Ancient Greek Rhythms in Tristan and Nietzsche

Abstract

It was Friedrich Nietzsche, appointed professor of classical philology in 1869 at the age of twenty-four and before he had completed his doctoral dissertation, who first postulated on the basis of rigorous textual studies that eminent classical philologists active in Central Europe in the nineteenth century had gone seriously off-track. Nietzsche’s teaching and research notes on ancient Greek rhythm, the four notebooks he composed during his short-lived professorship at Basel University, were not published until 1993. In them Nietzsche alluded to Wagner’s use of Greek rhythm in Tristan , though he did not give a straightforward account of how he understood it. This paper takes a cue from Nietzsche’s most extended analysis of a Tristan excerpt (act III scene 2) buried therein, which proves catalytic in leading to an analysis through which I argue how Wagner made covert use of ancient Greek rhythm in Tristan under the constraint of the modern notation and the metrical system.