Listen to "The Little Death" on Soundcloud, here.
(I apologize for the lack of a video, but there are not even lyric videos for this song yet.)
Professor Andrew Barshay of the history department said you can always begin with a work's title. (It makes sense, given that a title is probably the first thing one reads when one reads a work.) I think this is useful for us when trying to listen to "The Little Death" as we think of Nietzsche's The Case of Wagner. This song gives us sense of what Nietzsche associates with Wagner, and is not the music he lauds, such as Bizet. I believe it is clear from the title that this song is morbid, a recurring signifier Nietzsche attaches to Wagner's music, although it might be harder to trace what makes a song like "The Little Death" decadent, which is the other recurring word Nietzsche uses to describe Wagner. First, we ought to understand what he is saying. Next, we can return to the above lyric to get a sense of what this song has to offer in terms of decadence.
"I give prominence to this point of view: Wagner's music is morbid... the compulsiveness of his emotion, his over-excited sensibility, his taste, which always asked for stronger stimulants, his instability, which he disguised as principles...altogether these symptoms represent a picture of disease about which there can be no mistake. Wagner est une nevrose." (Case of Wagner, 18)
Decadence as a spirit only comes out in an aesthetic, and as such necessarily invokes some imagery of bright, shining light, rich backgrounds, etc. However, this wealth of excess that we associate it with is essentially the spirit of excess of decadence only observed materially. Excess also exists in the "over excited sensibility" which matches the "taste" of his music (and his audience) and results in the need for "stronger stimulants." The analogy of the drug here is significant, because it implies a sense of compensation for something in the individual's feelings. Wagner satisfies his audience, he scratches their itch, and so they love him. This sort of love is pathetic for Nietzsche, and speaks of a nervous disorder where the individual is scared to exist as one's own self.
It should be clear now that decadence and morbidity share a nexus of the feeling in the psyche, which is why the lyrics to this song, about feeling human pleasure due to the connection with a feeling of death exemplify Wagner. This is exactly what Wagner does to the senses and feelings of his audience - he gives them their ghastly experience and thus unlocks their own humanity. After all, it is the death-like orgasm which is la petit morte, or the little death. Nietzsche criticizes Wagner's music as offering this exact sort of pleasure, as one always requires the other in sex (except in the case of masturbation, which is still a fundamental lack). This other reduces the self to an incomplete machine, which requires continual fuel and maintenance, and gets these, in Nietzsche, as if coddled and unable to stand upright. All the metaphors here assume and work to preserve a sense of the able-bodied human, or the strong. Nietzsche has turned from the Dionysian pessimism of The Birth of Tragedy to something I don't understand as well. But that is not the topic of this post, which is just to demonstrate the sort of music we can find The Case of Wagner or such a spirit in works other than Wagner. This spirit is strong with those who cannot defend themselves, who are easily seduced, and fundamentally themselves "the poor in spirit." (17) Their lives are defined by their suffering, and thus they lose their inherent human will to experience life. They are upside down. In an odd way, Nietzsche has reversed himself and apparently realigned with, as indicated above in the spirit of the strong, able-bodied, a correct way of being and thus reestablished a modern hierarchy of being. This is a notion I do not believe is true, because in this reversal Nietzsche embraces the notion that there are entirely different spheres of existence which will still partake in the same being. (This is what I say I do not fully understand yet.)
For a moment, I am going to say that it is wrong to cast one's net out to the sea of words before your eyes when reading some work and assuming that you have drudged its deepest meaning. This is not reading. I have done so above because we are not interested so much in swimming in Nietzsche's vast ocean so much as connecting it to some other music (note the metaphor breaks down). We should not, especially in the case of Nietzsche, let his words or ours be drowned, caught in their own, splashing paroxysms of deterministic thought. A quotation from On Truth and Lies, I think, is appropriate here:
“That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in a blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of existence by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have something of the same character…
This man, who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity,
truth, freedom from deception, and protection against ensnaring surprise
attacks, now executes a masterpiece of deception…he wears no quivering and
changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical
features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm
cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he
walks from beneath it.”
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