During his ten years as a university teacher Nietzsche attracted between two and nineteen students per course, or eight on average (Stroux 1925). This figure is not untypical for a small provincial university like Basel, which had a student body of 116 in 1870. He reached considerably larger audiences through two ambitiously conceived and exquisitely worded lectures for the educated public (Reibnitz 1992, 36-40). Not long after his arrival in Basel, in January 1870, he lectured on Greek tragedy as ‘‘music drama’’ of the Wagnerian type - a concept so outlandish that even Wagner protested (KGW III 5/1, 22). In another public lecture two weeks later, he presented Socrates as the paragon of rationality whose bad influence on Euripides caused the decline of tragedy as an art form: ‘‘Euripides is the poet of Socratic rationalism’’ (KGWIII 2, 32; Landfester 1994, 57). Nietzsche goes on to argue that Socratic dialectic is by definition optimistic. As such it contrasts sharply with the tragic worldview: ‘‘Originating from the deep spring of shared suffering, tragedy is by nature pessimistic’’ (KGWIII 2, 38; Landfester 1994, 63). The respective titles of these lectures, ‘‘The Greek Music Drama’’ and ‘‘Socrates and Tragedy,'' were deliberately provocative, even irritating, and the reception was mixed.
Nietzsche's indictment of Socrates and Euripides as the destroyers of tragedy and the nexus of drama, music, and suffering anticipate major themes of BT, the work that would soon immerse its young author in a national controversy. Published in Leipzig in January 1872 and dedicated to Richard Wagner, BT is a literary masterpiece that reads as if it was conceived and written as a seamless, continuous whole. But it was not. Its accomplished form conceals a very complex textual history whose successive stages have not yet been fully elucidated (Vogel 1966, 108-13, 150; Silk and Stern 1981, 31-61; Reibnitz 1992, 36-53; KGWIII 5/1, 209-302; Landfester 1994, 446-55). However, this much is certain: BT is an artful collage based on a series of preexistent essays and drafts. Yet no preliminary drafts for the Wagnerian part of BT seem to exist; it appears to have been written during the final phase, presumably later than April 1871 (Vogel 1966, 150; Silk and Stern 1981, 59-60). What started as a book on the Greeks - his ‘‘Griechenbuch,’’ as Nietzsche called it - metamorphosed into a study of Wagner as the German reviver of Greek tragedy.
As a work of aesthetic criticism and cultural psychology, BT is a conceptual tour de force. It argues that Greek culture of the archaic and classical period, tragedy included, is the product of the interaction of two ‘‘art forms’’ symbolically named after two antithetical and yet complementary divinities, Apollo and Dionysus (1-6); that tragedy originated in the intense emotional states and in the singing and dancing associated with the cult of Dionysus (7-10); that Greek tragedy ‘‘died by suicide’’ when its innate Dionysian spirit was destroyed by the rationalism of Socrates and Euripides (11-15); and that a rebirth of that tragic spirit has taken place in Germany thanks to Richard Wagner’s ‘‘music drama’’ (16-25). The Greek part of BT and its Wagnerian counterpart are two sides of the same coin - an urgent call for the renewal of contemporary German culture through recourse to the musical and choral culture of pre-Hellenistic ancient Greece.
Nietzsche thought that he was not primarily writing about antiquity, but about his own time. The Greeks were merely role models. BT is by its own declaration first and foremost a work of cultural criticism. Bringing Wagner into the picture was not an anachronism designed to make the ancient Greeks look more relevant. To the contrary, intellectually and culturally, Wagner remains Nietzsche’s true point of departure, at least for the final version of BT. Nietzsche’s affinity with Wagner had three roots: love of the Greeks, especially of the archaic period; a creative commitment to musical culture; and a missionary zeal to save the German culture of their time from the perils of the industrial revolution (cf. Bremer 1987). Intimately familiar with Greek tragedy, albeit mainly through translations, Wagner saw eye to eye with Nietzsche on the tragedians and anticipated the latter’s value judgments by more than two decades: ‘‘Birth out of music: Aeschylus. Decadence: Euripides’’ (Wagner in 1849, quoted by Vogel 1966, 99). Like the Greek tragedians, Wagner was both a poet and a composer who drew on myth for the subject matter of his operas. He admired and imitated the trilogic/tetralogic form of Aeschylean tragedy and confessed that he entered into an ongoing ‘‘state of rapture’’ when he read the Oresteia for the first time (Bremer 1987, 42-43 and 54-58). But the similarities between Wagner and Greek tragedy end here.
