacrusis before it, the way we arrive at this chord. Yes, the anacrusis, you mean the attack, like that. Yes, that's it. Of course. And which slumps, if I may say so. Yes, that's it. Like Wagner on his couch in Venice, no doubt, saying, I'll never get there. It's a chord of which one can say it foreshadows an A minor, but just as well a C major. There's a tonal uncertainty.
13:53 That's undeniable. In that sense, tonality was cast off, but only for a few measures, because the appoggiaturas end up resolving. Come on, let's continue. But we don't stay there. That takes me to B flat. So we don't stay on B flat. But we can keep hearing the resonance of the B flat in our ear. It's really devious music.
14:28 There, B flat. You just have to act as if you didn't hear the resolution, right? There. So that's how I answer your question. Once again, I refer you to multiple sources. So, I noted with pleasure something I myself discovered on the web. It's not my culture to begin with, you can imagine given my age group. But there's on Google, well on the internet, an entry, 'the Tristan chord.'
15:04 There are multiple sites that take up this Tristan chord dossier and try to answer your question. There. That's why I won't claim to settle it in a few seconds. Except, roughly, with Chailley's position, which says very well, roughly, that Wagner still remains somewhere within tonal constraint, but does everything to give us the impression it has disappeared.
15:37 Is it? Or if you prefer another metaphor, they're trapeze artists who take our breath away because suddenly they let go, they fall. But Wagner was constantly setting up a safety net. He catches you, right? As we just saw with Kluski-Bekar a moment ago. There. I recall here. Good. What made me suddenly talk about Tristan? Yes, there. Schoenberg, the antithesis of Stravinsky, starts from the Tristan chord and then he takes the step further that—no, it wasn't Wagner who took it.
Schoenberg: from atonality to serialism 16:10 That is, he abandons tonality even before his music is called dodecaphonic or serial. We've often alluded to this notion; today we'll be a bit more precise. It's atonal first. There's first the abandonment of tonality. Some connoisseurs, as they say with lots of scare quotes, aren't entirely stupid when they say this is perhaps one of the most interesting periods of Schoenberg—the one where there's no more tonality and there isn't yet, I won't say the rhetoric, but there isn't yet the dodecaphonic formalization and the constraints of serial music.
16:51 For example, there isn't yet the series that replaced the theme or tonality. This is the period when he's searching, I think, in the Kammersymphonie, the first chamber symphony, right? Opus IX, as far as I know. You see, we're really in still-youthful works. But it's not the very first works, it's not Opus IV, it's not yet Transfigured Night, which are post-Brahmsian, post-Wagnerian; the Gurre-Lieder are absolute masterpieces, but in which one has the impression that Schoenberg reviews everything most beautiful in the music that preceded him, to say farewell—which is very cultural, very Hebraic.
17:35 Why did you choose me to kill beautiful music? Look how beautiful it was—there's a kind of review, as if it were, for the last time, a farewell to beautiful music: the Gurre-Lieder, the symphonic poem Pelléas et Mélisande, the same reference as Debussy, but with a quite different treatment, much more tortured. Of course, Transfigured Night, which is Opus 4, there, and a few lieder and the first quartets, I mean, to be fully exhaustive, up to that extraordinary break that is the second quartet, where already, the voice—which is very rare, that vocal parts should appear in a quartet—is an originality; you really have to wait for Schoenberg for that.
18:22 So, this very fertile period where he abandons tonality—and, to use another metaphor, it's no longer the river, tonality, which is a bit like the privileged direction; the river follows a course, we do say a 'course,' right? With an upstream and a downstream, there's an order. No, it's the sea, there are currents going off in every direction. It's oceanic music. There are the two ways in which I now come back to my starting point, in which the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
19:02 I'm going to be a bit more precise now, I'll go up to the war of '14. That's why I always say late 19th, early 20th century, up to 1920, let's say, that is, the end of the war of 1914. The old world is truly in its death throes at that point, something will never be the same after that. Except for the worst. Because in '14, people were already saying there can no longer be war now.
19:32 Look at the press of the time, I'm not making anything up. Weapons are so terrifying, in '14—we're not in '40—weapons are so terrifying that it would blow up the planet. So you see, it's unsettling to think about that. Like Hugo who said aviation would put an end to wars. Yes, there, what an era after all. Well, what follies. And we're far from the peasant common sense that had prevailed until then. Yes, in the old world and the old regime.
20:06 No, but above all, it's only the worst that we'll find again after '14. That is, we believe never again after '14. And lo and behold, 20 years later, there's something far worse than '14-18. There. But apart from that, there's something that will never be the same. Yes. There, I won't go back over it because we'd have to go into pure history and politics and there's enough material there to lead us astray. So I come back. In any case, we'll find it again through our topic.
20:36 So, music seeks its way, since I took the metaphor of the watercourse. I'm thinking of a mysterious fragment of Hölderlin, a commentary on a fragment of Pindar where he says 'The waters, the waters impetuously sought their course.' As if the main direction had been lost. The waters impetuously sought their course. And this is written at the start of the 19th century, right, when Europe is already being plowed from Spain to Russia by Napoleon's cannons or Beethoven's drums.
21:11 right? Maybe we could clarify precisely the chronology of... How does one go, with Schoenberg, from atonalism to dodecaphonism, actually? It's around 1920 that serialism was put in place. Yes, well, precisely, I wouldn't want to abandon my subject, which is Nietzsche-Wagner, but we're obliged to start where we were, music, when this dossier—I won't say this conflict, because it went as far as mad love as much as the most inextinguishable hatred between the two.
21:44 But this Nietzsche-Wagner dossier appears against the background we're in the process of developing, of which Schoenberg is no small part. Indeed, yes, generally we say it's from Opus 19 onward. They're played more rarely than some other works, that's why they're a bit less familiar. It's the works for solo piano where the first serial formalizations appear. It's just before Pierrot Lunaire.
22:14 Sorry? There, there. Yes, there, Pierrot Lunaire and even Pierrot Lunaire, that's opus 21, I think, I'm trying to remember. But in any case, the great break for me is opus 24. That is to say, there had already been serial works, but the first masterpiece, and one that's fairly frequently performed, is the Serenade opus 24. Where some, Boulez for one, will later say, it's almost a shame.
22:49 He who was so creative, so innovative, he comes back to forms, since in the Serenade you find minuet, theme and variations, you find forms again. It's not as if Schoenberg, seized with vertigo by the ocean opening before him, with this whole set, this infinity of directions none of which is privileged, were clinging to traditional structures. Even if the admirable theme and variations in opus 24, far from Goldberg, from Diabelli, isn't it, or a fortiori from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star by Mozart as a set of variations.
Reading of § 255: healing through the south 23:26 There. Yes. So, I'll perhaps begin with a quotation from Nietzsche which I've even cited before in other contexts, but the most important texts in our... are those that can be called upon for problems and questions apparently independent of one another. Because they put their finger on a symptom. There. I'll read this text, paragraph 255 of Beyond Good and Evil, where he says—yes, I'll say first why I'm reading it, it's because it announces the whole program we've just been talking about, including the music he won't hear, he'll die before or he'll have, or he'll have sunk into madness before, all this music which up to today, the music of the twentieth, twenty-first centuries, including jazz, is anticipated there.
24:24 So it's a crucial passage. And we're going to see that this music he calls for, this new music, which he thought he heard... The famous music sister to the palm tree, no? Yes, exactly. Bravo, that's the passage. When he speaks of... But there's more precision. No, not yet, in fact, you're taking the words out of my mouth, this music whose first shock for him was hearing Bizet's Carmen, of course. There's already Spain, so Africa, the palm tree, we're not far. Let's go.
24:56 I hold that one must approach German music—so what reigned from Bach down to him—with great caution. Right, we've swallowed enough of it, we can feel it coming. A man who loves the south as I love it. There, our debate, Nietzsche versus Wagner, first statement of the problem, south versus north. That's clear. Let's try to see it clearly and this period will be less chaotic.
25:26 I hold that one must approach German music with great caution. A man who loves the south as I love it. As a great school of recovery for the soul and the senses. There's the word out. And there are still fools who take Nietzsche as an aesthetic, philosophical, theoretical reference, as if that were his point, poor unfortunate man. He's a sick man seeking a cure. The fundamental dichotomy for Nietzsche is the healthy and the unhealthy.
25:56 Besides, right now we hear the word sanitary, it doesn't surprise me that... That's what led me to choose this topic. I'm starting to have it, I was going to say, up to here—sorry, that was a friend's expression, it made me laugh yesterday evening—I mean this invasive sanitarism, isn't that so? There. So, I'll still recall... In Nietzsche it's invasive too, indeed, yes. Ah, but this is the beginning of the era we're living through.
26:28 this way of having others take charge of your health at every moment. Don't eat that, it's not organic! Oh come on, really, enough! The famous 'Umwertung aller Werte,' it's a transformation of good into evil. But actually that's not even his problem, good and evil. Even less true and false, but that—let's say even the fairly erudite Nietzscheans who don't just wave their idol like a banner, but who've actually read a bit of his books, know that he doesn't care at all about true and false, I don't know, completely.
27:06 They give themselves the right to contradict on page 14 what he says on page 13. On the other hand, they prefer the aphorism, isn't that so, to the systematic treatise, all that is very well known. You don't need me to tell you that, I'll move on. On the other hand, I mean, the healthy and the unhealthy, that's recurrent and becomes increasingly invasive and important right up to his last writings. That's why I'm insisting on this. Yes, so, I'll say, still, since we mentioned the pandemic, so, it's a serious matter.
Parenthesis: the pandemic and the crisis of capital 27:37 I'm in the most exposed age bracket. Ah yes, certainly. I'm not saying, like some conspiracy theorists, which I am not, that the virus was invented in a lab somewhere in Houston or in China, I don't know, it doesn't matter, it depends which side you're on, and that China threw it out to ruin the West. The West, isn't that so, to hide the great crisis of capital announced by Marx, and say, but it's the pandemic's fault, capitalism, it's efficient, but ah, if it weren't for that damned virus sent by the Chinese, we wouldn't be here.
28:07 Right, there, I mean, it's serious. But the exploitation... Because we're not dogs when we defend the notion of care. But precisely, the political-media exploitation being made of it, especially these last days and today, is turning into obscene cynicism. Yes, yes. That is to say, and here I'll seem a thousand times more of a conspiracy theorist than the biggest conspiracy theorists. So, you see, apparently it's one thing and its opposite. I don't rule out that the dithering that is the most immediate news in this matter—we lock down, we don't lock down, we lock down again, we don't, we come out of it, we go back in.
28:50 Ah, but the vaccine will solve everything, that's it, after all, the crisis is over. Ah yes, the vaccine, it's not arriving. Oh dear, not enough doses. A lawsuit this morning between the health official in Brussels and AstraZeneca who isn't providing enough. But what is all this? It's as if we were permanently playing for extra time on the pandemic. We're not going to give up such a providential windfall. I'm talking about the MEDEF, the employers, the American pension funds, the seriousness behind all this.
