Moving back from this tone of exhortation into a mood suitable for contemplation, I repeat that only from the Greeks can we learn what such a miraculously sudden awakening of tragedy can mean for the innermost, fundamental life of a populace. It is the people of the tragic mysteries who fight the Persian wars, and then, in turn, the people who carried on these wars use tragedy as an essential potion in their recovery.2 Who would have suspected that these particular people, after being stirred right to their innermost being for several generations by the strongest paroxysms of the Dionysian daemon, still had such a regular and powerful outpouring of the simplest political feeling, the most natural instinctive emotion for their homeland, the original manly desire to fight?

Nonetheless, if we always sense in every remarkable Dionysian arousal which takes hold of its surroundings how Dionysian release from the shackles of individuality registers at first as a heightened restriction of the political instinct, all the way to indifference and even hostility, it is also true that, on the other hand, Apollo, the nation builder, is also the genius of the principium individuationis [principle of individuation] and that a sense of state and homeland cannot survive without an affirmation of the individual personality.

From orgiastic experience there is only one way out for a people, the route to Indian Buddhism, which, with its longing for nothingness, in order to be endurable, generally requires those rare ecstatic states with their ascent above space, time, and individuality: just as these states, in their turn, demand a philosophy which teaches people to use some idea to overcome the unimaginable dreariness of intermediate states. In cases where the political drives are considered absolutely valid, it’s equally necessary for a people to turn to a path of the most extreme secularization. The most magnificent but also the most terrifying example of this is the Roman empire.

Standing between India and Rome and forced to make a tempting choice, the Greeks succeeded in inventing a third form in classical purity. Of course, they did not make use of it for long themselves, but for that very reason they made it immortal. The fact that the darlings of the gods die early holds in all things, but it’s equally certain that then they live among the gods for ever. So people should not demand from the noblest thing of all that it should possess the hard-wearing durability of leather; that crude toughness characteristic of the Roman national impulses, for example, probably does not belong to the necessary predicates of perfection.

But if we ask what remedies made it possible for the Greek in their great period, with the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political drives, not to exhaust themselves either with an ecstatic brooding or in a consuming pursuit of world power and worldly honour, but to reach that marvellous mixture — just as a noble wine makes one feel fiery and meditative at the same time — then we must keep in mind the immense power of tragedy, which stimulated the entire life of the people, purifying it and giving it release. We will first sense its highest value when, as with the Greeks, it confronts us as the essence of all prophylactic healing potions, as the mediator adjudicating between the strongest and inherently most disastrous characteristics of a people.

Tragedy draws the highest musical ecstasy into itself, so that, with the Greeks, as with us, it immediately brings music to its culmination. But then it places the tragic myth and the tragic hero next to the music, and he then, like a powerful Titan, takes the whole Dionysian world on his back and thus relieves us of it. On the other hand, with the same tragic myth, in the person of the tragic hero, tragedy knows how to redeem us from the greedy pressure for this existence and with a warning hand reminds us of another state of being and a higher pleasure for which the struggling hero, filled with foreboding, is preparing himself, not through his victory, but through his destruction.

Tragedy places between the universal validity of its music and the listener sensitive to the Dionysian an awe-inspiring parable — the myth — and with that awakens an illusion, as if the music is only the production’s highest device for bringing life to the plastic world of the myth. Trusting in this noble deception, tragedy can now move its limbs in the dithyrambic dance and abandon itself unconsciously to an ecstatic feeling of freedom; without that deception it would not dare to revel in the very essence of music.

The myth protects us from the music, while it, by contrast, immediately gives the music its highest freedom. In return, the music gives back to the tragic myth, as a return gift, an urgent and convincing metaphysical significance, of a kind which word and image could never attain without that unique assistance, and through the music, in particular, there comes over the spectator of tragedy that certain presentiment of the highest joy, the road to which leads through destruction and negation, so that he thinks what he hears is like the innermost abyss of things speaking to him out loud.