Nietzsche was a gifted pianist and music critic, and his initial admiration for Wagner was based on his profound musical connoisseurship as well as the intellectual kinship between the two. But to interpret the origins of tragedy with recourse to Wagner and his music was an approach that was singularly unfortunate and bound to fail. It forced Nietzsche to privilege music as the key element of tragedy to the exclusion of almost everything else, and to talk about the nature of tragic music with an inner certainty that belies the fact that the musical dimension of tragedy is almost entirely lost. In his ‘‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’’ of 1886, some eight years after his break with Wagner, Nietzsche declared Wagnerian music ‘‘the most un-Greek of all possible art forms’’ (KGWIII 1, 14, 23-24) and regretted having conceived the Wagnerian part of BT in the first place. Many readers of BT would agree with Nietzsche’s second thoughts, and few will complain that Reibnitz (1992) omitted sections 16-25 from her magisterial commentary.
Wagner is not the only modern intruder who works havoc in the pages of BT. A more profound influence on Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Apollinian/Dionysian duality and its alleged influence on Greek tragedy was Arthur Schopenhauer. In the fall of 1865, Nietzsche discovered Schopenhauer’s principal work, The World as Will and Representation (1818, 1844), in an antiquarian bookstore, bought it, and became an instant convert to this peculiar philosophy. Wagner too was an admirer of Schopenhauer, in whose aesthetics music ranked as the highest form of art because, unlike the other arts, it transcends appearances and represents the ‘‘world will’’ itself. Schopenhauer’s ‘‘principle of individuation,’’ his doctrine of universal suffering with its innate pessimism, and the privileged role he assigned to music made a lasting impression on Nietzsche and determined his understanding of Dionysus, Greek art, and Greek tragedy. Schopenhauer’s name and concepts loom large at the beginning and end of BT(especially secs. 1-2, 4, 16, and 21-22). According to Schopenhauer, the driving force behind every activity on the human and cosmic level is a primordial and irrational ‘‘will’’ which expresses itself in the world of phenomena, a dream world based on illusion as the ‘‘will to life.’’ Individually this force is experienced through one’s awareness of one’s own self as will. This process of the objectivation of the universal will in individual bodies, urges, and life-experiences - the principium individuationis, which is invoked in eleven of the twenty-five sections of BT - is an ongoing, never-ending effort because the eternal striving of the will cannot be satisfied. Dissatisfaction with the insatiability of the will is the cause for endless suffering in the world. The only escape from suffering is the complete surrender of one’s own individuality, which is tantamount to a renunciation of the individual will to life.
Although Schopenhauer’s principal tenets are evidently indebted to Indian philosophy and have no immediate parallels in Greek thought, Nietzsche miraculously found a Greek comparandum in the myth of Dionysus Zagreus. Attested mainly in Neoplatonic sources, the myth relates ‘‘that as a boy [Dionysus] was torn to pieces by the Titans’’ and restored to a new life through reconstitution of his dismembered body. By calling it Dionysus’ ‘‘rebirth’’ (BT 10: 68.26), Nietzsche adopts a late antique detail of the Zagreus myth that may or may not have been present in the classical period (Henrichs 2004, 126). According to Nietzsche, Dionysus Zagreus is ‘‘the suffering Dionysus of the Mysteries, the god experiencing in himself the agonies of individuation’’ (BT 10: 68.11-13), whose fate is reenacted in the suffering heroes of tragedy, who ‘‘are mere masks of this original hero, Dionysus’’ (BT 10: 67.23-24; cf. Henrichs 1993a, 36-39). In an even bolder move, Nietzsche suggests that his Schopenhauerian reading of the Zagreus myth captures the essence of tragedy, which he defines as follows: ‘‘the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, the conception of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and of art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored oneness’’ (BT 10: 69.3-7).
