Domingo/Kaufmann/Wagner: "Lohengrin".

[A]

"Act One [prelude] [B]
"The banks of the river Scheldt.
"Near Antwerp, King Henry the Fowler of Saxony has assembled a group of Brabantine nobles and commoners to discuss affairs of state. He is dismayed to find the local political situation in disarray … and suddenly a knightly figure is seen approaching in a small boat drawn by a swan …"

"Act Three [finale, 'In fernem Land': i.e. in a foreign/distant land]
"The banks of the river Scheldt.
"… He narrates the story of the Holy Grail and its keepers, and how he … was sent …"

Unfortunately, I could not find both videos taken from the same production of Richard Wagner's "Lohengrin, romantic opera in three acts", so we have different orchestras, choirs and conductors: three different interpretations. Still, one can appreciate Lohengrin's leitmotif in both videos (hint: pay attention to the music accompanying Plácido Domingo). Wagner gave great importance to them.

Besides its undeniable beauty (I'll confess: I am a fan of Wagner), "Lohengrin" in many ways exemplifies the ideals of the nineteenth century European (indeed, global) romantic artistic and cultural movement: focus on individuals and emotions, nature reflecting those emotions, exotic/medieval settings, the hero, struggle against all odds, tragedy and fate, among others. It has a clear popular appeal (see here, however, for the other side of the romantic coin).

A more modern and equally magnificent (in fact, critically acclaimed) performance of "In fernem Land" follows below. The tenor is Jonas Kaufmann, in the role of Lohengrin. The contrast between both performances should prove instructive. While still recognizably romantic, viewers will find it visually different; the idea is to give the performance a more modern look, consonant with modern sensibilities (hint: compare both tenors' body languages, facial expression, and clothing and stage lighting).

Note, however, the soprano, Anja Harteros, in the role of Elsa von Brabant, trying to stop Lohengrin's speech and her final dismay: their fate is tragically sealed by Lohengrin's answer to her otherwise natural question.

Image Credits and Notes:

[A] The beautiful photo opening this post comes from Justin Mier's blog, specializing in photography; I believe he is the author, to whom all credits are due and all rights belong. It seems appropriate to this subject because one could almost see the Swan Knight emerging from the fog and approaching the shore.

[B] All quotes from the booklet included with the CD box set The RCA Opera Treasury - Lohengrin (1997, BMG Classics).

Domingo y Gardel: "El Día que me Quieras".

From this Saturday on I'll do my best to post a link to a musical piece, which I find personally meaningful (sorry, youngsters, you'll probably hate me for this).

To start, I couldn't possibly get anything better than Plácido Domingo, singing Carlos Gardel's “El Día que me Quieras”. Domingo, on top, chose three great songstresses!

You may not remember them, but I few years back the Three Tenors (Domingo, José Carreras, and -- What's his name? The Italian fellow … -- just kidding, Luciano Pavarotti was great, too, even if he wasn't Spanish) were all the rage.

I didn't like the musical accompaniment that much, unfortunately: too “American”. Oh, well.

The Problem of Nietzsche.

"By birth, Socrates belonged to the lowest class: Socrates was rabble[*]. We are told, and can see in sculptures of him, how ugly he was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is among the Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is often enough the expression of a development that has been crossed, thwarted in some way. Or it appears as declining development. The anthropological criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo [monstrous in appearance, monstrous in spirit]. But the criminal is a decadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal? At least that would be consistent with the famous judgment of the physiognomist that so offended the friends of Socrates. This foreigner told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum - that he harbored in himself all the worst vices and appetites. And Socrates merely answered: 'You know me, sir!'
"Socrates' decadence is suggested not only by the admitted wantonness and anarchy of his instincts, but also by the overdevelopment of his logical ability and his characteristic thwarted sarcasm. Nor should we forget those auditory hallucinations which, as 'the daimonion of Socrates,' have been given a religious interpretation. Everything about Socrates is exaggerated, buffo, a caricature; everything is at the same time concealed, ulterior, underground." (Emphasis added. see here)

The author of that extraordinarily vile invective against Socrates became influential during the twentieth century, after a lifetime of obscurity and mediocrity: Friedrich Nietzsche.

What did Socrates, largely a mythical figure, do to deserve that outburst? "What really happened there"?

Credited by Plato, his disciple, with being the first true philosopher, little is known with any certainty about Socrates. Rightly or not, he emerges from Plato's writings as a rationalist, whose dialectical method was based on logical argument.

One could interpret Nietzsche's venom and slander as the words of a depraved Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, and leave things at that.