29:26 We're not going to, well really, at the moment when the big one is being prepared, the gravest crisis capital has known since the 1930s and no doubt one that will sweep away that one. And it's worrying because the one in the 1930s only ended with 50 million dead. There we have it, no need to blame it on capital. That would be an unbearable rehabilitation of Marx. Well, of Marx, of the rising masses, isn't that so? And of those who think that with today's productive forces, these marvels wrested from the history of intelligence, from scientific and technical creation, and from the sweat and intelligence of men, deserve better than bourgeois relations of production which reek of mold as much as anything can.
30:13 You know, when they say Marxism is outdated, it makes me laugh because capitalism long predates Marxism. So if it's outdated, by a simple mathematical relation of order that I'm drawing, capitalism has been in the trash for a long time. Well no, it's still here. So it reeks of decomposition. There, I'm closing my parenthesis. But I'll stay with the word decomposition. I haven't left my subject, the text I'm reading. We stay with the healthy and the unhealthy. I'll pick up and continue.
Depth is on the surface: Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx 30:44 A man who loves the south as I love it, as a great school of recovery for the soul and the senses. It's a sick man speaking. As a profusion of light, the south, and of sun. Is he speaking literally, figuratively? Why exclude one or the other? It's typical of pathology to hesitate between metaphor and taking things literally, isn't that so? Which transfigures everything by pouring itself out over sovereign beings, Greek statuary, full of faith in themselves.
31:15 That man, the one who loves the south as Nietzsche loves it, is somewhat wary of German music which, by making him fall back into his bad taste—there, we move from a medical demand to an aesthetic one, it's interesting to follow the text closely—into his bad taste, risks compromising his recovery too. There, the parallel is made. Having good taste is on the side of health. Good grief! Better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.
31:46 Yeah. I've heard it said, with a vulgarity that only the rich have—because the vulgarity of the fishwife at the Marseille market, that of Honorine in Pagnol, is adorable, it's delightful. Vulgarity in the etymological sense, vulgum, correct me, I'm waiting. Vulgousse, vulgousse. Vulgus, sorry, that's indeed the people. Yes, that's it. Vulgus is folk. Vulgus, folk. Good, good, so that has a popular flavor.
32:16 On the other hand, when—yes, it's a lady in a leopard coat, at the time, with sunglasses, in short, a Frenchwoman from Abidjan, who told me, better to cry in a Rolls than in a Citroën 2CV. A southerner of that species—and there I agree with Nietzsche—a southerner by conviction, that's underlined, and not by origin. Well, yes, he'll have a hard time passing, isn't that so, for a Sicilian, though he would have liked that very much.
32:46 Sometimes he happens to say, my name is somewhat Slavic in origin. You know, he tries not to be German. Yes, Polish, the greatest of the Poles. He has himself called Nitzki, there, there. Because the Poles are the French among the Slavs. But yes, there, it's the era when everything is played out constantly around races, nationalities, identities. Ah well yes, we're talking about Germany, there's even a whole chapter on that. There, yes, people and homeland. A southerner of that species, southerner by conviction and not by origin, should he happen to dream of the future of music, here we get to it.
33:18 And by means of freeing it from the grip of the North, and that's indeed what's going to happen at that point, will hear in it the first strains of a deeper music. We didn't expect that. We thought that with Carmen, we'd say a lighter music that would free us from German heaviness. No, deeper. Good grief. That's where we see that Nietzsche's depth—and this is a great quality in him, I mean, in his thematics—depth lies in the surface, not in the depths.
33:50 Yes, because he does say, I don't recall exactly where in the passage, but the people who pass for profound, that's the German people par excellence, but it's nothing of the sort, etc. So depth is superficial. No, but there's a fine dialectic of surface and depth here that recalls the best of what will be said from Hegel to Freud. In Marx it's obvious in his critique of ideology, what am I saying? When Hegel goes to great lengths to say the Idea—I say this for those who take Hegel and confuse the Idea in him, as the young Marx made this confusion, in the period when he was a Feuerbachian—the Idea, that's the ideas I have in my head.
34:26 No, not at all. In Hegel, on the contrary. The Idea, what's developed in his Logic, is precisely what consciousness practically never attains. Consciousness, in Hegel, is always caught in fantasy, indeed the Phenomenology of Spirit is somewhat the catalogue of all the fantasies consciousness is obliged to pass through, and all the ideas that succeed one another in phenomenological consciousness—none of these ideas is the Idea with a capital I, precisely. Yet in Marx there's the famous dialectic of the abstract and the concrete. No, but that's to get us there.
34:58 There's nothing more concrete than the Idea in Hegel. So, I'll get there. Hegel, to settle this debate, Hegel says the Idea is not the Idea if it doesn't externalize itself. So the Idea may well be the depth, but as long as it doesn't appear on the surface—hence his aesthetics, for example. It's the surface, or the law, his reflection on right, on writings. When he says the Code of Hammurabi, it's the first time. It's not that it's not the sovereign's arbitrariness deciding punishment and crime and chastisement.
35:33 It's written, it's a reference for everyone. It's the expression, the externalization, the passage to the outside. The Idea is truly the Idea only when it's outside my head. Well, when it incarnates itself, when it's realized, and I think of Marx saying what distinguishes even the clumsiest architect from the most skillful bee is that the architect has his house in his head before realizing it outside, because you don't really sleep well in a house on paper, on a blueprint.
36:11 There. There. So, let me recall. So here, this dialectic he's drawing between depth and surface is profound. We must take seriously what he says here about musics—we'll see—anti-Nordic, anti-German, verging on extra-European, to which he attributes depth—depth in that sense, isn't that so, not in the heavy sense of what weighs down, as in German music, but on the contrary, of what truly expresses what comes from the depths.
A music sister to the palm tree: toward Africa 36:45 A southerner, there, will hear in it the first strains of a deeper, more powerful, more cruel music. Here all of Nietzsche's ambivalent sides rush in, isn't that so—more cruel, and perhaps, and more secret. A music—and this is underlined—more than German, so we're starting to leave Mitteleuropa, the center, Germany, that is, the European center. More than German, which—which, this new music whose first echoes he hears, which, in the presence of, sorry, German music, which, in the presence of the blue and voluptuous sea that Nietzsche has before his eyes in Nice, in Genoa, etc., in Naples, in Sorrento, which, in the presence of the blue and voluptuous sea and the clarity of the southern sky, would cease to appear expiring, faded, pale, as all German music does.
37:47 He says somewhere else that Wotan is the god of bad weather. A music more than European, then—this time it's explicit. And so he anticipates, what we've already seen, that the renewal of European music at the moment of its exhaustion, to recap everything in order, will happen through the two geographic edges of Europe, through Spain, the African edge, through Russia, the Asian edge.
38:18 And when Africa is enslaved and transported to the United States, one must factor future jazz into this more-than-European music. We'll come back to it. All right? And we'll see, especially afterwards—I'll risk being a bit ironic here—that this isn't the best way to oppose Wagner, because those who know nothing at all about the problem we're looking at between Nietzsche and Wagner, who only deal with Wagner musicologically, with his scores, say that there are precisely diminished minor thirteenths in Wagner with the delayed third as an appoggiatura that announce all of jazz harmony.
39:02 It's as if we never get out of it. It's not that we want to settle it. No. I'll continue my text. A music more than European that would affirm its worth even facing the bronzed sunsets of the desert. We've arrived on the other side of the Mediterranean. We've reached the Maghreb or Egypt or Libya, whatever. All right? Have we arrived elsewhere? Not quite. It's still too familiar. The Mediterranean has never been a border between Europe and Africa. Believe someone who's flown over it by plane for professional reasons.
39:36 Almost once a month for a whole period and for many years. The Mediterranean, in under an hour, it's over, you've flown over it. But afterwards, it never ends, it's the Sahara. The separation is there. So, for now, if we only get as far as the Maghreb, to the green plain of the Mitidja or the region of Carthage north of Tunis, we're not yet at that remoteness Nietzsche requires.
40:06 So we must first reach the desert and not stop there. Watch the progression carefully. A music more than European that would affirm its worth even facing the bronzed sunsets of the desert. A music sister to the palm tree. There, in the desert, we leave the dunes behind and go to the oasis. Isn't that so? So we can feel Africa south of the Sahara coming. Isn't that so? Where the palm trees would multiply, the greenery too. A music that would feel at home among the great and beautiful solitary beasts.
40:38 Well, here we are. We've moved on to Kenya now, haven't we? Right. You've seen the progression. It's rigorous. The beautiful solitary beasts, and would go roaming with them. We picture poor Nietzsche, don't we, squinting through his glasses. You know he was... I don't know, Sartre said with a coquetry all his own, my slight strabismus, when he had one eye that told the other to get lost, to put it plainly, right? We picture Nietzsche, we imagine, roaming in a painting by... what's his name, our marvelous...
41:09 By the Douanier Rousseau, isn't that so? The flute player in the middle of the jungle like that, right? Well, I don't know if with his tailcoat and his bow tie... Thinking of the blond beast you're talking about. Yes, of course, of course. Anyway, let's be clear since we're at it. At the period we're talking about, the end of the nineteenth century, sub-Saharan black Africa isn't entirely explored. There are blank spots, as they say.
41:40 Where the white man's hand has never set foot, to borrow an old joke from Tintin, isn't that so? Where the white man's hand has never set foot, there are blank spots. It works on the imagination. We imagine that the essential thing happens at the very heart of things, in the Congo. In the heart of darkness. That's where there must be what has troubled us forever, the missing link, the missing link between ape and man.
42:10 Good grief, those are the great problems of the nineteenth century. The missing link, we must look for it there, in those unexplored zones we don't yet know—so that's where it must be. And it is there! And we find it and it's a German! It's Tarzan! No but that's extraordinary! Do you realize the sequence? The actor who played Tarzan and immortalized him on screen, Johnny Weissmuller, you couldn't make it up! The white miller! A great swimmer, by the way. That's what Weissmuller means, but there, we can't hide anything.
42:42 Who, unable to go any lower than one minute—he was the first to go under a minute in the 100 meters freestyle at the Olympic Games—reconverted himself, isn't that so, for our happiness and for his fortune, to Hollywood! All right? So what's there, at the heart? The ape-man? But of course! He's a German, I'm telling you! We're certainly not going to put a Black man there? Come on! Really, come on! All right? But this German is the master of the jungle.
43:12 The animals obey him, isn't that so? He's the new Orpheus. Right? He tames them, not with the harmonious chords of his lyre, that smacks of the Greek world, no, but with his howls. I don't know. Oh! It's extraordinary! Well, afterwards they'll say the human sciences are at least as rigorous as mathematics. Sure. And even in that very delirium, it's almost announced in the text you mentioned. Yes, yes, yes.