If in these last sentences I have perhaps been able to provide only a provisional expression of this difficult idea, something immediately understandable to few people, at this particular point I cannot refrain from urging my friends to a further attempt and from asking them with a single example of our common experience to prepare themselves to recognize a general principle. With this example, I am not referring to those who use the images of the action in the scene, the words and emotions of those doing the acting, so that with this help they can come closer to the feeling of the music, for none of these people speaks music as a mother tongue, and, for all that help, they proceed no further than the lobbies of musical perception, without ever being entitled to touch its innermost shrine. Some of these who take this road, like Gervinus, do not even succeed in reaching the lobby.1 No, I must turn only to those who have an immediate relationship with music, who find in it, as it were, their mother’s womb and stand bound up with things almost exclusively through an unconscious musical relationship. To these true musicians I direct the question: Can they imagine a person capable of perceiving the third act of Tristan and Isolde purely as an immense symphonic movement, getting no help from words and images, without suffocating from a convulsive spreading of all the wings of the soul? 2

A man who, as in this case, has set his ear, so to speak, on the heart chambers of the world’s will, who feels in himself the raging desire for existence pouring forth into all the veins of the world as a thundering rainstorm or as the most delicately spraying brook — would such a man not fall apart on the spot? Could he endure hearing in the suffering glass case of his human individuality the echo of countless cries of desire and woe from the “wide space of the world’s night,” without, in the midst of this shepherd’s medley of metaphysics, inexorably flying off for refuge to his primordial home? But what if nonetheless such a work can be perceived as a totality, without the denial of individual existence, what if such a creation could be produced without shattering its creator — where do we get the solution to such a contradiction?

Here, between our highest musical excitement and that music, the tragic myth and the tragic hero interpose themselves, basically only as a metaphor of the most universal facts of all, about which only music can speak directly. However, if we felt as purely Dionysian beings, then myth would be entirely ineffectual as a metaphor and would remain beside us unnoticed. It would not make us turn our ears away for an instant from listening to the echo of the universalia ante rem [the universal before the fact] . But here the Apollonian power breaks through, preparing for the reintegration of the almost shattered individuality with the healing balm of a blissful illusion. Suddenly we think we still see only Tristan, motionless and dazed, as he asks himself, “The old melody, what does it awaken for me?” And what earlier struck us as an empty sigh from the centre of being now only wishes to say to us something like “the barren, empty sea.” And where we breathlessly imagined we were dying in a convulsive inner paroxysm of all our feelings with only a little linking us to this existence, now we hear and see only the hero mortally wounded and yet not dying, with his cry full of despair, “Longing! Longing! In death still yearning, and not to die for very longing!” And when earlier, after such an excess and such a huge number of consuming torments, the jubilation of the horns, almost like the highest agony, cuts through our hearts, there stands between us and this “jubilation in itself” the celebrating Kurwenal, turned towards the ship which carries Isolde. No matter how powerful the pity gripping us inside, this pity nonetheless saves us, in a certain sense, from the primordial suffering of the world, just as the symbolic picture of the myth saves us from the immediate look at the highest world idea, just as the idea and the word save us from the unrestrained outpouring of the unconscious will. Because of that marvellous Apollonian deception it seems to us as if the empire of music itself confronted us as a plastic world, as if in it only Tristan’s and Isolde’s destiny had been formed and stamped out in pictures, as in the most delicate and expressive of all material.

Thus the Apollonian rescues us from Dionysian universality and delights us with individuals. It attaches our aroused feelings of sympathy to them, and with them it satisfies our sense of beauty, which longs for great and awe-inspiring forms; it parades images of life before us and provokes us to a thoughtful grasp of the kernel of life contained in them. With the immense power of image, idea, ethical instruction, and sympathetic arousal, the Apollonian lifts man up out of his ecstatic self-destruction and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, leading him to the delusion that he is watching just one image of the world — for example, Tristan and Isolde — and that through the music he is only supposed to see it even better and more inwardly. What can the healing magic of Apollo not achieve, if it can even arouse in us this delusion, so that it seems as if the Dionysian is really working to serve the Apollonian and is capable of intensifying its effects — in fact, as if the music were even essentially an artistic presentation of an Apollonian content?

