Wittgenstein’s Masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Gets Turned into Beautiful, Meditative Music

Lud­wig Wittgen­stein’s Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus (avail­able in our col­lec­tion of 130 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks has sure­ly set a fair few of its read­ers on the path to phi­los­o­phy. But how much music has it inspired? Improb­a­ble as it may sound, the Ger­man-Aus­tri­an philoso­pher of math­e­mat­ics, lan­guage, and mind’s ultra-terse 1922 mas­ter­piece has brought about at least two pieces. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Finnish com­pos­er M.A. Num­mi­nen adapt­ing the Trac­ta­tus into an avant-garde com­ic opera. Today, we have Tibor Szemző’s Trac­ta­tus.

You can down­load the whole piece as a sin­gle MP3 on Ubuweb, or hear it above. Accord­ing to UBU’s page about it, the work, first com­posed for Szemző and Péter Forgács’ video Wittgen­stein Trac­ta­tus, “took six months of hard work in the stu­dio to pro­duce, yet it is only 30 min­utes and 30 sec­onds long.”

And not only has Szemző set to music Wittgen­stein’s state­ment after state­ment on the rela­tion­ship of lan­guage to real­i­ty, he’s done so in sev­en dif­fer­ent lan­guages, com­bin­ing read­ings record­ed in Eng­lish, Span­ish, and Hun­gar­i­an in Budapest, Japan­ese in Tokyo, Czech in Prague, the orig­i­nal Ger­man in Vien­na, and Slo­vak in Bratisla­va.

Though I can only real­ly fol­low three of those (assum­ing I real­ly grasp Wittgen­stein in the first place), Szemző’s Trac­ta­tus makes me appre­ci­ate how well Wittgen­stein’s Trac­ta­tus — with its sim­ple yet com­plex lines like “Every­thing we see could also be oth­er­wise” and “The light that work sheds is a beau­ti­ful light, which, how­ev­er, only shines with real beau­ty if it is illu­mi­nat­ed by yet anoth­er light” — func­tions not just as a set of lyrics, but as an exer­cise in for­eign-lan­guage com­pre­hen­sion. And did­n’t Wittgen­stein want to get us think­ing about lan­guage in the first place?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wittgen­stein Day-by-Day: Face­book Page Tracks the Philosopher’s Wartime Expe­ri­ence 100 Years Ago

Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Trac­ta­tus Gets Adapt­ed Into an Avant-Garde Com­ic Opera

Wittgen­stein: Watch Derek Jarman’s Trib­ute to the Philoso­pher, Fea­tur­ing Til­da Swin­ton (1993)

See the Homes and Stud­ies of Wittgen­stein, Schopen­hauer, Niet­zsche & Oth­er Philoso­phers

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.