Response to 10/31/11 Prompt

I found the following to say quite a bit about what Nietzsche considers his favorite music:

“This music seems perfect to me. It approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is pleasant, it does not sweat. ‘What is good is light. What is divine moves on tender feet’: first principle of my aesthetics. This music is evil, subtly fatalistic: at the same time it remains popular— its subtlety belongs to a race, not to an individual. It is rich. It is precise. It builds, organizes, finishes; thus it constitutes the opposite of the polyp in music, ‘the infinite melody.’ Have more painful tragic accidents ever been heard on the stage? How are they achieved? Without grimaces. Without counterfeit. Without the lie of the great style.”

What I’m not so sure about, however, is if he is referring to Wagner when he says, “This music is evil… not to an individual.” I ask because I do see the possibility of Nietzsche considering a movement of music like Bizet’s as redemption from Wagner (and as we know, redemption is something we don’t want).

At the end of section 2, Nietzsche illustrates how Bizet understands the tragedy of love while Wagner merely operates as though he does, and mocks the emotions of love in an artificial way. As if this isn’t enough, Wagner uses his disorganization to mislead his audience. In my opinion, Nietzsche likely hates Wagner for another reason: since Nietzsche understands music, the tragedy of Wagner’s compositions comes out in this disorganization by mixing the melancholic emotions and leaving the listener (Nietzsche) able to find neither a footing in the piece nor the origins. But because Bizet speaks to both the Apollonian and Dionysian, he is a greater composer.

If Wagner’s “infinite melody” (which is so despised by Nietzsche) could be considered the inspiration for cinematic music, would it be unfair to attribute, by Nietzsche’s line of reasoning anyhow, general popular music to a composer like Georges Bizet? We do have artists such as the Beatles and Pink Floyd who were known for anthologies of medleys, and films such as Good Night and Good Luck and The Wall (ironically) in which music is either the centerpiece or at least distinguished from the plot, but wouldn’t that just be a byproduct of this movement? That is to say that the redemption of the pure Dionysian from the pure Apollonian would cause a combination (what Nietzsche wants), but that from these combinations would spawn genres of art in which music would be either the dominance of a whole or the trivial part of a whole?