The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein

By Uwe Alschner

What causes people with great artistic talent to close themselves off from truth and goodness and beauty? Ultimately, it is a lack of education. Education that is structured Socratically and that places the question of the view of the world and humanity at the center of those considerations that are at the starting point of efforts to convey to other people the joy of thinking about their role in the world.

Socrates was Plato’s teacher. He lived in Athens in the fifth century BC and was sentenced to death in 399 BC because he encouraged young people to think for themselves through education, enabling them to recognize the inadequacy of the political decisions of the time and the prudence, or stupidity, of economic strategies.

No written records of Socrates himself have survived. Everything we know today was passed down by his student Plato. However, both Socrates and Plato were educated in Athens on the basis of Solon the Wise, who had consolidated the idea of the Attic Republic through the laws and courts he introduced. This idea had its origins in Greek tragedy, a cultural development that spanned from Homer to Aeschylus to Sophocles and represented the civilizational transition from an archaic clan- and blood-rule to a social selfperception based on moral principles and values.

Although Athens existed as a place long before, “the Athens of Greek classical antiquity” was developed and created as a cultural idea primarily through poetry, especially through tragedy.* To recognize this, it is necessary to consider the core aspects of the poetry of Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles: The epic poem1 Illiad describes the misfortune that befell Greece after its victory in the Trojan War. Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Achilles were responsible for this. The Trojan War, which arose from the abduction of Helen, wife of Menelaus, by Paris, had no winners, only losers, as almost all those involved lost their lives in connection with this war. Even the seemingly invulnerable Achilles is ultimately killed by the oligarchical god Apollo at the Scaean Gate (by which he also plays a role in Friedrich Schiller’s classic poem “Nänie,” that was masterfully set to music by Johannes Brahms).

Aeschylus then brings the Trojan tragedy to the stage in classical poetry in his trilogy, the Oresteia. In the first play, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra after his return from Troy — because, in order to go to war against Troy, he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. In the second play, Agamemnon’s son Orestes avenges his father’s death because the oligarchic god Apollo reminded him of the Hellenes’ duty to atone for patricide. Orestes kills his mother. In the third play, Orestes is pursued by the goddesses of vengeance (the Erinyes). In Athens, a court must finally decide on the case of revenge and counter-revenge. The city itself becomes part of the dispute because the Furies threaten retribution if Orestes is not handed over. The court is undecided, and instead of the cowardly Apollo, who also fears the goddesses of vengeance, Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom, casts the decisive vote: Orestes may live if the Athenians erect a pillar to the Furies that reminds them daily of how terrible the Furies’ revenge would be if they ever again acted on the basis of archaic, unreasonable traditions or rites and wisdom was left out.

Finally, Sophocles follows up with the Oedipus trilogy in the plays Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone to complete the civilizational idea of the nation of Athens. Once again, the theme of senseless death is addressed, here using the example of the city of Thebes. While the main characters Oedipus, his parents Laius and Jocasta, their brother Creon, and Oedipus’ children kill themselves in apparent accordance with archaic customs and oracular sayings, it is King Theseus of Athens who offers refuge and protection to Oedipus, who has committed patricide and incest and is now wandering around insane and blind, from persecution by his brother-in-law Creon. Ironically, it is in the grove of the Eumenides, the former goddesses of vengeance who, following the wise advice of Pallas Athena, were transformed into ‘well-meaning’ spirits, that Oedipus finds peace in Athens, even though Creon wants to send him back to Thebes to die, without giving him an honorable burial.

Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles have thus each found in their tragedies the “heart of the matter” for the artistic refinement of the idea: it is not the cultural-ritual practices described that are essential (nor is it the para-psychological reinterpretation into supposed erotic desires, as Freud claims to have diagnosed in Oedipus), but rather the moral and civilizational dimension (made very clear by its recurring treatment over time) of liberating a society from irrational and unreasonable fixations on emotional impulses or conventions such as revenge and oracles. Athens, and with it Socratic-Platonic classical Greece, had become the cradle of civilization through its poetry. The creative thinking of poets (ποίησις, poiesis means to create something new, to achieve progress) developed a higher quality of civilization from its lower stages through art. It is in this sense that Percy Bysshe Shelley speaks of poets as the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”2 They shape civilization.

Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a polymath of the period following the devastating Thirty Years’ War. This means that he had an extraordinarily broad and equally profound education. What’s more, Leibniz was an advocate of Plato’s Socratic method of using education to achieve reconstruction through technical progress for the benefit of all and for the glory of God. In his “Discourse on Metaphysics,” Leibniz even quotes Plato extensively on the necessity of exploring the laws of the cosmos. Leibniz agrees with Plato in his rejection of a materialistic philosophy:

Leonard Bernstein and his attack on Leibniz

Leonard Bernstein is considered an educated and sophisticated man. However, the composer and conductor, who died in 1990, did not shy away from discrediting Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (and with him the Socratic method of finding truth beyond the material world) in the most vulgar manner.

During a performance of his musical “Candide” in 1989 at London’s Barbican, Bernstein, who had already begun conducting the overture, turned around seemingly out of the blue and gave the “spontaneous” speech heard in the original in the video clip above and transcribed here:

Surprise. My dear friends,

I hear you thinking. Here comes the old professor to lecture us again. But I promise to be brief and only by way of introduction. The reason I feel I should say a few words, … if you’ll pardon my croaky voice, I too have the English disease, like so many of you, the royal flu.

The reason I feel I ought to say something is that for more than 30 years, 35 years to be exact, people have asked me, why Candide? Whither and whence Candide? I thought I might answer a bit more clearly by speaking not only as a composer of this work, but as an everyday observer of history, like anyone here, but particularly of that period of history known as the Age of Enlightenment, roughly the 18th century. And that was the century in which Voltaire lived, wrote, and had extraordinary influence. His masterpiece was a tough, skinny little novella called Candide, which inspired the playwright Lillian Hellman and me to have a bash at it musically.

Voltaire’s book was actually entitled Candide or Optimism, it being a viciously satirical attack on a prevalent philosophical system known as optimism, which is based on the rather indigestible writings of a certain Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and popularized by our own beloved Alexander Pope. For example, in this great line from his essay on man, one truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

Now, according to Leibniz, whose ideas Pope was lyricizing, if we believe in a creator, then he must be a good creator, and the greatest of all possible creators, and therefore could have created only the best of all possible worlds. In other words, everything that is, is right.

Granted that in this world the innocent are mindlessly slaughtered and that crime mostly goes unpunished, that there is disease and death and poverty, “but if we could only see the whole picture, the divine universal plan, then we would understand that whatever happens is for the best”, thus spake Leibniz.

Naturally, Voltaire found this idea absurd every day of his life, but particularly on that day in 1755 when all of Lisbon, Portugal, exploded in an earthquake and uncountable numbers of people were drowned, crushed, buried alive, exterminated. Now if Leibniz was right, said Voltaire, then God is just playfully spraying his flit gun and down go a million mosquitoes at random, haphazardly. Well, the Lisbon disaster was the last straw for Voltaire and provoked him to write Candide in which he lashed out against all established authority. Royal, military, or mercantile, but most of all at the power of the church, which actually was burning heretics at the time, burning them alive to prevent earthquakes.

In other words, says Voltaire, sectarian religion is always an incitement to conflict. And optimism, as a strict belief, therefore breeds complacency, induces lethargy, inhibits the human power to change, to progress, to rise against injustice, or to create anything that might contribute to a genuinely better world.

During my incredibly extensive researches for this lecture, which you are now suffering, I came across the following quite succinct summing up of the whole Voltaireism. Quote, “Voltaire was acting as an eclectic who had synthesized the ideas of the Stoics, the Epicureans, the skeptics.” Oh, the hell with it. Let’s play the overture. (…)

Bernstein is, as can be easily seen in the complete video, completely full of himself and showcases himself by celebrating his own composition (“Surprise…”). This deals with a work of philosophical materialism — Voltaire’s Candide. In doing so, Bernstein uses Voltaire. It’s all about Bernstein, not Voltaire; it’s about the composition and the performance (“Oh, the hell [with the quote about Voltaire]. Let’s play the overture!”). It’s about Bernstein, the — in his own opinion — brilliant composer who reduces the meaning of life to physical existence (just like Voltaire), and who, in doing so, portrays a polymath, scientist, and philosopher who is as concerned with perfecting creation as he is with glorifying the creator (unlike Bernstein, who obviously does not believe in a creator and therefore cynically mocks Leibniz).

But perhaps Bernstein secretly fears Leibniz? Perhaps he fears that Leibniz could be right with his metaphysics and philosophy. Therefore, he must turn Leibniz’s teachings into their opposite and portray him as a cynical Nazi (Bernstein is the son of Jewish immigrants to America) who takes pleasure in the suffering of others (which is why he shouts out the name in a militaristic-sadistic manner).

