Music is clearly very important to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and his philosophy. Nietzsche’s first book was originally titled The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872). He commented on classical music and the music of his day throughout his writings. He composed music and was an accomplished interpreter and improviser on the piano (Liébert 2004: 13–29). He wrote to Hermann Levi, “Perhaps there has never been a philosopher who, to such a degree, was at bottom so very much a musician as I am” (Schacht 2003: 131). Yet, Nietzsche nowhere gives us a discreet philosophy of music, never goes so far as to specify what he thinks music is. We will attempt to fill part of that void here by connecting what Nietzsche says about music with what he says about philosophy and by highlighting how Nietzsche uses Dionysus as a figure for both. As we shall see, everything there is to say about philosophy and music in Nietzsche’s writings passes through the figure of Dionysus. A careful consideration of the way Nietzsche figures Dionysus in his writings – from the earliest to the last – will clarify what very well may have been Nietzsche’s considered views about music, philosophy, and the relations between the two.
Nietzsche introduces Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy as, precisely, the spirit of music from out of which tragedy is born. Dionysus is not the same as music on this account. The god rather figures or represents, Nietzsche says, the spirit of a music that stands alongside a fascination with the image rich world of dreams and illusions figured for the ancient Greeks in the divinity of Apollo. For the concept of music, Nietzsche tells us, the Greeks substituted the “intensely clear” figure of Dionysus, an image of a “non-imagistic” art, the representative of a great musical impulse in nature itself (1967: 33). This figure of music is associated for the Greeks with intoxication, ecstasy, dancing and self-forgetfulness. It prepares those who grasp its deep psychological import for a connection with their fellows and a reunion with a natural world that had become hostile, alien and a threat to their humanity. “In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community,” Nietzsche writes. “He feels himself a god” (1967: 37). So conceived by Nietzsche, music is a very powerful force in the life of the pre-tragic Greeks.
Yet, Nietzsche goes on to say, this force was not originally powerful enough to challenge the influence of Apollo on these ancient Greeks. The calm restraint and sun-like eye of the soothsaying god, Apollo, held out for the Greeks the seductive illusion of a dream world which, even in its intensity, preserved for them the sensation that it was mere appearance. They believed this world was beautiful despite the fact that they knew it was not real. And, for a long while, the beauty of these appearances and the illusion preserved in them held their own against the wilder emotions and collapse of the principium individuations – the principle of individuation – promised in the music of Dionysus. That Apollonian tendency was even forceful enough among the Greeks to hold out against a more virulent Dionysian tendency, “that horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty” celebrated in the festivals and rites of the so-called “barbarian,” that is to say, non-Greek people. Doric art, famously, immortalizes for Nietzsche “this majestically rejecting attitude of Apollo” (1967: 39).
The majesty of this rejection would not hold out forever, though. In art, generally, the passing of Doric for Ionic style reflected the beginning of a reconciliation of the Apollonian tendency to the more barbarous Dionysian impulses that emerged “from the deepest roots of the Hellenic nature” itself. In other words, Nietzsche suggests, something of the “witches brew” of sensuality and cruelty was already contained in the Greek figure of Dionysus but held back and restrained. When it eventually “made a path” for itself, the resulting destruction of the principium individuationes was, for the first time, Nietzsche says, “an artistic phenomenon” (1967: 39). And this is an important transformation. As one of two fundamental impulses in nature, music is figured by the Greeks as a god of dancing, drinking, percussive and harmonic musical sounds content to live alongside the impulse to indulge the images in dreams and the shimmering appearances of our wakeful life. When that dancing, drinking impulse finally expressed a force that was latent in it but not yet manifest because held back by that equally powerful impulse to calm restraint, then the music figured for the Greeks in the dancing god, Dionysus, produced something more vibrant, challenging and distinctly artistic. In fact, it became, for Nietzsche, an emblem of art itself.
