Music, The Birth of Tragedy, and Nietzche's ... - Nietzsche Circle

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lived his music. And as noted to begin with Nietzsche played at a virtuoso level of ability
— impressing even Wagner who quipped that a professor had no right to play that way.
But I have been arguing that what is most crucial is that Nietzsche made the theme of
“music and words” his own in his own profession of classical philology, beginning with
his writings on rhythm and meter in ancient Greek poetry and as he also wrote fairly
extensively on ancient Greek musical drama, speaking again and again of the relation
between music and drama in antiquity, thematizing the relation of opera and ancient
tragedy, and above all and most importantly, on The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of
Music, here and as I have been doing throughout, to give his first work its initial subtitle.
Nietzsche would reissue The Birth of Tragedy with a new subtitle Hellenism and
Pessimism just because he was sensitive (as authors are) to the book’s lack of reception
and to is yet more limited when it came to the question of comprehension among those of
his contemporaries who did read it. I have argued that it is for this reason that Nietzsche
both composed his intriguing “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” when he reissued his first
book and designed the first four books of The Gay Science along with its companion
piece, the work Nietzsche was inspired to call “his own” symphony, the first three (and
the only published books of) Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Writing nothing more plain in this respect than the declaration that the “great
dithyramb is the ancient symphony” (KSA 7, 9 [57], 296), Nietzsche argued that we fail
to understand the Greeks just because we do not raise the question of the origination of
tragedy as it should be posed on the basis of or out of the spirit of music. It is this same
question that he later underscores in his self-critique which was of course and also a
critique of the book’s first readers, particularly those readers who did more than fail to
read it but made of it instead the object of a calumniating misprision. 97 Nietzsche thus
denigrates those who represent Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as literary authors, as
literary and cultural theorists do to the present day, for the simple reason that we only
know such musical poets through their texts, texts we can no longer sight-read.
Nietzsche’s point here is that it makes no difference in this sense when it comes to the
medium of the text, whether one happens to be trained as a classical philologist or not.
That is, it doesn’t matter, in effect then, whether one reads Aeschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides in the original Greek or in translation, because in either case one assumes one