My reading, however, is different. Nietzsche's bile, directed against his view of Socrates, the man, should be interpreted as a hateful tirade against what Socrates came to represent:

"With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of logical argument. What really happened there? Above all, a noble taste is vanquished; with dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, argumentative conversation was repudiated in good society: it was considered bad manners, compromising. The young were warned against it. Furthermore, any presentation of one's motives was distrusted. Honest things, like honest men, do not have to explain themselves so openly. What must first be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the logician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?" (Emphasis added)

In Nietzsche's mind, Socrates morphs from risible "buffoon" into a fearsome threat, because by adopting reason and dialogue, embodied by Socrates, the true Greeks of "noble taste" and "good bearing", the "good society", allegedly forfeited their "authority", their "command": "the plebs come to the top".

Recognizing implicitly the weakness of his position, Nietzsche gives up on rational reasoning, and, instead, appeals to an hominem argument (nominally against the man, but by association, against the ideas of the Enlightenment); in so doing expresses without masks the fear that others also expressed in barely disguised form (Corey Robin called that "elective affinity").

And, to Nietzsche's horror, since the Enlightenment, reason and democracy were predicated as the way of the future for Europe and the world.

Indeed, a spectre was haunting Europe.

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Nietzsche's fears about reason were as premature and unjustified as his attack is full of ironies: democratic dialogue between reasonable and polite gentlemen does not lead to social change.

That, however, does not stop Nietzsche from fearing the mere possibility. This makes of him a rightful enemy of democracy and a prophet of fascism, in addition to being a Post-Modern precursor. Is in this sense that Nietzsche deserves to be read and where he does provide insight.

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Ironically, the man who distrusted science and reason, appealed to Cesare Lombroso (the father of the "science" of anthropological criminology) to justify his tirade.

After mercilessly mocking Socrates' alleged ugliness, Nietzsche ended up looking like this:

Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche by Hans Olde (1899/1900) [A]

And after throwing stones on Socrates' reason roof, fearing reason all his life, only at the end Nietzsche fully embraced unreason [#]:

"To his friend Meta von Salis he [i.e. Nietzsche] wrote:
" 'God is on the earth. Don't you see how all the heavens are rejoicing? I have just seized possession of my kingdom, I've thrown the Pope in prison, and I'm having Wilhelm, Bismarck, and [anti-Semitic politician Adolf] Stocker shot.'
"To his closest friend, theologian Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche wrote:
" 'The world will be turned on its head for the next few years: since the old God has abdicated, I will be ruling the world from now on'."

There is poetic justice in that.

Notes:
[*] The original in German reads "Sokrates gehörte, seiner Herkunft nach, zum niedersten Volk: Sokrates war Pöbel". The noun "Pöbel" translates as "rabble" and it is this word I use, instead of the softer adjective "plebeian", which Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale used. While etymologically connected to plebe, Pöbel carries in German a stronger negative connotation than the English plebe.
[#] Quoted from Sax, Leonard. What was the cause of Nietzsche’s dementia?
Journal of Medical Biography 2003; 11: 47–54.

Image Credits:
[A] "Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche by Hans Olde (1899/1900)". This image is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. Source: Wikipedia.

Nietzsche at Nuremberg.

Thursday, 17 January 1946.

Morning Session

The President: "I call upon the Counsel for France".

[A]

M. François de Menthon (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic):

"Over a people in this state of spiritual crisis and of negations of traditional values the culminating philosophy of Nietzsche was to exercise a dominant influence. In taking the will to power as a point of departure, Nietzsche preached, certainly not inhumanity but superhumanity. If there is no final cause in the universe, man, whose body is matter which is at once feeling and thinking, may mould the world to his desire, choosing as his guide a militant biology. If the supreme end of humanity is a feeling of victorious fullness which is both material and spiritual, all that remains is to insure the selection of physical specimens, who become the new aristocracy of masters.
"For Nietzsche the industrial revolution necessarily entails the rule of the masses, the automatism and the shaping of the working multitudes. The state endures only by virtue of an elite of vigorous personalities who, by the methods so admirably defined by Machiavelli, which alone are in accord with the laws of life, will lead men by force and by ruse simultaneously, for men are and remain wicked and perverse.
"We see the modem barbarian arise. Superior by his intelligence and his wilful energy, freed of all conventional ethics, he can enforce upon the masses obedience and loyalty by making them believe in the dignity and beauty of labor and by providing them with that mediocre well-being with which they are so easily content. An identical force will, therefore, be manifest in the leaders, by the harmony between their elementary passions and the lucidity of their organizing reason, and in the masses, whose dark or violent instincts will be balanced by a reasoned activity imposed with implacable discipline.
"Without doubt, the late philosophy of Nietzsche cannot be identified with the brutal simplicity of National Socialism. Nevertheless, National Socialism was wont to glorify Nietzsche as one of its ancestors. And justly so, for he was the first to formulate in a coherent manner criticism of the traditional values of humanism; and also, because his conception of the government of the masses by masters knowing no restraint is a preview of the Nazi regime. Besides, Nietzsche believed in the sovereign race and attributed primacy to Germany, whom he considered endowed with a youthful soul and unquenchable resources." (see here)

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After the previous tragicomic interpretation of Nietzsche and his moral philosophy, the words of the French Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg add a rather sinister dimension to the man and his political philosophy.

