Corpus · The Birth of Tragedy · Full-text route

Music, Myth, and the Struggle Announced

Optional full-text route · Station 13 of 19

Read: §16 and §17 of The Birth of Tragedy, both in full.
Allow: About 60–90 minutes, including the passages, this guide, and a short written response.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Haussmann): §16 · §17.

About the overlap with Reading 7. Reading 7 (station 17) also assigns the close of §16. That runs from the point where, after the long quotation from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche sums up Schopenhauer’s doctrine of music as the language of the will, and goes to the end of the section. Read all of §16 now so that you meet the section whole and in order. This page links to Reading 7 for the close reading of that stretch, and you will reread it there.

Quotations on this page follow Haussmann’s free translation. The long passage in §16 from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) is Schopenhauer’s text, quoted by Nietzsche; Haussmann’s English renders both.

Before you read

Reading 6 ended with an image of Socrates practising music: a thinker who reaches the limit of explanation and finds that he needs art. §16 turns that possibility toward Nietzsche’s own time. The long historical example, the birth and death of Greek tragedy, is over. Now he says he must “confront with clear vision the analogous phenomena of the present time.”

To do so, he returns to his first principles. What is music, that tragedy can be born from it and die without it? His answer leans openly on Schopenhauer, and he quotes Schopenhauer at length to make it. §17 then uses that answer to explain what went wrong after tragedy’s death, in music, in drama, and in a whole culture’s idea of cheerfulness.

The main question: What must music be, for it to give birth to tragic myth, and how does Nietzsche turn that answer into a diagnosis of what theoretical culture puts in myth’s place?

Read §16 and §17 once. In §16, mark exactly where the Schopenhauer quotation begins and ends. In §17, mark every appearance of the word “comfort” or “cheerfulness.”

What to notice

1. The turn to the present. Where in §16’s opening does Nietzsche’s account of the Greeks become a hope for his own culture? Which phrase first names that hope?
2. Whose voice? In the long quotation, Schopenhauer speaks. What does Nietzsche say before it to endorse it, and what does he draw from it afterwards?
3. Two endings. In §17, how does the ending of an older tragedy differ from the ending of the new drama? What replaces what?

Close reading

The turn to the present

§16 opens with a summary. Tragedy “perishes as surely by evanescence of the spirit of music as it can be born only out of this spirit.” Nietzsche then announces a new task: to enter the struggles being fought in his own world “between the insatiate optimistic perception and the tragic need of art.” The opponent he names is “the Most Illustrious Opposition,” optimistic science with Socrates at its head. The paragraph promises that he will soon name the forces that guarantee a rebirth of tragedy, “and who knows what other blessed hopes for the German genius!” §16, the opening

This is where the book’s account of the Greeks begins to carry an explicit hope for the present. Mark the sentence. You will want to test later sections against it, and the 1886 preface will single this hope out.

Two worlds of art, one thinker

Nietzsche restates his two gods. Apollo is “the transfiguring genius of the principium individuationis.” Dionysus breaks its spell and opens the way to “the innermost heart of things.” He then credits one thinker with seeing the depth of this opposition between image-making art and music, even without the Greek gods as a key. Schopenhauer, he says, gave music a unique place because it is “not a copy of the phenomenon, but a direct copy of the will itself.” Nietzsche also cites Wagner’s essay on Beethoven. Wagner, he says, “affixed his seal” to this insight by insisting that music is not to be judged “according to the category of beauty.” §16, Schopenhauer and Wagner

Notice what Nietzsche claims for this insight: that with it he could see how classical scholarship had lived on “phantasmagoria and externalities.” A philosophical thesis about music is being offered as the key to a problem in the study of Greek antiquity.

Whose words? The Schopenhauer quotation

Nietzsche asks his question in short form: “how is music related to image and concept?” He answers by quoting Schopenhauer “at full length.” The quotation makes several claims:

• The world of phenomena and music are two different expressions of the same thing.
• Music is a universal language.
• Music gives “the universalia ante rem,” the kernel before all forms.
• Suitable music makes a scene seem to disclose its secret meaning.
• Music that deliberately imitates phenomena fails; “all specially imitative music does this.”

§16, the quotation

Keep the voices apart. Everything inside the quotation is Schopenhauer’s claim. Nietzsche adopts it, but it arrives with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will attached.

Compare §6 (station 6). There, Nietzsche wrote that music “appears as will” when the lyric poet interprets it in images, and that music, “according to its essence, cannot be will.” Here the quotation calls music “the direct copy of the will itself.” Is that the same claim, a refinement, or a shift? The text does not settle it for you.

From music to myth

After the quotation, Nietzsche draws his own conclusion. Music stimulates the imagination to give its invisible world a form, and it makes images and concepts appear more significant. From this, he says, “I infer the capacity of music to give birth to myth,” and above all tragic myth. The section then explains tragic pleasure through the hero’s destruction and the “eternal life” of the will. §16, the inference to myth

Reading 7 gives this closing stretch its close reading, in Reading 7, commentary 1 and Reading 7, commentary 2, and you will reread it there. For now, note one thing. Nietzsche calls the facts that support his inference “intelligible in themselves.” The step from those facts to “the capacity of music to give birth to myth” is his.

Joy behind the phenomena

§17 begins by saying that Dionysian art, too, seeks to convince us of “the eternal joy of existence,” but a joy we are to seek “not in phenomena, but behind phenomena.” We are made to look into the terrors of individual existence, and “a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily” from the flux of forms. “We are really for brief moments Primordial Being itself.” In spite of fear and pity, we are happy, “not as individuals, but as the one living being.” §17, the metaphysical comfort

This is the fullest statement of the consolation the book offers. It depends on a claim about what we really are: not individuals, but, for brief moments, the one underlying being. Mark that as an R claim, and note that it is where the comfort comes from.

