Origins: The First Act

In 872 the young Friedrich Nietzsche burst onto the German intellectual scene by publishing The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Others had speculated on the origins of ancient theater, starting with Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., but no one before Nietzsche had conceived of it as a “birth,” and a metaphysical one at that. For Nietzsche, Greek tragedy was the child of a strange marriage between characteristics of the Greek gods Apollo (associated with singing, poetry and the arts) and Dionysus (the god of wine, capable of deep compassion and terrible cruelty). On the […]