And, yet, Nietzsche (and his political philosophy) is the man some (like this young, up-and-coming Post Keynesian) want to propose as your inspiration, instead of Karl Marx.

Now, choose.

Don't worry if you have a family. It's not me you'll have to answer to, if you chose the wrong guy.


Image Credits:
[A] Nuremberg Trials: some of "he accused on their bench (front left to right: Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walther Funk; back left to right: Franz v. Papen, Arthur Seyß-Inquart, Albert Speer, Konstantin v. Neurath)". The image is in the public domain. Source: Wikipedia.

Nietzsche, the Übermensch?

Or, The Birth of Tragicomedy.

In life, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was, or tried to be, many things. Intellectually influential, however, he was not, as the following Google Ngram chart suggests:

(Right-click to open in a separate tab)

Born well into the Romantic period, Nietzsche in many ways embodies, with diverse degree of success, notions associated with that movement: the man struggling alone against frightful difficulties, against society itself and its norms, to bend the world to his will: the Übermensch (Superman).

Nietzsche's goal in life:

"I teach you the overman [i.e. Übermensch, literal translation; superman]. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?" (link)

"Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" [A]

It was in death (first intellectual and, then, physical) that Nietzsche became influential. There is little more romantic than that.

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During most of his childhood, after his father and little brother's deaths, Nietzsche was the only male in a not very affluent Prussian household, dominated by strong female authority figures (including his mother and domineering sister, Elisabeth -- two years younger -- grandmother and two unmarried aunts).

Never much of a "farfallone amoroso" (oblivious to his shyness, moody disposition, and chronic financial insolvency, Nietzsche apparently attributed his lack of success with the ladies to his appearance alone), Nietzsche twice turned to the military in pursuit of fulfilment ("Cherubino, alla vittoria! Alla gloria militar!"), in spite of his poor eyesight and health.

The first time (1867), as a trainee artillery officer, a horse-riding accident left him disabled. A few years later, during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), fully recovered from his injuries, he volunteered for duty but, after a short stint, was sent home in defeat, not by French bullets or bayonets, but by diarrhoea and diphtheria.

After that experience, Nietzsche settled for academic life. However, unhappy with the professorship his teacher, Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, got for him at the University of Basel, in 1878 Nietzsche resigned, to become a gardener. A few weeks later, he quit his new career; his weak back taught him the seemingly unimagined: gardening involves not only fresh air and the magnificent Alpine outdoors; it involves back-breaking work.

Then, he attempted a writing career, but his books wouldn't sell, leaving him always short of cash.

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On January 1889, Nietzsche's writing career came to an end, after suffering an irreversible mental breakdown. A final indignity awaited for him: his care fell upon Elisabeth (for whom Nietzsche had mixed feelings), until his death in 1900.

Those proved to be Nietzsche's luckiest career moves, as the Google Ngram chart also suggests. Elisabeth would become his best literary agent: immortality finally was at hand.

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As is often the case with philosophers, Nietzsche's work is subject of interpretation. For Alain de Botton [*] a generous interpreter (from whom I draw heavily), Nietzsche is a moral philosopher and tragic romantic hero whose own life illustrates his philosophy of struggle in the face of overwhelming adversity:

"Like his father, he [i.e. Nietzsche] had wished to offer us paths to fulfilment. But unlike pastors … he had judged difficulties to be a crucial prerequisite of fulfilment, and hence knew saccharine consolations to be ultimately more cruel than helpful." [page 243]

While that interpretation allows us to salvage something valuable from his life, Nietzsche himself conspires against it, for his own inadequacies (among them, lack of empathy, and egotism) and lack of self-awareness. More a tragicomedy than a drama.

Notes:
[*] De Botton, Alain. 2000. "The Consolations of Philosophy". Sydney: Penguin Books Australia.


Image Credits:
[A] "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog", 1818, by Caspar David Friedrich. This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art. The work of art itself is in the public domain. Wikipedia

Update:
(17-08-2014) Added the short paragraph on Nietzsche's luckiest career move.