These more powerful Dionysian energies which, as it turns out, were always already embodied in Greek music, did not produce an effect on the Apollonian impulse to clarity and calm restraint by simply asserting themselves against or offering themselves as a fresh alternative to the ancient Greek fascination with images and appearances. Nor did these competing tendencies reach a dialectical reconciliation of forces that otherwise naturally opposed one another. Rather, Nietzsche leads us to believe, the more primitive Dionysian impulses forced themselves on the Apollonian, shaping and forming the fascination and restraint associated with the images and illusions of dreams and appearances. This shaping of itself and its object is the meaning and effect of the aesthetic phenomenon Nietzsche attributes to the spirit of music figured in Dionysus. The plasticity of the Dionysian tendency is not a separate or new force but a capacity of that impulse to form itself to and, thereby, remake the shape of the forces it affects. Music, as figured in the god Dionysus, is an especially good candidate for such a plastic power.
That is because this music affects us more immediately and more deeply than the other arts. It produces effects in us that, arguably, all the other arts are striving to achieve. This music is felt as much or more than it is perceived. It reverberates in our bodies and our soul, moving us to sway and dance, to tap our fingers and our feet, to leap out of our seats and clap our hands in appreciation, to swoon and lose ourselves in a transport of thoughts and feelings, dreams and expectations. This music is felt as such a force by performers and listeners alike. In the first, it motivates and informs the transformation of scored notes into audible sounds. In the second, and also in the first, since the performers also listen, it shapes and informs the transformation of audible sounds into dance and daring emotions and ideas.
Nietzsche once located the source of this power in a “tonal subsoil,” what he described then as the universally comprehended and communicated “expressions of one primal cause unfathomable to us” (1978: 21; see Allison 1996). The Schopenhauerian inflection, here, is unmistakable. Music represents, for Nietzsche throughout the early 1870s, a primal force, a felt immediacy we vainly articulate in the arbitrary gestures of consonants and vowels that make up the so-called natural languages. “As our whole corporeality stands in relation to that original phenomenon, the ‘Will,’” Nietzsche writes, “so the word built out of its consonants and vowels stands in relation to its tonal basis” (1978: 22). What is comprehended and communicated in this Tonbild are pleasure and pain, biologically based states which are the common, primal cause in all humans and, so, the shared basis for an understanding that overcomes the differences in native languages. Kathleen Higgins connects this common biological existence – “all that is entailed by ‘being alive’” – to the figure of Dionysus and, through Dionysus, to a mode of self-awareness and self-understanding she describes as an appropriately Dionysian self-forgetfulness (1986: 665).
Music of the sort associated with Dionysus, then, is capable of making us forget ourselves, the better to share with others like us an awareness and understanding that linguistic expression only ever obscures. It is the basis for a shared communicability that the human voice struggles to preserve in song but loses as soon as it resorts to words. (This is the sense to make of Nietzsche’s remark, in the “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” that The Birth of Tragedy “should have sung” (1967: 20).) The Dionysian music that preserves this shared sensibility and sensitivity to the feelings of pleasure and pain is modeled, for Nietzsche, on the dithyramb of the ancient choral song. In the dithyramb, generally thought to have been an antistrophic verse in iambic meter, the devotee puts on the god and makes himself as “divine” as the limitations of his singing and dancing allow. Nietzsche wants to capture in this dithyrambic music the physicality of bodily engagement and “the emotional power of the tone” through which “something never before experienced struggles for utterance” (1967: 40). What is struggling to be heard in the dithyramb is music itself, a music we are only ever on the verge of hearing, a truly Dionysian music that must be distinguished from Apollonian music, on the one hand, and the special art of music, in Nietzsche’s day and in ours, on the other.
Apollonian music was Doric, Nietzsche tells us: solid, restrained, “architectonics in tones . . . that were merely suggestive, such as those of the cithara” (1967: 40). The notes of the cithara (or lyre) set a tone for the poetry or dramatic scene they accompanied. They were a scaffolding. They did nothing to direct the action or the melodic line, to mobilize the plot or the harmony, to set a rhythm for the narrative or the musical score. In this music, the non-imagistic Dionysian impulses have been subordinated to the image rich symbolism of the lips, the face, and speech. Apollonian music subordinates the emotional power of the tone, the uniform flow of the melody and the incomparable world of harmony to the message it seeks to communicate and the world it seeks to represent (Nietzsche 1967: 40).
