The Three Tragedians

Only the first of Nietzsche’s books, BT, deals with Greek drama. Its long and complex genesis begins in the years between 1858 and 1864, when he was a schoolboy at Schulpforte (Janz 1981, 1: 65-132). Not only were the seeds of his abiding interest in Greek tragedy planted there, but his teachers also instilled in him a lifelong aversion to Euripides. Invented by Aristophanes, Euripides-bashing had been elevated to an art form by August Wilhelm Schlegel in his 1808 Vienna lectures on dramatic art and literature (Behler 1986), which went through four editions between 1809 and 1846. In Schlegel’s words, Euripides ‘‘not only destroyed the external order of tragedy, but missed its entire meaning.’’ Nietzsche inherited Schlegel’s negative view of Euripides and appropriated it with a vengeance. His debt to Schlegel explains why he privileged Aeschylus and Sophocles over Euripides, whom he ignored in his lectures and seminars and whose plays he did not know at all well (Henrichs 1986). In his autobiographical sketch from 1864 he reminisces about his ‘‘first impressions of Sophocles, of Aeschylus, ofPlato’’ (in Janz 1981, 1: 121) - the omission of Euripides is ominous. Ironically, it was Wilamowitz who rehabilitated Euripides in numerous publications between 1875 and 1926 and restored his reputation as a serious and superior playwright (Calder 1986).

The tragedies to which Nietzsche returned most often in the course of his active life are Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, and the Aeschylean Prometheus, whose authenticity he took for granted. He lectured on all three plays during his Basel years, but they preoccupied him long before he became a professor there. At fourteen, in his first year at Pforte, he researched the figure of Prometheus (Janz 1981, 1: 87-88). When BT was finally published thirteen years later, the Aeschylean Prometheus loomed large in its argument (Reibnitz 1992, 238-52, 273-74). More conspicuously, the title page of the first edition carried a vignette with the classicistic image of a Prometheus unbound. On it the defiant Titan is sitting comfortably on the rock to which he was once chained; the fetters are dangling from his hands, and his right foot is trampling the dead bird of prey that used to feed on his liver (Brandt 1991).

In the spring of 1864, shortly before his graduation from Pforte, Nietzsche wrote an ambitious term paper in Latin, German, and ancient Greek on the first chorus of Oedipus the King (HKGW 2, 364-99). The tragedians, he argues, were not only poets but also composers who set the music for the dances of the chorus ( HKGW 2, 376). He owed this point to Rudolf Westphal, then the leading expert on Greek music (Latacz 1994, 38). In a deliberate departure from Aristotle, Nietzsche insists on the pivotal role of choral performance and its emotional effect on the audience (cf. Silk 1998). His paper thus anticipates his future argument in BT, which derives tragedy ‘‘from the spirit of music.’’ to his emphasis on tragedy as theater and on its performative function as reflected in the singing and dancing of the chorus, Nietzsche emerges as one of the precursors of dominant trends in the current criticism of tragedy (see Wilson, chapter 12 in this volume).

On the larger question of the meaning of the Oedipus myth and of Oedipus the King (Burkert 1991), Nietzsche complains that the criticism of his day is excessively concerned with the guilt of Oedipus. In his eyes, categories such as guilt and punishment do not apply to Oedipus. Oedipus cannot be guilty because he did not commit his crimes intentionally, and he cannot be punished because he is not guilty. Destined to suffer, his suffering serves the divine world order. Like the majority of more recent critics, Nietzsche assumes a close conceptual connection between Sophocles’ two Oedipus plays and adopts the Hegelian and Schlegelian view according to which Oedipus at Colonus finally furnishes the necessary ‘‘conclusion and reconciliation’’ (HKGW 2, 369) that the first Oedipus play fails to provide (Seidensticker 1972; Bernard 2001, 12-17, 58-83). On this reading, the Oedipus figure of the earlier play is revalidated by its sequel, in which culpability is converted into heroic status through human suffering and divine intervention (Reibnitz 1992, 228-32). By rejecting the moral calculus of retributive justice conventionally applied to Oedipus, Nietzsche seeks to liberate him from Christianizing distortions and to restore that hero’s Greek identity as he sees it - that is, his suffering and his status as a cult hero. The ‘‘most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage, the unfortunate Oedipus’’ (BT9: 61.24-25),1 would occupy Nietzsche for years to come. In the first of his 1870 lectures on Oedipus the King, which compares ancient and modern definitions of the tragic, he returns to the issue of Oedipus’ crime and punishment and reasserts his earlier view:

