Friedrich Nietzsche

Das griechische Musikdrama

The Greek Music Drama

Translated by Paul Bishop

Introduction by Jill Marsden

Contra Mundum Press, New York NY, 2013

This is a translation of a text by Nietzsche not previously available in English (or certainly not in print for many years). It is the text of a lecture Nietzsche gave in the Basel Museum in 1870, closely related to his book of 1872, The Birth of Tragedy. So the lecture, along with another two weeks later ‘Socrates and Tragedy’, marks the beginning of the process in which Nietzsche moved from young lion of classical philology appointed to a chair at the University of Basel in his early twenties, to an invalid retired from academia, with no fixed abode, writing books largely ignored by the academic world. These lectures prepare the way for Nietzsche’s approach in The Birth of Tragedy where a philosophy and aesthetics…