Bernstein claims that Leibniz created a system of optimism. This is not true, as the term was first coined in 1737 by an opponent, the Jesuit Louis Betrand Castel. Leibniz did not use it in this way.

Leibniz and metaphysics

Instead, in his Metaphysical Treatises of 1686, Leibniz spoke primarily and repeatedly of the task of attaining happiness (Felicité in the original French text Discours de Metaphysique by Leibniz). According to Leibniz, God created the best of all possible worlds in order to enable the happiness of all human beings through a life oriented toward spiritual union with God (“la félicité de cette cité de Dieu est son principal dessein”). This happiness presupposes freedom of will, which also includes the possibility of morally wrong decisions by human beings in this world. Furthermore, every human action has a direct effect on the entire universe. Beyond all physical reality, there is a reality that transcends physics (metaphysics = beyond physics), which is of a spiritual nature and in which human souls exist eternally as existing spirits. According to Leibniz, God is the most perfect spirit (le plus accompli de tous les Esprits) and the most outstanding being (le plus grand de tous les estres).

Leibniz, who would go on to publish his Theodicy in 1710, which is based on his metaphysical dialogues, thought primarily in logical terms—far beyond the narrow mathematical use of the word logic, which Bernstein deliberately omits. Showing the connection between the creator God and creation was dear to Leibniz’s heart. This connection logically leads to the conclusion that God created the best of all possible worlds because it represents the physical reality of a spiritual creation in which, through human beings who are spiritually connected to God (the core of Leibniz’s Monadology is this connection of souls with God and with each other), the increasing (i.e., not yet absolutely achieved!) perfection of a material world is at stake. To this end, humans must become aware of their connection to God—and it is this awareness that Bernstein (like the members of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences before him with their “competition” on the alleged similarity of the views of the poet Alexander Pope, quoted by Bernstein, to the metaphysics and philosophy of Leibniz) attempts to thwart.

Bernhard Mandeville as Leibniz’s opponent

Leibniz held a view that not everyone liked. Anyone who considers themselves “more worthy than others,” or at least finds themselves in a position of power over others and wants to maintain this position, cannot like the idea that there is a creative soul at work in every human being that is capable of making new discoveries that could fundamentally turn the existing situation upside down. Since in archaic and ancient societies, a few (Greek: ὀλίγοι oligoi “few”) ruled over many people (ἀρχή archē “rule, leadership”), this explains why oligarchs have no interest in a worldview based on the idea that humans are created in the image of God. Such circles are characterized above all by their efforts to regard humans as just another animal species that must be led and managed in principle like a herd or a bee colony—by those few who claim to have special gifts in their blood (or genes) that elevate them from the masses to quasi-divine status.

The Greek gods of Olympus were essentially oligarchs who lived among “ordinary mortals” but were intent on maintaining strict segregation. Zeus was, in this sense, a quasi-immortal supreme oligarch who never forgave his fellow god Prometheus for giving (mortal) humans fire (the ability to learn) and a soul.

In oligarchical England, starting in the 16th century, Henry VIII (who himself had been educated by humanists such as Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam in the spirit of contemporary piety (devotio moderna)) as a response to the Renaissance, a decidedly oligarchic and exclusive understanding of society prevailed, which regarded the masses as animal-like, destined like the world as a whole to subservience, and in need of domination and exploitation. It is therefore no coincidence that the prevailing view of economics today originates from oligarchic England and can be traced back to Bernard Mandeville (the philosophical liberalism with which Leibniz struggled throughout his life also originated in England).

Bernard Mandeville is considered the founder of the free market economy and the spiritual father of Adam Smith as well as the later “Austrian School” of economics founded by Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. Mandeville was a contemporary of Leibniz, who was born in Holland in 1670 and worked in England after his education. Mandeville was a staunch opponent of the contemporary doctrine of piety and the equal dignity of every human life as advocated by the devotio moderna, but also explicitly by Gottfried Leibniz and August Hermann Francke, which aimed, for example, to establish orphanages and educate the general population.

Mandeville criticized this objective, which focused in particular on scientific and technological progress in the interest of the common good, in his work “The Fable of the Bees.” Mandeville emphasized that (oligarchic) humans must be free to pursue their selfish goals “in the small,” and that the combination of individual, selfish, even criminal actions inevitably leads to the greatest possible good “in the large.”

