The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music

by Friedrich Nietzsche

This, too, is a matter of more than scholarly concern. This highly peculiar book is thought by some to be a fascinating, original study which becomes polluted by Nietzsche’s fanatical zeal for the Wagnerian cause from §16 to the end. A distinguished previous translator, Walter Kaufmann, has a note at the end of §15: ‘The book might well end at this point – as the original did… The discussion of the birth and death of tragedy is finished in the main, and the following celebration of the rebirth of tragedy weakens the book and was shortly regretted by Nietzsche himself.’ That is written from the standpoint of someone who not only had no interest in Wagner, the man or his work, but who wished that Nietzsche never had had either.