Heroes who speak more superficially than they act

Nietzsche admits a difficulty. The significance of tragic myth never became fully clear to the Greek poets, let alone the philosophers: “their heroes speak, as it were, more superficially than they act.” He compares Hamlet. Because Greek tragedy survives only as words, he says, we must reconstruct its musical power “almost by philological method.” And he calls the Greeks, with a saying he attributes to Egyptian priests, “eternal children,” who did not know what they had made. §17, the poets and the music

This is an honest admission, and it creates a problem. Nietzsche’s account of tragedy depends on the power of music we cannot hear, and on meanings the poets themselves, he says, could not put into words. Ask what, then, could count as evidence for it.

An eternal conflict

Nietzsche now generalizes. If tragedy was driven from its course by the dialectical desire for knowledge and the optimism of science, then there may be “an eternal conflict between the theoretic and the tragic view of things.” Tragedy could be reborn only after the spirit of science has been led to its limits. The symbol for that culture is “the music-practising Socrates” of Reading 6. He defines the spirit of science precisely: “the belief in the fathomableness of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.” Its first effect was to destroy myth, leaving poetry “a homeless being.” §17, the conflict of views

Tone-painting and the New Dithyramb

Nietzsche’s example of music turned against myth is the New Attic Dithyramb. Its music imitated phenomena, “a battle or a storm at sea,” and so lost its power to make myth. “Tone-painting is therefore in every respect the counterpart of true music”: it makes a poor phenomenon poorer still. Music becomes “the slave of phenomena.” He adds a parallel change in drama, “character representation and psychological refinement from Sophocles onwards.” Types give way to individual traits, until New Comedy offers only stock masks. §17, the New Dithyramb

Here an aesthetic preference functions as a law. Nietzsche assumes that music which imitates is inferior to music that is a “mirror” of the will. Test the rule with a piece of programme music you know. Does it only point to things, or can it do more?

Two endings and two cheerfulnesses

In the older tragedy, Nietzsche says, one felt the metaphysical comfort at the close. He hears it purest, perhaps, in Oedipus at Colonus. In the new drama, one sought instead “an earthly unravelment of the tragic dissonance.” The hero is rewarded with a marriage or divine favour. “The hero had turned gladiator.” “The deus ex machina took the place of metaphysical comfort.” §17, the new endings

Then Nietzsche contrasts two kinds of Greek cheerfulness. One is the earlier “naïveté,” the blossom of Apollonian culture over a dark abyss. The other is “a senile, unproductive love of existence.” Its noblest form is “the cheerfulness of the theoretical man.” That cheerfulness dissolves myth and substitutes “for metaphysical comfort an earthly consonance,” a deus ex machina “of machines and crucibles.” It believes it can correct the world by knowledge, and it says cheerfully to life: “I desire thee: it is worth while to know thee.” §17, the cheerfulness of the theoretical man

A difficulty

Can music’s power to give birth to myth be stated without Schopenhauer’s metaphysics?

§16 builds its central inference on a quoted account of music as the direct copy of the will. §17’s comfort depends on our being, for brief moments, the one underlying being. If you do not accept that metaphysics, what is left?

One candidate is an account of experience: music can make images and stories seem more significant than their content alone would explain. That is something you can test against listening. A stronger candidate is Nietzsche’s account of reality: through music, the individual is in touch with the one life beneath appearances. That needs more than the experience to support it.

Write both versions in your own words. Then decide which one the rest of the book needs. The theme page on recurrence, time, and becoming asks the same question about §16.

Retrospect checkpoint: an 1886 comparison

If you are following the chronological alternate, skip this until after the 1886 preface lesson.

In self-criticism §6, Nietzsche regrets having expressed his new valuations “in Kantian and Schopenhauerian formulæ.” §16 is where the book relies on Schopenhauer most openly, by quotation.

In §7 of the preface, Nietzsche recommends “the art of earthly comfort” over metaphysical comfort. In Haussmann’s English the word “earthly” appears in both places: in §17’s scorned “earthly consonance” and “earthly unravelment,” and in the preface’s “earthly comfort.” This guide has not established whether Nietzsche’s German uses the same word in both places, so do not build an argument on the echo. Compare the substance instead. §17 scorns an earthly resolution, the rewarded hero and the machine-god, as the mark of the un-Dionysian. The preface recommends laughter as an earthly comfort against the need for metaphysical comfort. Is the 1886 recommendation a reversal of §17, or a different kind of earthliness? Add your answer to your ledger.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

What does Nietzsche think a culture loses when it trusts knowledge to correct the world, and how much of his answer depends on Schopenhauer?

• Begin with the “eternal conflict” of §17 and Nietzsche’s definition of the spirit of science.
• Use one example of loss: the New Dithyramb, the new endings, or the theoretical person’s cheerfulness.
• Then identify the claim from §16 that the example depends on, and say whether it survives without the metaphysics of the will.

A successful response separates Schopenhauer’s quoted claims from Nietzsche’s inference, states the metaphysical comfort precisely, and ends with a judgment you can defend from the text.

Continue

Continue the optional full-text route: Station 14 · §§18–19: Alexandrian Culture and Its Art →

§17 ends with the theoretical person’s cheerful “I desire thee.” §18 asks what that cheerfulness rests on, and what it hides.

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A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised September 24, 2026.

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