Parenthesis: positivism and neo-positivism 43:42 Since it's my program every Wednesday evening, I can allow myself to advertise, sorry, for my Wednesday evening series on our Facebook page, where I'm showing that, against the invasive neopositivism, since we think we've gotten rid of its advances that were Marx and Freud, that is, precisely what ruins positivist empiricism—no, not all empiricism, nor all positivity. Positivism was progress. I myself defend it. I prefer positivism to obscurantism.
44:14 I prefer Auguste Comte to Schopenhauer in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, neopositivism is a regression and not the progress that positivism was. It's a regression after the advances of Marx and Freud, after the demonstration of the symbolic order, after the natural sciences, having made their course—physics, chemistry, biology—we move to the human sciences, the sciences of history. And there, all the depth of Clouscard's quip, that so-called human sciences—Durkheim, Weber, well the founding fathers, appeared just when, as if by chance, to lock down nascent Marxism.
44:54 Yes, so precisely, Marxism is the dialectical fusion of all the human sciences. Exactly. What's interesting, for example, in Auguste Comte, is that there's already a classification of the sciences that will inspire even what the Soviets took up in planning. That's very important. He's not entirely wrong to say we shouldn't waste our time with first causes and final causes. That's what separates him from certain Marxists who keep doing metaphysics to find out whether mind precedes matter or matter precedes mind. Auguste Comte, wisely—and Kant had said it, and even more usefully, and more subtly, almost a century earlier—we must drop first causes and final causes, where we think we're talking about the world when we're talking about the antinomies in our own heads, to put it a bit simply, the antinomies of reason, as Kant says, we must drop that and, for once, I'll cite Voltaire in his favor and not against him, unlike his venomous remarks against Rousseau, we must cultivate our garden.
45:54 Between first causes and final causes, let's concern ourselves with the here and now and develop it. There, that's what I mean. What's missing in Rousseau is the class struggle, but clearly. No, no, and above all, as you say very well, it's a progress. And also, what's missing is the dialectical fusion of the natural sciences, the physical sciences—that, for him, he limits to us, precisely. There, and what you just said is all the more pertinent given that he doesn't even have the excuse of ignoring the issue, since he's the first to use the term sociology.
46:30 Yes, exactly. He's not the first to give us a treatise on sociology—we'll have to wait for Durkheim. He mentions the need to one day, I don't know, crown it, or rather it's a sociology. Because in the meantime, all we have is philosophy, and Comte has this fine phrase, actually, calling the philosopher the specialist in generalities. We oppose the generalist and the specialist. Well, we need to get past that. I come back to it—Comte's problem, I think, is the story of spectroscopy.
47:01 For him, it wasn't possible to study the chemical composition of the sun. You said -scopy, I didn't hear. At the very moment spectroscopy is invented, which will study the sun's spectrum, he issues an edict against precisely this kind of study. For him, a sort of fusion between physics, chemistry and biology was something impossible. You can't have a chemical approach to the living, precisely—which is already a symptom of his metaphysical way of thinking.
47:31 In the sense of the sciences sitting side by side. There's already this desire to classify the sciences. There isn't, as you rightly said, the dialectical unification. By contrast, a Claude Bernard, who knows biology better than anyone since he founds today's biology—exactly—at the time of Auguste Comte, a Claude Bernard, far from drawing this rigid boundary between the chemical and the biological, goes so far as to say: the living is the dead.
48:05 Let's be clear. That has romantic connotations. He didn't say no. He would have said the living is death. I grant you that. What he says is a bit aggressive. But what is he saying? What is an organic molecule? The virus. You see how we come back to it? The virus that threatens us more through the MEDEF than through its own lethality. What is a virus?
Ignoring good and evil: the escapism of the century 48:35 There's debate over whether it's a living being, a chemical thing or an organic one, it's complicated. All that. Come on, let's set aside these questions of threshold and where we place the cursor, since we'll always have occasion to come back to it—we can let it go for now and return to our subject. So I'll finish the text: a music, then, sister of the palm tree, who would feel at home among the great and beautiful solitary wild beasts and would go roaming with them.
49:05 Ah, this dreamer would imagine a music whose rarest charm would be to entirely ignore—it's underlined—good and evil. It's no longer, through an effort of will of the superman, a matter of being beyond good and evil, but simply of ignoring it. Well, let me say the word. Here, Nietzsche is—I say this behind his back—a victim of the chief malady of the century. Not in the sense of melancholy, in the literary sense, that's very profound, but it's something else. No, it's me introducing another exception.
49:37 Isn't that so? The evil, the moral fault of this century, is escapism. Rimbaud, who is far more lucid than Nietzsche at seventeen—Rimbaud is seventeen and is far more lucid than Nietzsche on the verge of collapse, than the graying Nietzsche—Rimbaud says, speaking of himself in the greatest self-portrait he ever made, in "Delires I: Foolish Virgin" in A Season in Hell, where he achieves the tour de force of literary and at the same time speculative virtuosity of making his own portrait through the mouth of a Verlaine he imagines speaking about him.
50:14 He has Verlaine say, speaking of him, Rimbaud: I never understood that rage he had to want to escape. Don't fret in your prison. Baudelaire begins with wine, hashish, artificial paradises, eros. Right? And above all death. "O Death, old captain, it is time, let us weigh anchor, this land bores us."
50:44 There it is, escapism. "O Death, let us set sail. If sky and sea are black as ink, our hearts, which you know well, are filled with rays of light." Well, let me go all the way since there are only two lines left, but it's so perfectly suited to what I'm trying to slip in about the escapism of this century. "Pour us your poison that it may comfort us." Health, sickness. "Pour us your poison that it may comfort us." The opposite of Nietzsche. "We want, so much does this fire burn our brain, to plunge to the bottom of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, what matter."
51:15 So there, you see, just like Nietzsche, we don't care, it's metaphysics. "Hell or Heaven, what matter, at the bottom of the unknown to find the new." That's the last line of The Flowers of Evil, the new. The new. In a prose poem: "One must always be drunk, that's all there is to it." On what? "On wine, on poetry or on virtue, as you wish. But get drunk." The essential thing is to escape. Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow. You could go further, of course. Let me continue, because it's fruitful.
51:47 We don't want to see it—The Wanderer and His Shadow sets up a kind of dialogue between the reader and the passing romantic hero. "What ails you, traveler, you look…" It's a bit like Baudelaire's, isn't it? You look devastated, anguished. Anyway, what are you looking for? Do you want this? The north, the south? How does he put it? Ragon, the land of vineyards? Well. Should I choose the north or the land of vineyards?
52:18 It's marvelous. What does the traveler answer? "I am seeking a mask, quick, another mask." It all echoes back—rather the lie, isn't it? We come back to Nietzschean themes, right? Classic. Isn't the surface deeper than the depth? The mask is truer, but in the Nietzschean sense, meaning less unhealthy than the truth. Beautiful individuality, Apollonian individuation, the effort of individualizing unification coming to mask the unbearable, the Dionysian depths with its masses—a kind of swarming, threatening rabble of the proletariat in the nineteenth century.
53:03 The lumpen. Well yes, the lumpen, the carnival, whatever you like. Dionysus isn't carnival. He's saturnalian. No, but there's a… Yes, but yes. The Parisian tradition of the fatted ox, have you heard of it? Yes, that's the nineteenth century. Yes, right in the thick of it. Yes, yes. No, but well, I won't go on a tangent or it would take a rifle to stop me. That's Nerval, actually. As it happens, he never stops. Let me recall that it goes back to the Apis bull of the Egyptians.
53:36 The tradition of the fatted ox of the Paris butchers, which is linked to carnival. He's probably the one who makes a symbolic connection because that's what's needed. And that we sacrifice at the moment when… No, but there's always been a cult of the ox. I've never understood why bovine… If there's no bit of Egypt and mischievous spirit in it, it's not funny. No, but I've never understood why "bovine" is a pejorative epithet, isn't it. Ah yes, it's… What's more noble than a cow? What's more noble than a cow. But yes, that's it.
A hospitable and profound music: Nietzsche and women 54:06 Go tell that to a Maasai, or a Fulani, that it's pejorative, a bovid all the same. But yes, all the same. Come on. Sacred cows. So, this dreamer would imagine a music whose rarest charm would be to—underlined—entirely ignore good and evil, and let us escape from a world in which I have, after all, responsibilities to fulfill, from good and evil. Except that perhaps a vague nostalgia for vague golden shadows and tender weaknesses would sometimes brush over it.
54:44 So he imagines himself deep in the Congo where memories would come to him of twilights over the black forest. It's strange, isn't it? Except that perhaps a vague nostalgia for vague golden shadows and tender weaknesses would sometimes brush over it. A music, he resumes, that would absorb into itself, come from very far away, from a Germany that has become distant, the tints of a declining moral world, become almost unintelligible, a music, and here comes the fall, hospitable and profound enough to welcome these belated fugitives.
55:26 The implication being that I too am a fugitive—I'm not inventing anything. The only difference between poetry in the sense of poïein, creation, literature, expression—expression, in short, what is at work in the humanities, in aesthetics—the only difference between poetics and mathematics is that poetry is an exact science. Yes. Right? No, I say that to my mathematician friends who know that it's a tribute to mathematics.
55:57 Yes, yes, yes. They do much better than merely limit themselves to exactness, don't they. They're much more operative and pragmatic, aren't they. A music that would absorb into itself, come from very far away, a music hospitable and profound enough. I do want to reflect on this last phrase though. Doesn't this pair of epithets remind you of anything? Come on, a music hospitable and profound enough to welcome this belated fugitive. I don't know, personally I picture images of Greece, of another kind of hospitality.
56:29 Come on, come on, Aymeric, we're among Frenchmen. We're among guys and among Frenchmen. Come on, come on, I'll guide you. Go on. The trifle, come on. Isn't that right? Oh yes, of course. A music hospitable and profound. No but all right, yes, I understood. As a doctor once told me who said, I don't like crudeness, I don't mean to say he's an idiot for he has neither the charm nor the depth. The depth, yes.
56:59 Sorry, we're with Rillard, we're among guys, we're among Frenchmen, among Gauls. Especially me, with my name Pagani, I don't know if I'm really a Gaul. Because it's the thing in the world most commonly shared, along with good sense. But what a confession, Nietzsche, so clumsy with women, good sense. I won't keep coming back endlessly to that terrible photo where he's there, in the Tibet of Europe, that is, near Sils Maria in the Engadine, at 3000 meters altitude—I've been there. With Paul Rée, is that it?
57:29 Yes, yes, the photo where he's pulling the little cart they give to tourists, really, it's a caricature. Nietzsche, first of the great tourist masses, isn't he? German tourists. In Switzerland, already. Well, the mediation between Italy and Germany is Switzerland, that's what I'm telling you. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, that's the Alpine school, hence the battle of Pavia. Nietzsche and Paul Rée pull the little cart in which sits the Russian woman, as Cosima put it, isn't that so?
