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Frederick Nietzscshe

Listen to This Nietzsche-Composed Playlist

Inspire

It is well known that what that philosopher most loved was music and today, thanks to a group of Canadian musicians, we can listen to his compositions.

We typically see Nietzsche as the philosopher who created suspicion in humans and their ideals, and whose work is uncomfortable for many, and who had an enormous mustache. After all, he created nihilism by naming it. And although his work is a hard nut to crack, luckily we have the clarity of his 10 rules for writing, which is almost amicable, as well as a recently rediscovered aspect of Nietzsche as musical composer, which allows us a more intuitive approximation toward his irresistible mind.

Those who are familiar with this philosopher will know that he loved music above all else (or will have read his famous phrase: “Without music, life would be a mistake.”) As a young man he was a fervent admirer of Richard Wagner until he turned against him as part of his crusade against Christianity. But in the middle of that scandal, Nietzsche said: “There has never been a philosopher who has been in essence a musician to such an extent as I am,” and he hoped – although with his characteristic skepticism – that some of his compositions would be made known to complement his philosophical works.

Nietzsche composed music all his life (here you can listen to his scores and a complete chronology of his compositions), but now we can hear some of his works as a playlist thanks to these Canadian musicians who played them and uploaded them to Spotify: Lauretta Altman, Wolfgang Bottenberg and the singers of Montreal Orpheus perform the pieces that lie somewhere between exuberance and melancholy, and which offer an unusual opportunity: we approach the great philosopher from an angle that none of his texts would allow.

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