Needless to say, Nietzsche’s notion of an archetypal tragedy dramatizing the suffering of Dionysus is not supported by any Greek evidence. Even if the Zagreus myth is as old as the late archaic or classical period (Parker 1995, 494-96), it is unthinkable that the tragedians and their audience would have understood it as the foundation myth of Attic tragedy. Nor could they possibly have seen the tragic heroes as human surrogates of the suffering Dionysus. The known versions of the Zagreus myth do not emphasize the suffering of the god, but his return to life. In the final analysis, Nietzsche’s ‘‘suffering Dionysus’’ who is reincarnated in tragic heroes like
Oedipus and Prometheus must be exposed as a Christian construct in pagan disguise, modeled on the figure of Christus patiens and superimposed on Greek tragedy by a pro-pagan and anti-Christian pastor’s son.
Nietzsche inherited the polarity of Apollo and Dionysus from the Romantic scholarship of the early nineteenth century but drastically reinterpreted and problem-atized the conventional definition of the two divinities (Vogel 1966, Reibnitz 1992). His innovation was to turn the two gods into the dual concept of the Apollinian and Dionysian, thereby transforming a minimalist approach to Greek polytheism into a grand aesthetic theory (Henrichs 2004, 125-28). The shift from religion to art explains why in the course of BTthe two ‘‘art deities’’ give way to the two ‘‘art forms’’ that are named after them (Henrichs 1993a, 23-26). Again appropriating Schopenhauerian concepts and terminology, Nietzsche associates the Apolli-nian with ‘‘dreams’’ and ‘‘illusions’’; that is, with the clearly delineated and demarcated world of natural phenomena which is tantamount to the ‘‘principle of individuation’’ (BT 1). The Dionysian corresponds to ‘‘intoxication’’ (BT 1), to the primeval ‘‘oneness’’ of things (BT 2-3, 5, 10), and ultimately to Schopenhauer’s ‘‘will.’’ Tragedy is the product of the interaction between the two principles: ‘‘What we call ‘tragic’ is precisely this Apollinian elucidation of the Dionysian’’ (KGWIII 3, 200, from 1870/71). Nietzsche makes his case with visionary certainty; no proofs are adduced, and none is available. His argument that Greek tragedy constitutes a mirror image of the universal scenario of cosmic struggle and human suffering has had a tremendous impact on classicists and non-classicists alike; it is almost irresistible, and yet it must be resisted because it is refuted by the very different roles that Apollo and Dionysus play in Greek culture and in the Greek tragedies that survive.
In retrospect Nietzsche described BT as his sacrifice to Dionysus (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 295), but his ideas on ‘‘the birth of tragedy’’ are a far cry from current theories, which tend to interpret tragoidia as a song having to do with the sacrifice of a goat. The origins of tragedy are lost to us and cannot be recovered, and speculation is no substitute for hard evidence, which is unavailable. Nietzsche derives tragedy with Aristotle from the cult of Dionysus, and the majority of scholars would agree that he has a point, even though the idea that the original Dionysian chorus of prototragedy consisted of satyrs is sheer fantasy. The importance of Dionysus for Greek tragedy, as far as both its origins and his role in the extant plays are concerned, remains controversial. In the current debate the minimalists are contesting the progress that has been made in recent years thanks to more holistic interpretations (Friedrich 1996 and Scullion, chapter 2 in this volume versus Bierl 1991 and Henrichs 1995). Ironically, Nietzsche has been invoked by both sides.
World History
