There are libraries about Nietzsche and his intense connections to music. Special attention has been paid to his shifting assessments of Wagner, but I wonder if that hasn’t been so exaggerated as to eclipse other interesting questions about the musical Nietzsche. How did his aesthetic ideas influence his own attempts to compose music – and vice versa? Here’s his “Manfred Meditation,” composed around the time of the early and pivotal “Birth of Tragedy.”
And what about the other potential Nietzsches that got eclipsed by Nietzsche the iconoclast philosopher? As noted by my friend Q, author of the lively and addictive Mangan Paper, in response to the Nietzschean apothegm, “the wisest among us is a cross between ghost and plant,” “What a prodigious sci fi writer was lost in old Nietzsche!”
Filed under: unanswered questions
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 