Nietzsche, Music and Madness

'WITHOUT MUSIC life is pure fallacy, torment, banishment. Nietzsche's highly quotable remark to Heinrich K6selitz2 serves well to epitomize what may have been the most intense spiritual and physical bond with the art of music in any of the great philosophers. It is a relationship that is notable for its continuity in a life of few constants; its durability is confirmed in the earliest recorded recollections of the child and the reports from beyond the close of the philosopher's intellectual life. With Nietzsche a responsiveness to tone and rhythm was an aspect of the most basic, if not primitive level in the relationship of the human organism to sensuous organization and meaningful abstraction in the outside world. While this instant rapport with music was manifest at an early age and remained at a more or less constant intensity for many years,3 Nietzsche's extraordinary verbal and analytical intellect began to assert itself only relatively late. It then developed quickly to productive capacity, flared up repeatedly in the ever new forms of his mature writing, and after a final dazzling burst of creativity, abruptly flickered and was extinguished. But the tie with music lay deeper in Nietzsche's psyche. More than a year after his mental collapse, when the recollection of his own books was no more than a blur, Nietzsche again improvised on the piano for his 'maestro'. A letter written to the musician Carl Fuchs reflects the hope for an ultimate recovery that Kbselitz thought justified by such a performance

Art · Psychoanalysis · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Psychology

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