It was as rare to find these properly Dionysian qualities – the emotional power of tone, the uniform flow of melody, the incomparable world of harmony – in the music of Nietzsche’s day, as it still is in ours. The music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or the Jimi Hendrix Experience may have a privileged access to the essence of Dionysian music by virtue of growing from the tonal subsoil which sustains that essence, but that is no guarantee that all music or even this specific music expresses the spirit of Dionysus (see Nietzsche 1986: 345, 348). There is so much that can and does get in the way: forced ornamentation, staged distractions and, especially, words, which sacrifice music for a message the artist wants to communicate for an audience that demands to understand. If “life without music would be a mistake,” as Nietzsche is so often quoted as remarking (2003: 232; see also 1954: 471), then a tragic reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy – one following the wisdom of Silenus, say – would have us believe that there has not been music enough in the special art of music to save life from falling into error (Nietzsche 1967: 42–3).
At the time he wrote The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was under the impression that the music of Richard Wagner could be appropriately salvific:
Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit a power has arisen, which, having nothing in common with the primitive conditions of Socratic culture . . . is rather felt by this culture as something terribly inexplicable and overwhelmingly hostile – German music as we must understand it, particularly in its vast solar orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner.
(1967: 119)
Nietzsche commends Wagner for confirming the “eternal truth” of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics (1967: 100) and cites a long passage from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation as an exemplification of what Wagner himself believes he has accomplished (1967: 101–3).
“Music,” says Schopenhauer there, “if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the universality of concepts, much as they are related to the universality of things” (Nietzsche 1967: 101; Schopenhauer 1907: 339). “This relation may be very well expressed in the language of the schoolmen,” Nietzsche adds by way of additional quotation, “by saying, the concepts are the universalia post rem, but music gives the universalia ante rem, and the real world the universalia in re” (Nietzsche 1967: 103; Schopenhauer 1907: 340). This account of Wagner’s German music is meant to contrast strongly with the culture of opera in his day to which Nietzsche attributes a stillo rappresentativo and a powerful, non-aesthetic yearning for the “idyllic,” for “Alexandrian flatteries” and for “a superficial pleasure in the play of line and proportion” that has become “an empty and merely distracting diversion” (1967: 118). It would not go too far to describe much of the music of our day as such an empty distraction.
Yet, Nietzsche tells us, his regard for Wagner and his music began to wane in the year the first edition of The Birth of Tragedy was published, with the groundbreaking for the Festival Theater at Bayreuth in May, 1872 (1997: 195–9). He reveals this to us in “Richard Wagner at Bayreuth,” the fourth of the Untimely Meditations, published two years before a second, virtually unchanged edition of The Birth of Tragedy appeared in 1878. There, Nietzsche contrasts Wagner with Goethe and connects him with a “poeticizing folk” (1997: 229). Out of pity for this folk, Nietzsche says, Wagner became a “social revolutionary.” He saw the folk – not the people of his day but a mythically artistic people – as “the only spectator and listener who might be worthy of and equal to the power of his artwork as he dreamed of it” (1997: 230). Where Goethe is represented as discriminating, one of the “last great followers of the Italian philologist-poets,” Wagner is said to “no longer recognize any distinction between the cultivated and the uncultivated” (1997: 249). Through his music, Nietzsche concludes, Wagner sought to resurrect a folk who would confirm his greatness, and he sought this precisely not by speaking to the future but by interpreting and transfiguring the past (1997: 250).
