On the Musical Gathering of Echoes of the Voice: Walter Benjamin on Opera and the Trauerspiel

Opera between Tragedy and Trauerspiel

What little Walter Benjamin wrote on music possesses an undoubtedly enigmatic character. I will attempt here to draw out of his pronouncements the outline of a view of music and language bearing on the understanding of opera. I wish to emphasize at the outset, however, that I am concerned not with the interpretation of opera as such nor with the analysis of music, but rather with how both are conceived and echoed in Benjamin's writings. I will focus my interpretation on Benjamin's The Origin of German Trauerspiel. This text not only opposes tragedy to the Trauerspiel ("mourning play") but also constitutes Benjamin's confrontation with Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy and its purported Wagnerism.¹ Just as for Nietzsche the question of tragedy is inextricably bound with the birth of his own thinking, the issues raised by Benjamin's investigation of the seemingly restricted literary genre of the German Baroque Trauerspiel open onto his own historical practice and metaphysical outlook. And because Wagner represents for Nietzsche, at the time of The Birth of Tragedy, the very possibility of seeing the modern world as a revival of the musical spirit of tragedy, Benjamin's critique of the mythical elements inherent in Nietzsche's Wagnerism also bear on his preoccupation with the problematic face of modernity.²

I will start by laying out certain themes of Benjamin's confrontation with Nietzsche that will be important later in my discussion of opera. First, the very title of Benjamin's book, The Origin of German Trauerspiel, hints at a contrast with the themes of birth and rebirth prevalent in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. The Nietzschean figure of birth (Geburt ) is a figure of ecstatic renewal. In particular, music is for Nietzsche a "womb" of phenomena: "Music can give birth to myth (the most significant example) and particularly to tragic myth: the myth which expresses Dionysian knowledge in symbols."³ Benjamin's notion of origin (Ursprung ), on the other hand, is emphatically a "historical category" set in opposition to mythic genesis (Entstehung ). The investigation of the origin of a phenomenon (be it an artistic genre, a work of art, or a historical event) is not identified with its moment of birth but is rather revealed by bringing together the traces it has left in the course of its history.⁴ If the existence of works of art in the world in which they are created can be called their life, then Benjamin's presentation of origin depends on making manifest the afterlife of such works, after their world has died out.⁵

Second, against Nietzsche's ecstatic affirmation of the healing power of art in the balance it establishes between Dionysian intoxication and Apollonian dream, Benjamin posits a more sober, critical (he would call it "Socratic") understanding of the relation of beauty and truth. The process of criticism to which the work of art is subjected destroys the illusory dimension (Schein ) inherent in it, but at the same time—insofar as it is only by working internally, through the work of art, that the hidden truth that sustained it in existence can be revealed—criticism also vindicates beauty or does justice to it. Such truth is then beyond beauty, but there is no access to it apart from beauty. Benjamin's understanding of the relation of beauty and truth is implicitly a critique of Nietzsche's aestheticization of existence: Nietzsche takes "art, and not morality, to be the truly metaphysical activity of man."⁶ Benjamin traces Nietzsche's conviction to the latter's early infatuation with Wagner, claiming that "the Schopenhauerian and Wagnerian metaphysics necessarily vitiated the best aspects of Nietzsche's work . . . the nihilism lodged in the depths of the artistic philosophy of Bayreuth nullified the hard, historical actuality of Greek tragedy."⁷

Third, the contrast between tragedy and Trauerspiel opposes two diverging schemes for transcending or redeeming the contingency of empirical events. Tragedy, in Benjamin's understanding, provides the possibility for individual fulfillment of the contingencies of history; the tragic hero...