58:07 Or Nietzsche's sister, who couldn't stand her, Elisabeth Förster—when they say "the Russian woman," you see, it's like a Ku Klux Klan guy saying "the Negro," it's the same thing. "The Russian woman," isn't it, who bewitched her brother, right? So, who is there, whip in hand. It's an extraordinary photo, really, it's beyond invention. You'd think it was a Sacher-Masoch whip with her cossack cloak. Exactly, giddy-up, whipping our two companions along, one of whom, Paul Rée, to whom—and I'm not inventing anything, I tell you we're still in mathematical rigor here and almost about to surpass it—Nietzsche had entrusted the task of asking Lou Salomé whether she would consent to marry him.
59:00 That is, he asks that of whom? Of the very man who would marry her, Paul Rée. She would be called… Ah yes, I'd forgotten that. But yes! I know she found other mentors, with Rilke. That won't be the one after. As it happens, your humble servant knew someone who knew all these people. That's quite something… Well, I'm old, but still, I knew a wonderful woman, Anna Schwartz. She was already a very old woman when I knew her. In the Drôme, she looked after handicapped children. A remarkable woman whose father had been a diplomat.
59:32 And she had known Lenin as a young girl. Bukharin. She spoke of Bukharin very familiarly indeed. She had known Mahler. She had known post-diplomatic circles of that era. Of course. Rilke. She said "Rilke" with a kindness you can't even imagine, but everything sagged—the eyelids, the eyes—everything sagged. She must have known him rather old. There you go. Yes. And Lou Salomé, of course.
1:00:02 Isn't that so? So this photo, all on its own, is a whole program. I don't want to make an image say more than it can give, but still. Now, in this photo, Lou Salomé and Paul Rée look at the photographer. Nietzsche looks at the horizon line—he's the only one not looking at us, with a strabismus more pronounced than in any of his other photos. A bow tie, a frock coat, and we're at 3000 meters altitude. You'd think you were dealing with dancing Zarathustras, wouldn't you, but instead you get a stiffness—as I understand there's a need to imagine oneself roaming among, how does he put it, the beautiful, solitary wild beasts, in the sub-Saharan jungle.
Shifting the problem: Wagner, the blues, and Siegfried Idyll 1:00:43 There. I've tried to shift the usual way of framing the problem, where we make Nietzsche a progressive, Wagner an antisemite—which he undeniably is—and therefore a reactionary. It would be so simple if there were a good guy, a bad guy, a progressive, a reactionary, as though Nietzsche were not at least as reactionary. Let me note, since we're on this subject which I won't settle, he's too…
1:01:14 One of the greatest praises of Wagner I've ever come across comes from the greatest Nazi hunter, Wiesenthal. If you don't take my word for it—I don't have time to read the text now, since I have quite a few references to get through here—but I'll put it up, if you like, on our Facebook page or somewhere, but I mean, it's worth thinking about. There's praise of Wagner from someone who knows full well his antisemitic leanings and all that, but who nonetheless recalls his whole revolutionary, progressive past—so well, in short, it's much more complicated than one might think.
1:01:56 And let me recall that this music comes from the palm tree—Wagner too is one of the first to make it resonate. And here I'm alluding to something, coming back to the heart of music, to something very precise, namely what is fundamental and perhaps, let's say, the strategic center of jazz culture, since we're talking about music that comes from the palm tree.
1:02:28 I mean the blues and, within the blues, the famous blue note. You see, I'm being very precise here all of a sudden. Here's an E major chord. That is, E, G-sharp, B. A major third followed by a minor third—that's called the perfect chord (the triad). It's so fundamental that even the most uninitiated, or those who say "oh but I don't know music theory," everyone understands what a triad is.
1:02:59 They're the notes of the bugle call. The basic notes. We've already seen, elsewhere, that what the blues brings, with a blurring and a restarting of musical harmony, is that the dichotomy—which we saw last time—between major and minor, the same chord, C major, C minor, or whatever, it's the same.
1:03:34 And three inversions of the same chord. So, the blues indulged in the luxury of doing both at once, a chord that is both major and minor at the same time. That is, my natural E here, in the C major chord, if I make it an E-flat, and if I do both at once, that gives me—and now you have a jazz chord. That's not a classical chord.
1:04:04 Right away, we're in what's soon going to be the blues. Let me go back. There, I was in C, I go back to E. Why do I favor E? Because that's the key of Siegfried Idyll. One of the rare masterpieces… That Nietzsche actually saved, by the way. Precisely, one of the rare instrumental masterpieces of Wagner, since it's one of the enigmas of Wagner scholarship. Right? Wagner never managed to produce a work of so-called pure music.
Wagnerian drama: the endless melody and Greek mousikè 1:04:35 He wrote a vague symphony when he was young, made some vague attempts at chamber music. There's nothing convincing there, it doesn't hold a candle to what was being done at the same time by his contemporaries—I'm not even talking about Brahms, who utterly outclasses him on that level. No, no, of course. On the other hand, as soon as he's seized by his idea of the drama—that is, not theater, but the fusion, I don't know, where you can no longer separate text and music, action and the lyrical and the dramatic.
1:05:09 Drama means action, in Greek. That's also something Nietzsche reproached him for—it's a bit like, we find the same suspicion of theater that you find in Rousseau, for instance, or Plato's suspicion of poets—it's the bread that's too tied to the drama, precisely. That's also why. Of course, of course, quite so, but it's a bit cruel what you're saying about Nietzsche there, because you're saying Nietzsche is in fact closer to Rousseau, whom he detested, in a way. Yes, exactly. He's closer, but yes, of course. And then we come back to my earlier point about regressions.
1:05:41 Is returning to the operatic aria really renewing music? Personally, I love Carmen, who doesn't? I'm not committing myself very much there. It's no accident that it's the most performed opera in the world, after all. Vox populi, right? The height of confusion in all we're discussing, of the confusion I'm trying step by step to clarify, but which runs through all the literature surrounding our problem, is that the first critics of Bizet denounced Carmen as reeking too much of Wagnerism, as showing too much of this new influence.
1:06:21 But yes, who would have thought. You see how complex all this is. Right? Too much importance given to the orchestra. Anyway, marvelous writing. Except the arias are classical. The action stops and suddenly, "the flower that you threw to me," and there's an aria—we're back to the aria form—whereas Boulez, who's hardly suspected of musical conformism, says that what's perhaps most modern in Wagner is his "unbounded melody" [mélodie indéfinie]. Better to say unbounded melody than infinite melody. That is, a melodic chant that has neither beginning nor end, that isn't four-square, not "pom, pom, pom, pom, pom, pa-dom."
1:06:57 I love that too. Right? But that's the Italian tradition of the so-called arioso form. Here, we're dealing with forms. The arioso form. Whether it's an aria, an arietta, a theme, a melody, a tune, a standard, all that is the arioso form. Right? Whereas Wagner, reconnecting with an immense and very ancient tradition, the one that fuses language and music, speech and music—I'm thinking of Greek theater.
1:07:30 Let's not forget that the totality of the arts brought together the visual arts, the set, the theater, the dance—which was important in the theater—the chorus, the alternation between chorus and soloist in Greek tragedy. Let's not forget that all of this was united among the Greeks under a single term, mousikè. Mousikè is poorly translated as "music" among the Greeks. When Socrates in the Phaedo says that just the night before, which was his last night as a living man, he saw a figure dressed in white, a divinity telling him, Socrates, make music, compose.
1:08:14 Ah yes, that's true. "And upon waking, I wondered what this oracle meant, until I realized it was asking me to keep doing what I had always done, in the sense that music is the highest philosophy, and it is indeed philosophy that I practice." Superb, Plato. But here, if we translate it as "music," we get it slightly wrong. We think it means composing a string quartet. No. It means doing what Sophocles did, what Aeschylus did, doesn't it. And rightly so—the verses, the chanting, the long and short syllables, the iambs, the trochees, the dactyls, the spondees.
1:08:50 With this relation to mathematics and to poetics that is... There you go. Pythagorean, of course. That's his first school, going back to our Plato. There you go. So Wagner reconnecting with this old tradition of intimate fusion in drama. So the drama is not Wagner's text that would then have to be set to music. The drama is precisely the complete fusion where music and word become inseparable.
1:09:21 That is, where the word recovers what linguists have explicitly set aside, what they call the continuous variables. The tone, the accent — interesting. I'm not talking about the tonic accent, which linguists study, its placement, etc. But when you study French, it doesn't matter whether I speak raising my voice or lowering it. Yes, that's the difference between phonetics and phonology. Exactly, that's it. Whereas poetry plays almost entirely on that.
1:10:00 "What, has your soul served love as a slave?" One, two, one, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three — that's Racine, it sounds like a waltz. Well, regardless of meaning, that's what I'm saying here. Meaning is the concept, it's language. But there's a musical part too; poetry, great poetry, always unifies the two. Hence Verlaine's line: music before all else, the rest is literature. Well, that's the privilege of poetry.
French Nietzscheans and their musical ignorance 1:10:31 An inextricable matter where, when you think you see opposites, you find them together, and when you see them together, you see everything that separates them, isn't that so? So here I'm going to bring in some remarks by Nietzsche that are less well known than this text, even though they appear in fairly common works. I'm thinking, for example, of Ecce Homo, or of some of Nietzsche's regular, obligatory correspondents — I'm thinking of Overbeck, of Gersdorff, above all of Peter Gast, who was a mediocre musician but whom Nietzsche chose precisely to speak all the ill he could of Wagner, isn't that so?
1:11:12 He was himself, he composed himself, Nietzsche. Yes, of course. I'll speak about these compositions at the end, precisely. But, sorry, because I need to redo a little code — let me read this to you, we won't believe our ears, I mean, as to how congruent this is with what we've just been saying about the fact that, from the very beginning of the text we just saw, the health-sickness dichotomy has come to sit atop all the other cognitive dichotomies, the true and the false, or the moral one, good and evil, or the aesthetic one, even the beautiful and the ugly — all of that is superseded in favor of the healthy versus the unhealthy, to come back to current events, isn't that so?
1:11:59 Which is troubling us. So, precisely, there you go, you see? He's talking about Zarathustra, his work, after having published it. "If, from this day forward, I..." That's in Ecce Homo, right? Yes, exactly, bravo. "If, from this day forward, I look back a few months..." So we're at late Nietzsche, the last publications. "I look back a few months earlier, I find as a premonitory sign a sudden and radical change in my taste, above all in music."
1:12:32 "Perhaps Zarathustra belongs entirely to the music of a tomb. In any case it is certain that it presupposes a veritable rebirth of the art of listening." So we've been warned. I say this because I never stop criticizing Cold War Nietzscheanism, the French Nietzscheans in particular, the same ones who admire Heidegger, precisely the one who saddled us with the worst version of Nietzsche. The one who sullied Hölderlin, who would like us to forget that Hölderlin was an ardent partisan of the French Revolution and an admirer of Rousseau, and who would like us to forget the Hölderlin who wrote an aphorism so dazzling that Adamov stole it from me.