We might say Nietzsche comes to hear an absence of the truly Dionysian impulse in Wagner’s music after Bayreuth. Better put, there is an absence of a truly artistic phenomenon, a shaping of the Dionysian tendency to fit and form an equally powerful tendency to calm restraint that is also there in that music. Wagner’s “higher self no longer condescends to serve its violent, more earthly brother,” Nietzsche writes, “it loves it and cannot but serve it” (1997: 228). If Wagner’s music still sounds “Dionysian” to some, it can only be as echoes of the primitive “witches brew” and no longer in what Nietzsche recognizes as the art in music. Where does Nietzsche continue to find the truly Dionysian tendency, music as exemplary of art itself, in the period after his falling out with Wagner? Not immediately in any music extant in his time. No, in fact, not in music at all, not even his own music, but rather in his writings. (Walter Kaufmann reports that Nietzsche had virtually stopped composing once he started publishing (Nietzsche 1978: 17).) And among those writings, not in the first stabs at Human, All Too Human or its two sequels, Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Dawn, or even in The Gay Science. He finds it in the narrative and the grand style given to that “Dionysian monster who bears the name of Zarathustra” in the book Nietzsche named after him (1966: 26).
Beginning in 1886, Nietzsche began revising his earlier writings, and these revisions, including the “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” added to both editions of The Birth of Tragedy, are revealing. In these revisions, and in the books published from 1886 to the end of his life, Dionysus is figured as a productive force. Not only singing and dancing but also creating: creating worlds, creating “truths,” creating forms of life. In these writings, Dionysus is the creative force in everything that is alive. This creative force is, of course, what Nietzsche will come to call the will to power. Dionysian music, and philosophy, as we shall see, expresses this will to power. And, insofar as everything that lives returns eternally, about which we have more to say below, that force always creates difference. Dionysus is no longer a force alongside nature but nature itself entirely animated by this difference-making Dionysian force. That very same force animates Nietzsche himself to ask, in the “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” “what would a music have to be like that would no longer be of romantic origin, like German music – but Dionysian?” (1967: 25).
There was clearly something Nietzsche admired in the figure of Dionysus from his first book. In that book, however, as we have seen, he associated the sylvan god precisely and closely with Wagner’s German music. In his writings after 1886, by contrast, we see a distinct shift in the valence of the Dionysian forces and that there are clearly, now, multiple forces. Arguably, the difference in Nietzsche’s thinking and writing, generally, and his figuring of Dionysus, in particular, can be attributed to the work completed from 1883 to 1885 in the four parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. More specifically, it can be attributed to the “fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable,” the thought that came to him in August 1881, “6000 feet beyond man and time” (2000: 751). The idea of the eternal recurrence or return gets a preview in the penultimate section (§341) of the 1882 edition of The Gay Science (Nietzsche 1974: 273–4), and in the final section of that edition, titled “Incipit tragoedia,” Nietzsche introduces the figure of Zarathustra with a text that rehearses the “Prologue” for part one of his next book.
This is not the place for us to rehearse all the complexities of Nietzsche’s most demanding thought. It will be enough if we restrict our remarks to the significance of the eternal return for Nietzsche’s thoughts about music. Nietzsche himself suggested that “the whole of Zarathustra may be reckoned as music; certainly a rebirth of the art of hearing was among its preconditions” (2000: 751). And what we are advised to “hear aright” in that text is “a voice bridging centuries,” the “halcyon tone” of that voice and the tempo of its speeches, described as a “tender adagio” (2000: 675). It might seem odd that the thought of the eternal return, that (to put it most succinctly) were there a point to life we would have realized it by now, could produce the calm, richness and joy promised in such a halcyon tone. But this is exactly what we find in the “wisdom” that concludes Nietzsche’s extended ruminations on the eternal return in Part Three of Zarathustra: “Sing! Speak no more! Are not all words made for the grave and heavy? Are not all words lies to those who are light? Sing! Speak no more!” (1966: 231). With this ode to eternity – For I love you, O eternity! – Zarathustra embraces the fate promised by the thought that everything that can happen has, that everything returns eternally.
