Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is divided into two sections. The first fifteen chapters address the birth of Greek Tragedy which he believes took place upon the meeting of the Apollonian and the Dionysian world views. The following ten chapters discuss

In following chapter, Nietzsche finally arrives at his conception of music. He begins with explaining that research has discovered that Archilochus first introduced folk song into literature; as a result of this, the Greeks placed him among the ranks of Homer. The folk song separated itself from the wholly Apollinian epos with its union of the Apollinian and the Dionysian. Nietzsche “conceive[s] the folk song as the musical mirror of the world, as the original melody, now seeking for itself a parallel dream phenomenon and expressing it in poetry.” He concludes that “melody is therefore primary and universal,” and “generates the poem out of itself.” If one listens to a collection of folk songs, they “will find innumerable instances of the way the continuously generating melody scatters image sparks all around, which in their variegation, their abrupt change, their mad precipitation, manifest a power quite unknown to the epic and its steady flow.” These unrelated images that flash within one’s mind is condemned by the steady flowing Apollinian epos (Cockburn; Nietzsche 53).

However, though this Apollonian art redeems us through illusion, one of Apollo’s main precepts is “know thyself.” To do this, one must look inside himself and see the Dionysian suffering that lay at his core. All of this Apollonian beauty rests on top of a hidden knowledge of suffering exposed by Dionysus. This is another example of the duality of Apollo and Dionysus but also their unity in coming together to redeem life.

The preface of The Birth of Tragedy is written to Wagner but is also speaking to the reader. Nietzsche anticipates criticism toward his work but ensures both Wagner and the reader that the subject of art is of great importance. Written during the height of the Franco-Prussian War, Nietzsche fears that “readers will find it offensive that an aesthetic problem should be taken so seriously—assuming they are unable to consider art more than a pleasant sideline, a readily dispensable tinkling of bells that accompanies the ‘seriousness of life.’” He warns against believing that such a subject of art is simple and irrelevant but to realize “what a seriously German problem is faced here and placed right in the center of German hopes.” Nietzsche believes that the issue is at the core of the German national character, and may be its salvation. He is “convinced that art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life.” Nietzsche then concludes the preface with dedicating his essay to Wagner. By associating himself with the great German composer, Wagner, Nietzsche tries to keep people from writing him off as a flake and attempt to establish himself as a serious philosopher on an important subject (Cockburn; Nietzsche 21,32).

Nietzsche then proceeds to delve into a slightly confusing, yet extremely profound concept. He proposes the question of “What if he, the lyric genius, also beholds himself as the subject of the lyrics?” What if Archilochus becomes the definite object of which the subjective and agitations of the will become directed. Nietzsche proposes that “Archilochus, the passionately inflamed, loving, and hating man, is but a vision of the genius, who by this time is no longer merely Archilochus, but a world-genius expressing his primordial pain symbolically in the symbol of the man Archilochus.” The actual artist surpasses the form of man and becomes this form of “world-genius”; the man is merely a symbol of the feelings and emotions expressed by this “world-genius” (Cockburn; Nietzsche 50).

Plato also recognized this connection between music and the character of a man. He believed that simple, straightforward music was the best and that rhythmic and melodic complexities were connected with depression and disorder. Counterpoint, a form of music with a note-for-note correspondence, was the most desirable. Plato also belie

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