English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Tristan, chromaticism, and the end of tonality 0:00 Richard Wagner is, above all, for musicians, the brilliant author of Tristan, Tristan and Isolde. What is certain, and this can be measured, is that all those who would go on to have importance in the evolution of music afterwards, and who would create what we call avant-garde music, contemporary music, twentieth-century music, whatever you want to call it, would be marked by this unavoidable reference to Tristan.
1:30 It is in Tristan that Wagner pushes his chromaticism to the extreme, the use of very small intervals. The smaller the intervals, the more he dissolves the usual reference points of so-called classical music, reference points that had structured musical discourse over the centuries, and in particular that fundamental reference point which is tonality. I'll simply remind you that tonality is the equivalent of the direction of the ground, of the vertical, for a dancer.
2:00 That is to say, it's what makes it necessary to start from the ground and return to it at the end, isn't it? A few leaps and a few entrechats. There's a way of landing on your feet, as we say so well in French, because of a direction privileged above all others in the movements we make, on pain of falling flat on your face, which is gravity, the vertical, which at every instant connects us to the center of the Earth, as we've known since Newton. Imagine the greatest dancer of all time, or the greatest ballerina ever seen, who had the chance to perform a pas de deux, not at the Bolshoi, not at the Paris Opera or the one in Milan, but who did it in an immense space capsule, that is, in weightlessness, where there is no longer a privileged direction.
2:47 That's what atonal music is, music deprived of tonality; it's music where there is no longer that reference point, where there is no longer a fundamental note from which one starts and to which one must return, like do, do, do, re, mi, re, do, mi, re, re, do. I start with do, I end with do, I've landed on my feet. So Wagner prepares atonal music, these enormous proportions of Wagnerian work, right? We're also at the limits here. Some will see it as bloated. On a simply measurable level, these are works that last hours and hours, on average between 3 and 5 hours, all the same.
3:20 Wagner's lyric dramas, not counting the Tetralogy, which lasts 4 days, and which stir up an enormous orchestral mass, plus choruses—well, you can't get any bigger than that. Moreover, there would be a reaction afterward, in contemporary music, to make works that last a few seconds—I'm thinking of Webern—and with extremely reduced forces.
The small form: listening to a Corsican serenade 4:08 But now I'm going to move to the other extreme. I'm going to move to what in music is called the small form. And small, that's not only in terms of dimensions, of duration. It's also small in terms of forces. Since if I want to make only a single singer heard, a single voice, belonging to the genre of the serenade, we naturally think of Italy here, and very precisely of Naples.
4:41 The serenade is the Neapolitan genre par excellence. Everyone knows 'O sole mio.' It's a genre particularly prized, perhaps because of the beauty of the Bay of Naples. Well, why do I go back to Wagner to arrive at a serenade?
5:11 Because Wagner makes this admission in his magnificent work simply called Beethoven. He speaks of the night. He says that music is what brings out of the night the sounds that come from within. Sounds like the cry that one utters in erotic pleasure or in a nightmare. Those are the examples he takes. The cry that expresses what is deepest within. Wagner says at one point, this song that comes from within, I have never felt it so intensely.
5:42 Never have I seen the depths of the soul expressed so well, with such overwhelming simplicity, as by a gondolier in Venice. It is to pay homage to this popular tradition that I'm going to have you listen to a serenade which I'll borrow from the Corsican tradition. A love song, since it's a man addressing a woman with respect, timidity, and a controlled sensuality, since he starts from her hair, which he compares to that of the fairies. It's titled 'Stammi vicinu, un ti n'andà, ti tengu cara.'
6:17 Stay close to me, don't go away, I love you, ti tengu cara. Traditional Corsican serenade. Stammi vicinu, un ti n'andà, ti tengu cara.
Nietzsche and Wagner: the friendship around Greek tragedy 9:11 —a question Wagner had already been asking himself before, since he is, after all, nearly a generation older than Nietzsche. Nietzsche is not a philosopher, contrary to what many people believe. He has a philosophical culture, of course. He has an enormous amount to contribute to philosophical reflection, but he himself is a philologist. Today we'd call him a linguist specializing in the philology of ancient Greek. That's why he knows Plato so admirably, for instance. An immense musical culture too. And of course, like everyone else, he breathes in Wagner's music in the young Germany of the time.
9:41 Nietzsche's great dream is to go spend his weekends on Lake Lucerne, where the Wagner couple lives—a couple that scandalizes all of Europe, since Wagner, a great seducer, is living there with Liszt's daughter, whom he took away from her husband, the most prestigious conductor of the time. He, Wagner, a little musician from a working-class background, snatched away the wife of Hans von Bülow, from a great Prussian family. Nietzsche is going to spend time with them. The friendship between the two starts off very well. Both are troubled by the same reference point.
10:11 How did the Greeks manage to gather the whole city on the tiered benches for four days, uniting music, gesture, speech, and myth—the most popular thing there is? Every kid in Athens knew the twelve labors of Hercules, and so on, and each time it was as if they were hearing them for the first time. You know how it works with children's tales. How did the Greeks manage to unify all the arts in that mysterious culmination of Greek art which is tragedy? Tragedy, which the Greeks called mousiké.
10:43 Mousiké, that is, the totality of all the arts gathered under the aegis of music. That was their shared reflection. So this friendship isn't going to last, I'll let you guess. This 'friendship of stars,' as Nietzsche says somewhere—he had heard it said, it was modern science at the time, that constellations were drifting apart from one another. For now I'll limit myself to Nietzsche's grievances; he knew the history of music well, at least as well as Wagner. What he reproaches Wagner for above all is betraying what had once been their shared ideal.