If the point of the eternal return is that there is no single end toward which everything in its own unique way is tending, there can be no one unfathomable cause or truth that the tone in our voices is struggling to utter. Rather, the richness and wealth of this tone, the source of its joy, is that there are many, many reasons for living, many, many truths struggling to be heard. Words, once thought too arbitrary to express the truth of nature, are now deemed too heavy and grave to negotiate the multiplicity of truths nurtured in the tonal subsoil. Zarathustra sings, and with his songs he begins to correct at least part of what Nietzsche found lacking in The Birth of Tragedy – “It should have sung, this ‘new soul’ – and not spoken!” (1967: 20).
[H]e that has had the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, that has thought the “most abysmal idea,” nevertheless does not consider it an objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence – but rather one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things.
(Nietzsche 2000: 762)
Zarathustra sings this eternal Yes, and this singing, this affirmation, Nietzsche tells us, “this is the concept of Dionysus once again” (2000: 762).
So, in Zarathustra’s singing affirmation of the eternal return and of life in the face of the thought that everything in life returns eternally, Dionysus is transfig- ured. He no longer represents a tendency to unprincipled abandon plasticizing itself to and forming a powerful fascination with images and appearances. He no longer promises the “metaphysical comfort . . . that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes in appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable” (1967: 59). Through the songs of Zarathustra, Dionysus has become the dancing, singing god who affirms “the art of this-worldly comfort” (1967: 26; see Conway 1992). Through the songs of Zarathustra, Dionysus has learned to laugh, to leap and side-leap, even, in a fitting image of inversion, to stand on his head (1967: 26). Dionysus, transfigured through Zarathustra and the thought of the eternal return, becomes a new model of music for Nietzsche.
To get a fuller appreciation of this new Dionysian figure of music, and to follow the reasoning that has taken us to this point, we must not get so caught up in what Zarathustra sings and affirms that we fail to notice the more important aspect, the tone of those odes and Yes-sayings. We find that tone in Nietzsche’s style or, as Alexander Nehamas would have it, Nietzsche’s styles (Nehamas 1985: 13–41; see also Kofman 1993). Zarathustra deploys a dizzying array of styles and voices, and songs and affirmations make up a large part of that array. With every other style in that text, these songs and affirmations are uniformly joyful, rich, and tempered, free of rage and turpitude. The text as a whole is truly carried away by this tone, but it is not all joyful, playful celebration. The music of Zarathustra makes a serious point without arguing for it, and in the course of making that point, and refiguring it musically, Nietzsche refigured Dionysus as the multiple, difference-making force he becomes in the later writings.
To retell our story, Nietzsche borrowed Dionysus from the ancient Greek figure for a fundamental impulse to make non-imagistic music. He attributed that impulse to Wagner’s German music. When Wagner’s music failed to live up to that Dionysian standard, Nietzsche tried to find it in his own writings. He abandoned the model of his first five books, extended treatments of some one subject, and experimented with paragraphs of varying length, including aphorisms, on a number of related subjects, finally developing a style that became fruitful and multiplied in Zarathustra. With the eponymous hero of that book, Nietzsche experimented with the Dionysian impulse and made a monster of that hero. Transfigured through Zarathustra and the thought of the eternal return, Dionysus becomes a multiple, difference-making force and figures for Nietzsche the impulse to create new worlds, new truths and new forms of life. This Dionysian impulse is especially in evidence in the tone of Zarathustra’s songs and affirmations and in Nietzsche’s styles, more generally. Finally, this Dionysian music, the multiplicity of styles in Nietzsche’s writing, is the creative force behind Nietzsche’s perspectivist philosophical position.
This tells us that Nietzsche viewed music, Dionysian music, as the fundamental artistic impulse behind all the special arts and philosophy. What is distinctive about this impulse is that it is creative and that it bears this mantle lightly, calmly and with a joyfulness that enriches everything touched by it. This is characteristic of Nietzsche’s writings in the last years of his life, up to and including the letters at the end signed “Dionysus.” In the special art of music, there is the well-known example of Carmen:
Yesterday I heard – would you believe it? – Bizet’s masterpiece, for the twentieth time. . . . How such a work makes one perfect! One becomes a “masterpiece” oneself. . . . To sit five hours: the first stage of holiness!