The tragic worldview is found only in Sophocles. He saw the undeserved fate as tragic: the enigma of human existence and the truly terrible constituted his tragic muse. Katharsis occurs as a necessary feeling of consonance in a world of dissonance. The suffering, the origin of tragedy, achieves a transfiguration in his work: it is understood as something that sanctifies. The mystical, beneficial translation of Oedipus at Colonus is a case in point. (KGWII 3, 40, cf. 415; echoed at KGWIII 5/1, 167 and BT9: 62.9)

At first glance, Nietzsche’s insistence on the ‘‘sanctity’’ of the suffering hero appears to be supported by a passage in Oedipus at Colonus: ‘‘I come as someone sacred and reverent [hieros eusebes te], a benefit to the citizens here’’ (287-88). But the similarity is superficial. Sophocles does not present Oedipus’ heroization as a reward for his suffering. Ironically, despite Nietzsche’s deep-rooted disdain for all things Christian, the implied causal connection between suffering and sanctity reflects Christian rather than Greek sentiment. Two years later, in BT, Nietzsche revisits Oedipus, ‘‘the noble human being [who] does not sin’’ (9: 61.29-30), and drastically reconceptualizes the concept of heroic suffering by recasting the suffering heroes of tragedy as human surrogates of the ‘‘suffering god’’ Dionysus. Here Nietzsche’s recourse to Christian concepts is even more palpable.

As a student at Leipzig, in 1866/67 and again in 1868, Nietzsche immersed himself in Greek tragedy, thus setting the stage for his early Basel lectures on the subject and ultimately for BT (Reibnitz 1992, 17-19). To judge by his notebooks, he worked extensively on textual problems in all three tragedians, contemplated a future lecture course on Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, and planned articles on such tragic topics as ‘‘guilt and aesthetics in antiquity,’’ ‘‘fate and tragedy,’’ and ‘‘optimism and pessimism of the Greeks.’’ With the exception of the lectures on Libation Bearers, none of these projects ever materialized.

Nietzsche started his tenure in Basel as the newly installed Professor of Greek in the summer of 1869, and he taught there for ten years (Meister 1948). His duties included not only giving lectures and seminars at the university, but also teaching six hours per week in the highest grade of the senior high school, the Padagogium, where he offered courses on the tragedians, Euripides included, on a regular basis between 1869 and 1876 (Gutzwiller 1951, 177-83; Janz 1981). Decades later several of his students recalled that he set very high standards and challenged them to think hard and creatively. In his annual report for 1870/71, for instance, Nietzsche states that he had them write an essay about ‘‘their impression of the Bacchae of Euripides and about the nature of the cult of Dionysos’’ while they were translating the play (quoted by Gutzwiller 1951, 182 and 204-5; Henrichs 1986, 378). In a note from the summer of 1870 Nietzsche adds: ‘‘According to the statements of my pupils [the play] made a strong impression and aroused their interest’’ (KGWIII 3, 93). Unfortunately we will never know whether Nietzsche discussed the issues that would make Dionysus, Euripides, and Bacchae such central concerns in BT when he introduced his young audience to the most Dionysiac of all extant tragedies.

In the larger picture of Nietzsche’s academic teaching as a whole, the course on Bacchae remains an anomaly. Nietzsche’s prejudice against Euripides was so great that he never made him the subject of any of his lecture courses or seminars at the university, where he invariably treated him as a mere foil for Aeschylus and Sophocles. His university lectures covered a lot of ground, from Greek literature, philosophy, and religion to meter, rhetoric, and Latin epigraphy (Janz 1974). Invariably, Nietzsche was meticulously prepared, as his extensive lecture notes attest. In preparing his lectures, he relied heavily on the work of other scholars, but with few exceptions he does not acknowledge his sources, nor was he expected to do so. The surviving autographs of his lectures are among the least researched texts in the entire Nietz-schean corpus; they are only now beginning to be recognized as important documents in their own right from which valuable information can be gleaned about Nietzsche’s scholarship and about the dissemination of knowledge during one of the most formative periods of the nineteenth century (Most 2000a; Porter 2000b).

