Written and Recorded in 1990
A Tragedy was an instrumental composition I wrote during the
summer of 1990. In those days, I was working hard for writing an essay about a
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, as a course work, and was obsessed with
ideas and facts I was absorbing from various books I referred for my essay
writing. One of the ideas that impressed me the most from this research reading
was Nietzsche’s famous theory called Eternal Recurrence and it didn’t take long
for me to write this composition by combining the theory with other elements taken from
Nietzsche’s biographic information. Actually, I was so inspired that I could
write this musical work long before completing the course work.
Part IV of this composition tries to describe a huge gap
between the protagonist’s mind and the society that surrounds him, which could
be summed up in his own words, ‘Human, All Too Human.’
As I have already mentioned in the annotation for Part II of
this composition, we assume Friedrich Nietzsche himself to be the protagonist
here, and the composer ascribes simple slow arpeggio played by the piano and
the acoustic guitar part that associated with the former in a musical way to
describe the pure state of the protagonist’s mind. Other non-musical noises
obviously represent another element; what surrounds the protagonist’s mind
externally. In this video version, I also added some quotes from those who
actually surrounded Nietzsche; Ulrich von Wilamowitz Mollendorf, a senior
classical philologist notably criticising Nietzsche’s first published work from
academic view points; Hans von Bulow, a famous conductor and a close friend of
Richard Wagner criticising Nietzsche’s musical work from an expert’s view
point; and Richard Wagner, the famous composer and a close friend with
Nietzsche at that time, criticising Nietzsche’s private behaviour in a letter addressed
to his doctor. I also added Nietzsche’s potential reply for each criticism, by randomly
choosing from his words.
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