(Nietzsche 1967: 157)
Especially in the context of the thought of the eternal return, what must have impressed Nietzsche about Carmen is how it makes a way for itself without any end given to it from the start, how out of all the songs and tones available and without a strict model for getting from the beginning to the end, Bizet selects those tones and songs that give style to his music:
This music is evil, subtly fatalistic; at the same time it remains popular – its subtlety belongs to a race, not to an individual. It is rich. It is precise. It builds, organizes, finishes: thus it constitutes the opposite of the polyp in music, the “infinite melody.”
(Nietzsche 1967: 157)
Around the story of a woman’s unbridled passions, and the passions she inspires, Bizet composed the means for a distinctly Dionysian music to be heard.
In the end, what Nietzsche expects of music and philosophy is not so hard to understand. He expects music, Dionysian music and philosophy to express the multiple possible forms of life available to creative, daring souls ready to act on the knowledge that there is no one reason for living, no one primal truth we are always struggling to utter. He expects this music and philosophy to be soaked through with the urge to dance, to laugh, to throw off the weight of the stillo rappresentativo, to make the god, Dionysus, appear, not on a tragic stage but on a stage set to celebrate life conscious of the thought of the eternal return. He expects music and philosophy to give us the palpable sense of being alive. However distracting much of our music (and philosophy) is today, there are still moments when this Dionysian music is heard.
See also Aesthetic properties (Chapter 14), Schopenhauer (Chapter 31), and Wagner (Chapter 35).
Allison, D.B. (1996) “Some Remarks on Nietzsche’s Draft of 1871, ‘On Music and Words’,” New Nietzsche Studies 1: 15–41.
Conway, D.W. (1992) “Nietzsche and the Art of This-Worldly Comfort: Self-Reference and Strategic Self-Parody,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 9: 343–57.
Higgins, K.M. (1986) “Nietzsche on Music,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47: 663–72.
Kofman, S. (1993) Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. D. Large, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Liébert, G. (2004) Nietzsche and Music, trans. D. Pellauer and G. Parkes, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Nehamas, A. (1985) Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Nietzsche, F.W. (1954 [1889]) Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. W. Kaufmann, New York: Penguin Books.
—— (1966 [1883–85]) Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and No One, trans. W. Kaufman, New York: Viking Press.
—— (1967 [1872/1888]) The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Random House.
—— (1974 [1882/1887]) The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Random House.
—— (1978 [1871]) “On Music and Words,” trans. W. Kaufman, The Denver Quarterly 13: 16–30.
—— (1986 [1880]) The Wanderer and His Shadow in Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 301–95. —— (1997 [1876]) “Richard Wagner at Bayreuth,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. D. Breazeale and trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 195–254.
—— (2000 [1908]) Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Random House.
—— (2003) “An Heinrich Köselitz in Venedig,” in Sämtliche briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden, 2nd edn, G. Colli and M. Montinari (eds), vol. 8, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 231–3.
Schacht, R. (2003) “Nietzsche, Music, Truth, Value, and Life,” International Studies in Philosophy 35: 131–46.
Schopenhauer, A. (1907 [1818]) The World as Will and Idea, 6th ed., vol. I, trans. R.B. Hal-dane and J. Kemp, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Company.
Babich, B. (1996) “Nietzsche & Music: A Selective Bibliography,” New Nietzsche Studies, 1: 64–78. (An extensive list of resources for further reading.)
Benson, B.E. (2008) Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Includes an alternative perspective on Nietzsche on music.)
Higgins, K.M. (2003) “Music or the Mistaken Life,” International Studies in Philosophy 35: 117–30. (Discusses Nietzsche’s thesis that music is crucial to human life.)
Klosowski, P. (1997) Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. D.W. Smith, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (A book-length study of the difficult concept of eternal recurrence.)
Nietzsche, F.W. (2003) Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. R. Bittner, trans. K. Sturge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The notebooks provide Nietzsche’s final thoughts on music. Selected notes were published as the book The Will to Power.)