In his first semester Nietzsche gave two lecture courses, on Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers (KGWII 2, 3-104) and Greek lyric poetry (KGWII 2,107-82), respectively. The combination of these topics reflected his vision of the evolution of lyric poetry and tragedy as closely related products of the Dionysian spirit ( BT 5-6). In his eyes, the primitive ‘‘folk-poetry of the masses’’ performed at the festivals of Dionysus is the matrix from which tragedy originates: ‘‘It is an awesome fact that tragedy was born from the musical lyrics of the Dionysia’’ (KGW II 3,14-15). This is not a reference to the twenty dithyrambs performed each year at the City Dionysia, but to the more ecstatic Dionysiac cult songs of the archaic period: ‘‘Originally the expression of a wine-induced state of pleasure, an intoxicated optimism, with dancing, mimicry and improvisation. Its core [was] a mime in which figures from the entourage of Dionysus frolicked: (hi)story of the god: exuberant music of the pipes’’ (KGW II 2, 146). According to Nietzsche, the oldest and most authentic form of the dithyramb reenacted the ‘‘suffering ofDionysus’’; its plots and its music provided the model of ‘‘solemnity, sorrow, and passion’’ that inspired the tragedians (KGWII 2, 158-59). By contrast, the dithyrambs of ‘‘the official polis cult’’ were, in Nietzsche’s eyes, more subdued and less expressive of the Dionysian mood (KGW II 2, 146-47), a view that is echoed in the 1870 lectures on Sophocles {KGWII 3, 14-17, see below) and developed further in BT 2 {Reibnitz 1992,119-22). Nietzsche’s construct of the alleged antecedents of the dithyramb is characteristic of the recourse to evolutionist models and of the preoccupation with imaginary ‘‘origins’’ that he shared with much of the scholarship of his time {Wessels 2003) and that is reflected in the very concept of‘‘the birth of tragedy.’’

After the Platonic dialogues, tragedy was the one genre to which he would return most often in his teaching. In the short span of five years, he lectured three times on Libation Bearers and once on Oedipus the King. In addition, he three times gave a seminar on Libation Bearers. His interest in ‘‘the artistic problem of the [play’s] middle position’’ within the trilogy {KGW II 2, 36) and his fascination with its chthonian ambience {KGWII 2, 36, 47-50) may explain his preferential treatment of Libation Bearers. But one can only wonder why he lectured on Sophocles only once and failed to offer any other course on that playwright except for a seminar on ‘‘The Life of Sophocles’’ in the winter of 1873/74 {cf. KGWII 3, 45-56).

Meticulous and technical, Nietzsche’s lectures on Libation Bearers combine a line-by-line philological commentary with more general introductory material in which Nietzsche, playfully posing as a latter-day Aristophanes of Byzantium, reconstructs the lost hypothesis of the play by discussing the structure of the plot, the treatment of the Orestes myth before and after Aeschylus, Aeschylean stagecraft, choral performance, and the history of the Aeschylean text. Interesting mini-essays embedded in the commentary deal with central issues such as the trilogic form, the strophic arrangements of the choral odes, and the cult of the dead. One of the more memorable moments of Nietzsche’s engagement with the play is this tantalizingly aphoristic comment on its ‘‘theatrical effect’’: ‘‘The scenes rigorously symmetrical. The drama lacks perspective. Scene after scene is treated in the same way. All the scenes are equally near and detailed’ {KGWII 2, 36, trans. Porter 2000c, 414-15). Similarly on music: ‘‘The musicality. The music of the language. All is music, there are no spoken and sung parts, everything sung. The song-dance too never ceases’’ {KGW II 2, 35). Nietzsche's interest in the performative dimension of tragedy and his insistence on the preeminent role of music and choral dance in Libation Bearers are the principal links between these lectures and BT.

On the whole, Nietzsche’s Basel lectures, whether on tragedy or on other subjects, are admirably clear, systematic, and informative, but they are hardly riveting. Unremarkable in tone and conventional in conception as well as content, they rarely reveal their author’s true genius. Still, they make fascinating reading today, precisely because they illustrate a side of Nietzsche that is fundamentally different from his essays, his letters, and his philosophical works. The lectures on Libation Bearers are a case in point. Their attention to detail and lack of imaginative insight set them apart from the flights of fancy found in BT.