1:13:21 Yes, Arthur Adamov — I was at his place, he was writing an anthology of violent poetry. All right? And I bring it out, I was a groupie, a young admirer of Adamov, and I read him this aphorism. So I quote, Hölderlin: "I hate the rabble of priests" — you know it well — "I hate the rabble of priests. But above all, the genius who consorts with them, with that."
1:13:52 How far we are from Heidegger! Good grief! Right? So, this Nietzsche — I'm throwing stones into their garden, yes, because I'm showing that it's a French tradition that Baudelaire denounces in an admirable draft letter to Jules Janin, where he says that even all French musicians together amount to no more than a poor harpsichord next to German orchestration.
1:14:25 Baudelaire, right? So I'm showing them that it's their ignorance of musical matters that makes them understand nothing, neither of Nietzsche nor of Wagner. They don't understand Wagner. I mean... Sometimes, first of all, there's also a — if I may, because we really need to wring the neck of this idea of Nietzsche as anti-antisemite — why he uses, in fact, his struggle against... Yes, yes. It's that suddenly, while he's steeped in an antisemitic milieu, he doesn't realize that Wilhelm II actually has a more social policy than Bismarck, and it's a way of opposing Wilhelm II because Nietzsche was disappointed by the death of Frederick III, who was a supporter of the English school.
1:15:09 That is, the English school, meaning we really leave the problem, which is merciless. The problem, let them die off. So when he attacks the antisemites, he's attacking Wilhelm II, but he attacks him for his social policy. But of course. Because in fact what he would want is... Or even the way he talks about a fusion of Jews and Junkers, but to make a superior European race out of it. Yes. We're still in the deliriums. Yes, yes. Crossing the... what does he call it? The Prussian thoroughbreds with the Jewish mares.
1:15:40 Yes, there you go. Something like that. In any case, it's — it's a quotation, right? Exactly. Losurdo has done all the — let's say, the historical context. He's described it well. But indeed, as you say, we don't have great... Already, it's important to read it, but then there's the musical potential which, I would say, super-expresses all the stakes we're talking about. Well, there you're going back to the political order. There I was going back to the musical ignorance of most French people who put Nietzsche on a pedestal, which is yet another matter. How can you understand Nietzsche while being so far from music?
1:16:11 Be aware of it. Even among those who pride themselves on being music lovers, isn't that so? They're stuck in the music-loving of Mr. Everybody, of France Culture, that is, they're stuck in the repertoire of neo-baroquism. In short, I'm thinking of Lacoue-Labarthe, I don't know if you see this kind of... Jean-Luc Nancy, these are intelligent, refined, cultured people. That's all there is in Paris, intelligent, refined, cultured people. That doesn't mean they aren't ideologically blinded, especially in musical matters. It's no accident that Heidegger is hopeless at music.
1:16:43 As much as he had things to say about poetry, about painting, about Cézanne, whatever you like — Cézanne again, he must have borrowed pretty much everything he says about him from René Char. But then, during his days at Le Thor near Avignon and near L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, I recommend a photo of Heidegger throwing the ball, playing pétanque. It exists. Yes, yes, I have documents like that from our comrade Michel Clouscard, which he posted on Facebook. Look it up. With a... Michel Clou...
1:17:13 Yes. That's not our friend, unfortunately. I'm thinking of our comrade Alexandra Tricoté, of course. We won't — let's leave her real identity aside. There you go. Yes, no, but she deserves it. So it's extraordinary, the document she sends. She's dressed down. We threw the tile, as they say in Avignon. Well. You're bringing it back to the political terrain and there you're scrambling the order I wanted to follow. And I'm going to seize the opportunity. Thanks to you, you mention Losurdo.
Losurdo: Nietzsche's antisemitism and the doctored letter 1:17:45 Losurdo has definitively resolved, with documents to back it up, this story of antisemitism, yes or no — one, the philosemite, Nietzsche, so he's with us, and the other antisemite, Wagner, so he's the devil. I'll give the conclusion in advance so as not to scramble the cards. Wagner has nothing of Nazism except — and it's not nothing — two fundamental themes: antisemitism and German nationalism.
1:18:17 And a certain xenophobia, especially anti-French, by the way. Except that his nationalist side only appeared once he'd been snubbed in Paris, where he would have loved to triumph. Because before being snubbed and failing after the cabal against Tannhäuser, on the contrary, he only made remarks ridiculing all German orchestras and performers compared to the perfection of French musicians — I remind those who know a bit about this. All right? And as for Nietzsche, he only becomes philosemitic, at least in a few well-chosen and well-known statements, after his break with Wagner.
1:18:58 You say it's more against Wilhelm II, but I say it's above all against Wagner — for him it amounts to the same thing. Because Losurdo has shown this very well, the demonstration is right there: when he was received at the Wagners', that is, up until 1873, 18... Yes. I said yes, sorry, my slip. 1870, yes. When he's a professor at Basel, when he finds the time dragging in Basel, though later he'd rather be a professor at Basel than God.
1:19:32 When he finds the time dragging, because he's waiting for the weekend, yes, when he's once again invited to the Wagners'. Right up to the end of his life, at the time of his worst writings against Wagner, he never stops saying that the days he spent at Tribschen, on the happy island as he calls it, were the happiest days of his life — right up to the end of his life he never stops repeating it. He practically signs his letters Dionysus. Of course, of course, no, but I'll quote others, it's crazy, that's the word for it. But in '72, and there Losurdo is indispensable with his water-diviner's genius for finding the decisive document.
1:20:07 He sends a text rarely commented on, or when it is quoted, it's been redacted — Losurdo has proven this — in the reference edition by Colli and Montinari. I'll give the title right away, it's the famous letter on theater. Sorry, letter on tragedy, exactly. Not the letter on music, the letter on tragedy, sent in '72, by Nietzsche, who wasn't yet estranged from the Wagner couple, who dreamed of nothing but going back to see them on weekends and bringing them presents ordered for the children, whose long-awaited uncle he was.
1:20:40 He laments, he joins what you just said about Wilhelm II. He laments the direction German power is drifting toward, Germany going to rack and ruin, susceptible to democratic sirens, all of that. And at the end there's this sentence: all this misfortune is due to the Jewish press. Word for word, the Jewish press, Judenpresse — you can't be clearer than that.
1:21:11 And here's the thing: in the official edition, the Colli... His sister's? No, no, no, no. No, no, but today's, today's — the edition that is authoritative, the edition of Nietzsche's complete works, the most scholarly one — this passage is redacted and "the Jewish press" is replaced with... "the Socratic press." Bravo, you know your Losurdo. Yes, but precisely, I've spent my time rereading the translation, I know it well, several times, I've reread it several times, but I think it's the edition of The Will to Power by his sister, where this sister is supposed to be more antisemitic than her brother — you can see she's actually softening his antisemitism.
1:21:52 Precisely, because "Socratism" was already a code word at the time for not saying "Jewish." That's where I wanted to get to. You can clearly see the critique of Socrates, of Plato, especially of Socrates, because Nietzsche says very clearly it's a shame that this fine aristocrat Plato let himself be spoiled by that journalist Socrates. The journalists, already, the Jews who rule over the media. As for his sister, who is the alibi of those I'm criticizing — Losurdo told me, and I believe no one knows the Nietzschean archives as well as he does — he told me that Nietzsche was even more antisemitic than his sister, and that his sister sometimes corrected his manuscripts because he was, frankly, too antisemitic.
1:22:41 She would come and tone it down, too soon, one has to be political, she was more political than he was. I said something silly earlier, when I said Wilhelm II was the opposite of Bismarck. Wilhelm II wanted to return to Bismarck's system of light social security, including for... Yes, of workers' welfare, of social security in general. Nietzsche's dream, that's it, in your allusions. Because in fact Nietzsche's dream would have been to follow Frederick III, and his wife, who was English, and thus who held all the English prejudices of her time, from a social standpoint.
1:23:15 That is... The most Nazi figure at Bayreuth was Winifred Wagner, that is, an Englishwoman. Yes, it's... The one Siegfried, Wagner's son, had married. We shouldn't overlook the Nazi sympathies of a certain segment of the British aristocracy. Yes, quite so. "Mr. Hitler, he's a gentleman." There you go, that's it. That's Chamberlain's phrase upon returning from Munich, isn't it? And I recall that Roosevelt was so appalled by the sympathies of his ambassador — the American ambassador in London, just before the outbreak of war, namely father Kennedy, Joseph, I'm not making this up — that he had, in his reports and letters from the embassy, the most important post in the State Department, that is, the American embassy in London.
1:24:06 He was so pro-Nazi that Roosevelt was forced to recall him and replace him. Roosevelt, who was accused elsewhere of Bolshevism by the American far right simply because he was planning things. Yes, that's it. He even planned the invasion of France, but that with — yes, yes, yes. Operation Overlord. And putting it under trusteeship, yes, yes, no, of course. That, he planned well. So much so that de Gaulle was forced to send a telegram to Leclerc saying, "Take the Second Armored Division and go with the communists to rise up in Paris before the Americans arrive."
Bizet as antidote: the African chance 1:24:36 "Otherwise we'll end up with AMGOT." Yes, certainly. That can't happen. So, yes, yes, absolutely. Let's see. The battle of Paris. No, no, but I'm quoting. Second quotation: "Of the enormous domain of art which is anti-German and will remain so" — so we come back to the text we just saw, a music more than German — "of the enormous domain of art which is anti-German and will remain so, and from which, once and for all, the young Germans, the horned Siegfrieds and other Wagnerians, are excluded."
1:25:06 I'm thinking of the guy who stormed the Capitol, the most famous one, with his horns. It's odd how all of this is so current. Yes, it's odd how current all of this is. Capitol-esque. "Of the enormous domain of art which is anti-German and will remain so, and from which, once and for all, the young Germans, the horned Siegfrieds and other Wagnerians, are excluded. Bizet's stroke of genius" — there's the antidote. I'm sticking with the medical metaphors — the antidote. "Bizet's stroke of genius, which gave resonance to a sensibility so new yet so old, which until then had found no language in the cultivated music of the time."
1:25:47 And he spells it out — listen closely to this sentence, he's rarely been so precise — "a more southern, more tawny, more sun-browned sensibility. The tan which is doubtless not comprehensible from the standpoint of the North's humid idealism." We already had Nietzsche versus Wagner, so the south against the north, now we have the dark against the pale. "Skin so white it needs an aspirin," Marie-Chantal would say, wouldn't she, to Madame de Villeparisis on the beach at Juan-les-Pins, or at the Eden-Rock in Antibes, sorry, Cap d'Antibes, we mustn't mingle with the proletariat right in Antibes itself — so, "and which is doubtless not comprehensible from the standpoint of the North's humid idealism."
