Music, originally known to the Greeks through an Apollinian sense, eventually developed another, a Dionysian, counterpart. "The very element which defines the character of Dionysiac music (and thus of music generally): the power of its sound to shake us to our very foundations, the unified stream of melody the destruction of maya" (Nietzsche 21). In the following passage, Nietzsche relates the origin of tragedy: "It is admittedly an "ideal" ground on which, as Schiller rightly saw something which surprises us just as much as the fact that tragedy originated in the chorus" (Nietzsche 39). The original theater introduced the chorus in order to set itself off from a naturalistic idea of art; and the first choruses were sung by satyrs. Through the blend of poetry and dramatic scenes with the chorus, the audience, and music, the tragedy composes the image-making and mastering of form of Apollo, who tries to make meaning out of experience, with the instinctual, savage, and sensual nature of Dionysus, who tends to collapse systems through intoxication. Dionysus .
also serves to remind us, through his nature, that there is a very real aspect to ourselves and to reality which transcends the ordered conception of the Apolline. .
Nietzsche's account of the tragedy is rooted in his conception of the artistic tension between the Dionysian and the Apollinian components of human experience. "We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics when we have come to realize the continuous evolution of art is bound up with the duality of the Apolline and the Dionysiac" (Nietzsche 14). The Apollinian principles of order, individuation, and control counter, and are countered by, the Dionysian features of intoxication, agency, and chaos. Both of these deities are integral and within this dialectic there oscillates moments between love and hate until the union was completed in the birth of tragedy.