The lasting influence of Mandeville is evident in the fact that in 1966, the later Nobel Prize winner for economics, Friedrich von Hayek, referred to Mandeville as his “mastermind.”

Leonard Bernstein’s attack on Leibniz must be seen in the light of today’s prevailing globalist-oligarchic worldview of “free trade”.

Gottfried Leibniz, who would in all likelihood have become Prime Minister of England had his patron, Electress Sophie of Hanover, the granddaughter of King James I, not died suddenly in 1714, just two months before the last Stuart queen, Anne, had not died suddenly in 1714, just two months before the last Stuart queen, she would have recognized, on the basis of his philosophically rational piety (monadology), a particular obligation to respect and promote the potential of every human being.

For Leibniz, this promotion should have been achieved, as a matter of course, through a classical Socratic education.

Mendelssohn and Lessing alongside Leibniz

Lessing had eloquent advocates, including Gotthold Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn. Neither of them knew Leibniz personally, but they were greatly impressed by his scholarship. When Leibniz’s system of organizing society based on Christian charity as a commandment of reason (and thus a republican self-government in the spirit of Plato, which did not seek the overthrow of a king, but rather the education of philosopher-kings whose government pursued the common good according to principles of rational necessity) increasingly found support even among the upper middle class and the nobility after his death, the struggle against Leibniz intensified.

In this context, Leibniz’s highly sophisticated and differentiated philosophy was oversimplified and distorted as a “system of optimism” in order to blame it, as Voltaire did, for consequences that had nothing to do with the system. Leibniz was thus made a scapegoat for the catastrophes and imperfections of a world that he would never have allowed to be attributed to him during his lifetime, but against which he was unable to defend himself.

In response, Mendelssohn and Lessing—initially anonymously—stepped into the breach in a competition organized by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (an institution that owed its existence solely to Leibniz).

Even before the Lisbon earthquake mentioned by Bernstein in his speech in London, a competition was announced in Berlin in 1753, which only superficially dealt with the question of the agreement between the views of the British poet Alexander Pope and Leibniz’s philosophical system of thought, but which essentially compared Leibniz to a poet and thus discredited the system of optimism attributed to him as fiction or baseless invention, rather than subjecting it to serious philosophical examination.

Lessing and Mendelssohn prominently exposed this malicious tendency in their satirical and scathing response, published in book form in 1755. They mercilessly expose the paucity of the royal scholarly society’s call for papers, which should have known better:

“God willed it so, and because he willed it so, it must be good: this is truly a very easy answer, with which one never gets stuck. It dismisses you, but it does not enlighten you. It is the most remarkable piece of worldly wisdom of the lazy; for what is lazier than to invoke the will of God in every natural event without considering whether the intended event could also have been an object of divine will?” — Mendelssohn and Lessing, Aufgabe

In terms of content, both not only expose the paucity of the competition (and thus Leibniz’s intention to disparage it), but also correctly point out essential aspects of how the system is to be understood, which Leibniz himself never called “optimism,” but which the Jesuit Castel in 1737, more than twenty years after his death in an obviously commissioned review of the long-published text. Mendelssohn and Lessing write:

“Leibniz says: where different rules of perfection are to be combined to form a whole, some of them must necessarily clash with each other, and this clash must either give rise to contradictions or to exceptions on one side. According to him, the best world is therefore the one in which there are the fewest exceptions, and these few exceptions occur in the least important rules. This is why the moral and natural imperfections about which we complain in the world arise; but they arise by virtue of a higher order that has made these exceptions inevitable. If God had allowed less evil to arise in the world, he would have acted contrary to a higher order, a more important rule of perfection, from which no exception should occur at all.” (…)

Nevertheless, Leibniz asserts in a much stricter sense than Pope that the slightest change in the world has an influence on the whole, because every being is a mirror of all other beings, and every state is the sum of all states. If, therefore, the smallest part of creation is changed or placed in a different state, this change must manifest itself in all beings, just as in a clock everything, both in space and in time, changes as soon as the smallest part of a cogwheel is filed away.” (…)

“According to Leibniz, on the other hand, all imperfections in the world must necessarily serve the perfection of the whole, or else their exclusion would certainly have resulted from the general laws. He asserts that God did not adopt the general laws arbitrarily, but as they must arise from the wise connection of his particular intentions or the simple rules of perfection. Where there is an imperfection, there must inevitably have been an exception. But no exception can occur where the simple rules of perfection conflict with each other; and every exception must therefore have occurred by virtue of a higher order, that is, it must serve the perfection of the whole.” (…)

