The traditional categories of tragedy are nearly destroyed in the deepened subjectivities of Romanticism of the 19th-century German philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer and his disciple Friedrich Nietzsche. In Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea (1819), much more than the social or ethical order is upturned. In place of God, the good, reason, soul, or heart, Schopenhauer installs the will, as reality’s true inner nature, the metaphysical to everything physical in the world. In Schopenhauer, there is no question of a Hegelian struggle to achieve a more comprehensive good. There is rather the strife of will with itself, manifested by fate in the form of chance and error and by the tragic personages themselves. Both fate and humanity represent one and the same will, which lives and appears in them all. Its individual manifestations, however, in the form of such phenomena as chances, errors, or individuals, fight against and destroy each other.

Schopenhauer accordingly rejects the idea of poetic justice: “The demand for so-called poetical justice rests on entire misconception of the nature of tragedy, and, indeed, of the nature of the world itself…. The true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight, that it is not his own individual sins that the hero atones for, but original sin, i.e., the crime of existence itself.” Schopenhauer distinguishes three types of tragic representation: (1) “by means of a character of extraordinary wickedness…who becomes the author of the misfortune,” (2) “blind fate—i.e., chance and error” (such as the title characters in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and “most of the tragedies of the ancients”), and (3) when “characters of ordinary morality…are so situated with regard to each other that their position compels them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do each other the greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the wrong” (such as, “to a certain extent,” Hamlet).

This last kind of tragedy seems to Schopenhauer far to surpass the other two. His reason, almost too grim to record, is that it provides the widest possible play to the destructive manifestations of the will. It brings tragedy, so to speak, closest to home.

Schopenhauer finds tragedy to be the summit of poetical art, because of the greatness of its effect and the difficulty of its achievement. According to Schopenhauer, the egoism of the protagonist is purified by suffering almost to the purity of nihilism. His personal motives become dispersed as his insight into them grows; “the complete knowledge of the nature of the world, which has a quieting effect on the will, produces resignation, the surrender not merely of life, but of the very will to live.”

Schopenhauer’s description has limited application to tragic denouements in general. In the case of his own archetypal hero, the hero’s end seems merely the mirror image of his career, an oblivion of resignation or death that follows an oblivion of violence. Instead of a dialogue between higher and lower worlds of morality or feeling (which take place even in Shakespeare’s darkest plays), Schopenhauer posits a succession of states as helpless in knowledge as in blindness. His “will” becomes a synonym for all that is possessed and necessity-ridden.

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872) was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer. The two elements of tragedy, says Nietzsche, are the Apollonian (related to the Greek god Apollo, here used as a symbol of measured restraint) and the Dionysian (from Dionysus, the Greek god of ecstasy). His conception of the Apollonian is the equivalent of what Schopenhauer calls the individual phenomenon—the particular chance, error, or person, the individuality of which is merely a mask for the essential truth of reality which it conceals. The Dionysian element is a sense of universal reality, which, according to Schopenhauer, is experienced after the loss of individual egoism. The “Dionysian ecstasy,” as defined by Nietzsche, is experienced “not as individuals but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united.”

Nietzsche dismisses out of hand one of the most venerable features of the criticism of tragedy, the attempt to reconcile the claims of ethics and art. He says that the events of a tragedy are “supposed” to discharge pity and fear and are “supposed” to elevate and inspire by the triumph of noble principles at the sacrifice of the hero. But art, he says, must demand purity within its own sphere. To explain tragic myth, the first requirement is to seek the pleasure that is peculiar to it in the purely aesthetic sphere, without bringing in pity, fear, or the morally sublime.

The essence of this specifically aesthetic tragic effect is that it both reveals and conceals, causing both pain and joy. The drama’s exhibition of the phenomena of suffering individuals (Apollonian elements) forces upon the audience “the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena,” which in turn communicates “the exuberant fertility of the universal.” The spectators then “become, as it were, one with the infinite primordial joy in existence, and…we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy.” Thus, he says, there is a desire “to see tragedy and at the same time to get beyond all seeing…to hear and at the same time long to get beyond all hearing.”

The inspired force of Nietzsche’s vision is mingled with a sense of nihilism:

“Only after the spirit of science has been pursued to its limits,…may we hope for a rebirth of tragedy…I understand by the spirit of science the faith that first came to light in the person of Socrates—the faith in the explicability of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.”

Nietzsche would replace the spirit of science with a conception of existence and the world as an aesthetic phenomenon and justified only as such. Tragedy would enjoy a prominent propagandistic place. It is “precisely the tragic myth that has to convince us that even the ugly and disharmonic are part of an artistic game that the will in the eternal amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself.” And, consummately: “we have art in order that we may not perish through truth.”

Tragedy in music

Musical dissonance was Nietzsche’s model for the double effect of tragedy. The title of the first edition of his book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, was also influenced by Schopenhauer, for whom music differed from all the other arts in that it is not a copy of a phenomenon but the direct copy of the will itself. He even called the world “embodied music…embodied will.” Nietzsche’s theorizing on the relation of the tragic theme to art forms other than the drama was in fact confirmed in such operas as Mussorgsky’s version of Pushkin’s tragedy Boris Godunov, Verdi’s of Macbeth and Othello, and Gounod’s Faust. In contrast to these resettings of received forms, Wagner, Verdi, and Bizet achieved a new kind of tragic power for Romanticism in the theme of the operatic love-death in, respectively, Tristan and Isolde, Aida, and Carmen. Thus, the previous progression of the genre from tragedy to tragicomedy to romantic tragedy continued to a literary-musical embodiment of what Nietzsche called “tragic dithyrambs.”

An earlier prophecy than Nietzsche’s regarding tragedy and opera was made by the German poet Friedrich von Schiller in a letter of 1797 to Goethe:

I have always trusted that out of opera, as out of the choruses of the ancient festival of Bacchus, tragedy would liberate itself and develop in a nobler form. In opera, servile imitation of nature is dispensed with…here is…the avenue by which the ideal can steal its way back into the theatre.