The exact opposite is true for his lectures on Sophocles. Delivered in the summer of 1870, less than two years before the publication of BT, as an introduction to Nietzsche’s interpretation of Oedipus the King, they anticipate major themes of his first book. Outlines of fifteen lectures survive in his handwriting {KGWII 3, 1-57). The lectures open with a comparison of ancient and modern drama in which Nietzsche differentiates the ‘‘pessimism’’ of Greek tragedy and the inexplicable suffering of its heroes {cf. BT 9-10) from the moralistic nexus of guilt and punishment that preoccupied playwrights like Schiller and Grillparzer. The next five lectures deal with fundamental aspects of Greek tragedy and bear a distinctly Nietzschean stamp: the origin of tragedy in the ‘‘ecstatic state’’ and transformative power of the primitive spring festivals of Dionysus (BT1-2, 4); the antagonistic and yet complementary art forms of the Apollinian, which represents order and restraint, and the Dionysian, which stands for abandon and dissolution (KGWII 3,11, the first occurrence of this influential concept; cf. BT 1-6, 9, 16, 21); the cultic setting and ‘‘democratic’’ audience of the tragic performances, which aimed at producing emotions (pathos) rather than action (dran) - both positions considerably modified in BT 7 and 12; the chorus as an ideal poetic construct that transcends and transforms reality (BT 7-8); and, finally, tragic plots as a sublimation of their epic antecedents (BT3-4, 10). The general part concludes with a section titled ‘‘Ancient Tragedy and Opera,’’ in which Nietzsche discusses the modern reception of Greek drama and acknowledges Gluck and Wagner as representatives of ‘‘this ancient union of composer and poet’’ (KGW II 3, 32; cf. BT 19-25). Lectures 8-15 deal directly with Sophocles and compare him with Aeschylus and Euripides. Nietzsche sees the succession of the three tragedians as an evolution from the primitive ‘‘artistic instinct’’ to cogitation and reasoning; that is, as a pattern of progressive rationalization that culminated in the Socratic rationalism of Euripides: ‘‘Reformation of the [tragic] art according to Socratic principles: everything must be sensible so that everything makes sense’’ (KGWII 3, 44). In Euripides, ‘‘reason destroys instinct’’ (KGWII 3, 37). By contrast, Sophocles, the most tragic of the tragedians, preserves the true tragic spirit and ‘‘purifies dramatic poetry by separating reflection from the action of the characters’’ and ‘‘relegating it to the chorus’’ (KGW II 3, 39, and 44). One wonders how Nietzsche managed to reach such an implausible conclusion. It is remarkable that while critical of Euripides in these lectures, Nietzsche does not come down on him quite as hard as he does later in BT. In 1870, Euripides is not yet held responsible for ‘‘the death of tragedy’’ (BT 11: 71.23-24; cf. Steiner 1961).

In the posted announcement the lectures on Sophocles were billed as an ‘‘Introduction to Sophoclean Tragedy,’’ but Nietzsche’s actual autograph offers a more telling title: ‘‘AcIE TAYPE. On the History of Greek Tragedy’’ (KGW II 3, 1). The Greek quotation, ‘‘worthy bull,’’ is taken from an Elian cult song in honor of Dionysus, whom the women of Elis invoked in one of his tauromorphic manifestations (PMG 871; cf. Scullion 2001). Is it mere accident that the ‘‘worthy bull’’ of Elis caught the attention of two devoted ‘‘disciples’’ of Dionysus, Jane Harrison and Walter F. Otto (Harrison 1903, 438; Otto 1965, 80 and 193)? This remarkable motto puts a distinct Dionysiac imprint on the entire lecture course, in which the tragic is defined with a Schopenhauerian twist (and in anticipation of BT 2-3) as follows: ‘‘The tragic idea is that of the cult of Dionysus: the dissolution of individuation into another world order: guidance toward the belief in transcendence through the horrible terrors of existence’’ (KGW II 3, 12; for additional affinities with BT see Reibnitz 1992, 28-35).

A later and more conventional discussion of tragedy and the tragedians including Euripides can be found in Nietzsche’s lectures on the history of Greek literature (KGWII 5, 79-146), which were delivered in two sequels, in winter 1874/75 and summer 1875, when the controversy over the publication of BT had already hurt

Nietzsche’s reputation as a classicist. Not surprisingly, BTis never mentioned in these lectures, and the account of the origins of tragedy that opens the section on the tragedians is remarkably different from BT and refrains from reiterating the extreme positions of the earlier book. To give but one example, Nietzsche maintains in these lectures, as he does in BT, that the earliest form of tragedy dramatized the sufferings of Dionysus (KGWII 5, 80-81). In BT he goes on to argue that the divine suffering is reenacted on the tragic stage by each suffering hero, whom he considers ‘‘mere masks’’ of the suffering Dionysus (BT 10). In his lectures of less than three years later, however, he toned down his earlier claim considerably. Instead of postulating an identity between Dionysus and the tragic heroes as suffering protagonists, he merely juxtaposed the ‘‘sufferings’’ (pathea, cf. Herodotus 5.67.5) of Dionysus with those of ‘‘other heroes’’ as two successive stages in the evolution of tragedy (KGW II 5, 80). It looks as if Nietzsche had decided to mitigate his earlier view in order to avoid further controversy.