He also explores Nietzsche's listening habits, his playing and style of composition, and his many contacts in the musical world, including his controversial and contentious relationship with Richard Wagner. For Nietzsche, music gave access to a realm of wisdom that transcended thought. Music was Nietzsche's great solace; in his last years, it was his refuge from madness."--Jacket.

A prevailing belief among Russia’s cultural elite in the early twentieth century was that the music of composers such as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Nikolai Medtner could forge a shared identity for the Russian people across social and economic divides. In this illuminating study of competing artistic and ideological visions at the close of Russia’s “Silver Age,” author Rebecca Mitchell interweaves cultural history, music, and philosophy to explore how “Nietzsche’s orphans” strove to find in music a means to overcome the disunity of modern life in the final tumultuous years before World War I and the Communist Revolution.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was not only a philosopher who loved and wrote about music; he was also a musician, pianist, and composer. In this ground-breaking volume, philosophers, historians, musicians, and musicologists come together to explore Nietzsche’s thought and music in all its complexity. Starting from the role that music played in the formation and articulation of Nietzsche’s thought, as well as the influence that contemporary composers had on him, the essays provide an in-depth analysis of the structural and stylistic aspects of his compositions. The volume highlights the significance of music in Nietzsche’s life and looks deeply at his musical experiments which led to a new and radically different style of composition in relation with his philosophical thought. It also traces the influence that Nietzsche had on many other musicians and musical genres, from Russian composers to current rock music and heavy metal.

Renowned philosopher and prominent French critic François Noudelmann engages the musicality of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were amateur piano players and acute lovers of the medium. Though piano playing was a crucial art for these thinkers, their musings on the subject are largely scant, implicit, or discordant with each philosopher's oeuvre. Noudelmann both recovers and integrates these perspectives, showing that the manner in which these philosophers played, the composers they adored, and the music they chose reveals uncommon insight into their thinking styles and patterns. Noudelmann positions the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with Sartre's, Nietzsche's, and Barthes's unique philosophical outlook. By reading their thought against their music, he introduces new critical formulations and reorients their trajectories, adding invaluable richness to these philosophers' lived and embodied experiences. The result heightens the multiple registers of being and the relationship between philosophy and the senses that informed so much of their work. A careful reader of music, Noudelmann maintains an elegant command of the texts under his gaze and appreciates the discursive points of musical and philosophical scholarship they involve, especially with regard to recent research and cutting-edge critique.

 Friedrich Nietzsche regarded himself as the most musical philosopher—he played the piano, wrote his own compositions and espoused a philosophy encouraging all to dance for joy. Central to his life and his ideas were the music and personality of Richard Wagner, whom he both loved and loathed at different times of his life. Nietzsche had considerable influence on composers, many of whom employed Wagnerian sonorities to set his words and respond to his ideas. This book explores Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner, the influence of his writings on the music of Strauss, Mahler, Delius, Scriabin, Busoni and others, his place in Thomas Mann’s critique of German Romantic music in the novel Doctor Faustus and his impact on 20th-century popular music.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) has exerted a decisive and radical influence on the central themes of twentieth-century philosophy, art and literature. But who Nietzsche actually was, and what his thought can be construed to mean and imply, are questios which have been addressed in such a variety of ways by authors ranging from Lukacs and Adorno to Kaufmann and Derrida, that no single reading seems able to dominate or determine the entire terrain of Nietzche's intellectual heritage.