ABSTRACT
Nietzsche disregarded all the usual technical questions about ancient music. Whether the Greeks ever used superimposed sounds, whether they were limited altogether to heterophony, or consecutive sounds, what they meant by musical modes, were matters he did not even refer to. But he knew instinctively that they were great musicians, and with one gorgeous leap of pure intuition he threw out his wonderful statement that "tragedy sprang from the genius of music," and "was, in the origin, chorus, and nothing but chorus". This phrase was an arrow aimed unerringly by great genius, and it hit very near the centre. For it means, as he says, that tragedy sprang from the genius of music. But what was this adequate music? When Nietzsche comes nearer to describing it we realize that this flight of intuition concerning the priority of the Greek chorus over Greek tragedy is supported by no scholarship even distantly Greek.