1:26:35 "African luck" — "African luck, there was a music that comes out of the palm tree" — now it's made geographically explicit. "African luck, fatalistic gaiety, with deep, seductive, dreadful eyes" — we find cruelty again — "the lascivious melancholy of the Moorish dance." But all the twentieth-century musics that pass through — mambo, cha-cha-cha, the Latino dimension — yes, there's a whole succession, my grandparents were mad about the rumba, I'm old, this goes back a long way, but yes, it goes back to Nietzsche, it goes back to an era Nietzsche was a contemporary of.
1:27:13 There's the famous "rumba variation" — that's by metaphor. No, but you don't know how right you are, since you're on the subject: few people know that the Kreutzer Sonata wasn't originally dedicated to Kreutzer. Yes, he looked for someone else, yes, that's because... Ah, but he'd found him, he was a black man, there weren't many black men in Vienna, a fabulous violinist who fascinated the salons of the time, who fascinated the salons of the time, he has a Germanic name, I'll find it, because I have "Kaiser Grubber" stuck in my head, but that's a Marxist philosopher, and it's making my memory stumble — with whom Beethoven, at the last moment before the premiere of the Kreutzer Sonata, had a falling-out, because the mixed-race man in question had spoken ill of a woman whom Beethoven, rather puritanical at heart, wanted above all suspicion — so an anecdotal quarrel — and as a result he changed it, taking Kreutzer as the dedicatee, Kreutzer who never played it, and finally, at the premiere,
1:28:23 it was indeed the mulatto man who played it, without having rehearsed it, even though it's a fearsomely difficult score for the violin, sight-reading it live, over Beethoven's shoulder at the piano — so, you don't know how right you are, and there had already been, in the salons of eighteenth-century France, a Chevalier de Saint-Georges, who was also — how does Nietzsche put it — dark, tanned, even more than that, black like Senghor, who was an excellent composer, Rococo, I recommend it, listen, on YouTube you'll find the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, who wrote music that those who don't know it will think is Mozart, somewhere between Haydn and Mozart, all right, but masterpieces of the kind, and he was known as an incomparable dancer, well, there you go — so yes, this story goes back a long way; after all, the eighteenth century is the triangular trade, sugar, the Antilles, well, it's not zouk yet, but still it's music of African origin, let's say it, since we started from that word, transported to the United States,
1:29:34 and which will give rise to that fabulous richness of Brazilian music, where Western tradition collides — Portuguese melancholy, the fado which turns up again in bossa nova with its melancholies, those themes which all carry a kind of incurable sadness, even "The Girl from Ipanema," even "Desafinado," all of that — well, that's the Portuguese origin, Atlantic melancholy if you will, mixed together — "Desafinado" is also the breaking of tonality, precisely, it's going to be out of tune.
1:30:06 Exactly, exactly, that's right, as we say of a violin string being out of tune — and mixed with rhythms from slaves of African origin, who were never anywhere more numerous than in the northeastern region of Bahia, with its seventy-four churches and the apex of baroque architectural frenzy — I mean, Latin American baroque, which is already more profuse than any, even in Austria or Spain, explodes as nowhere else in Bahia, with a syncretism, isn't that so, pagan, Christian, animist, animalistic, whatever you like.
1:30:49 So the lascivious melancholy of the Moorish dance, capoeira, salsa — it's all already there. The lascivious dance of the Moorish dance. Corsicans know a thing or two about Moors, don't they? It's our emblem, the Moor's head, for one. Second, I have uncles named "Death to the Moor." Go on, they're not going to badger me, my compatriots, saying it's the Arabs coming to take over from us. No, come on, let's drop it. Because there are some who want to kick out the French and, beneath that, kick out the Arabs.
1:31:21 We have to be honest. Official Corsican autonomists reject this and have made a point of offering to welcome refugee boats adrift in the Mediterranean, scandalously snubbed by our elites. We have to be fair. These are policies. They don't want it said that at the base of Corsican autonomism there's a racist, xenophobic undercurrent. And it's a good thing that they distance themselves from it.
1:31:52 So, once again I read: "Fatalistic gaiety with deep, seductive, dreadful eyes, the lascivious melancholy of the Moorish dance." So I'll stay a bit longer on this quotation about the Moorish dance. How can one not think of the countless scenes in Hollywood films, including the worst ones, of the scene meant to be a bit risqué, the famous belly dance?
1:32:24 Every time, the Orient is coded as the belly dance, played by an actress — among them, Yvonne De Carlo, Maureen O'Hara, whoever, at the time these weren't sacred monsters. There can be masterpieces in there, as well as duds, but still it's a must, isn't it? You know how America reduces everything to a crude caricature. The Frenchman has a beret and a baguette under his arm. And the Orient, it has the belly dance, Turkish delight, and I-don't-know-what treachery, as in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
1:33:05 Why do I dwell on what Nietzsche says here, and on Hollywood, the lascivious melancholy of the Moorish dance? Samson and Delilah, to take a great Hollywood peplum. Why? Because those who defend Nietzsche against Wagner would have us believe that Wagner is the father of what is now called "lambda" people-music.
1:33:35 He's reproached for everything and its opposite: for being bombastic, elitist German music, the great tragic art going back to the Greeks. But he's supposedly at the same time the father of popular rock'n'roll — yes, they say he's Hollywoodian. With his total work of art, you can see where they're headed. Whereas it's Nietzsche here who is Hollywoodian, who calls for a music, I quote, "in which the lascivious melancholy of the Moorish dance is expressed." Go on, go and learn Nietzsche's music and texts.
1:34:08 And not just a few ideas extracted from their context like that, but the literalness of his expression. Let me continue. The passion sparkling, sharp and sudden, like a dagger, and scents, we have it all here, and scents emanating from the yellow afternoon, right in his American period, from the yellow afternoon of the sea at whose approach the heart takes fright as at the memory of forgotten islands where they once dwelt.
1:34:44 Quotation — I'll skip a passage — quotation, a few lines further on, one found in Wagner's music, insinuating through its hidden sexuality, a binding agent for a society in which everyone pursued their own pleasures. That's the crowd-pleaser side. Wagner, on the expression of popular libidinality — there's a haunting fear of the masses, that's what they like in Nietzsche. That's where they commune, like the ecologists, like everyone — we're too many, and the masses, yes, you see, all of a sudden everything becomes clear.
Siegfried against Parsifal: the road to Rome 1:35:18 No, but let me get to my Nietzsche-Wagner, I'll bring it up to date. There. Come on, now we're going to move on to the confessions. I'm not talking about the famous text on Parsifal, which I've quoted so many times, where Nietzsche, on the eve of his collapse. I'm not sure we've talked about it in these conversations. Yes, it's true it's important. I'll start there and I'll end with the text I was about to read. But I'll start there, all right? So now I have to change browsers. There, and I have it here.
1:35:48 of... Well then, well then, here it is. Oh darn! Oh no, don't tell me I've lost it. No, wait, one second, let me just get my little story. While you're looking, I'll gather all this. Please, please, go ahead. I was saying what's Nazi about Wagner — the only... what's Nazi about Wagner is his German nationalist side, but precisely where Nietzsche, in his opposition to Wagner, becomes Nazi squared — well, if you take Nazi squared — is his appeal to Europe, it's the great Europe of the Reich.
1:36:27 That's precisely where what gets misunderstood is that his rejection of German nationalism is already a shift toward a dictatorship on a larger scale, in fact. So he's an anticipator of all these anti-democratic unifications of Europe, from the Third Reich down to the European Union. Of course, sorry, I must have looked like I was glancing to the side. I notice I have a glitch on my screen where my references are, but I might have the text, let me try to find it, I have it, if you give me three seconds, I have it here, in my archives.
1:37:02 I'm a good sport. Yes, so wait, remind me, what was I supposed to be illustrating there? I think we were talking about the letter on Parsifal, actually. Yes, of course, no, I mean to come and illustrate — ah yes, we're moving on to the confessions, there. That's it. And so, it's filming, and so, Dominique, have you found the texts you wanted to show us? Yes, yes, sorry, let me find my way through this haystack.
1:37:32 let me remind you that Wagner is the man, famously, about whom the most has been written immediately after Jesus and before Napoleon. It's easy to get a bit lost in it sometimes. And I've read all of them. No, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I've read quite a lot. And so I was saying we were moving on to the confessions, that Nietzsche was finally going to confess and confound all the Nietzscheans of the Cold War. I call them that to distinguish them clearly from Nietzsche himself, who has quite enough faults of his own, but also qualities they don't have.
1:38:07 So, to sum up, what are the confessions? Well, first there is — it's famous for those who, well, it's famous, it's known by those who know the dossier, which isn't many people. And even among those who know it, not many point it out. As if it were meant to compromise the whole well-meaning narrative of the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship, right?
1:38:37 Namely that Nietzsche delivered us from reactionary German music, antisemitic, Christian, well, and so on. In fact, the most, perhaps the most anti-Wagnerian text is probably also the most anti-Christian, or, as we'll see, more precisely, the most anti-Catholic — which, coming from our German, is not an entirely indifferent nuance, is it? — is found precisely in Beyond Good and Evil, which, that's a famous text, let me remind you, right?
1:39:13 To those who would have the audacity not to know it, right? I remind you — sorry, it's the beginning of Peoples and Fatherlands, but I have a book that's falling apart. So Delga editions are better bound than 10-18 editions, which always fall apart. Back then, that's just how books were made. Yes, it was glued, not sewn.
1:39:43 Yes. Well, there. So, there. So here, it's often said that the falling-out between Wagner and Nietzsche, to come back to that, had been brewing, but it breaks out from the moment Wagner writes his testament, his final work — let's not forget he's much older than Nietzsche — Parsifal.
1:40:24 curiously, he's a bit older. Curiously, the falling-out doesn't come from a Germanic work by Wagner. Generally he borrows from the old stock of the Nibelungs, from the literature, from the Icelandic Eddas or Scandinavian sagas or the Nibelungenlied, right, from the Rhine valley, or from the Saint Gall manuscript in Switzerland, right. Instead, here, in Parsifal, as he had done once before in Lohengrin, who is supposedly his father, actually, his son, the son of Perceval, he borrows from what's called the Matter of Britain.
1:41:03 There, a curious feature — in short, from what German nationalists disdainfully call welsch, what is welsch, right. A small remark in passing to show how all this is more complex than those who talk about it realize, right. So indeed, Nietzsche comes across the text of Parsifal, the libretto. The libretto. I'm not talking about the music. And he writes this. I don't know.
1:41:37 Good grief, I had it right there. Come on now. There. Beginning of Peoples and Fatherlands. There. Well yes, but yes, that's what I don't understand. I had it right there. Ah, there it is, there it is. There, this time I've got it. So, perhaps by pushing the comparison further, one will discover, to Wagner's credit and that of his Germanism, that in every respect he went, Wagner did, higher, showed himself bolder, stronger, harder and greater than any nineteenth-century Frenchman could have done, for the reason that we Germans have remained closer to barbarism than the French.