Nietzsche's grievances: Siegfried versus Parsifal 11:18 To regenerate humanity through the Dionysian work of the Greeks, who celebrate not the Christian pessimism of a Europe in its death throes and decadence—I'm speaking their language here—but who, on the contrary, regenerate themselves through a return to Greek optimism. Now wait, let's be clear. The Greeks are more pessimistic than we are about what comes after death. During banquets, the Greeks would parade a skeleton around, saying 'Memento mori, remember that you will die, make the most of the time that passes.' So they're optimistic here on earth because they're pessimistic about the beyond.
11:52 It's the opposite of the Christian world. It's the Christian inversion, 'my kingdom is not of this world,' whoever wants to save his life will lose it. What does Nietzsche reproach Wagner for? For having betrayed the pagan, Dionysian, Greek side, in favor of the pessimistic, Christian, romantic side. He even said that all German philosophy was the result of bad German cooking. That when you eat nothing but cabbage and potatoes and drink beer, you get a kind of inner resentment, from bad digestion, which explains the pessimism of German thought—and which disappears in front of a good plate of pasta al dente eaten in Turin on a beautiful spring afternoon.
12:33 What he likes best in Wagner is the character of Siegfried, because he remains Dionysian, Greek, Nietzschean—there's something of Hercules and Theseus in him. Siegfried, the slayer of the dragon, the one who can boast of feats, who slays monsters and who, with his sword, shatters all the old values to affirm the hero's will to live. Nietzsche likes that. He says, but Wagner, in his old age, grew ashamed of this youthful sin and wrote his testament, Parsifal.
13:05 That is indeed the last work Wagner wrote, in 1882, before dying in Venice in 1883, in the very place where he had composed Tristan. Perceval—well, now we're no longer in the Greek world. Perceval the Welshman, but it's the quest for the Grail, it's the Christian world, it's a fool who, when struck on one cheek, turns the other, who is dazed, who never understands what's happening, who doesn't ask questions when he should. And it's he who is supposed to be the agent of our salvation—that drives Nietzsche mad. That's the cause of the falling-out.
13:36 I'll go back to my point about music and history. The history of music wavers between a past that keeps trying to make a comeback—an ancient, Greek, neoclassical, baroque past, clean, with a place for everything, everything in its place, with a rhythm that reeks of vitality—and a time of modernity, of length, of illness. That's what Nietzsche reproaches Wagner for most. There's a medical side, a very topical one, an ecological, prophylactic side to Nietzsche, in which he's wary everywhere of what is unhealthy—though you never know if it's in the physical or the psychic sense.
Pity and Nietzsche's reversal before Parsifal 14:13 That's where there's an enormous ambivalence. What was unhealthy for the Nazis was also the Jews—yes, the feeling of the unhealthy can go very far. I'll quote you a text that is never quoted, by Nietzsche, because it comes at the end, and it will serve as a kind of musical coda to my point. After having written the worst things about Parsifal in Beyond Good and Evil—ah, you think that's German, that's genuflection, that's pious nonsense, it reeks of incense, he's become senile, Wagner has gone soft, whereas Italian musicians have vigor.
14:47 When Nietzsche writes this, he had not heard a single note of the music of Parsifal. I'm not talking about the text, which could well have disturbed Nietzsche with its blood—there's plenty of blood in Parsifal, the blood of Christ, the blood of the wounded swan. This Nietzsche, whose counter-value par excellence—and I'll sum it up with this expression—is pity. There is nothing less Nietzschean, according to Nietzsche himself, than pity. Nietzsche even says: either one is for Christ or one is for Zarathustra.
15:17 Zarathustra is the man without pity. One must pass through the total absence of pity to renew humanity. If we start softening with pity, we're done for. But then, a few weeks before his death—his psychic death, as you know, he went mad—he finally hears the music. He suddenly says what a shock this music was for him. Has Wagner ever done better? I quote him word for word. 'A shield of accomplished workmanship.'
15:48 'An epigrammatic masterpiece.' It's true that an epigram is the shortest and most dense thing one can write in poetry, whereas up to that point he had denounced the bloated lengths of Wagner. 'An elevation in the fearsome sense of the word.' It's true that elevation is a religious term. The elevation at Mass is when the chalice, the corpus Christi, is raised—and it's no accident, because that evening he writes in his notebook, going even further: he says the prelude to Parsifal is as if someone were speaking to me in secret and telling me the secrets I had never wanted to admit to myself—that is, the secrets of Christianity, that is, of the strongest thought of these last centuries.
16:24 In short, the exact opposite of what Nietzsche says in his published works—the music has taken precedence over the text. Extraordinary depth and honesty on Nietzsche's part, who completely reverses what he had said when he had only read the text, once he hears the music. Has Wagner ever done better? So what does Wagner's work close on? Music and history—we are caught up by our own history. We'd like to be baroque enthusiasts, to go back to before—it's very fashionable, what I'm saying. Wagner had the honesty, as an artist—because he was odious otherwise, as a man—to express the fact that we are caught up by the truth. Music, in some way, is honest. There's nothing more romantic than plunging back into the past, nothing more romantic than wanting to flee one's own modernity to lodge oneself in some past niche. Music, when it is authentic, prevents us from this deadly regression. Music.