With that pre-established harmony which reigns between the perfect drama and its music, drama attains a supreme degree of vividness, something which verbal drama otherwise could not approach. As in the independently moving melodic lines all the living forms in the scene simplify themselves in front of us into the clarity of curved lines, the juxtaposition of these lines sounds out to us in the harmonic changes which sympathize in the most delicate way with the action as it moves forward. While this happens, the relation of things becomes immediately perceptible to us in a more sensuously perceptible way, which has nothing abstract about it at all, as we also recognize through it that only in these relations does the essence of a character and of a melodic line clearly reveal itself.
And while the music compels us in this way to see more and more profoundly than ever and the scenic action spreads itself in front of us like a delicate spider’s web, for our spiritual inward-gazing eye the world of the stage is just as infinitely widened as it is illuminated from within. What could a word poet offer analogous to this — someone who struggles with a very imperfect mechanism in indirect ways to attain with word and idea that inner expansion of the vivid world of the stage and its inner illumination? Musical tragedy, of course, also uses the word, but at the same time it can set beside it the fundamental basis and birth place of the word and reveal to us from inside what that word has become. But nonetheless we could just as surely claim about this depiction of the action that it is only a marvellous appearance, i.e., that previously mentioned Apollonian illusion, through whose effect we are to be relieved of the Dionysian surge and excess. In fact, the relationship between music and drama is fundamentally the very reverse — the music is the essential idea of the world, the drama only a reflection of this idea, an isolated silhouette.

That identity between the melodic line and the living form, between the harmony and the relations of the characters in that form, is true in a sense opposite to what it might seem to be for us as we look at musical tragedy. We may well stir up the form in the most visible way, enliven and illuminate it from within, but it always remains only an appearance, from which there is no bridge leading to true reality, into the heart of the world. But music speaks out from this heart, and although countless appearances of that sort could clothe themselves in the same music, they would never exhaust its essence, but would always be only its external reflection.

Of course, for the complex relationship between music and drama nothing is explained and everything is confused by the popular and entirely false contrast between the soul and the body. But particularly among our aestheticians it’s the unphilosophical crudity of that contrast which seems to have become, who knows the reasons why, quite a well-known article of faith, while they have learned nothing about the difference between the appearance and the thing-in-itself or, for similarly unknown reasons, don’t want to learn anything.

If one result of our analysis might be that the Apollonian in tragedy, thanks to its deception, emerges completely victorious over the Dionysian primordial element of music and makes use of this for its own purposes, that is, for the highest dramatic clarity, a very important reservation would naturally follow: at the most essential point that Apollonian deception is broken up and destroyed. The drama, which, with the help of music, spreads out in front of us with such inwardly illuminated clarity in all its movements and forms, as if we were seeing the fabric on the loom while the shuttle moves back and forth, achieves its effect as a totality which lies beyond all the artistic workings of the Apollonian. In the total effect of tragedy the Dionysian regains its superiority once more. Tragedy ends with a tone which never could resound from the realm of Apollonian art.

And as that happens, the Apollonian illusion reveals itself for what it is, as the veil which, so long as the tragedy is going on, has covered the essentially Dionysian effect. But this Dionysian effect is nonetheless so powerful that at the end it drives the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and where it denies itself and its Apollonian visibility. So we could truly symbolize the complex relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy with the fraternal bond between both divinities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo finally speaks the language of Dionysus, and with that the highest goal of tragedy and art in general is attained.

Footnotes:

2Persian Wars : Persian forces invaded Greece twice, in 490 and in 480 BC. The first expedition ended with the Battle of Marathon and the second with the naval battle of Salamis and the land battle of Plataea. These victories were high points of classical Hellenic experience, particularly for the spirit of courage and cooperation they displayed in the face of what looked like insuperable odds.

1Gervinus : Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805 to 1871), German literary and political historian.

2Tristan and Isolde: an opera by Richard Wagner, first performed in 1865.