Incidentally, Friedrich Schiller dealt indirectly and artistically with Voltaire in a similar constellation. In addition to his criticism of Leibniz, Voltaire had also dragged the historical figure of Joan of Arc (Die Jungfrau von Orleans, as the title of Schiller’s romantic tragedy reads) through the mud with an even more salacious “poem” entitled La Pucelle (The Virgin). The “poem,” which was even more obscene in its original version, also contained numerous salacious allusions in its later “official” version. Schiller dealt with the scandal in a poem—without mentioning Voltaire—in which he wrote, among other things:

(…)

The world loves to blacken what is radiant

And drag the sublime into the dust,

But fear not! There are still beautiful hearts

That glow for the high and glorious, (…)

— Friedrich Schiller, The Maid of Orleans

Such a beautiful heart clearly beat in the chest of Kurt Huber.

Kurt Huber, Leibniz, and humanism

How perfidious (if indeed intentional) or at least foolish (if merely due to the narcissism of the maestro) Bernstein’s attempt to discredit the great humanist polymath Leibniz was, is clear from the fact that Leibniz research in the 20th century was only Professor Kurt Huber, mentor of the members of the resistance group “The White Rose” around the Scholl siblings, Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst, and Wilhelm Graf. Significantly, however, this only happened after Huber was executed as a co-conspirator in the summer of 1944.

Kurt Huber – Leibniz und Wir

“Kurt Huber was not granted the opportunity to complete this biography and, in accordance with the book’s subtitle, to present Leibniz’s ‘portrait of a German man’ to a Germany in ruins. But through his death, he fulfilled this in another way for Germany and the world. The intention of his work to lead to Leibniz has been achieved, as far as this is possible in the book itself; it will only be realized when this biography is accessible to all and contributes its part to leading our time to the philosopher whose year we are celebrating this year.” — Inge Köck, Kurt Huber as a Leibniz researcher, in: Kurt Huber zum Gedächtnis. Bildnis eines Menschen, Denkers und Forschers, Regensburg 1947, p. 157

“Huber builds a bridge between love of God and logic. Against this background, it becomes clear that Leibniz understood logic much more fundamentally and comprehensively than is common today. The universal task of logic that necessarily follows from Leibniz’s worldview is no longer recognized today. Logic is therefore reduced to “mathematical logic,” i.e., logic is regarded as part of mathematics rather than as the foundation of mathematics and all other sciences. Leibniz would not accept this reduction of logic.” — Ralf Schauerhammer, Kurt Huber über Leibniz

Bernstein, Wagner, Nietzsche, and pessimism

Despite his scathing attack on Leibniz, Leonard Bernstein is considered cultured and educated. As is Richard Wagner, whose works Bernstein often conducted, of course. Friedrich Nietzsche was a great admirer of Richard Wagner. It was Nietzsche who, towards the end of the 19th century, gave the concept of tragedy a completely new and culturally backward meaning. In contrast to Leibniz and the optimism he was accused of, Nietzsche also had a decisive cultural and philosophical influence on the concept of “pessimism.”

Starting from the nihilistic assertion of the non-existence of objective reality, Nietzsche transforms tragedy into its opposite. He denies the significance of tragedy for the development of the idea of civilized Athens and classically educated (in Schiller’s sense of the word) Greece, claiming that “in its oldest form, Greek tragedy had only the sufferings of Dionysus as its subject, and that Dionysus was the only stage hero who existed for a long time … All the famous figures of the Greek stage—Prometheus, Oedipus, etc.—are only masks of that original hero Dionysus.”

Everything, according to Nietzsche, is nothing but a “Dionysian spell”

“which, while seemingly stimulating the Apollonian impulses to the highest degree, is nevertheless able to force this excess of Apollonian power into its service. The tragic myth can only be understood as a representation of Dionysian wisdom through Apollonian artistic means; it leads the world of appearances to its limits, where it negates itself and seeks to flee back into the bosom of true and only reality; where it then, with [Richard Wagner’s] Isolde, seems to intone its metaphysical swan song:

‘In the surging wave, in the resounding sound, | In the blowing universe of the world’s breath, — | Drown, sink, — unconscious, — supreme, delight!’“

— Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music

As with Bernard Mandeville and the Hellfire Club (“Fay-ce que tu voudras” = Do what you will), which invokes Mandeville’s philosophical absolution of the usefulness of vicious behavior, it is also Nietzsche’s will that plays with itself “in the eternal fullness of its pleasure.” A Dionysian, ecstatic, and irrational will.