1:42:26 So we always do more. I remind you that Nietzsche — I'm not going to give you all these quotations, there are 500 of them — says: I criticize Wagner like no one else, but I forbid anyone else from having such a great name in their mouth. He reserves for himself the monopoly on criticizing Wagner, by the way. Perhaps even Wagner's most astonishing creation — he's going to contrast, I'll tell you in advance, with Parsifal, which really is the symbol of Wagner's Christian collapse — he's going to contrast the beautiful figure of the pagan Siegfried, who with his sword breaks the laws, right?
1:43:03 Like Zarathustra's hammer. Perhaps even Wagner's most astonishing creation will always remain, and not only at present, inaccessible, foreign, inimitable for the entire Latin race in its decline. Well now, that's not very progressive Nietzsche talk, the Latin race in its decline. We'll hear Mrs. Merkel talking about the Greeks again. After Prussia's victory over France, I'd say the Greeks aren't Latins. Anyway, all that — I heard it myself when I was working for the European Commission, the pizza Europe.
1:43:34 Yes, that's charming. The PIGS too. Yes, again, I'll take the words back. Or else the PIGS. So, remind me of the initials — Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland, the only country. There's no Italy and Greece. Ah, it's Italy. Italy, Greece and Spain. What am I mixing up? There, there, there. Anyway, anyway. That's not... Come on, let's be clear, medic — in the sense that only a right-wing man can give this word, so, the far rights.
1:44:04 So Wagner's most astonishing creation will remain — he's alluding to Siegfried — will remain always, and not only at present, inaccessible, foreign, inimitable for the Latin race in its decline. There we find decline again, sickness, impotence, the pale side, the withered ones, far from Mediterranean soil. It's the character of Siegfried I want to talk about. Siegfried, the very free man, perhaps indeed too free, too hard, too jovial, too healthy.
1:44:41 There we go, back to health again. Too healthy, too anti-Catholic, it's underlined. Not because he's Protestant, but because he's pagan. Too anti-Catholic for the taste of old, weakened civilized peoples. Perhaps he is even a sin against Romanticism, this Siegfried — as if Wagner, in writing Siegfried — it's always the same with Nietzsche. It's not badly perceived, in a way, to the ear. Because it's true that Siegfried, in the tetralogy, the third part of the Ring of the Nibelung — a prologue plus a trilogy, Das Rheingold, the prologue, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and finally Götterdämmerung.
1:45:18 Götterdämmerung being very long, in the middle is Siegfried. All right? And in Siegfried, in the middle of Siegfried, comes the famous forest bird scene, the most ecological Wagner there is, the most relaxed, the gayest, the most solar, the very opposite of Tristan. That's not good. So perhaps he is even a sin against Romanticism, this Siegfried, as if Wagner had brushed against what would become post-Romanticism and what will cure us — the text we saw earlier — as if he had sensed a music on palm leaves, almost.
1:45:51 Perhaps he is even a sin against Romanticism, this Siegfried, decidedly unsympathetic to the Roman peoples. But Wagner, in the sad days of his old age — so here we get to Parsifal — has largely atoned for this sin. Anticipating a taste that later became a policy, he set himself, if not to follow, at least to preach, with the religious fervor peculiar to him, the road to Rome. One has to be German to understand the connotations of such an accusation. The road to Rome!
1:46:21 Wait, the emperors, and the emperors! We're right in the middle of Bismarck's fight against the Kulturkampf. You're right in it! Against the Catholics! I see that you, who dislike the Marxian-Marxist distinction — in which you're right on the substance — I see that you're being very Marxian. I'm teasing you. No but it's true, because when Marx denounces the Robinsonades, you're showing that all these people think they're talking about Africa, about this, about Asia, about the Orient, when in fact they're talking about their own historical present.
1:46:54 It's the Kulturkampf that's going on at that moment. I don't know. And to affirm something new in Germanic identity, announcing a renewal, a terrifying renewal of Europe in its decline. How current all this is, my God! What do we keep being told to get us out of trouble? It seems to have nothing to do with it — our defects, the crisis, the debt. We need the German federal model. The kids, we shouldn't send them to high school anymore. It should be an apprenticeship at 14.
1:47:25 Yes or no? That's exactly what we're told. It's not... it's not the comprehensive middle school. There. You understand — the road to Rome is peculiar to him, and even less the common core. To cut short any ambiguity. Ah, Nietzsche cutting short any ambiguity. Seizing the opportunity. I shall have recourse to a few well-struck verses that will betray, even to the least subtle ears, what I mean, what I hold against the Wagner of the last years and against the music of his Parsifal.
1:47:57 Let's listen closely. Could these still be German? Could these dull groans come from a German heart? So here's where the nationalist nests. It's Wagner. German that macerates here. He's not wrong. It macerates the whole time in Parsifal. The wound that will not heal. When he saw the libretto, he said too much blood, and I don't like hysterical women. Later he'll say 'we others' against an echo of Wagner, we're in a hospital. And to say it once and for all, it doesn't entirely displease us.
1:48:28 The dossier never ends. And this uncertain swaying of bells, these sidelong glances of nuns. There are real bells in Parsifal. Just as there are real anvils in Das Rheingold. These Angelus chimes, these faked ecstasies — one can't write a more merciless text — whose lamps claim to surpass heaven. Could all this still be German? Think about it, he's denouncing pious church-mongering. You haven't yet crossed the threshold. What you're hearing is Rome.
Nietzsche had only read the libretto: Gracq's preface 1:49:01 It's the Roman faith without its creed. There, how Nietzsche shoots down in flames the testament — no doubt, even those who are anti-Wagnerian recognize that Parsifal is a masterpiece. Debussy, with a subtlety all his own, will derive from it The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, his only quasi-religious work, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, on a text by D'Annunzio, by the way. Now, when Nietzsche writes this — because there are those who invoke what I've just read from Nietzsche to say that Wagner is worthless, Parsifal being the most worthless of all Wagner — they forget, or they never knew, or chose not to know, that Nietzsche had not heard a single note of the score of Parsifal when he wrote that, he had only seen the text.
1:49:56 And there, as for the text, I give him credit — too much blood, it's not hysterical, watch out, the text of Parsifal, the blood of Christ mixing with the blood of the swan splashed by an arrow, that red blood spurting onto the immaculate plumage of the swan, the wound of the Fisher King that never stops rotting — it's not like decadent Europe, all these bloods mixing together, the savior's blood, the fisherman's blood, it's appalling. He had not heard it conducted by Knappertsbusch in 1952, I forget which, because that's...
1:50:29 which carries it to the highest incandescence, right? And he hadn't listened to Parsifal at that time. Let me delay my reading of Parsifal a bit further, because I suddenly think of it, to read you the text of one of those Frenchmen who didn't fall into the same misreadings. And we're right in the midst of the literary avant-gardes, since it's none other than Julien Gracq, who, in his first publication, Au château d'Argol, good grief, I need to find it, says this.
1:51:09 Give me back my Château d'Argol, please. Colon. Open quotation marks. Yes, listen, it's coming. There it is, it was hidden by my alarm clock. Which didn't go off, of course. So here's what Julien Gracq says in the preface to Au château d'Argol, and you'll see we're right in it. We come back to our subject. Sorry.
1:51:40 Wagner's work, preface by Julien Gracq to Au château d'Argol. Wagner's work closes with a poetic testament, Parsifal, which Nietzsche was gravely wrong to throw too lightly to the Christians as fodder. It's as if he'd just heard the text I read and is reacting to it. Thereby taking on the grave responsibility of leading critics astray toward a line of inquiry that is visibly superficial, given the violent discomfort one still feels today hearing people speak of the master's acquiescence to the mystery of redemption.
1:52:17 And here comes the key sentence. Whereas Wagner's work had always so clearly tended to widen the orbits of its subterranean search. The opposite of Catholic hagiography, right, of pious church-mongering. Whereas Wagner's work had always so clearly tended to widen further the orbits of its subterranean, or more precisely infernal, search, it alone would end up making us understand that Parsifal means something entirely other than the ignominy of extreme unction performed on a corpse that is, moreover, still quite noticeably resistant.
The prelude to Parsifal in Monte Carlo: the 1887 letters 1:52:55 This was marvelously written, wasn't it. So now, let's move on to the confessions. Nietzsche finally discovers Parsifal's music, or at least the prelude — that's already something — when he's in Monte Carlo, in winter. What a good rhythm! Summer, 3000 meters altitude in the Upper Engadine at Sils Maria, right, and winter, Turin, Nice, Genoa, right, the cuisine of wine, wine culture as opposed to beer culture — it being understood that all German metaphysics is a resentment against poor digestion.
1:53:34 And too many potatoes. There, we always come back to problems of prophylaxis and dietetics. So he hears it and reports on it, right, to our friend, to his correspondent, Peter Gast, a mediocre composer. Well, I recently heard for the first time the overture to Parsifal, that is, in Monte Carlo. We're in 1887 when he writes this. It's really on the eve of the collapse.
1:54:05 Yes, it's 1888. There isn't much time left to live consciously. Yes, in 1888. There. 1888, that's Ecce Homo. When I see you again I'll tell you exactly what I understood of it. Understood and underlined. Moreover, apart from the questions that don't relate to it — there, he's right — as to what such music can or should be used for. And, adopting a purely aesthetic point of view.
1:54:36 Has Wagner ever done better? Good grief, it's the worst of his works, the one that ruined everything relative to his own ends. There, and now it's the best. But that's Nietzsche for you. Once you know him a bit. The supreme psychological lucidity. We know what 'psychological' means, it's Nietzsche's — it's his weak point, his psychologism, by the way. And at the same time, you can clearly see there was never a meeting between Nietzsche, Freud and Bergson. Is this the era of Bourget in France?
1:55:07 Yes, Bourget's disciple, who had had enormous success. The psychological novel. In short, exactly. And theater too. So, the Strindbergs. Has Wagner ever done better? The supreme psychological lucidity and precision, all the qualities Wagner isn't supposed to have — usually — under Nietzsche's pen, regarding what must here be said, expressed, communicated — it's underlined — with the adequate form, the briefest.
1:55:42 Good grief, I thought Wagner was all bombast. The briefest and the densest and most direct, sorry. You'd think he was talking about Bach's music. Every nuance of feeling developed to the point of — listen closely — to the point of the epigram. Wagner and the epigram — there'd be a thesis to write on that, right? The most condensed, most elliptical form, the epigram. There. So Parsifal, which was supposed to be...
1:56:13 A torrent of vomit, of mud, of whatever you like, right, of gutter filth — now it's held up as the perfection of the epigram. And a clarity of the music as art that makes one think of a shield — we naturally think of a shield, being a Greek philologist as he is, of the shield of Achilles, right, he knows his classics well. But what a contradiction — what is less Romantic and more thoroughly classical than the shield of Achilles.
1:56:44 I don't know. In Homer, of course, in Homer. With the form adequate to every nuance of feeling, a clarity of the music that makes one think of a shield of finished craftsmanship, finished, perfect, in Latin, and in grammar. And to finish, a sublime feeling toward... Oh, addressed to those who will have reached a perfection in the art of the beautiful, in the ancient sense. No, so there's also something sublime, isn't there?
