Ancient Greek Rhythms in Tristan and Nietzsche

Year 2018, Volume: 2 Issue: 2, 183 - 226, 29.12.2018

Wai Ling Cheong

https://doi.org/10.33906/musicologist.481394

Abstract

It was Friedrich Nietzsche, appointed professor of
classical philology in 1869 at the age of twenty-four and before he had
completed his doctoral dissertation, who first postulated on the basis of
rigorous textual studies that eminent classical philologists active in Central
Europe in the nineteenth century had gone seriously off-track. Nietzsche’s
teaching and research notes on ancient Greek rhythm, the four notebooks he
composed during his short-lived professorship at Basel University, were not
published until 1993. In them Nietzsche alluded to Wagner’s use of Greek rhythm
in Tristan, though he did not give a straightforward account of how he understood
it. This paper takes a cue from Nietzsche’s most extended analysis of a Tristan excerpt (act III scene 2) buried therein, which proves catalytic in
leading to an analysis through which I argue how Wagner made covert use of
ancient Greek rhythm in Tristan under the constraint of
the modern notation and the metrical system.

Keywords

Greek rhythm, Wagner, Tristan, Nietzsche

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