“Only as an aesthetic phenomenon [does] existence and the world appear justified: in the sense that tragic myth convinces us that even the ugly and disharmonious is an artistic game that the will, in the eternal fullness of its pleasure, plays with itself. This elusive primordial phenomenon of Dionysian art, however, can only be directly understood and immediately grasped in the wonderful meaning of musical dissonance: how music, placed alongside the world, can alone give us a concept of what is to be understood by the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. The pleasure generated by tragic myth has the same origin as the pleasurable sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with its primal pleasure perceived in pain, is the common womb of music and tragic myth.”

— Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music

Nietzsche’s words in themselves seem weird enough, but their monstrosity becomes evident when considering that the “tragic” of the “Dionysian art” was real horror: The term tragedy is derived from the cries of woe which the sacrificial creatures emit. Those were most often goats or bucks. Hence Tragedy: τραγῳδία “goat song” (from τράγος trágos “goat buck” and ᾠδή ōidḗ ”song”). In the Dionysian rave, some followers tore apart the sacrificial creature alive in an act of sparagmos and ate its flesh raw (omophagia). However not only animals were thus sacrificed: The poet Orpheus was ripped apart by the maenads who were mostly female ravers of Dionysios. The modern term maniac comes from the Greek μαίνομαι (maínomai, “to rave, to be mad; to rage). Nietzsche has thus been considered a maniac for his obsession with the pessimism and delight for brutal and archaic rites, which he dared to consider art.

It is this nitzschean irrational, arbitrary, and totally totalitarian and misanthropic manipulation (as developed by Nietzsche’s admired Wagner and his cult of the mystical Nordic, which also gave rise to the Nazi cult) that Gottfried Leibniz rejected with his philosophy of rational creation. Of course, Leibniz knew that humans are part of this creation and that their actions are significant in a moral sense, since everything is connected to everything else. This is the core of his (Leibniz’s) monadology.

Friedrich Schiller, whose concept of aesthetics as an art to be understood and fulfilled rationally in accordance with creative laws preceded and diametrically contradicted Nietzsche’s irrational-ecstatic concept, experienced during the French Revolution where the Dionysian-subversive actions of manipulated masses lead. His Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man are the anticipated response to Nietzsche. And to Leonard Bernstein3.

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* This paper was inspired by two seperate presentations by Mindy Pechenuk, on classical musical composition, and Gerry Rose, on Greek Tragedy.

1

Homer’s Iliad is not a tragedy in the strict sense, but an epic. An epic is a work of lyric poetry that deals with man’s relationship to God, his relationship to nature, and his relationship to his fellow human beings.

A tragedy is a work of poetry that takes its name from the archaic Dionysian mysteries. In these Dionysian festivals, animals, mostly (goat) bucks, were originally quartered and torn apart alive in excessive sacrificial rites (omophagia). The cries of the goat (τράγος trágos “goat” ᾠδή ōdḗ “song”) gave these ritual performances their name.

2

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defense of Poetry, in: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Selected Works. Poetry and Prose, Leipzig 1985, p. 665

3

In Bernstein’s defense, reference should be made to this interview with his daughter. She talks about her father and his difficulties with composing and adapting to external expectations (from his environment) regarding atonality, etc. A biography mentioned by Bernstein’s daughter also describes the difficult history of the creation of Bernstein’s Candide. He originally did not want to accept the commission (!) but was persuaded to do so. The composition then took a very long time. Finally, since the 1950s, there has been repeated open speculation that Bernstein was apparently homosexual and that his marriage to his wife was a (false) “beard”. Given that Bernstein launched his attack on Leibniz in London, it does not seem entirely far-fetched to assume that the pressure Bernstein was under throughout his life may also have played a role here. In other words, this attack does not actually reveal Bernstein himself, but rather the Bernstein who acted outwardly as was expected of him. Against this backdrop, Bernstein’s bitterness about Leibniz’s belief “in the best of all possible worlds” would be humanly understandable as an expression of deep pain. Bernstein was unable to muster this belief.

Uwe Alschner is a historian and founder of Never Again is Now Global where this article was first published