"La musica può proiettare immagini"? A proposito di un frammento di Friedrich Nietzsche

The essay is focused on Nietzsche’s posthumous fragment 7[127], belonging to the preparatory materials for The Birth of Tragedy, which substantially rejects the main issue of Wagner’s aesthetics, i.e. the idea that traditional opera is built on a mistake: in it “a means of expression (Music) has been made the object; and the object of expression (Drama) has been made the means”. According to Nietzsche, music by no means can arise from a “poetic intent”, as well as from stimuli generated by external representations; in its nature music – here Nietzsche follows strictly the theories of Schopenhauer – constitutes a radical departure from every sort of images. But Nietzsche says also in the same fragment that music can project images, which are symbolic reproductions, as it were, of its content; and thus recreates in his own philosophical prosa, in an extremized form, a dilemma which can be found also in Schopenhauer’s thought: while actually in The World as Will and Representation the bilderlos character of music is repeatedly stated, some passages of this same work open space to the possibility that a certain analogy exists between the structures of music and the reality of external world.