ABSTRACT
Among the unsorted papers in the Cambridge University Library is a (German-language) manuscript of just eight pages dating from 1939/40. Its author is Hans Keller, at the time of writing a 21-year-old émigré from Nazioccupied Austria.1 The text is a fantasy on reactions to the new-fangled invention, radio, and the speakers include heroes and villains ancient and modern.2 Of the reactions two in particular stand out (they appear here in translation). The first is by ‘Nietzsche’ –
– and the second is a satire on the opening of Plato’s Phaedrus:
The importance of meaningful dialogue for instruction was a familiar enough theme in Keller’s writing: after all, it was his musical father, Arnold Schoenberg, who had begun his Harmony manual with the words, ‘I have learnt [what to put in] this book from my pupils’;3 and, according to Hugh Wood, Keller engaged in his ‘basic activity’ when he taught at the Dartington Summer School ‘through informal Socratic dialogue’.4 Yet – and this ‘yet’ is crucial – in his twenty years at the BBC Keller not only impressed himself on countless ‘invisible friends’ through his meticulous broadcasts, but was also known as a moralist, ‘the musical conscience of British broadcasting’ no less.5 He was gripped by radio, certainly, but was he for or against? If this is a contradiction, then Nietzsche himself noted something similar in Plato:
And in our turn we may resolve these contradictions by turning to an idea familiar from Freudian psychology, that of Besetzung. (James Strachey translates this as ‘cathexis’.) Besetzung indicates an investment of energy, or ‘quantity of affect’, in an idea or person, an investment arising from the instincts either directly or reactively. The precise meaning of the idea has been much debated;7 but for our purpose we may posit two stages in the establishment of an affect (or feeling): first, we allow our attention to be engaged by an object or ideal: secondly we value the affect positively or negatively, calling upon the agencies of, say, love or hate as we do so. In the first instance we are aware of the strength of the affect, its quantity; in the
second, we assess its worth, its quality. Plato’s Socrates invested a considerable quantity of affect into the question of drama; but he nevertheless attributed a negative quality to it. We shall return to this paradox centrally in the fifth and final part of this paper. But throughout I shall consider both the importance of the figure of Socrates and the ambivalent attitudes towards him held by many thinkers and artists since Plato. II
The contradictions of Besetzung are at their keenest in Death in Venice, Benjamin Britten’s last opera of 1973. Here Socrates is a key figure in the moral argument. The work is a single action normally performed in two acts; and the libretto, by Myfanwy Piper, is fairly closely based on the celebrated (German-language) novella by Thomas Mann of 1912, itself cast in five parts (or ‘acts’).8 Mortality hung over the enterprise: Mann named his protagonist, the ennobled Gustav von Aschenbach, after Gustav Mahler who died in 1911; and Benjamin Britten, who kept a picture of Mahler over his desk,9 was taken seriously ill during the work’s composition and died in 1976, three years after its completion. At the first performance Aschenbach was memorably sung by Peter Pears, who had much to do with the shaping of the opera’s plain but charged style of recitative. Mann invokes Plato’s Phaedrus on two occasions: in part 4 and in the closing pages of part 5;10 both occasions find parallels in the opera, the first in Act I, Scene 7, and the second in Act II, Scene 16.11 These scenes are in fact crucial to our understanding of the work. But before looking at them, we need first to reconstruct Mann’s attitudes to the image of Socrates and its relation to music and drama. These attitudes in turn form a critique of Nietzsche’s epochmaking The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), his celebrated early work that significantly reclaims the ancient Greeks for modern Germans. So before reconstructing Mann, we must reconstruct Nietzsche. Following Schiller, Nietzsche famously held that the essence of an artwork lay in its quasi-musical affective tone. This is to posit quality of affect as its origin:
Therefore, continued Nietzsche,
Moreover, this making of music ‘visible’ – in other words, this journeying from Dionysus to Apollo – openly refuted the subjectivism of Arthur Schopenhauer on the grounds that Schopenhauer’s ‘striving individual’ is merely ‘bent on furthering his own egotistic purposes’:14
(The point, indeed, anticipates Jung’s grounding of an artist’s vision in a shared (‘collective’) unconscious; W.H. Auden likewise was to insist that as music was fundamentally joyous, there could be no genuinely tragic art.) It was through Greek drama especially that the murkily ecstatic, dream-like Dionysos opened ‘a path to the maternal womb of being’, revealing ‘music’ through ‘tragic myth’ and allowing us ‘to understand the delight felt at the annihilation of the individual’.16 To articulate this drama, though, required the clear ‘transcendent genius’ of Apollo.17
