AESTHETICS famous tragedian, Euripides, tragedy dies by its own hand, poisoned by an injection of rationality The blame for this must be laid at the door of Socrates, who inaugurated a new era that valued science above art Socrates, according to Nietzsche, was the antithesis of all that made Greece great His instincts were entirely negative and critical, rather than positive and creative In rejecting the Dionysiac element he destroyed the tragedians’ synthesis ‘We need only consider the Socratic maxims ‘‘Virtue is knowledge, all sins arise from ignorance, the virtuous man is the happy man’’ In these three basic optimistic formulae lies the death of tragedy’ (BT 69) Tragedy, in Euripides, took the death-leap into bourgeois theatre The dying Socrates, freed by insight and reason from the fear of death, became the mystagogue of science Was it possible, in modern Germany, to remedy the disease inherited from Socrates, and to restore the union of Apollo and Dionysus? Nietzsche had no appreciation of the novel, which in the nineteenth century might be thought the genre most fertile of the beneficent illusion that in his view was the function of art The novel, he thought, was essentially a Socratic art form, that subordinated poetry to philosophy Oddly, he blamed its invention on Plato ‘The Platonic dialogue might be described as the lifeboat in which the shipwrecked older poetry and all its children escaped, crammed together in a narrow space and fearfully obeying a single pilot, Socrates Plato gave posterity the model for a new art form—the novel’ (BT 69) Nor had Nietzsche any high opinion of Italian opera, in spite of the combination of poetry and music it involved He complained that it was ruined by the separation between recitative and aria, which privileged the verbal over the musical Only in Germany was there hope of a rebirth of tragedy: From the Dionysiac soil of the German spirit a power has risen that has nothing in common with the original conditions of Socratic culture: that culture can neither explain nor excuse it, but instead finds it terrifying and inexplicable, powerful and hostile—German Music, as we know it pre-eminently in its mighty sun-cycle from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner (BT 94) The Birth of Tragedy peters out into a set of rapturous and incoherent programme notes to the third act of Tristan und Isolde No one has condemned their weaknesses with more force than Nietzsche himself, who after he had emerged from the spell of Wagner prefaced later editions of the book with an ‘Attempt at Self-Criticism’ There he recants his attempt 262