Opera and mass art in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

Abstract

Nietzsche's critic of the opera, accomplished in The Birth of Tragedy and in its preparatory writings, exceeds the strict boundaries of aesthetics and becomes a general review of modern culture. In this context, I attempt to delve into the hypothesis, according to which the young Nietzsche offers some rudimentary elements for an early definition of “mass art”. To this end, I place the operatic art in the philosophical map of the first Nietzschean works through a study of his marginal condition regarding aesthetics, based on what Nietzsche recognizes as the “Socratic pleasure in understanding”. It is therefore appropriated to analyse the path from the “illusions” of beauty and metaphysical solace up to the artistic sterility of the theoretical man, path that reveals a shift of the opera towards the field of morality. Lastly, the hypothesis is tested through a reconstruction of the concept of “mass” (expressed in the voices Masse, Menge and Schaar) and its importance with respect to the relation between tragedy and opera.