Nietzsche on Music: Perspectives from The Birth of Tragedy
2011; University of California, Los Angeles; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0160-2764
Autores Tópico(s)Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel
ResumoSince the first appearance of The Hirth ofTragedy Ollt ofthe Spirit of Music, Nietzsche has arguably proved to he amongst the most influential intellectuals upon European artistic practice. Indeed, four musicians with strong Nietzschean traces who immediately come to mind are Richard Strauss (Also Sprach Zarathustra, 1895) and Gustav Mahler (Symphony NO.3 D Minor, 189511896), Frederick Delius (A Mass of Life, 19°4119°5) and Arnold Schoenberg (Der Wanderer E~'tht Songs, Opus 6, 19°3119°5). Yet this paper is not concerned with the vicissitudes of Nietzsche's influence upon musicians over the last four or five generations, let alone with the influence of a Richard Wagner or a Georges Bizet upon him, nor, for that matter, with his own attempts at composition. The Birth ofTragedy, common with Nietzsche's other publications, verges upon the potentially intimidating. Even on a cursory reading, it presents its readers with significant problems of how they are to orient themselves. Not only do we confront his visionary, and at times abstruse, concerns with ancient Hellenic and contemporary European culture, but we also need to adjust again and again to his rhetorical, and at times self-conscious, strategies. As Nietzsche himself was to acknowledge his 1886 Attempt at a Self-Criticism, his text is one without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof.! Indeed, commentators of more analytical persuasion have long warned us of Nietzsche's propensity for playing the most basic of notions through a conceptual concertina, compressing and billowing the meanings of terms in part to crack the habitual grip on thought which language holds us.)
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