Pain

Orpheus hardly hears himself singing; he sings and that is all. The forest falls silent when he sings; the gods pause, the beasts listen. And of what does he sing? Of gods, I imagine, of beasts, of the forest in which he wanders. Strange doubling – a song of the forest in the forest. Song that passes through words. Isn’t that what makes the gods pause, and the beasts? Here is a human being – here, and perhaps for the first time, is music.

Music that must pass through words, music that is never yet itself, that is given only as it lets language tremble. Orpheus is the first singer, the first musician. But of what does he bring to song, even as he sings of gods, of beasts? What is it that doubles itself by his song?

For Nietzsche, notes Schmidt, music has a precedence over language; only the language of tragedy approximates the song that surges before speech. In music, ‘pain is pronounced holy’; music is the ‘language of the will in its immediacy’. And in the preface he appends to The Birth of Tragedy many years after its publication, doesn’t he regret that his book did not sing?

How to make Dionysian art intelligible? ‘Through the wonderful significance of music dissonance‘. Dissonance, pain: is music, for Nietzsche, the language of the birds and beasts? Is it a language of the gods? Perhaps it is only to tragedy that it answers, in a dissonance that returns to tear harmony apart.

Orpheus sings. There is pain in the forests; birds die, beasts die, but do they sing of their pain? And the gods – what do they know of shattered harmony? Orpheus sings of gods and beasts, but he sings as one who is neither, who knows for the first time, the pain of existence. But a pain, now, of the tearing apart of natural harmony.

The beasts stir, the gods at the edge of heaven listen with awe: who is this new being whose existence is pain? From whence comes the song that tears apart all joy?