1:57:15 A sublime and extraordinary feeling, an experience, a sensation of the soul in the very depths of music, which does the greatest honor to Wagner, 1887. A synthesis of states which will seem irreconcilable to many men, even to superior men — those are the ignoramuses I was talking about. A synthesis of implacable rigor, of elevation — the word is in quotation marks, you know that's a moment in the Catholic Mass, the elevation, when the corpus Christi is raised and one must bow one's head.
1:57:51 The head bows, the corpus Christi rises. Can I tell an anecdote? I was… I was five years old. I was at my aunt's in Corsica, very traditional, who had put me in Jeanne d'Arc, the Catholic school. It was a girls' school, but it accepted boys in the lower grades. I was in the preparatory class, second year — that doesn't exist anymore. Now there's only one CP. I was in what was called "onzième," after "douzième." And, of course, Mass every morning before class.
1:58:24 It wasn't at 6 o'clock. So, barely awake, you had to put your knees, a bit sore in winter, down on the cold marble and listen to Mass. It's a very good childhood memory. And at the moment of the elevation, I got fed up that every time we bowed our heads even though I felt it was the most important moment. Suddenly, I commit sacrilege. I raise my head and I say, I see him, I see him. I don't know. The sister turns around like that.
1:58:54 "Yes, yes, yes, that's very good, that's very good." All right. And afterwards, we go back to class single file. Each time, whoever goes first is a reward, a good mark for what he did during the day. And there she said, "It's Dominique who goes first today because he has seen God." Well, frankly. You see, the elevation, I know it. I'm one of the few to have experienced it. Hence, moreover, your enthusiasm in the etymological sense of the term. Inhabited by God. That must be it. I knew it. Altitudo, altitudinist, isn't that right?
1:59:26 All right. So, exaltation. So, an implacable rigor, an elevation — careful, here it's profound, in the fearsome sense of the word. With a knowledge and a penetration, we are at the opposite of a hospitable and deep nature. That was the feminine and maternal side. Here, it's the knife, isn't it?
1:59:57 And a penetration that pierces the soul like knives. Here it's a bit more masculine, on the contrary. Isn't it? I'm speaking here really at the level of sexual symbolism, you know. And almost quasi-genital, almost, here, right? So, completely unbeknownst to poor Nietzsche. And with compassion — my God, but really, Nietzsche, the most anti-Nietzschean value is pity. Really, what could be more degrading for the superman than to feel compassion?
2:00:27 Well, that's fine for decadent Christians, Germans, Nordics, for the pale dampness of those aspirin tablets who haven't been to the beach yet. But really, compassion — nowadays that's all there is. It's emotion, current events. You see? I remember Frédérick Lemaître in Children of Paradise, an actor who really existed, of course, who comes on stage and hears the authors telling the lead actor, "Can't you do that again with a bit more emotion?"
2:00:57 And we see Pierre Brasseur, magnificent, arriving in rags because he's just fought a duel, and he says, "That's it! Emotion! More emotion! Always emotion!" We haven't gotten past that these days. So, an elevation in the fearsome sense of the word, with a knowledge and a meditation that pierces the soul like knives, and with a compassion for what is seen here and judged in its entirety. That's unique! These things are found in Dante, nowhere else.
2:01:27 And here again is one of the summits of Christian literature. The Divina Commedia, no less! Never has a painter painted a gaze so charged with melancholy and love as Wagner did in the final measures of his prelude. So he had only read the prelude, but yes. The same day, he writes to his sister. Note, with his sister he's at ease. And there, it goes even further. All right?
2:01:58 Prelude to Parsifal. He writes it almost like a telegram. Colon. "The greatest boon that has been granted me in a long time. The power and the rigor of indescribable feeling." We find again the power, the masculine side I was referring to, and the rigor, which is opposed to the soft and decadent side often reproached to Wagner in general. "I know of nothing that grasps Christianity at such a depth and that leads so sharply to compassion."
2:02:28 No, he's really struck there. We must give him credit if… That's why he's a brilliant reactionary thinker. Yes, I am giving him credit. No, but he really grasped Christianity in all its depth, precisely. He understood that the progressive spirit had to be eradicated even within Christianity. But he's struck down like Saul. There, yes, that too. He's falling off his horse. Yes, that's it. And soon he'll embrace the horse. It's the wrestling with the angel. Yes, that's it. But of course, but judge for yourselves.
2:02:58 "Totally sublime" — he's talking about himself — "totally sublime and moved." Same comparison as in the letter to Peter Gast: no painter has managed to render, as Wagner did, a vision so indescribably melancholic and tender. And here there's this incredible sentence — as I told you, we're moving into the sublime here — "as if, after many years" — during which I wrote nonsense, that's me adding — "during which someone finally spoke to me" — very well written, nobody wrote as well as Nietzsche did in Germany at that time — "as if, after many years, someone were finally speaking to me about the problems that concern me."
2:03:33 "Not, of course, to give me the answers I hold ready for my French readers" — that's me adding — but the Christian answers, "which have, after all, been the answers of the strongest souls the last two centuries have produced." Go put your clothes back on. Yes, quite so. No, no, it's extraordinary. And now I'd like to conclude, if you don't mind, with the text that may be the most beautiful he wrote in this vein.
The Song of the Tombs: Wagner, murderous singer 2:04:03 And here, I'm getting back to it — I have to get rid of all these parasites, there. I have plenty of… There. So I'm finding my favorite references again, there. No, no, historical ones, sorry. There. It's a text taken from Zarathustra. How does this happen? Why is it bugging like that?
2:04:34 Wait, excuse me, there. Ah yes, all right, there, there. There. Music, Emmerich, well, there. I prepared the texts and I can't find them anymore, damn it. So I don't quite understand… you find that, but if I can't find it, I'll find it again very quickly on Google, don't worry. There, there, that's it.
2:05:04 So, Elise, the death of — no, that's not it, Facebook, of Atelier — well, where is it? Wait, I'll pause. There, it's back, and we've found the reference. Yes, well, our last one, to give honor where honor is due, taken from Zarathustra, in a passage where Nietzsche speaks of Wagner without naming him, there. Without naming him, but we'll recognize him easily. And with a sincerity, perhaps beyond the letters I just read — but here, these aren't letters, this is a work, it's crafted, it's Zarathustra, it's an immense poem.
2:05:45 And he even said, in the text I read earlier, it's a poem that must be heard musically. And, I tell you, because it's very long, I'll skip most of the part where he says, where he spends his time saying, "I go to see the graves of my youth," all the ideals I believed in and that I saw die within me. It's not… And all this with a poignant nostalgia, this text. For example: "One day I wanted to heal the ills of humanity, you sowed ulcers on my path, etc., you disgusted me with charity."
2:06:16 Each time he addresses "you" — we don't know to whom, some diabolical spirits, all those who killed what he believed in. In fact, he's addressing himself, if you look closely. So, "One day I wanted this, and you did that to me." So I'll give a few samples. "It was at what I had that was most vulnerable that the arrow was aimed. At you, whose skin is like down" — he speaks to the things he loved, and even more to the smile that dies in a glance.
2:06:48 "But I want to speak this language to my enemies. What is it to kill a man compared to what you have done to me? The wrong you have done me is greater than a murder. You took from me the irreparable. Thus do I speak to you, my enemies. Did you not kill the visions of my youth and my dearest miracles? You took from me my playmates, the blessed spirits. In their memory I bring this crown and this curse." And here he crosses the sea and goes to the isle of the tombs of his youth. So, "One day I wanted this."
2:07:19 "Every day was to be sacred to me." Thus once spoke the wisdom of my youth. "But then, you, my enemies, you stole my nights from me and turned them into insomnia full of torment." We know they suffered terribly from migraines and insomnia, don't we? "One day I made the vow to renounce all disgust. Then you turned everything around me into an ulcer. Alas, where then did my noblest vows flee?" There, I'm skipping three pages like that. And we come to the music. "One day I wanted to dance."
2:07:49 Here we find again the ideal of lightness against the spirit of gravity, of Zarathustra the dancer of Dionysus. "One day I wanted to dance as I had never yet danced. One seems to hear Siegfried in the Forest Murmurs act." That Siegfried. "I wanted to dance beyond all the heavens. But then you corrupted my favorite singer."
2:08:19 "And he struck up his most lugubrious, his darkest song." We can see this very clearly, and it's been a line of thought for many musicologists. What is it that made us move from the dazzling solar side of Siegfried, who's bursting with youth? It's often been said that if the Ring were one immense symphony, Siegfried would be the Scherzo. Scherzo, and in Italian, that means "joking." The zenith, yes. The zenith, and at the same time the most bounding, the most dancing. There's even humor when Siegfried carves his thing out of a reed and it squeaks because he can't manage to sing like the bird.
2:08:51 "And one day I wanted to dance as I had never yet danced. I wanted to dance beyond all the heavens. Then you corrupted my favorite singer. And he struck up his song." How did Wagner move — like a kind of musicologist — from the joyful, solar gaiety of Siegfried to the dark twilight of the gods, where everything grows confused, including the plot with its potions that take away and restore memory, and everything sinks into catastrophe.
2:09:26 How did Schopenhauer end up winning out over Dionysus, and the German over the Greek? "And he struck up his most lugubrious and darkest song. Alas, he sounded the horn" — in German, "cornait," that's "horn," that's the horns, the Wagnerian instrument par excellence — "he sounded in my ear tones that seemed to come from the most funereal horn."
2:09:57 And here there's this overwhelming passage where he addresses Wagner directly. We find Tristan again here, precisely. Of course, of course. And here he addresses Wagner: "murderous singer, instrument of malice, you, the most innocent one. Already I was ready for the finest dance. Then, with your chords, you killed my ecstasy." Funny, that's called innocence. Besides, there's already a hint of Parsifal — the naïve one.
2:10:29 The idiot, the naïve one, the pure one, the fool, the innocent. It's interesting, moreover, to see that in his final years Nietzsche discovers Dostoevsky. Ah yes, The Idiot. And he senses very well the parallel between the idiot and Parsifal. Isn't Parsifal called by Wagner "der reine Tor," the pure fool? Well, we'll conclude on that note, shall we? Yes. With an injunction, to our anti-Wagnerian Nietzscheans of the Cold War — I repeat myself and I keep going on about it — reread Nietzsche carefully and listen to a bit more music alongside it.
2:11:10 Wagner or someone else, it doesn't matter at all. It's not… but train your ear a little. You'll be more Nietzschean in the best sense. Bravo for this pathology. We're back in the medical realm, but that's how it is, that does… Yes, I've prescribed a bit of music. Well, there you go, that was something close to my heart with this pandemic and this constant medicalization. There. I'm cutting it, then. Yes, quite so, quite so.
2:11:43 See you next week.
